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[New York, 05 February 2009]

Israel’s future represents humanity’s future; Israel’s conflict is the nadir of our human experiment.  History has never wanted Israel to exist, has never considered the Jewish population to be worthy of any form of consideration save that of revulsion and enslavement.  No population in human history has fought and struggled for their right to self determination for as long, or has been dismissed, debased and destroyed as consistently across the ages as the Jewish people.  The West’s treatment and consideration of blacks for the last 500 years is but a drop of water in the well that is the oppression of populations.  Today’s Jewish state-which recently celebrated its 50^th anniversary-exists only because Adolph Hitler failed in his perverted scheme to eliminate Jews from the future pages of history.  His policy of lebensraum (German for “living space”) was realized as the victors of WWII reinterpreted it-as a permanent home for the Jewish people-not as Hitler had envisioned:  the extermination of all peoples not Aryan. 

But that reinterpretation of living space was not achieved until after over 15,000 Nazi concentration, work and death camps across 15 European countries and 6 million murdered (35% of the worldwide Jewish population in 1939, which is roughly the size of the worldwide Jewish population currently living in Israel).  It is no surprise, then, to witness the United Nations continue the sentiment of Hitler in its denunciation of Israel’s incursion into Gaza.  They are merely continuing the same bigoted and hateful rejection of the self determination of a population they would sooner see extinct.  Their sentiment should be anathema to that of American’s, for the right of self determination is what our Founders bequeathed to us; and strength through victory in pursuit of that right being recognized by our shared community is the enduring lesson they taught us.  Our Founding Fathers would steadfastly defend the action of today’s Israel.

And so must we.

However, to believe that the international community abhors Israel’s Gaza incursion strictly because of its fundamental anti-Semitism would be short-sighted.  There has been a pervading culture of fear across Europe since before WWII concluded, has only intensified in the aftermath of the world’s last global conflict, and until recently had avoided residence on our own American shores.  I liken it to the same culture of fear that pervades the weaker less-popular primary school child on the playground courtyard.  Terrified that the school’s bully is going to harm them without reprieve, they futilely attempt to do good by them in the misguided hope of gaining the bully’s favor and avoiding what their own lacking strength cannot accomplish-avoidance of a beating.  But placating one’s enemies is not a path to victory, only a path to delayed defeat.  Pleading with your enemies to “make nice” only emboldens them to continue pilfering your inept defenses and complacent acceptance of peace under someone else’s terms.  This is the policy of the United Nations.  It is not the policy of Israel.

And until last week was not the policy of the Executive Branch of the United States government.

Israel does not seek the world’s favor.  And since most of human history is comprised of various populations attempting to either enslave or exterminate the Jewish people, it is hard to blame them for striking their current course.  Israel realizes that an enemy intent on their destruction, on ending their way of life, must be dealt with on a level wholly different than purse snatchers, bank thieves, and money launderers.  They understand that the rules for dealing with criminals must be different from the rules dealing with terrorists.  They understand that it is not crimes being committed by Hamas against Israel, but rather terrorism.  When cultural extinction is the ultimate objective of your enemy, civility or adherence to basic investigative procedures are unaffordable luxuries whose pursuit only serves to expedite your enemy’s plans.  The Israeli’s understand this.  And they are wise to ignore the international community’s condemnation of their acts considering no nation has ever come to their aid over the last several millennia when their existence has been threatened.  Israel’s first priority is ensuring the existence, the protection and assured future of its people.  Whether the global community appreciates their methods for attaining that priority could not be of lesser value to them.

Not so with the newly elected president of the United States.  Less than one week in office and President Obama enabled the terrorists to do catastrophic harm to not only the 46% of the American voting populace who did not cast their ballot for him, but as well to the 53% of Americans who elected him to office.  America’s enemy is no different from that of Israel’s in its desire for our way of life to cease immediately and with the most severe and calamitous pain inflicted.  The celebrations in the streets of the Middle East on September 11, 2001, the internet broadcasts of decapitated journalists, the ignored distinction between civilians and children from uniformed soldiers, are all testament to the brutality of our enemy; and to the chilling differences between our current enemy and the enemy as defined by the nations involved in WWII.

But America’s newly elected president, in the opening days of his administration, has chosen to adopt the European adherence to the Geneva Convention (written in 1948 when the Allied and Axis powers alike conceived of enemy combatants as uniformed soldiers fighting for recognized nations.)  In one fell swoop, President Obama ordered the following:

• The closure of Guantanamo Bay prison
• The staying of all military commissions (with the implied intention to have these prisoners tried in civilian courts where intelligence sources and methods will be requested shared in open court by defense attorneys)
• Adherence to the Geneva Conventions’ definitions of “prisoner of war” for those the Bush Administration labeled enemy combatants
• Requiring of the CIA to conduct interrogations as per the Army Field Manual: no coercive techniques, no threats, no promises, no good cop-bad cop techniques
• Al Qaeda leaders to be protected from “outrages on personal dignity” and “humiliating and degrading treatment”

Let us be perfectly blunt: it was George W. Bush who put the world on notice after 9/11 that the US would treat terrorists and harbingers of terrorists alike, the result being not a single American killed on US soil by terrorism since.  And it was Bill Clinton who decided not to take out Osama Bin Laden when he was quite literally in the crosshairs of a US predator drone.  It was George W. Bush who toppled Saddam Hussein and enabled a democratically elected government the inalienable right to life and liberty less than three years into his presidency, while Bill Clinton spent all eight of his administration playing cat and mouse with Saddam while the Iraqi dictator pursued chemical, biological and nuclear technology.  For all of George W. Bush’s shortcomings and just reasons for criticism, the US was a safer nation under his watch after eight years of Bill Clinton leading us to the horrible effects of 9/11 through the very same approach to national defense now being adopted by President Obama.

And the only plausible explanation for such misguided actions seems to be fear of our enemies-the idea that if we don’t give them a hard time upon capture, our courtesy will both encourage them to share critical intelligence with our law enforcement agencies and perhaps compel them to dissuade their terrorist friends from committing any more acts of violence against our citizens and interests across the world; that our once supportive friends in Europe will come to our defense in times of need having seen our compassion and respect for the personal dignity and civil rights of the killers who wish to take from us what our Founding Fathers called our inalienable right to life, liberty and a pursuit of happiness; that the likelihood of the Republican party conducting a witch-hunt in four years for Democratic lawbreakers will be diminished if our interrogations are “by the book,” in this case, the Army Field Manual.  Over 2,700 Americans were murdered in under ninety minutes on September 11, 2001, in part, because the United States government of the 1990s was operating from a position of fear in its (mis)management of terrorist threats against us. 

Israel knows this system of conciliatory gestures followed by terrorist responses all too well, i.e. land for peace initiatives.  Perhaps President Obama is too young to remember the conciliatory gestures his American predecessors have offered only to be followed by reversals of promises.  His own Secretary of State should be able to offer him some stories on North Korea alone, not to mention Iraq and Libya, with respect to US conciliation going unreturned and unappreciated when attempting to persuade nuclear nonproliferation.  Europe has its own rich history of appeasement, so much so that if not for the intervention of the United States the official language of France may well have become German.  President Obama should remind what appears to be his European constituents of that the next time he is speaking before thousands on the cobbled streets of another foreign city.

And he can start in Tel Aviv, and with a pledge of support for our Israeli friends.

Let us admit that when we gerrymander the globe, the law of unintended consequences will most assuredly play a role.  Had the members of the UN Partition Plan in 1947 decided to create a Jewish state in the North Pole, or on a manmade island in the South Pacific, the Israeli conflict would indeed be different.  An Israeli state stuck in the middle of the principle Arab region in the world was bound to create biblical unrest.  But even separated geographically from the Gentile world, Israel would undoubtedly still suffer from international isolation and condemnation in defense of its right to self determination.

As the UN sits in what should be humiliating silence on Hamas, Hezbollah and Iran-supported acts of terrorism and professed support of genocide in their call for the destruction of the Jewish state, Israel continues its historic fight for life, liberty and the pursuit of suicide bomb-free commutes to and from work and school.  To allow Israel to fail in its defense of its right to exist-for the international community to not throw its full support behind Israeli forces in Gaza-is to concede humanity’s right to self determination and accept the inevitable violence, inequity and brutishness of a Hobbesian world

And to offer Israel anything but our unequivocal support is for America to ignore the premise of its own founding at the free world’s peril.

President Obama rightly claims connection with Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. as the eventuality of Dr. King’s work.  Dr. King correctly asserted that injustice anywhere is a threat to justice everywhere.  While both black and white Americans should revere the life and work of Dr. King because of his strict adherence and belief in victory through nonviolence, Israel and the United States are each faced with a body of adversity that will not succumb to change through nonviolent means, will not be weakened by nonviolent acts of civil disobedience or passive Christian turn-the-other-cheek dogmatism.  Our respective aggressors are too ideologically disparate from ourselves for King-like action, all too bent on our respective destruction as the only acceptable vestige of success respected or desired.  And the criticism of both Israel’s self defense and of President Bush’s response to terrorism against our country by the usual suspects of the UN is perhaps a greater injustice than either the aggression by Hamas or Islamic fundamentalism.  While our own detractors correctly assert that Israel is our only friend in the region, it is worth remembering that there is a reason they are our friend.  Terrorist-led states (even if democratically elected) are an injustice threatening justice everywhere.  And nations whose very existence is threatened have a like-minded right to defend themselves without the approval of the international community.

For the international community, particularly the United Nations, to continue to give terrorist groups a pass on the world stage while excoriating nations acting in defense of liberty is an act of injustice with widespread consequences across the planet.  The message to all free peoples in the world delivered by the international body politic created in the wake of Hitler’s final solution is that justice is not delivered through war but through peace, that freedom is not a birthright but a social condition amendable to the whims of transient governments, and that the right to self determination is neither sovereign nor salient, but subject to popular vote.  We cannot afford such a message to be allowed voice any longer.  Israel is right to ignore the UN, and the United States and President Obama should be more concerned with protecting Americans than the Geneva Convention-afforded rights of terrorists.

.   .   .

The last half of the 20^th century has seen the greatest expansion of wealth in human history, an explosion of technological advancement that propelled mankind into the stratosphere and beyond and beamed the breadth of the world into credit card-sized devices we carry in our pockets.  We have more “stuff” than any generation has ever had before us, and owe more in debt for it than any other previous peacetime generation.

And we are afraid of losing it.

We are so afraid of losing our stuff-home, job, society’s impression of our standing in the community, etc-that we seem to have forgotten that there are in fact non-material things still worth fighting for, that there are indeed principles that require our committed efforts-if not our blood-for sustenance and mere survival.  WWII did not rid the world of all that ails it, the Allied powers did not defeat all evil in their victory recorded on paper at Potsdam-endangered principles remained: freedom from tyranny, equality of races and religion, a peaceful nation’s right to self determination.  And if the idea of America has come to mean anything, it is an unwavering defense of such principles in both foreign and domestic settings.

Mr. President: maintain the tools that have made the country you now preside over a safer place.  Keep the world on notice that its support-both active and passive-of terrorism against the United States will be met with unimaginable force.  Save your rhetoric about extending an open hand for the Republicans after you right the economy and bring successful conclusion to the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan.  Your clenched fist should remain in the face of those who wish us harm.

Anything less, Mr. President, is treasonous.

[New York, January 20, 2009]

On this day, January 20, 2009, the United States of America has taken one giant step in the fulfillment of the principles of our Founding Fathers first declared to each other and to their world over two centuries ago, that they hold the following truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their creator with certain inalienable rights among which are life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness.  A nation they knew to be unfinished at the drafting of the Constitution-understood to be unfinished both for the issues left unresolved at its founding, specifically slavery, and those issues that our Founders had not yet conceived but knew would challenge a nation of free citizens-was brought closer to completion this afternoon. 

Our Founding Sons wishes to extend our most sincere and heartfelt congratulations to the 44^th President of the United States, Barack Obama.  While we have always been proud to call ourselves Americans, there are moments in our lives when the pride brims a little more than usual.  And today we struggle to remember a time when we experienced greater pride at the American Experiment than in our witnessing of the first African American taking the Presidential oath of office a mere forty years since the death of Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., and in the capital city of a nation founded under the divisive yolk of slavery.  Every patriotic American should be proud of what our nation accomplished at noon EST, January 20, 2009.  Our short history of self-proclaimed global declaratives has yet another charge to record: Our Founders meant it when they affirmed in our sacred oath that all men are created equal.  And the example first set forth by the father of our nation in his peaceful ceding of power to the next generation of Americans was once again honored on the West Front of the U.S. Capitol.  We are a truly fortunate and blessed people to have God continue to shed his grace on thee.

Our country is larger than any government to serve in its hallowed chambers; the Office of the President is of greater import than any man or woman to serve the office-it is that belief that allows for a population divided in its support for political parties and candidates to come together on such days and share in the unifying pride of the quadrennial event of our peaceful transition of the executive seat of government.  So while we did not support presidential candidate Barack Obama, nor are we advocates of what we believe to be explicitly socialist remedies for problems facing a free market national economy and way of life as envisioned by our Founders, we pledge our unyielding respect to the Office of President Barack Obama and our very lives in the defense of our system of government as bestowed upon us by our Founding Fathers.  We urge our President to continue to honor our Founders’ legacy and preserve our union in the spirit in which it was conceived.  Socialist principles applied to the fabric of our unfinished nation would be one giant step backward in an otherwise momentous and forward thinking national moment.

Congratulations, President Obama on your historic personal, professional and patriotic achievement.  God bless you, and may God forever bless the United States of America.

…heaven knows we can use some divine intervention right now.

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[New York, 20 December 2008]

So much for President-elect Obama’s promises of change. 

In an opening sequence in The Dark Knight, Christopher Nolan’s sequel to his 2005 hit, Batman Begins, the film’s criminals furtively meet to discuss their criminal deeds, as one villain admits to another, “I said my drugs would take you places; I never said they would be places you wanted to be.” It was the deceptive betrayal in the content of that admission I was reminded of with Obama’s latest administrative appointment, Maria Shapiro, to replace Christopher Cox as chairman of the Securities and Exchange Commission.  Ms. Shapiro, formerly the head of the Financial Industry Regulatory Authority which is responsible for regulating brokerages (among which would have been Bernard Madoff’s firm), has a sum total of zero historical achievements in tough regulatory oversight.  On the newly created Economic Recover Advisory Board is the role of Chief Economist, announced to be filled with Austan Goolsbee who, among his otherwise distinctive qualifications, wrote a sterling defense of subprime mortgages in a March 2007 New York Times article (and to unnecessarily remind, subprime mortgages rank at the top of the list of triggers setting off our current global financial crisis). 

“I promised you change,” one could hear the President-elect say. “I never said it was the constructive, reform-minded change our country desperately needs.”  And so it goes with the vast majority of his administration appointments to date-a Who’s Who of Been-There-Done-That.

Of the fifteen cabinet positions in the Presidential line of succession (excluding the Vice President, Speaker of the House and President pro tempore of the Senate), Obama’s selections break down as follows:

• 40% are former President Bill Clinton appointees
• 73% are Democrats
• 20% are women
• 27% are minority (non-Caucasian)

Comparing to President Bush’s current cabinet:

• 13% are former President George Bush (41) appointees
• 87% are Republican
• 27% are women
• 20% are minority (non-Caucasian)

The only significant change they collectively represent is that none of them are of Bush’s cabinet (save for Secretary Gates, but we’ll revisit that in 12 months when he joins the ranks of an aspiring 10% unemployment rate).  In an age where Hollywood churns out remakes (pitiable ones at that) of other’s past work, pop artists remake classic tunes in poor taste for a generation ignorant to the original artists, and fashion designers are torn between offering us styles that live only on a runway or were first and last in fashion decades earlier, why should we count on politics to provide us with much needed originality?

Obama’s cabinet tells no different a story than Bush’s in its penchant for change, reform, or acknowledging the gravity of our times.  It is what we have come to expect from any politician achieving the highest office in our land-Democrat or Republican.

However, the quantity of former Clinton staff is a little more than eyebrow-raising.  The President-elect’s reasoning seems to be that the 1990’s were a much better decade than the first of the new millennium: no protracted military conflict, no financial crisis, no deterioration of civil liberties, greater international respect for the United States and in turn, a greater US respect for the international community.  Is anyone willing to acknowledge that the policies of the 1990’s may have contributed to the policies of this first millennial decade?  Or that the suffering of this decade may have been born in the last?  Or that had Clinton been a more effective president, Bush may have had a less arduous administration?  While not seeking to absolve the Bush administration of arguable short comings, or to place undue blame for Bush policy on Clinton’s administration, to structure the Obama administration as a repeat of the Clinton administration and assume better times is to both ignore the lessons learned in the last eight years and to mistakenly praise as righteous the eight years before that.

But the last thing we at Our Founding Sons wish to do is portray ourselves as naïve: a President McCain offered us nothing in his campaign to suggest he’d be any different in his cabinet post selections.  More alarming was McCain’s extreme erraticism in the final months of the campaign which could lead one to surmise a cabinet post for a Senator Obama could very well have been in the President-elect McCain deck of cards.  Politics-as-usual is not a strategy unique to a particular political party. And Obama’s selections offer us little hope for his promised change, with one exception.  Arne Duncan is both a politically prudent and hopeful selection for Secretary of Education.  While we of course wish success for each of the cabinet appointees (assuming Senate confirmation) we intend to pay special attention to Mr. Duncan.  We believe there is no greater issue requiring the full force of our government than education, particularly education reform.  Let’s hope Mr. Duncan is adept enough to do what no Education Secretary has been able to do in decades-prepare our young citizens today for the world that awaits them.

Obama doesn’t score much better, however, on his appointees to his other cabinet and sub-cabinet level positions.  In fact, in the area of gender diversity, Obama falls far short of the inroads made by his predecessor.  Of the fifteen positions highlighted below, President Bush filled 54% of them with women, compared to President-elect Obama’s 15%.  And on the question of a Clinton III Administration, Obama has filled these fifteen positions with 38% of former Clinton White House staff, compared to 15% of former Bush (41) staff appointed by President Bush (43).  However, in the area of political bipartisanship (both Obama and Bush filled 100% of the below positions with their own party) and racial diversity (Obama filled 8% to Bush’s 3% of the below positions with minority candidates), politics-as-usual continues to prevail.

On August 28^th of this year, at a DNC speech, President-elect Obama declared that, “change doesn’t come from Washington, change comes to Washington.”

With 30 top cabinet and sub cabinet positions announced, with the complete Presidential line of succession appointed, with the departments that are to oversee our financial, educational, and military industries already provided with the leadership that has been promised to change our country, reform our country-better our lives and the lives of our children-we find ourselves scratching our heads and wondering in what cities across the country are our change agents with tickets to Washington waiting for their rides?  We’ll go pick them up ourselves and drive them to the White House.

All we need is an address, Mr. President-elect.