When The Bus Is Barackin', Don't Come A Knockin'

“Lincoln, they used to talk about him almost as bad as they talk about me.”



Actually, no. The comparison is laughable. And the pity-party he's throwing just tells us that “Obama is a guy who has a thin skin and does not take criticism well,” in the words of Eric Foner, the historian who did much to encourage this Obama-as-Lincoln comparison.



Anyway, it is beyond ridiculous for a POTUS to make himself an object of pity. Never feel sorry for a man who flies in Air Force One. Or rides around the Midwest waving to tiny groups of voters from behind the armored windows of a multimillion dollar bus (Ground Force One?).

Here's a soundtrack that suits the occasion, WMAL's Brian Wilson performing 'The Long and Whiny Road'.

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Central America, Plan Mexico, and Where's The Drug Czar?

Assistant Secretary William Brownfield, Bureau of International Narcotics and Law Enforcement Affairs, is one of the few people in Washington who is working during August. Maybe that's because narco cartels never take a holiday?



For whatever reason, he made some extensive remarks at a Council of the Americas confab last week on the current state of counter narcotics efforts in the Americas.



The gist of his remarks was that in the 1990s our counter narcotics programs succeeded in choking off the major drug trafficking routes that existed on the Atlantic coast, and later we did the same to the Pacific routes that sprang up in the 2000s, so today the dominant trafficking routes to the U.S. come straight up through the middle of Central American and Mexico. Hence, we are re-running the Plan Colombia playbook, only this time we're calling it the Merida Initiative. I think that's a fair summary.

As a result of the efforts in northern South America, in the Caribbean, and in the eastern Pacific, you now see the overwhelming majority of the flow of narcotic products through Central America on its way to the North American market. And, I might add, beginning in the year 2007, you see a squeeze at both ends of the Central American isthmus, not just the efforts of Plan Colombia and its successor plans to the south, but the beginnings of an impact of the efforts to put the squeeze on the routes to the north in Mexico under the Merida initiative.



- snip --



And where are we today? Let's ask ourselves the question: How serious is this threat, that is affecting, and in my opinion, threatening the very core institutions of Central America today?



First, we calculate that more than 95%, let me repeat that figure, more than 95% of all illicit drugs that enter North America from South America have transited Central America. Ninety-five percent.



What impact might that have on the region? Here is a statistic, dates from 2010, the last year that we have full statistics. In 2010, the homicide rate in Honduras was 82 per 100,000 population, in El Salvador, 65, in Guatemala, 41. To put that in some perspective for you, here in the United States, a society not known around the world for its passivism and lack of violence, our homicide rate is somewhat below five. More than 70,000 youth in the seven countries of Central America, and overwhelmingly focused on the northern three of Guatemala, Honduras and El Salvador are calculated to be members of gangs ... The entire population of Central America is about one seventh of the population of the United States of America. If you play the statistical game and say what would this correlate to in the United States, it would mean about a half a million gang members on the streets of the United States cities.



Ladies and gentlemen, Central America in a very real sense is a victim. It is a victim of geography, and it can do nothing about that ... It is a victim in a very real sense of progress elsewhere in the region. Progress in Colombia, under Plan Colombia, where thanks to the heroic efforts of a large number of Colombian citizens, the problems have been squeezed down substantially over the last eleven years, and the progress that we see beginning, I submit, more on that later, in Mexico, with the Mexican government's efforts to retake control of its own communities, its own streets, and its own borders.



-- snip --



If I could use the metaphor of three houses located side-by-side on a street. One house erupts in flames, and the community, alas, due to resource and budgetary issues, has only one fire truck. Where does the fire truck go? It goes to the house that is burning. Well, sure enough, sparks pass over to the third house and it starts to burn as well. The fire truck goes to the third house. It knows perfectly well that the house in between is eventually going to burn, but you’ve only got one fire truck. You're watching that house in the middle, you know that at some point in time you are going to go after it, but you’ve got one truck, and you are going to focus the truck on the house that is actual burning. And it is burning today, ladies and gentlemen, and I suggest to you that what we will talk about for the remainder of this morning is where to put that fire truck, what equipment to put on that truck, how many people we can put on that truck, and how we can get maximum value out of that truck.



-- snip --



We have limited resources to work with. On the 23rd of June, in the city of Guatemala, the Secretary of State committed $290 million from the United States Government to support this effort in the course of this year. Not $2.9 billion, not $29 billion, $290 million ... I do not see the likelihood of a vast infusion of new funds coming from that element of the United States Government that is constitutionally entitled to fund and appropriate the taxpayers' money in the United States in the foreseeable future.

A few questions followed, including this one, which went right to the heart of the narco trafficking problem - the demand by users in the U.S. for drugs that come from South and Central America:

QUESTION: I’m William Steadman. I’m a retired Foreign Service Officer. U.S. domestic demand is certainly a considerable problem which you noted. I’d like to know what is being done, what can be done, and what coordination exists among various U.S. government state and local agencies to deal with domestic demand. Thank you.

Ambassador Brownfield's answer was not so well focused. In fact, he tried to pass the ball to the Drug Czar, who wasn't present to receive it.

[I] got to tell you that you can bet that you could have asked the same question, as you well know, in the year 1965 or 1955, and in many ways, the fundamentals of that question have not changed. I suppose the simple answer to your question is we have not yet solved the problem of demand in the United States of America ... I would suggest to you, for example, that the demand in the United States for cocaine has probably has probably dropped, I would throw out a figure, as much as 50% over the last 10 years ... demand is elastic, both in terms of how much or how little demand there is, and where it is located.



I am not the right one to give you a detailed answer to that question, because, of course, I am the Assistant Secretary for International Narcotics and Law Enforcement Affairs. The Director of the Office of National Drug Control Policy, sometimes referred to as the Drug Czar, is that position which for the past roughly 40 years has had the responsibility been linking all of these elements together into a common strategy and a common approach.

If anyone passed that question along to the Drug Czar, I'm not aware of it. By the way, when was the last time anyone saw or heard from the Drug Czar? I think Miami Vice was still on TV the last time he mattered.



Ambassador Brownfield did much the same press conference again today, this time in Ciudad Juarez, Ground Zero in the battle over international narcotics and law enforcement.

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Has This Ever Happened To You After A TDY?

A commenter (H/T to gwb) brought this story to my attention.



Imagine that you've taken a short trip out of town and, when you return home, you find a family of Romanian gypsies living there? And they've trashed your place. Then, once you get them thrown out, they move two blocks away and do it again at someone else's house.



Between this and their flaccid response to the riots, it's looking like British law enforcement has simply taken the summer off. The icing on the cake is that the victim in this case is a British Immigration Officer.

An immigration officer returned home to find gipsies had moved in, ransacked the place and dressed in her clothes.



Julia High was even offered a glass of her own wine by the Romanian squatters.

They claimed they had rented the property from her



The family of five adults and three children had ripped up carpets, emptied the fridge and dumped her belongings in bin bags in the garden of her £270,000 home.



They left water damage to the kitchen and bathroom, while a computer and digital cameras were missing. Only her beds and wardrobes were left intact. And once evicted, they squatted in another home two streets away.



Miss High, who works for the UK Border Agency, had spent a weekend visiting her parents and on the Monday evening went to see the Proms at the Royal Albert Hall before returning to the terraced home in Leytonstone, east London, which she has owned for 30 years.



She said: ‘The women came to the door dressed in my clothes, they were sitting around my dining room table, drinking my wine out of my glasses. They even offered me a drink and told me they were from Romania. They said I was dead and my son had rented the house to them. I am very much alive, single and I don’t have a son.’



She secured a county court eviction order the next day and police removed the family. But she has been forced to stay with friends during repairs, and fears it will be weeks before she can return.



She said: ‘These people have just trashed 30 years of my life and thrown it into bin bags. It is soul-destroying.’



Yesterday the Daily Mail found the family in a four-bedroom house two streets away, owned by a doctor who bought it in March but delayed moving in to carry out repairs.



When approached for a comment, the family spat and swore. One woman, who said her name was Dragoi Carmen, said: ‘I’ve never seen [Miss High’s] house, I don’t know why I’m being accused of this.’



Laura Eparu, who lives next door to Miss High, said: ‘I’m Romanian myself and I realised they were Romanian gipsies. They’ve brought shame on our country.’

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Congressional Flashmob Swarms Tel Aviv and Jerusalem

With Congress on its August vacation, our liberties and property are secure until after Labor Day. Good news for the rest of us, but bad news for the staffs at U.S. Embassy Tel Aviv and U.S. Consulate Jerusalem, where a whopping 81 - count 'em, 81 - visiting Congressmen plus their spouses are doing the grand tour of Israel on an excursion funded by the American Israel Public Affairs Committee (AIPAC).



They're coming in three waves. First, 26 Democrats - who are there now - followed by 55 Republicans in two groups, each of the three waves lasting one week. But this is not a CODEL, you see, because someone other than the U.S. taxpayer is footing the bill.

[B]ecause it’s not an official congressional trip paid for by taxpayers, there will be no military jet, no taking off when you feel like it, no landing in military airports. That’s part of the reason, in today’s parlance, it’s downgraded to only an AA jaunt, not AAA.



Still, the excursion includes a round-trip flight in business class for lawmakers and their spouses (that alone is worth about $8,000), fine hotels and meals, side trips, and transportation and guides.

It's a good thing that AIPAC is neither a political action committee nor an agent of a foreign government, otherwise our Congressional representatives might not be able to accept this freebie without legal complications. I'm just saying.

Unlike a proper congressional trip, we’re told that the AIPAC foundation “runs [the members] pretty good.”



There will be breakfast speakers, dinner speakers, Q&A’s with U.S. Embassy folks and Israeli media. There will be appearances by government leaders, including Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu (ask him about those recent demonstrations) and President Shimon Peres, as well as by opposition leaders. The schedule is packed from morning to late at night.



But wait. It’ll be okay. Judging from past trips — they’re not giving out the schedule for security reasons — the travelers will get a walking tour of the Old City and the Western Wall, plus a tour of the city, trips to Masada and the Dead Sea, the Holocaust Memorial, a trip north to the Golan Heights and to the border with Lebanon. There will be a couple of days to hang out in Tel Aviv — Miami on the Mediterranean.



At some point, the group will head to the West Bank to chat with Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas, Prime Minister Salam Fayyad and other leaders. No Hamas folks are invited.



Best of all, unlike codels, these are segregated by party — we’re told the members prefer that. Because there is no need for bipartisan cover to justify a taxpayer-funded jaunt, you won’t need to pretend to like someone from across the aisle.



-- snip --



The U.S. Embassy, oft-beleaguered by congressional trips, won’t need to coordinate logistics. The foundation does that. Still, a former diplomat noted, “The embassy will extend whatever assistance is needed” by the lawmakers — such as security for the trip to Ramallah. “We know who pays for our budget.”

Regarding "whatever assistance is needed" for a trip to Ramallah, well, let's just say that is A WHOLE LOT OF ASSISTANCE. The security part alone will be enormously taxing. Pity the poor RSOs who will have to take groups of 25 to 30 prima donnas and their handlers in and out of the West Bank.



Idle thought: how many Congressmen can you pack into a Suburban? Do they share seats without fighting? Do the freshmen members have to take the middle seats? Who called 'shotgun?' You know that the windows don't roll down, so does everyone have enough A/C, or is that too much, or is the A/C just right? Will this be all business, or more like a torturous family minivan trip to Disney World?

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USAID Hiring For Libya

H/T to U.S. Trade and Aid Monitor for news of these job announcements:

A recruitment campaign led by the U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID) initially seeks to deploy a Country Representative and Deputy Country Representative to Libya, where the vendors will work with the USAID Office of Transition Initiatives (OTI) within the Bureau of Democracy, Conflict, and Humanitarian Assistance (DCHA), according to personal contracting service (PSC) notices dated Aug. 15



-- snip --



The contractors will at first establish a presence in the city of Benghazi, the notices said, without indicating other potential locations.

The announcements (active links in the Aid and Trade Monitor post) include this description of the Office of Transition Initiatives:

Created in 1994 as a distinct operating unit within USAID, OTI helps local, indigenous partners advance peace and democracy in priority conflict-prone countries by providing fast, flexible, short-term assistance targeted at key transition needs.

I'm glad someone sees a key transition coming to Libya in the near future. I wish I could be as optimistic, but the see-saw war between Qaddafi and the rebel coalition doesn't inspire high hopes. The USG's official spokesmen were lukewarm at best in remarks today:

Neither [White House spokesman Jay] Carney nor State Department spokeswoman Victoria Nuland said the rebels now have the upper hand ... One senior military official said the Pentagon is not ready to declare the opposition forces have reached a turning point, although it is not insignificant that they appear to have been able to hold the ground so far.

Not insignificant? That's faint praise, indeed. It sounds like we are doing a good job of containing our official enthusiasm.

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Vladimir Putin: Is There Anything He Can't Do?

He's been at it again, staging another preposterous photo op for the sycophantic Russian official news media. This time he went diving in the Black Sea and came up with two ancient Greek ceramic urns. Really. He found them within minutes in water only two meters deep, and - hey, look - they didn't even have 1,500 years worth of crud all over them.



He's already hunted tigers, shot an arctic polar bear, fought forest fires, piloted a mini-sub to the bottom of the world's deepest lake, and done so much more, usually while shirtless and riding a horse. Which once again proves the wisdom of Mel Brooks - it's good to be the King dictator.



I wonder ... if Putin and Kim Jung Il even played golf together, would there be numbers high enough for their caddies to record all the holes-in-one they'd make?



Putin's act might finally be getting a little stale for some of his audience, as the BBC reports, but I don't think it will be going away.



How can he keep it fresh? I think the solution is obvious. Putin should grow a beard and take over those Dos Equis commercials, thereby making him officially The Most Interesting Man In The World.

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Where Is The Nanny State When Feral Children Run Wild?

The starkest and grimmest commentary I've seen on the English rioters comes from the historian, editor, and journalist Max Hastings. How liberal dogma spawned a generation of brutalized youths:

A few weeks after the U.S. city of Detroit was ravaged by 1967 race riots in which 43 people died, I was shown around the wrecked areas by a black reporter named Joe Strickland.



He said: ‘Don’t you believe all that stuff people here are giving media folk about how sorry they are about what happened. When they talk to each other, they say: “It was a great fire, man!” ’



-- snip --



If you live a normal life of absolute futility, which we can assume most of this week’s rioters do, excitement of any kind is welcome. The people who wrecked swathes of property, burned vehicles and terrorised communities have no moral compass to make them susceptible to guilt or shame.



Most have no jobs to go to or exams they might pass. They know no family role models, for most live in homes in which the father is unemployed, or from which he has decamped.



They are illiterate and innumerate, beyond maybe some dexterity with computer games and BlackBerries.



They are essentially wild beasts. I use that phrase advisedly, because it seems appropriate to young people bereft of the discipline that might make them employable; of the conscience that distinguishes between right and wrong.



They respond only to instinctive animal impulses — to eat and drink, have sex, seize or destroy the accessible property of others.



Their behaviour on the streets resembled that of the polar bear which attacked a Norwegian tourist camp last week. They were doing what came naturally and, unlike the bear, no one even shot them for it.



A former London police chief spoke a few years ago about the ‘feral children’ on his patch — another way of describing the same reality.



The depressing truth is that at the bottom of our society is a layer of young people with no skills, education, values or aspirations. They do not have what most of us would call ‘lives’: they simply exist.



Nobody has ever dared suggest to them that they need feel any allegiance to anything, least of all Britain or their community. They do not watch royal weddings or notice Test matches or take pride in being Londoners or Scousers or Brummies.



Not only do they know nothing of Britain’s past, they care nothing for its present.



They have their being only in video games and street-fights, casual drug use and crime, sometimes petty, sometimes serious.



The notions of doing a nine-to-five job, marrying and sticking with a wife and kids, taking up DIY or learning to read properly, are beyond their imaginations.



Last week, I met a charity worker who is trying to help a teenage girl in East London to get a life for herself. There is a difficulty, however: ‘Her mother wants her to go on the game.’ [English-to-American translation note: to 'go on the game' is to become a prostitute] My friend explained: ‘It’s the money, you know.’



-- snip --



When social surveys speak of ‘deprivation’ and ‘poverty’, this is entirely relative. Meanwhile, sanctions for wrongdoing have largely vanished.



When Work and Pensions Secretary Iain Duncan Smith recently urged employers to take on more British workers and fewer migrants, he was greeted with a hoarse laugh.



Every firm in the land knows that an East European — for instance — will, first, bother to turn up; second, work harder; and third, be better-educated than his or her British counterpart.Who do we blame for this state of affairs?



-- snip --



Of course it is true that few have jobs, learn anything useful at school, live in decent homes, eat meals at regular hours or feel loyalty to anything beyond their local gang.



This is not, however, because they are victims of mistreatment or neglect.



It is because it is fantastically hard to help such people, young or old, without imposing a measure of compulsion which modern society finds unacceptable. These kids are what they are because nobody makes them be anything different or better.



A key factor in delinquency is lack of effective sanctions to deter it. From an early stage, feral children discover that they can bully fellow pupils at school, shout abuse at people in the streets, urinate outside pubs, hurl litter from car windows, play car radios at deafening volumes, and, indeed, commit casual assaults with only a negligible prospect of facing rebuke, far less retribution.



John Stuart Mill wrote in his great 1859 essay On Liberty: ‘The liberty of the individual must be thus far limited; he must not make himself a nuisance to other people.’



Yet every day up and down the land, this vital principle of civilised societies is breached with impunity.



Anyone who reproaches a child, far less an adult, for discarding rubbish, making a racket, committing vandalism or driving unsociably will receive in return a torrent of obscenities, if not violence.



-- snip --



The police, in recent years, have developed a reputation for ignoring yobbery [English-to-American translation note: 'yobbery' is hooliganism] and bullying, or even for taking the yobs’ side against complainants.



‘The problem,’ said Bill Pitt, the former head of Manchester’s Nuisance Strategy Unit, ‘is that the law appears to be there to protect the rights of the perpetrator, and does not support the victim.’



Police regularly arrest householders who are deemed to have taken ‘disproportionate’ action to protect themselves and their property from burglars or intruders. The message goes out that criminals have little to fear from ‘the feds’.



-- snip --



A teacher, Francis Gilbert, wrote five years ago in his book Yob Nation: ‘The public feels it no longer has the right to interfere.’



-- snip --



So there we have it: a large, amoral, brutalised sub-culture of young British people who lack education because they have no will to learn, and skills which might make them employable. They are too idle to accept work waitressing or doing domestic labour, which is why almost all such jobs are filled by immigrants.



They have no code of values to dissuade them from behaving anti-socially or, indeed, criminally, and small chance of being punished if they do so.



They have no sense of responsibility for themselves, far less towards others, and look to no future beyond the next meal, sexual encounter or TV football game.



They are an absolute deadweight upon society, because they contribute nothing yet cost the taxpayer billions. Liberal opinion holds they are victims, because society has failed to provide them with opportunities to develop their potential.



Most of us would say this is nonsense. Rather, they are victims of a perverted social ethos, which elevates personal freedom to an absolute, and denies the underclass the discipline — tough love — which alone might enable some of its members to escape from the swamp of dependency in which they live.



Only education — together with politicians, judges, policemen and teachers with the courage to force feral humans to obey rules the rest of us have accepted all our lives — can provide a way forward and a way out for these people.



They are products of a culture which gives them so much unconditionally that they are let off learning how to become human beings. My dogs are better behaved and subscribe to a higher code of values than the young rioters of Tottenham, Hackney, Clapham and Birmingham.



Unless or until those who run Britain introduce incentives for decency and impose penalties for bestiality which are today entirely lacking, there will never be a shortage of young rioters and looters such as those of the past four nights, for whom their monstrous excesses were ‘a great fire, man’.

That's stark, all right. Even dismal. But it rings true to me. Who has not seen those feral children of all ages, or experienced the public's unwillingness to interfere with blatantly antisocial behavior?



It's the fault of the nannies (government agencies) who aren't doing their jobs, and therefore ultimately of the careless people (voters) who left them in charge.

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