9-11 Quarter to the Foe!

[jordan179]

Fourteen years ago, the Islamists attacked us in a literal bolt-from-the-blue and murdered almost 3000 Americans, starting with over 100 civilians they had made captive and were under the Laws of War bound to protect from harm.  In that action, they declared themselves not only our foes, but foes who were not entitled to the protections of those

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[jordan179]

Well -- Buchanan was worse so far, because Buchanan's inertia led directly to the American Civil War -- the bloodiest war, in terms of American lives lost in terms both relative to our population at the time and even absolute terms (despite the fact that our population was less than half of what it is today) that America has ever fought. Obama's disasters have so far mostly harmed others -- ironically, mostly the Third World Muslims and black Africans about whom he claims to vociferously to care. (Being cared for by Obama is apparently dangerous to one's health!)

Whether the cost of Obama to America in terms of war dead will be greater than that of Buchanan in the end remains to be seen. It would take only a handful of nuclear hits on American cities to exceed the butcher's bill of the American Civil War, though on the positive side, once that happened, we would hopefully take few additional losses, because we would have flashed-over into "kill them all" mode, and would be prosecuting the resultant war mostly by destroying every enemy city and formation we could with our own nuclear weapons. We would discover -- to our great delight -- what we did in 1945, namely how very cheap a form of war that is, once one no longer cares about the suffering about the enemy civilian population ...

... and the world would change forever, because nuclear weapons would now be Just Really Big Bombs, and the magic illusion we've lived under since 1945 would be forever dispelled. It might be the first atomic war since World War II, but it would most definitely not be the last.

Wilson didn't actually cost America that much. He enabled the Western Allies to win World War One (but screwed up Versailles to the point that World War Two became likely). He was also an immense, pompous and racist ass who badly harmed American civil liberties, though. These are characteristics he shares with Obama.

Carter laid the seeds of several future wars which actually came to pass in his lifetime. Almost nobody points out, because the media wants to spin him as a saint, that his abandonment of the Shah and cowardice against Khomeini led to Iran-Iraq War of 1980-88 (which in turn led to both Desert Storm 1990-91 and the 2003 Iraq War) and the Iranian intervention in our war in Iraq; his abandonment of Somoza to the Nicaraguan Civil War of the 1980's; and his Panama Canal Treaty to the Panama War of 1989-90. For a man of "peace," he made wargame designers rather happy.

Obama's worst damage to America will probably be in terms of the harm he's done our Constitution. He's shown that even a feckless and incompetent President can openly violate Constitutional rule and get away with it if he has a loud public cheering section (even if not a majority!) and future, more focused wannabe Caesars will take note of what he did. Obama's Presidency means that we're probably now in the last century or so of the American Republic; the Empire looms in our future.