HALF-FULL REPORT 09/04/09

Can this marriage be saved?

How many husbands have been blindsided with the most horrifying words in the English language for them – "I want a divorce!"?  It happens to wives too, but most often it’s the guys who are clueless until the damage is irreparable.

Ask any marriage counselor, and they’ll confirm that, try as they may with all their skill, once a certain tipping point of anger, contempt, and distrust has been attained by one spouse, there is little the other spouse can do to salvage the relationship.  It has to be sundered.

That tipping point may have been reached this week.  After being reminded of some pedophile cruising down the street asking schoolchildren, "Hi kids, want some candy?", the American people may be on the verge of demanding a divorce from the man they politically married last November.

That’s what the growing backlash to Zero’s national speech to schoolchildren next Tuesday (9/08) may lead to.  There are only two ways to divorce a president:  impeachment or resignation, and soon massive numbers of voters are going to say, we don’t care which as long as it’s one or the other.  When someone goes after your kids – that really tears it.

This is going to be a really ugly divorce.  Zero is like the husband who refuses to recognize he’s no longer loved, the husband who alternatively begs, grovels, threatens, blames, and in general does everything except accept responsibility for the reality of the situation.

Even when he’s thrown out of the house on his ear, he’ll continue to indulge in blame and bitterness from the sidewalk.  You can count on him claiming that the real reason his ex-wife divorced him is because she’s a racist.  The ex-wife will no longer care.

***
The Mary Jo Kopechne Memorial Brain Tumor may provide America with yet another blessing.  How about a born-again pro-America genuine sports hero successful businessman conservative Republican in place of Senator Sleaze?

There’s no one Boston Red Sox fans idolize more than Curt Schilling, the pitcher who won the 2004 World Series – the first time for Boston since 1918 – with an ankle injury so bad his sock was soaked with blood (the sock is on display at Cooperstown).

After helping the Red Sox win another World Series in 2007, he retired and has a very competently run and successful internet company, 38Studios, producing "MMORPGs."  (Massively Multiplay Online Role-Playing Games is a multi-billion dollar industry with millions of participants worldwide.)

This week, the Red Sox hero announced he’s considering running for the demised Teddy’s Senate seat.

Schilling has his own blog, 38Pitches, where you can check out his political views (38 was his jersey number for the Red Sox).  He sure doesn’t take any back talk from liberals or anyone else.  There are more Red Sox fans (who are fanatics in their fandom) than Democrats in Massachusetts.  Let’s hope Curt pitches for America in the Senate.

***
And who might be the HFR Hero of the Week?  The Governor of Indiana.

If you don’t know who that is, here are some clues.  He’s a graduate of Princeton and Georgetown Law, was chief political advisor to President Ronald Reagan, chief executive of the Hudson Institute, and was President George W. Bush’s OMB Director (Office of Management & Budget.)  His favorite outdoor activity is riding his Harley-Davidson Fat Boy.

One other clue:  his name is Mitch Daniels.

When he took office in January 2005, Indiana had a $600 million budget deficit.  One year later, it had a $300 million surplus.  He easily won reelection last year.  Yesterday, he wrote an extraordinary op-ed in the Wall Street Journal:  The Coming Reset in State Government.  You’ve got to read the whole thing.

Two excerpts:  

"We (he and his fellow governors) are facing a near permanent reduction in state tax revenues that will require us to reduce the size and scope of our state governments… Much of the government institutions built up in (previous) years will now have to be dismantled." 

"State governments will soon have to choose between a major downsizing or consigning themselves to permanent decline. Wishing for an improbably huge boom while chasing your own tail through self-destructive taxes won’t prove much of a strategy."

This is, of course, what we want for the Federal Government as well:  major downsizing with many of its institutions dismantled.  Mitch Daniels is providing a proven antidote to Zero’s gargantuan radical left-wing incompetence.  Palin-Daniels 2012?

***
Let’s turn to geopolitics.  In a move that Putin and the Kremlin finds upsetting, Turkey and Armenia announced this week (9/01) signed protocols to establish diplomatic relations, open their borders to each other, and establish trade relations.

The Russians hate it because it makes their former colony of Armenia less dependent on them, and they always prefer to have their neighbors at each other’s throats.  But it’s a major positive move for both countries.

Landlocked Christian Armenia has been isolated and trapped between Moslem Iran, Azerbaijan, and Turkey, and Christian but troubled Georgia to the north.  A border shutdown with Armenia has meant Turkey‘s access to all of Turkic Central Asia has been blocked.  So a substantial increase in peace, prosperity, and stability may ensue.  But of course there are trade-offs.

The agreement calls for an "international history commission" to "study" the Armenian Genocide of 1915.  That this has festered into so much hatred and obdurateness for so many generations shows the power of emotion to swamp reason.

Appended below is the section from Asia Minor Part II (May 2007) that explains what happened.  The solution has always been obvious:  the present day Turkish government recognizes the history of the Armenian Genocide, while not accepting any complicity – for the government that committed the genocide was one that seized power on the eve of WWI, and replaced after WWI.  The leaders who conducted the genocide were convicted of being war criminals.

If the Turks can finally come to grips with this easy solution, then the agreement’s a go.  Other trade-offs:  Azerbaijan has evidently been told that it’s not going to get back the Nagorno-Karabagh territory Armenia seized back in the 1990s.  This will make the Azeris really unhappy, and Baku may try and placate them by stirring up Greater Azerbaijan desires among the millions of Azeris right across the border in northern Iran.

The reason Ankara is willing to tick off its Turkic ally Azerbaijan is because of Cyprus.  Telling Azerbaijan it’s not going to get its territory back as part of a peace deal is a message to Greece that it’s not going to get Northern Cyprus back from Turkey and control all of Cyprus again.  Isn’t geopolitics fun?

And there’s more.  Armenia borders Georgia, two pieces of which have been stolen by Russia – Abkhazia and South Ossetia.  Turns out, the Russkies are now experiencing the Law of Colonial Ingratitude.  Both of them, and especially Abkhazia, have stopped taking orders from Moscow.

The Abkhaz despise Russians as much as Georgians, and are determined to keep Russian siloviki gangster businessmen out.  These mafiosi planned to use Sukhumi (the Abkhaz capital) as a base to run a panoply of rackets cashing in on the preparations for the 2014 Winter Olympics in Sochi, Russia, right across the border.  No such luck.  Now those entrepreneurial Armenians are taking the Russians’ place.  Flights between Yerevan and Sukhumi are full.

***
Just a couple of last minute items before we all blast off for the last week of summer.

You know you’re toast when the Liberal Bastion of the Washington Media calls for you to resign.  That’s what the Washington Post told House Ways & Means Chairman Charles Rangel yesterday (9/03) in Sorry, Charlie.  The HFR can hardly wait until Rangel calls the WaPo racist.

Almost as much fun is watching the demolition of Zero Czar Van Jones.  He’s a Communist, publicly calls Republicans rectums, and is a 9/11 Truther-wacko.  Somebody needs to ask this Commie nutcase if he thinks the moon landing was faked.  But he’s black, which means all accusations against him are automatically racist.  How long do you think he’s got until Zero throws him under the bus?

So enjoy the end of summer.  Be sure and take your kids on a Vacation from Zero next Tuesday the 8^th! 

Ps:  TTP’s Jack Kelly has made a request.  He’s on vacation too, at his favorite place in the world, a hidden cabin in Lake George in the Adirondacks.  He’s totally offline, so he’s asking all of you take a break from inundating him with pleas to write the A Government of Crooks book mentioned in the HFR last week.

Mr. Kelly will surface at the Williamsburg Rendezvous one week from today.  We’re going to have a fabulous time.  I hope to see you there!

APPENDIX:  Explanation of the 1915 Armenian Genocide excerpted from Asia Minor Part II (May 2007).

The Great War, known now as World War One, had begun.  The Ottomans felt they could not sit on the sidelines.  They had to choose.  On one side were their centuries-old enemies, the Austrian Hapsburgs allied with Germany.  On the other were their sometime ally Britain and their new rival Russia.

They fatally chose to side with the Hapsburgs.  But these were not the same Ottomans as before.  There was no more Sultan.  In his place was an oligarchy collectively known as The Young Turks.

As the humiliation of Ottoman defeats became overwhelming, epitomized by Turkey being derisively labeled the "Sick Man of Europe," a group of young Turkish intellectuals and military students formed a Committee of Union and Progress (CUP), initially as a secret society in 1889, then strong enough to go public in 1906.

Since the Ottoman Empire had from its inception been the personal possession of the Sultan who ruled with absolute powers, all the animosity for the empire’s degradation was directed at him. 

Thus the specific goal of  the CUP leaders who called themselves the Young Turks was depose Sultan Abdulhamid II (1842-1918), who had ruled since 1876, and establish a constitutional monarchy with an elected parliament.

When the Army joined with the CUP and threatened to march on the Sultan’s personal residence, Yildiz Palace, Abdulhamid II resigned on April 27, 1909, and was replaced by a puppet sultan, his brother Mehmed V.

For it was the "Three Pashas," Young Turk leaders Ismail Enver, Mehmed Talat, and Ahmed Cemal, who now ran the government, consolidating their power into a dictatorship in 1913.  They formed an Ottoman-German Alliance with Germany’s promise that together they could destroy the common threat of Russia.

Turkey thus joined the Central Powers focusing only on Russia, forgetting that it had also just declared war on Britain and France as well.  Minister of War Enver Pasha sent the Ottoman Third Army to seize the Baku oil fields (now in Azerbaijan on the Caspian Sea) in November 1914.  90% of it was wiped out by Russian forces.

Enver Pasha and the Young Turks needed a scapegoat.  They blamed the horrific disaster on a "traitorous" Christian people populating eastern Turkey who, they said, sided with their fellow Christian Russians causing Turkish defeat:  the Armenians.

By May of 1915, the Armenian Genocide was underway.  Over two million Armenians were living in Turkey.  They were rounded up and shipped in cattle cars (guess where Hitler got the idea) to concentration camps run under a program of purposeful starvation.  Historian Arnold Toynbee, assigned by the British Foreign Office after the war to investigate, determined a death toll of between 600 and 800,000 starved or slaughtered by the Young Turks. 

With Germany’s surrender at the end of 1918, the CUP dissolved, the Three Pashas fled to Berlin, and Mehmed V’s brother (Mehmed V died a few months earlier) Mehmed VI became Sultan, who tried the Three Pashas as war criminals.  They were found guilty in abstentia.  By 1922, all three were dead.