Thomas Sowell:
When Alfred E. Neuman asked “What, me worry?” on the cover of Mad magazine, it was funny. But this message was not nearly as funny coming from President Barack Obama and his national-security adviser, Susan Rice.
In a musical comedy, it would be hilarious to have the president send out his “happy talk” message by someone whose credibility was already thoroughly discredited by her serial lies on television about the Benghazi terrorist attack in 2012.
Unfortunately — indeed, tragically — the world today is about as far from a musical comedy as you can get, with terrorists rampaging across the Middle East, leaving a trail of unspeakable atrocities in their wake, and with Iran moving closer to producing a nuclear bomb, with an intercontinental missile on the horizon.
We will be lucky to get through the remainder of President Obama’s term in office without a major catastrophe, from which we may or may not recover.
Iran has announced repeatedly that it plans to wipe Israel off the face of the earth. But you don’t need an intercontinental missile to reach Israel from Iran. Tehran is less than a thousand miles from Jerusalem. As was said long ago, “Send not to know for whom the bell tolls. It tolls for thee.”
It was painfully ironic to hear Ms. Rice tell us that the danger we face today is not as serious as the dangers we faced in World War II.
Anyone who has actually studied the period that led up to World War II knows that the Western democracies followed feckless policies remarkably similar to those that we are following today. And anyone who studies that war itself knows that the West came dangerously close to losing it before finally getting their act together and turning things around.
In a nuclear age, we may not have time to let reality finally sink in on our leaders and to wake up the public to the dangers.
There was lots of “happy talk” in the West while Hitler was building up his Nazi war machine during the 1930s, as the Western intelligentsia were urging the democracies to disarm.
The dangers of Hitler’s sudden rise to power in Germany during the early 1930s were played down, and even ridiculed, by politicians, journalists, and the intelligentsia in both Britain and France.
A temporary political setback for the Nazis in 1933 was hailed by a French newspaper as “the piteous end of Hitlerism” and a British newspaper said even earlier that Hitler was “done for.” Prominent British intellectual Harold Laski opined that Hitler was “a cheap conspirator rather than an inspired revolutionary, the creature of circumstances rather than the maker of destiny.”
In other words, Hitler and the Nazis were the “junior varsity” of their day, in the eyes of the know-it-alls.
How different would the outcome have been had the Russian people been treated well after the invasion of the Soviet Union? The Germans were treated as liberators, initially, until Hitler began acting like Hitler. How different would the war have gone had not the Russians required so much of Germany’s attention?
Nothing like that is likely to happen (a resurgence of the populations against ISIS) as long as the US is not viewed as a savior or protector. Currently, we cannot be counted upon and, like Iraq did in not readily agreeing to a continued US presence, since we had shown ourselves to be leaderless and without resolve, these peoples will choose “the strong horse”. All we show them is the braying Democrat ass.
Chamberlin and Hitler; the gay fool and Iran, no difference. We all know that Rice is incompentent and is a butt kissing democrat. Rice was born in November 1964, 19 years after the close of the was. Her fellowship progam at the Brooking Institue was not glroious. There is no real cure for stupidity. Life is hard and even harder when you are stupid. Rice is the new world’s idea a good political figure, feed them shit, create brain of mush, and suprise another Himmler. Put a $100 bet that rice has no idea of who Himmler was?