Stop Telling People to Only Vote on Election Day

posted by Kurt Schlichter at Townhall 

Look, it usually doesn’t help to be harsh, but sometimes you have to be. So, harsh it is.  If you are one of those conservatives saying that we should only vote on election day and not use mail-in voting, ballot harvesting, early voting, or any of the tactics, techniques, or procedures that Democrats have used to win elections, then you’re an idiot.

There’s no sugarcoating it – you’re just plain stupid. I don’t know what the hell is wrong with you, but you need to pull your head out of your fourth point of contact and get with the program. We’re here to win, and that means mastering rules of the game as they exist, not as we wished they existed. You know what I’d like? I’d like one day of voting where everyone shows ID and marks a paper ballot and it’s counted publicly. You know what else I’d like? I’d like a pet unicorn. I’d name him Chet. But I’m not going to get a pet unicorn. And I’m not going to convince a bunch of Democrat state legislatures or a Democrat Senate to do what I want. I don’t know why this is hard to understand. It should not be hard. It’s obvious. 

Mastering the tactics, techniques, and procedures of the enemy works to defeat Democrat election shenanigans. Look what happened in California. In 2018, we got slaughtered because the communists were using California law to ballot harvest and do all the other things that allowed Democrats to mobilize their indolent, stupid, and lazy electorate and convert those morons’ feelz into counted ballots. So, in 2020, we did the same thing to mobilize normal people. We went to churches and gun shows and other places where patriots hang out, and you know what? We won a bunch of congressional seats. Holy cow! Republicans gaining seats in California? Yeah! Election tactics matter.

I am baffled about the near-religious conviction that some of these dogmatic individuals have about voting only in-person on election day. Guess who else wants us to do that? Democrats – perhaps there’s a reason.

It’s a certifiably stupid thing to do if you can have your people mail in ballots or vote early and don’t. Why? Well, when you vote early, that ballot is banked. It’s done. It’s over. It’s counted. Even in California, I know it’s counted. I get a little email saying, “Hey, we got your ballot and counted it.” They aren’t sifting out the Republican early ballots. They don’t know what’s in the envelope. Mine comes from Ted Lieu’s district near Los Angeles, so it is presumptively from some damn communist. The idea that these half-wit bureaucrats are smart enough to cull out the conservative ballots gives these morons far too much credit. 

In contrast, let’s look at what happened in Nevada last time. In Nevada, there was a freaking storm, and it was the people out in the rural boonies – the people we needed voting for us – who couldn’t get their pickup trucks to the voting place. The culinary workers in  Las Vegas voted weeks in advance under the eyes of their union overlords. We got screwed. But if our people had voted early and banked those votes, we might have won.

How about Maricopa County? You remember that? When and where did the problems arise? In Republican precincts on election day. They suddenly had the wrong ballots, or the machines didn’t work, or whatever. And people left because they couldn’t wait around. But if they had voted early…

Election Day voting makes screwing over Republicans easy because the conservative voters were located in identifiable places all at one single time. All the mail in ballots go into a big pile, so you can’t target patriots. If a machine breaks down during early voting, fine – you come back tomorrow. If all those Arizona Republicans had taken advantage of early voting and mailed in their ballots or gone and done early voting at one of the polling places, that wouldn’t have happened. Learn from your mistakes.

Oh, and early voting lets the GOP target low propensity voters, the folks who might not vote without getting a call. Election Day should be all about low propensity voters and running up the score, not reminding people who don’t need a reminder. The parties track who has voted – a fringe benefit is that if you have voted no one calls or texts you. Win-win.

But some people still adhere to the dumb idea that only in-person Election Day voting is secure. Who knows why they think that? It’s demonstrably wrong. Again, I wish things were different. I wish we had one day voting like they do in the rest of the civilized world. But that’s not the world we live in. That’s not the battlefield we’re fighting on. We don’t have that choice. Should we work for it? Yeah. And you know what would be helpful in that battle? Winning some freaking elections so we have the legislative majorities to enact those laws. But right now, we don’t. Right now, we have to find each location and figure out exactly how to get as many ballots counted as possible. That’s all that matters. Good intentions don’t matter. Wishing doesn’t matter. Wanting doesn’t matter. Counted votes matter. And only counted votes.

There’s a principle of engineering, the single point of failure. That means the one place in a system where, if it goes wrong, everything screws up. That’s why we have redundancy. Airplanes don’t fail because there are two or three of everything, unless you’re flying on the new DEI-friendly Boeing. The single point of failure in GOP campaigns is Election Day. Putting all our electoral eggs in one electoral basket makes it not only easier for the enemy to cheat but easier for us to cheat ourselves. How many votes do we lose because the Buick didn’t start or because Jimmy had to be picked up from school because he stuck a pencil up his nose again? How many votes do we lose because people just forget? If you vote six weeks ahead of time, you’re done. Finished. Your ballot is in. A meteor could strike you on election day, and your vote would still count. Your carburetor won’t stop you from voting. Your moron kid won’t stop you from voting. Your life chaos won’t stop you from voting. Nothing can stop you from voting if you have already voted.

We have to knock off this ridiculous obsession with Election Day voting. The enemy utilizes all the options. We must too. You’re not going to somehow shame them into changing the system by refusing to vote except on Election Day in person at a polling place. All you’re doing is making it less likely for conservatives to win, which makes it 100% more likely that you will never get the election system that you want. Stop being dumb. You should vote the first day you possibly can get it over with, get it done, and win for a change.

As Elite Education Falls in Public Esteem, Trade Schools Rise Among a New Generation

 Why pay up to $100,000 for one year of college when you can make that same amount working a technical job that doesn’t require a college diploma?

https://www.nysun.com/article/as-elite-education-falls-in-public-esteem-trade-schools-rise-among-a-new-generation

More and more members of Gen Z are opting for trade schools over a liberal arts education, with many college campuses bracing for a drop in enrollment that researchers call a “demographic cliff.”

Vocational-focused community colleges saw an enrollment increase of 16 percent last year — the highest rate since 2018 when the National Student Clearinghouse began tracking that figure. There was a 23 percent surge in students studying construction trades and a 7 percent increase in HVAC and vehicle maintenance and repair programs in 2023 compared to the year before.

That trend reflects the increasing allure of high-paying technical jobs. Data from the payroll services provider, ADP, disclose that the median pay for new construction hires was $48,089 last year, compared to $39,520 for professional services new hires. The fastest-growing job in America today is a wind turbine service technician, who can make up to $103,000 without a college degree. 

Most top-paid job postings still require an advanced degree, according to the career site Ladder. Yet data show that wages at the bottom end of the income distribution — say, for grocery store employees — are growing faster than those at the top end, a Carleton College professor, Nathan Grawe, tells the Sun. That helps explain the coming decline in the number of college students in America that he calls a “demographic cliff.” 

Mr. Grawe, who published the book, “Demographics and the Demand for Higher Education,” predicts fewer young persons reaching the college-going age in 2026. That will mark 18 years since the Great Recession was met with a plummeting birth rate, a decline that has only accelerated.

Elite universities that enroll small numbers of students will likely recruit just fine. Less prestigious four-year colleges and two-year colleges could struggle to fill up classes. They will be hit with a “double whammy” of smaller cohorts and a “shift in taste toward the trade schools, if that trend continues,” Mr. Grawe says. “They’re already seeing declining enrollments and grappling with budget pressures that result from that.”

It’s easy to see why students are turning their backs on getting a diploma. As costs skyrocket, student debts surge, and the promise of occupational reward hangs in balance, going to college today is much more of a gamble for one’s future than it used to be. 

In 2011, 86 percent of college graduates said that college had been a good investment for them personally, Pew Research Center reported. Their incomes reflected this investment. Now, only about a third of Americans now express a lot of confidence in higher education. According to Gallup polling, in 2013, 74 percent of adults aged between 18 and 29 years said college was “very important,” a number which fell to 41 percent just six years later.

“On the political right, we have people questioning some of the social benefits of what’s being offered at four-year institutions, and that has, in some conservative circles, led people toward supporting enrollment in two-year colleges, trade schools, and vocational-technical schools,” Mr. Grawe says. 

“At the same time, we’ve got people on the political left who are also questioning the returns to higher ed.” He cites the free college movement, which appears to be gaining momentum as several states have passed tuition-free initiatives. 

The average cost of college in America is $36,436 a student a year, a figure that has more than doubled in the 21st century. Some Vanderbilt students will have $100,000 in total expenses for the 2024-25 school year, the New York Times reports. President Biden’s attempts to forgive student loans have faced legal challenges.

Americans souring on higher education, on both the right and the left, say it’s not worth the private investment. “Why would we talk about free college for all if college is going to increase your earning potential?” Mr. Grawe says. “We don’t generally think that valuable things should be offered for free.”

That disillusionment is largely expressed toward America’s most competitive schools, which have recently been accused of  prioritizing diversity and inclusion over excellence. “I’m not anticipating that Harvard is going to be struggling for students,” Mr. Grawe says. “But what Harvard does and how the country perceives them does matter, I think, to higher ed more broadly.”

M.J. KOCH

Ms. Koch graduated in 2023 from Harvard College, where she was the editor-in-chief of the student weekly, the Harvard Independent. She reports on issues of higher education and foreign policy at The New York Sun.

X22, And we Know, and more- April 15

 

Happy 1000th and 1001st episodes day to the NCISVerse!! 🎉

The Robin Hood Effect

posted by J.B. Shurk at American Thinker 

In a previous essay, I broached the topic of popular nullification in the context of rejecting the State’s propaganda.  Citizens are increasingly seeing through the lies Western governments regularly tell their populations in order to buttress their authority and maintain effective social control.  As awful as COVID’s lockdowns and other rank authoritarian mandates were, they proved salubrious in educating the public as to how government institutions (including health agencies) fabricate scientific evidence and betray basic medical ethics in pursuit of broader totalitarian agendas.  Part of the heightened pushback to expensive “green energy” directives and farming regulations stems from enhanced public awareness that Western governments flood the information space with fake news meant to justify more expansive and intrusive government control.

For critical thinkers who are cognizant of governments’ longstanding use of psychological and sociological “dark arts” to manipulate their own citizens, the public’s “awakening” may seem too late, slow, or insignificant.  On the contrary, it is accelerating.

Shattering existing paradigms is like escaping from an intellectual prison.  For most people, that prison is all they have ever known.  A lot of lone escapees look back at their former cages from a distance and presume that those who remain locked up will never find the strength to break free.  The problem, however, is not a lack of strength, but a paralyzing misapprehension that the prison trapping so many minds represents the limits of what is possible.

Right now the rate of intellectual liberation seems slow because inmates escape one at a time.  When enough critical thinkers are able to demolish prison walls with the force of their reason, no government lie will be able to stop those who wish to be free.

Every social revolution begins with a trickle and ends with a downpour.  It’s a good time to invest in wellies and raincoats.

Popular nullification of prevailing paradigms occurs when a critical mass of the population refuses to play by the current rules.  Respect for the rule of law is usually the first to go.  Up to this point in time, TPTB have been lucky in that the vast majority of Westerners have been unwilling to break the law in pursuit of personal political aims.  In times of relative civic peace, people who identify as “good” citizens generally refrain from committing criminal acts.  If governments enforce reasonable laws in an impartial way, conscientious citizens will dutifully comply.  The criminal code becomes an integral part of the social mores that guide an individual’s behavior and expectation of behavior from others.  When law enforcement officers, prosecutors, and courts are instead seen as applying criminal statutes in an unequal, discriminatory, and malicious fashion, then the legal system is understood as nothing more than a partisan political weapon.  Once such legitimacy is lost, it is not easily restored.  In fact, corrupt legal systems tend to produce a “Robin Hood” effect, in which the moral stigma of being an outlaw disappears.

The U.S. and other Western governments have so eroded the public’s trust in their respective criminal justice systems that they risk mobilizing “Robin Hood” resistance forces on a national scale.  Throughout the West, significant budget expenditures are utilized to aid and abet illegal immigration.  Government offices assist foreign nationals in skirting existing work rules, identification requirements, and other domestic laws.  Meanwhile, when law-abiding citizens object to such flagrant criminality, police officers and prosecutors in too many jurisdictions direct their resources toward punishing the locals for violating some vague prohibition against “hate speech.”  Dissent is criminalized so that officers of the law can participate in ongoing criminal conspiracies without the burden of exerting any effort to conceal their culpability.

When the government is in cahoots with a foreign criminal class and intimidates honest people for noticing, respect for the rule of law vanishes quickly.  Just as an immoral law is no law at all, an unjust legal system requires moral people to seek justice elsewhere.

Denver, Colorado is the latest crime-supporting enclave to announce that it will defund police and fire departments and divert those critical tax dollars toward services and housing for illegal aliens.  A dispassionate observer might conclude that State agents are involved in a criminal conspiracy meant to keep blue-collar wages low, while sustaining hundreds of thousands of mail-in ballot recipients who may influence public policy by voting illegally.  Democrat politicians in Denver parrot the same Orwellian language used in other crime-sponsoring jurisdictions by insisting that illegal aliens be called “newcomers.”  When government agents employ euphemisms to hide their own criminal activities, honest citizens take note.  Police and fire departments feel the pain of remaining silent while the political class engages in indefensible criminality.  Because venal government agents put the public’s safety at risk, law-abiding citizens learn that they cannot stake their families’ lives on the defunct rule of law.

The fact that public officials break the law so shamelessly adds to the widespread perception in the United States that elections are rigged.  For decades, American citizens have called for secure elections that ensure that only legally permitted voters cast ballots.  Instead, politicians and election officials in too many states have worked to limit photo identification and signature verification requirements.  They have transformed Election Day into Election Season — providing political operatives the time to collect ballots for weeks both before and after important contests.  And they have taken advantage of COVID hysteria to normalize the use of mail-in ballots.  With many states running elections as nothing more than ballot-gathering operations in which political partisans print and mail millions of untracked ballots for their political allies to fill out and return, elections have never been more vulnerable to fraud.  Unlike elections outside the United States, American elections are not transparent, timely, or reproducible.

In an electoral system that invites fraud, tens of millions of illegal aliens provide criminal conspirators with ample opportunity to sway elections in battleground states that routinely come down to a few thousand votes.  Adding insult to injury, states that help illegal aliens break the law are perversely rewarded by receiving additional Electoral College representatives for their inflated populations.  It’s a rigged game, and American voters know it.  When hundreds of thousands of concerned citizens showed up in D.C. to protest for free and fair elections on January 6, 2021, however, the same criminal officials who condone fraudulent elections abused their powers to torment and imprison conscientious Americans.  As writer Dave King recently noted, “if you peacefully enter the Capitol Building, you go to jail,” but if you are a Muslim immigrant shouting, “Death to America” in Michigan, President Biden and Democrats will join your side and celebrate the terrorists in Hamas.  That kind of grotesque double-standard creates a profound “Robin Hood” effect.

Where is all this heading?  The social order will continue to disintegrate as respect for the rule of law withers.  Because those who have been entrusted to enforce the law have instead chosen to become criminals, law-abiding citizens will learn to protect and police themselves.  As the stigma of being branded an “insurrectionist,” “extremist,” or “domestic terrorist” disappears, more and more “Robin Hoods” will openly defy the State.

There is substantial evidence that such popular nullification of the State’s authority is well underway.  The corrupt FBI and DOJ have taken unprecedented steps to imprison President Trump for the rest of his life.  These Gestapo forces have persecuted Trump’s allies, ordinary conservative voters, Christians, pro-life advocates, and parents attending school board meetings.  Instead of effectively demonizing or intimidating their targets, however, the goose-stepping thugs providing muscle for the federal government’s criminal empire have only emboldened Americans to support the “villains” more vigorously.  When “outlaws” have more honor than governments, paradigms come crashing down, and widespread prison breaks begin.

A Remarkable Upgrade – Harriet Hageman Swings Big Timber and Big Truth

Sundance reporting for Conservative Treehouse 

From Liz Cheney to Harriet Hageman, a remarkable upgrade from voters in Wyoming.  Stunningly so.  I have alerts established for all things Hageman, because she presents as a stealth wolverine very quietly.  I like that.

Yes, you will hear me say it first…. this is my first opportunity to do so….  If there are reservations about Ben Carson for VP (personally I do not think there are any), then I would implore President Trump to consider Harriet Hageman as his VP running mate.  Yes, I would be good with taking a chance on Hageman as POTUS in ’28.  WATCH:

On May 31, 2022, Representative Matt Gaetz (R-FL) made an explosive announcement as an outcome of a whistleblower providing information to him and Jim Jordan about the FBI having a collaborative relationship with the Clinton/DNC law firm Perkins Coie.  {Go Deep} Specifically, the explosive element surrounds the FBI having a workspace within the DNC law firm that would have given Democrats an open portal into FBI databases for use in opposition research.

In this video former NSA Director Mike Rogers explains how he was notified of unlawful FBI extractions from the NSA database, what was happening with illegal search queries and what he did after the notification. WATCH:

Knowing that Perkins Coie and the FBI were working together on this targeting operation, makes everything else make sense.

However, the involvement of official government agencies like NSA Admiral Mike Rogers, creates a paper trail.  Search query logs, notifications to Mike Rogers, notifications to the FISA Court, notifications to FBI officials of the suspension of contractor access, and subsequent FISA court opinions like the 99-pages from Rosemary Collyer, all of it creates an internal trail of government documents that tell the story.

It’s those documents that become a risk to the people who operate within the system.  In this example of government documents, the trail outlines the targeting of Donald Trump and that was what he continued to ask the ODNI, DOJ and FBI to release.

Frustrated by the lack of action, in March 2022 Donald Trump filed a massive civil lawsuit against the Clinton campaign and everyone involved in this targeting operation. [SEE LAWSUIT HERE]  “Acting in concert, the Defendants maliciously conspired to weave a false narrative that their Republican opponent, Donald J. Trump, was colluding with a hostile foreign sovereignty,” the president states.

“Under the guise of ‘opposition research,’ ‘data analytics,’ and other political stratagems, the Defendants nefariously sought to sway the public’s trust. They worked together with a single, self-serving purpose: to vilify Donald J. Trump,” says one segment of the lawsuit.

All of the claims within the filing are substantiated by documents outlining the history of the events.  I’m not sure any defendant is going to be successful getting themselves out of the target zone on the lawsuit.  The suit alleges “racketeering” and a “conspiracy to commit injurious falsehood,” among other claims.

The basis for the evidence against the entire crew?  That was likely part of the assembly of evidence, the declassified documents at the heart of the battle, that were targeted by the DOJ and FBI raid.

 

Biden's Latest Lawless Student Loan Forgiveness

  

He wants to write off hundreds of billions in student debt before the courts can stop him.

 

The issue of bribing students just prior to the election is real.

The Administration is essentially turning college into an open-ended, taxpayer-financed entitlement by canceling loans on the installment plan. It even boasts that it has already “approved $146 billion in student debt relief for 4 million Americans through more than two dozen executive actions.” That's $36,500 per borrower. It’s good to be the King.

The Supreme Court ruled last year that Mr. Biden’s cancelation of $10,000 to $20,000 per borrower exceeded his authority under the 2003 Heroes Act, which allows the executive to “modify” loan terms in an emergency. The Administration “modified” loans, Chief Justice John Roberts wrote, in the “same sense that ‘the French Revolution “modified” the status of the French nobility.’”

An Administration official said late Sunday its new plans “involve different considerations” and use “different legal authority.” It invokes the Higher Education Act, which lets the Education Secretary “compromise” or “waive” claims. The Administration says its new plan is targeted even as it boasts about its scale.

Mr. Biden’s new loan forgiveness is still illegal. The High Court stressed that student loan forgiveness is a major question that requires clear authorization from Congress. But Mr. Biden seems to believe he can jam the courts by automatically forgiving debt before a judge has time to stop him.

The White House says most borrowers won’t even have to apply for loan relief. Sometime before the November election, Mr. Biden will simply declare their debt forgiven. That means a future Congress and a President Trump might be unable to undo the lawless act. Where are the press scolds who warn about a President who threatens democracy? (From the WSJ).

 

"Why should I have to pay for someone's degree in "Himalayan Lesbian Art" from the "Gender Studies" department or some useless "Art History" major that dropped out? I schooled as needed, in a trade and profession and paid for it as I went along which provided a good income and retirement. I didn't get a handout and what about my reimbursement? (DooDy)"

 

                                                                                Source:

 

Congress Plans New Funding Push for Israel and Ukraine

Sundance reporting for Conservative Treehouse 

In a moment of serendipitous timing for Zelenskyy, Iran fired approximately 300 drone missiles toward Israel.   Now Congress is promoting further funding for Israel and Ukraine. Serendipitous serendipity strikes again.

Keep in mind, the flight time over the 1,000-mile distance provided plenty of time for Israel to prepare and respond with countermeasures, making a suspicious type of person wonder why Iran would even go through the exercise.

“Given the events of tonight, it is even clearer that the best way to help Israel is for the House to quickly pass the Senate’s bipartisan national security supplemental next week,” Chuck Schumer said. The House has so far declined to take a vote on the Senate-passed legislation with many House conservatives opposed to sending additional Ukraine and wanted stricter border policies included in an aid package.  (LINK)  Huh, funny that.

As if on cue…

“The House Republicans and the Republican Party understand the necessity of standing with Israel. We’re going to try again this week, and the details of that package are being put together right now. We’re looking at the options and all these supplemental issues,” Speaker Mike Johnson said on Fox’s Sunday Morning Futures. (LINK)  Wow, what a remarkable coincidence. Amazing.

More than anything else, I always appreciate the way Nic Robertson provides the dramatic approach toward the needs and requests of the U.S. Dept of State and CIA.   He’s really good at this. WATCH:

Dead End in Mideast Owes to Blunders of President Carter, When He Threw Out the Shah ‘Like a Dead Mouse’

 Israel would be justified now in destroying Iran’s missile-launching platforms, defense production capabilities, oil production, and nuclear military program.

https://www.nysun.com/article/dead-end-in-mideast-results-from-blunders-of-president-carter-when-he-threw-out-the-shah-like-a-dead-mouse

We have now reached the dead end of the disasters of successive Democratic presidents in dealing with Iran. President Carter, as his national security advisor, Zbigniew Brezinski, remarked, “threw the Shah out like a dead mouse” in 1979. This has not received the attention it deserved as one of the greatest strategic blunders in the history of the United States.

The distorted vision that produced that terrible reversal in the correlation of forces and interests in the Middle East was echoed by President Obama‘s apologies for the secondary role played by the United States in the removal of the bumbling, Russian-influenced populist leader of Iran, Mohammad Mossadegh in 1953. This was in fact, chiefly a British enterprise, sponsored by Winston Churchill, and supported by President Eisenhower.

On their performances and services rendered to the cause of the west, the day will never come when those men will owe Mr. Obama an apology. This is illustrative of the delusional self- righteousness of the Obama and Biden notion that if we just appease Iran and Russia and Communist China enough, they will reform their unkind attitudes to America and the West and everything will get better. In fact, that is a certain way to ensure that everything gets worse.

Mr. Obama reneged on the American promise to provide the Czech Republic with anti-missile defenses, and while this became tangled up with a great many other policy issues involving Russia, and particularly Ukraine, it, undoubtedly contributed to the increasing confidence of our strategic opponents that they could act provocatively with impunity. Mr. Obama withdrew from Iraq, despite warnings that that could be hazardous, and ISIS almost overthrew the Iraqi government.

Mr. Obama announced a return of American and allied air strikes and modestly allowed that “This is American leadership at its best.” The ghastly saga of President Biden’s flight from Afghanistan is familiar to all. So is his syncopated response to Ukraine: first, it wouldn’t matter if it were only an incursion into Russian-speaking territory. Then Russia was going to occupy the whole country in a few weeks and Ukraine and the world just had to acquiesce in it, but President Zelensky and his family would be evacuated.

Then President Putin was a war criminal and America and NATO would give them whatever it took, but not the weapons they needed, as that would be “escalatory.” There was never a realistic exit strategy and the president spoke of defending “every square inch of NATO” but not a square inch of NATO was under threat. The NATO-sponsored Ukrainian offensive of 2023 was a fiasco.

The administration’s immediate response to the Hamas invasion of Israel, and the barbarous slaughter of civilians in October was purposeful and unambiguous. It was proclaimed that Israel, of course, possesses the right to defend itself. Israel declared war on Hamas, formed a national unity government, declared its objective to be the elimination of Hamas as a terrorist entity.

This was implicitly ratified by continuing American encouragement, but in the now familiar pattern of this administration, defending itself did not mean actually punishing and destroying those who inflicted on Israel the greatest destruction of Jewish life in a single day since the liberation of the death camps in Europe at the end of World War II.

The American administration’s definition of Israeli self-defense fluctuated, according to the demonstrations of Palestinian or pro-Palestinian groups in Michigan and Minnesota, both states the administration needs to be reelected. The Israeli war plan systematically, and with as little damage to civilian life as was possible, tore up the immensely intricate and extensive Hamas network of tunnels and bunkers and has so far eliminated between 35 and 50 percent of the actual Hamas terrorist fighters.

The rest appear to be concentrated in and underneath Rafah in the south and the administration’s definition of Israel’s right of self-defense now consists of not attacking its cornered enemy until unspecified measures of relief have been accorded to the civilians in Gaza, the human shield Hamas hides under. The Hamas leader, Ismail Haniyeh, has publicly announced that the discomfort of civilians is welcome as it raises Palestinian hatred of Israel.

The Pentagon is now instructing Israel on how to conduct this war, which Israel, with full justification, considers a war for its survival, since Hamas has made it clear that it will never accept the right of Israel to exist as a Jewish state, which is what the United Nations created it as in 1948. Israel also believes, and again with reason, that it is acting on the pledge of the Jewish people at the end of the Holocaust that the Jews would “never again” go passively to their deaths in large numbers without resistance or retaliation.

This brings us to the appropriate response to Saturday’s swarming attack by Iran on Israel, with the launch of over 300 attack drones and ballistic and cruise missiles against Israel. The president must be commended for ordering a maximum American effort to assist Israel in shooting down these air strikes, and it is a powerful confirmation of the technological sophistication and skill of the Israeli and American armed forces that approximately 99 percent of this attempted blitzkrieg was harmlessly destroyed in the air.

Nor is there anything inappropriate in America not participating in a retaliation by Israel against Iran. The problem with this administration’s notion of strategic responses in the Middle East is that it does not understand that this is not just another skirmish over the division of territory between Jews and Arabs.

It was a murderous assault conducted with the greatest possible barbarity, on orders from Iran, to try to sabotage the agreement that was close between Israel and Saudi Arabia, and to exploit the demonstrated aversion of the major western powers to any Israeli measures sufficiently forceful to produce a material positive change in the correlation of strength in the region. Israel was to retaliate once again for the 10,000th time and leave it at that. Israel, though, is at war and is fighting for its existence and is entirely justified in exterminating Hamas as a terrorist organization.

It was entirely justified in killing an Iranian commander of the Hamas invasion of October in a supposedly diplomatic building in Iraq (a country that President George W. Bush’s bungling has been largely handed over to Iran). After a massive air assault, which if it had not been for the superlative Israeli and American air defenses would have devastated much of Israel, it is time to recognize that Israel is at war.

As General MacArthur famously advised the United States, Congress and the nation in 1951: “Once war has been forced on us, there is no alternative then to apply every available means to bring that war to the swiftest possible victorious conclusion at the minimum possible cost in American and allied lives. In war, there is no substitute for victory.” We ignored that lesson in Korea, and in Vietnam, but we have no right to ask Israel, which is fighting a war all around its borders, and to some extent within its own territory, to forget that lesson also.

Israel would be perfectly justified in destroying Iran’s missile-launching platforms and sophisticated defense production capabilities, and its oil production, refinement, and export assets. It is also entitled to destroy Iran’s nuclear military program, and the whole world would applaud Israel for doing so. It could let it be known that if there was a further retaliation, Israel would set out to kill the entire leadership of this belligerent and malignant theocracy, which largely owes its incumbency to President Carter’s abandonment of our reliable and relatively progressive ally, the Shah of Iran.

CONRAD BLACK

Lord Black, Baron Black of Crossharbour, was Chairman of Hollinger International Inc. and a founding director of the New York Sun.