Free Republic

With the world melting down and the Bard semester heating up, I’ve fallen behind in my grand strategy posts; apologies to all and I hope to catch up with a post next week (during Bard’s spring break) on Machiavelli. But today’s business is still the Second Punic War, the conflict between Carthage and Rome that engulfed most of the Mediterranean world in what would prove to be the most important war in the history of what would, thanks to Rome’s victory, one day become western civilization. In the last post I wrote about how Rome had a grand strategy that...

Democrats back calls for Obama to explain strategyLARA MARLOWE in Washington The Irish Times - Friday, March 25, 2011 US ROLE: AMID GROWING calls for President Barack Obama to explain his strategy to Congress and the nation, leading Democrats say questions about the Libyan war raised by the Republican speaker of the house John Boehner are “legitimate”. Deputy national security adviser Denis McDonough told CNN that a letter sent by Mr Boehner to the White House on Wednesday contained “a very legitimate set of questions”. Democratic senator Sherrod Brown said Mr Obama “needs to face the nation and . ....

Barack Obama tried to convince Univision last night that the US has an exit strategy from the Libya conflict, and that strategy is to, er, stick around and fight. Jake Tapper calls it a Lewis Carroll moment, while others might consider it more Orwellian: In an interview with Univision Tuesday, President Obama re-defined the term “exit strategy,” and said our exit strategy in Libya would begin this week. “The exit strategy will be executed this week,” President Obama said, “in the sense that we will be pulling back from our much more active efforts to shape the environment. We will...

The Muslim Brotherhood's Strategy in Egypt"This is a revolution for all Egyptians--it's not ours" By Eric Trager Feb 10 2011, 9:15 AM ET Some Americans fear that Egypt in 2011 could repeat Iran in 1979, when a small group of religious fanatics hijacked a revolution. They see another popular uprising overtaking a much-hated, U.S.-backed dictator. They know that the strongest opposition group is the Muslim Brotherhood, an Islamist movement that is unfriendly to the United States (In my years of interviewing Brotherhood leaders, I've almost never heard one say anything friendly about the U.S., which they regard with open and...

...In 2012, the president's strategists can choose between trying to reproduce Obama's narrow wins in the affluent corners of the South (not including Florida) or attempting to hold on to swing states like Nevada and Colorado, where Democratic senators in 2010 won on support from well-organized Hispanic voters and the labor movement. It's not a tough call. It would be almost impossible to make the case for investing political resources in the South. The divorce is final. And largely for the good, as congressional Democrats will no longer have to twist their policies beyond recognition to accommodate Southern Democrats who...

Richard Haass, president of the Council on Foreign Relations, has written in the Wall Street Journal that we should “un-surge” in Afghanistan. While arguing against total withdrawal, he says “the U.S. effort there should be sharply reduced.” Mr. Haass’s recommendation on Afghanistan sounds similar to his (flawed) recommendation on Iraq during the debate about the surge. In a November 13, 2006, interview with Der Spiegel, Haass said: “We've reached a point in Iraq where we've got to get real.

The Gop Strategic Advantage Bill Connelly, Guest Columnist December 16th, 2010 The measures of Republican success in the 2010 midterm are familiar. The GOP gained: (1) a House majority, with a net pickup of 63 seats, (2) six Senate seats leaving Democrats facing a more challenging Senate playing field in 2012 and 2014, (3) seven governorships, and (4) twenty legislative chambers, giving Republicans control of both legislative chambers in 25 states—an increase of 11. Republicans now control more state legislative seats than any time since 1928. Republican gains include regional advances in the Midwest and Northeast, and important advances in...

With a new bestseller, a blockbuster TV show, and her kids popping up everywhere, Sarah Palin is changing politics forever, says Meghan McCain—and she’s either brilliant or insane. Unless you have been living under a rock, the complete and total media saturation of every single outlet with all things Sarah Palin, all the time, has hit a proverbial fever pitch these past few weeks. Between the premiere of the Mark Burnett-produced TLC reality show Sarah Palin’s Alaska and the launch of her book, America by Heart, today, she is simply everywhere. Her omnipresence and the questions about her future are...

ROVE IS POLITICALLY DEAD! I will personally spend the next two years to make sure that every candidate Karl Rove supports loses in the primary. I will repeat every bad story and every rumor about Karl Rove to make sure I do all I can to destroy any future he has left in politics. We lost the chance to win the United States Senate only because Rove decided to attack and defame the candidate we the people chose to represent the party. Had he been a real man and just supported the conservative after they won the primary, than those...

What would happen if conservatives targeted several dozen relatively weak leftist Democrats in states or districts conductive to the conservative message, and then sought to elect a genuinely conservative Democrat (recruited, of course, within the ranks of the conservative movement)? What would happen if conservatives decided in 2012 to unify behind an articulate conservative to run in the Democrat primaries and caucuses against Obama? Let the small leftist minority in America worry about not just losing a general election, but a primary: what would that do to the appeal of leftism in our political system? It would raise the profound...

Almost all societies in the world have gone beyond the stage where they expect stability and linear progressions of the past to long endure. Some societies — almost en bloc — anticipate the end of their security; others anticipate the end of their suffering. Few expect insulation from change. That change, however, need not be entirely inscrutable if we look at global patterns and at historical human behaviour. Economic Patterns: What we now call “economics” determines power and conflict patterns because wealth, or the deprivation of it, determines survival, and, for those who survive, “economics” determines the relative control they...

This is well worth reading.

Attention GOP candidates: There is no need, this year, to load up negative ads with adjectives painting your opponents as evil big spenders in the thrall of the Washington establishment. The simple facts of your opponents’ voting records are enough to defeat them. Just the facts, ma’am. Republican negative ad writers always delight in describing the stimulus package as bloated, wasteful, government-growing and useless. The adjectives get in the way. The polling we’ve done indicates that the simple words “stimulus package” convey all that and more.

When Bill Clinton moved to open the military to gays in 1993, the GOP and conservative Democrats led the effort to oppose gay rights. In 1996, Hawaii flirted with gay marriage and the GOP again led the charge against gay equality, culminating in the federal response known as the "Defense of Marriage Act". Flash forward fourteen years to the present. Gay marriage is ruled a federal right for the first time and the response from the GOP is… tepid. Not one nationally prominent elected official thought the issue was important enough to get worked up over.... Complicating matters for social...

Voters along California's Central Coast on Tuesday turned back a Democratic attempt to gain more power in the state Legislature, electing a Republican to fill a vacant state Senate seat. The win by state Assemblyman Sam Blakeslee denies Democrats the opportunity to consolidate their power in the Senate and come within one vote of claiming the two-thirds majority needed to pass budget plans and tax increases. The special election drew interest from around the state, both in endorsements and campaign donations. Republican gubernatorial candidate Meg Whitman campaigned for Blakeslee, while President Barack Obama endorsed the Democratic candidate, former Assemblyman John...

New Democratic strategy for creating jobs focuses on a boost in manufacturingBy Lori Montgomery and Brady Dennis Wednesday, August 4, 2010 President Obama and congressional Democrats -- out of options for another quick shot of stimulus spending to revive the sluggish economy -- are shifting toward a longer-term strategy that promises to tackle persistently high unemployment by engineering a renaissance in American manufacturing. That approach, heralded by Obama last week in Detroit and sketched out in a memo to House Democrats as they headed home for the August break, is still evolving and so far focuses primarily on raising taxes...

The White House is revising its Afghanistan strategy to embrace the idea of negotiating with senior members of the Taliban through third parties – a policy to which it had previously been lukewarm. Negotiating with the Taliban has long been advocated by Hamid Karzai, the Afghan president, and the British and Pakistani governments, but resisted by Washington. The Guardian has learned that while the American government is still officially resistant to the idea of talks with Taliban leaders, behind the scenes a shift is under way and Washington is encouraging Karzai to take a lead in such negotiations. "There is...

3 MILLION CUT OFF IN TWO MONTHS During the Senate impasse, from the week ended June 5 to the week ended July 10, more than 2.1 million Americans lost their benefits. Another million will join them by July 31. In Ohio alone, where unemployment stood at 10.7 percent in May, more than 83,000 people lost their benefits in June. Sister Barbara Busch, executive director of non-profit housing group Working in Neighborhoods in Cincinnati, 65 percent of the people who come seeking help with their mortgages are unemployed or underemployed. "I fear once the benefits run out, I suspect we'll see...

Democratic House members are so worried about the fall elections they're leaving Washington on July 30, a full week earlier than normal—and they won't return until mid-September. Members gulped when National Journal's Charlie Cook, the Beltway's leading political handicapper, predicted last month "the House is gone," meaning a GOP takeover. He thinks Democrats will hold the Senate, but with a significantly reduced majority. The rush to recess gives Democrats little time to pass any major laws. That's why there have been signs in recent weeks that party leaders are planning an ambitious, lame-duck session to muscle through bills in December...

Union 'card-check,' cap and trade, and so much more Democratic House members are so worried about the fall elections they're leaving Washington on July 30, a full week earlier than normal—and they won't return until mid-September. Members gulped when National Journal's Charlie Cook, the Beltway's leading political handicapper, predicted last month "the House is gone," meaning a GOP takeover. He thinks Democrats will hold the Senate, but with a significantly reduced majority. The rush to recess gives Democrats little time to pass any major laws. That's why there have been signs in recent weeks that party leaders are planning an...