The Short-lived UFO ‘Flap’ of February, 2023.

 

We know, some of you are already becoming testy. Anytime we write about UFOs we garner complaints from readers who tell us to stick to politics and knock off the nonsense. Here at WOOF we long ago realized that no matter how far right we may be, some readers are going to call us liberal; and no matter how pertinent (in select circumstances) we may consider UFOs, a vocal minority of readers will cavil about our lack of gravitas and clutter our email with dozens of tinfoil-hat memes. We don’t mind, really, but if this site adjusted its editorial policies to accommodate every critique, we’d run much shorter articles containing much shorter words, addressing much safer topics.

Postmodern politics…

Biden’s first “balloon czar?” She has nothing else to do!

What really compelled us to visit this topic was Allen Wayne Root’s recent suggestion that Kamala Harris be appointed President Biden’s “balloon czar.”  The sobering fact is that Root’s recommendation, though clearly sardonic, sounded entirely plausible given the many gaslightings already initiated by America’s first postmodern administration.

The actual Chinese spy balloon–just sampling our weather?

Of course, Americans knew nothing of the massive Communist spy balloon surveying the breadth of our nation until a photograph of it floating over Montana  was  published by a local newspaper, which called it a UFO.  More discerning observers recognized the object as a large, remotely controlled balloon, and journalistic interest turned to the Defense Department, where military experts are supposed to know about (and prevent) such anomalous intrusions. 

The Secretary launches a trial balloon?

After some dithering, military experts acknowledged the balloon was Chinese. Apparently they had known about it for four days and nights while it toured the U.S.  Later, these experts insisted they had known about the balloon since it was launched from Hainan, China.   But only upon the balloon’s national outing did Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin convene a meeting of top officials to “announce a new defense cooperation agreement,” which never seems to have been announced, and probably wasn’t agreed on..

Still a bit mushy…

The administration didn’t bother telling us about it, according to its initial story, because it was only intended to scan Guam and Hawaii (which was evidently okay?) but pesky prevailing winds  blew it off course and across North America. How Biden’s top brass knew this, together with how come the object accidentally blew over our strategic missile silos and strategic air bases, together with why Biden didn’t do anything to stop it–remains somewhat mushy.

NOTE: Some Chinese spy balloons may be cleverly disguised to appear innocent.

Instead of announcing any protective action, Pentagon Press Secretary Brig. Gen. Pat Ryder assured the public that “The United States Government has detected and is tracking a high altitude surveillance balloon that is over the continental United States right now.” But by then, everybody already knew that.  Asked why nobody thought to eliminate the threat, Biden’s military representative told PBS that the U.S. opted not to shoot it down “simply because [the military] didn’t want to run the risk of it landing on anything on the ground,” which given Montana’s vast open acreage seemed particularly farcical. Besides, even the toadies at MSNBC wondered aloud why it wasn’t intercepted on its approach over the Aleutian Islands.

An executive order?

For his part, when asked why he didn’t order the Chinese spy balloon shot out of the sky, Biden countered that he had indeed ordered his military advisers to shoot it down, but he was told no–and instructed to wait awhile.  This explanation repeated the “we don’t want it to fall on anybody” excuse, which may have mollified our cognitively impaired President, unless no such order was actually issued, and therefore never countermanded.

If President Biden really ordered a shoot down, he appears to have been discouraged by the quasi-infamous General Mark Milley, chairman of the Joint Chiefs. whom Biden may have forgotten he outranks.  More darkly, it may simply be the case that President Biden  was kidding (or confabulating) about giving any order at all–because Biden didn’t dare shoot the balloon down until the Chinese gave him permission. WOOF cannot claim it knows this–to claim the theory’s authenticity might group us with the kind of paranoiac crazies who subscribe to the reality of Hunter Biden’s laptop–but we cannot help wondering.

General Milley expertly fielding questions...

Mission accomplished…

At any rate, after concluding its overflight of the United States, the spy balloon was headed out over the Atlantic before it was finally downed by a missile from an F-22, only three days after Biden supposedly gave the order.  Thus, the American citizenry was protected from any accidental beanings, and the spy device was plunged into salt water, complicating its recovery and rendering its technologies less readily decipherable. That most of the balloon’s gleanings were already transmitted in real time to its Chinese handlers seems indisputable.

Thunder out of China…

A classic example of a hot-air-filled communist espionage device!

Naturally, the CCP insisted the object was merely a weather balloon that blew off course. China pronounced itself outraged at the hostility of America’s unduly martial response. Naturally, nobody outside Communist China and possibly North Korea took any of China’s objections seriously, and naturally no member of the Biden administration accepted responsibility for the dunderheaded fumbling of the entire affair. 

The lackeys are restless!

Tracked from the moment of its launch?

The media seemed dimly aware of the incident’s several paradoxes– and so its functionaries found themselves in the uncomfortable position of wanting answers to questions. If story number one was true, and the balloon was only discovered in flight over America, why wasn’t it noticed sooner? And if story two was correct and the balloon had been tracked from the moment China launched it, why hadn’t journalists been informed? Some even had the temerity to question the idea that avoiding dropping it on someone’s head was the reason no shoot-down of the device was ordered, or conversely, why Biden’s order to shoot it down was shrugged off, if such an order had indeed been issued… but mostly, wasn’t the whole imbroglio an embarrassment for the all-too-routinely embarrassed President Amtrak?

Look at all the mystery objects! 

Needless to say, none of the uncustomarily inquisitive reporters learned anything of substance from the doggedly nebulous Karine Jean-Pierre–who kept referring them to other, equally unforthcoming sources–even as word spread across the networks of several additional mystery objects suddenly occupying our air space.

The Washington Press Corps. (FILE PHOTO)

VanHerck  takes charge…

General Glen D. VanHerck

Unanimous in their view that some grown-up somewhere ought o be able to explain matters to them, reporters gathered for a press conference offered by Gen. Glen D. VanHerck, Commander, U.S. Northern Command, on March 6. Asked why the balloon was not immediately dispatched, VanHerck replied, “Hey, you can’t deter, you can’t defeat something if you can’t detect it,” which surfaced the fresh argument that NORAD’s radar is simply substandard–but, VanHerck explained, the whole thing turned out to be a stroke of good fortune because, “Actually, that high-altitude balloon was a great opportunity for NORAD and United States Northern Command to get some attention that I think we deserved.” (A point that seemed difficult to rebut.)

Balloons everywhere!

According to NORAD, our radar isn’t tuned to find low flying objects like spy balloons– which makes it hard to understand the version in which the balloon was tracked from the time of its launching.  VanHerck further explained that since refocusing our radar, NORAD discovered several other objects in our skies as well as over “Canadia” (to borrow Karine Jean-Pierre’s term).  The General wasn’t too sure what they were.

It was then that he was asked if the objects could be extraterrestrial and replied, “I’ll let the intel community and the counterintelligence community figure that out. I haven’t ruled out anything.” That’s right.  At least three additional balloons were located floating across North America, and NORAD thought they might be from outer space. Nightly newscasts were suddenly rife with discussion of the possibility of interplanetary invaders.  One pilot who observed an allegedly octagonal-shaped balloon was widely quoted as stating he observed no evident means of propulsion–a trait the news readers called typical of UFOs–(not to mention balloons).

Roswell all over again!

Respected UFO researcher David Halperin wrote “First there was one – the Chinese balloon first tracked over Alaska…Now there seem to have been three more, genuine ‘unidentified flying objects’ since we don’t know what they were or what they were doing here.  The commander of NORAD refuses to speculate…but as an old UFOlogist, I have to say: this feels like deja vu to 1947.” [Halperin meant it reminded him of the alleged crash of a flying saucer at Roswell, New Mexico, in 1947.]

Actually, as these photos demonstrate, the Air Force has been confusing balloons with UFOs since 1947.

The news seized upon the UFO theory, not because it made any sense whatsoever, but because it distracted viewers from the monumental incompetence and opacity of the Biden regime and provided a handy distraction from other news such as the chemical train derailment in East Palestine, Ohio, and the attendant environmental crisis.

It’s Trump’s fault.

Moreover, the White House quickly added, mystery balloons were not peculiar to the present administration. but had been detected and ignored at least five times during the Trump administration–an unverifiable assertion that even the most sycophantic reporters found impossible to verify and which faded quickly from consciousness, like one of  Biden’s statistical misquotations.

Oh, the humanity!

Nevertheless, three more objects were rapidly shot down by American aircraft, so the possibility that they were interplanetary visitors doesn’t seem to have deterred NORAD from blasting away  Time magazine remained invested in the interplanetary option,pointing out that pilots described one object as a “metallic, cylindrical airship;  flying at about 40,000 feet.” We may never know the exact nature of the object, but we know we shot it down. “Sunday’s object,” Time added, “shot down over Lake Huron, was the most mysterious of all, described as octagonal in shape with strings or cables hanging from it. Its means of staying aloft was unclear.” Helium might have constituted a reasonable guess. It transpired that this “most mysterious of all” the invading bogies (which inspired NPR to air an entire program on Michigan’s history with UFOs) was almost certainly a project from a local balloon club. 

“It’s no use, we can’t re-inflate it!”

Declared “missing in action” by an Illinois-based hobbyist club on Feb. 15, this twelve-dollar balloon  emerged as a likely explanation for the Lake Huron invader.  It took two heat-seeking missiles fired by an Air Force jet to eliminate the balloon, which was not emitting any heat, making the use of such missiles an odd choice of weapons–especially at four-hundred thousand dollars per missile– but at least the threat was neutralized. The club—the Northern Illinois Bottle cap Balloon Brigade (NIBBB)—is (wisely, we think) withholding further comment.  It also appears, at least for the time being, that no additional mystery craft are haunting our nation’s skies.  In other words the great UFO flap of February, 2023, seems to have faded into history.

The Northern Illinois Bottlecap Balloon Brigade–one of their aircraft is missing.

Flying saucers farewell…

UFOlogists will now excoriate us for our dismissiveness of the flying saucer phenomenon, but again, we are judged unfairly.  Oddly, no one at WOOF has actually beheld a flying saucer, or any similar airborne anomaly, yet readers know us to be editorially supportive of UFO reality.  Our cynical attitude toward the short-lived UFO flap of last February is not a product of overall disbelief–it is, rather, indicative of our refusal to mislabel a series of botched balloon interceptions as a possible invasion from space.  This narrative seemingly beguiled numerous TV anchors and commentators, but surely no one else took the possibility seriously.  Surely  Gen. Glen D. VanHerck of NORAD only left the extraterritorial possibility open during his press conference because he was waxing mischievous?

Another, less sanguine possibility is that here, entrenched as we are in the addle-pate realm of “Lunch-bucket Joe’s” postmodern reign, we have the bizarre image of Air Force generals (who always maintain the opposite) hastening to ascribe anomalous aerial phenomena to the possibility of invading space aliens.  Simultaneously, the lapdog newscasters, who used to whinny at any suggestion of UFO reality, chorused their approval of the ET hypothesis like an audience of goggle-eyed Spielberg fans.  Does any of this commotion bespeak an actual extraterrestrial threat? 

(READ MORE)

WHEN PIGS FLY (or) How the Ghost of Robert McNamara Haunts the F-35.

A lot of what amounts to American air superiority seems to ramify from good luck. No, we don’t mean to suggest that our pilots and airmen just get lucky up there, far from it. All we mean to say is, at various times of crisis a variety of somewhat remarkable circumstances have resulted in the right plane for the right moment in the right conflict, and made the job of the enemy impossibly difficult. Take Korea for instance.

Everybody at the Pentagon figured that American air power would run roughshod over North Korea’s forces when Truman commanded our military to intervene in the face of the surprise onslaught of Communist aggressors in 1950, and at first our P-51 Mustangs, F-80 Shooting Stars and F-84 Thunderjets dominated North Korea’s air space. That all changed, however, on November 1, 1950, when sleek, nimble, silver jets displaying the red star of international Communism filled the skies, demonstrating a marked superiority to anything the USAF had in theater. The enemy jet was the now-legendary MiG-15, and on April 12, 1951, MiGs intercepted thirty-six B-29 bombers under escort by nearly one hundred F-80s and F-84s.  After inflicting tremendous damage on the bombers while overwhelming all efforts by the American fighters to blunt their attacks, the enemy planes turned North and shot away unscathed. American Bomber command abruptly halted daylight sorties over enemy territory and our B-29 Super-fortresses remained grounded for three months while the situation was frantically reassessed.

The MiG 15, Commie pilots, Nazi technology, Rolls Royce engines.

Consternation over the Commie jet with Rolls Royce engines (the Russians being our loyal allies during WWII, remember?) flying at 600 mph while blowing our bombers out of the sky with a combination of 23-and-37 mm cannon, swept the avionics industry back home. The existence and development of the Soviet jet was known to U.S. intelligence, but nobody expected the Russians to commit it to action in Korea, and nobody entirely realized its potential in battle.  It seems unbelievable from our present vantage point that swept wings were not immediately recognized as integral to the MiG’s superior flight characteristics. In fact, back at North American Aviation the word was that their new XP-86 was about to be cancelled by the Air Force because despite being lighter and marginally faster than the Navy’s FJ-1 Fury, early flight tests showed it performed similarly to the XP-80 and XP-84, neither of which could tackle MiGs with confidence.

Be that as it may, a Navy F9F “Panther” won the first jet-to-jet fight in Korea.

Back in Ohio, North American’s designers brainstormed frantically in search of some game changing tweak that could rekindle the XP-86’s fortunes. It was then that a handful of imported technicians with less than salubrious past affiliations proved helpful. A cadre of officially Americanized German aerodynamicists looked at the MiG and nodded knowingly. The former Nazis already knew that swept wings not only reduced drag substantially, but also minimized the effects of “compressibility” –the problem that destabilized, and even disintegrated straight-winged aircraft when approaching the speed of sound. German data from the end of World War II proved that a swept wing combined with slats that ensured stability at lower speeds was the means by which jets could achieve transonic speeds and dogfight at the edge of the envelope.

The good guys arriving in the nick of time!

Thus, in the nick of time, (to generalize and oversimplify matters in our customary fashion), three squadrons of swept-winged F-86 “Sabres” arrived in the Far East and took to the skies over the Yalu River. This ended the primacy of the free-ranging MiG-15s. By the time our “police action” in Korea staggered to its conclusion in 1953, F-86 pilots were credited with shooting down 792 MiGs at a loss of only 78 Sabres, a victory ratio of ten to one. True, The Soviets (who were actually flying a lot of the MiGs) and their Red Chinese and North Korean comrades, claim to have knocked down in excess of 600 F-86 Sabres, but these claims meet our editorial standards for denunciation as commie lies, besides which production figures at North American make the estimate implausible, besides which any kid who grew up reading war comics knows the F-86 kicked butt.

Russ Heath’s original comic book panel, swiped by pop artist Roy Lichtenstein who inexplicably turned Heath’s Sabre into a P-51 in his classic pop-art painting “Whaam!”

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When things got “Strange”…

Care to venture a guess as to how the Aardvark got its name?

One could make the case we made above about a lot of aircraft, from the P-51 Mustang through to the F-14 Tomcat and F-16, and we’d still get angry emails or nasty Reddit comments about the planes we forgot to mention–but you could place odds against the likelihood of anybody objecting that we omitted the F-111 Aardvark.

Having said that, we are fully aware that before its retirement in the mid-90’s, the “Aardvark” performed certain duties with considerable aplomb. These included executing President Reagan’s one-night-long air war against Libya, which sufficed to put Qaddafi [this month’s spelling] out of the terrorism business (despite which, of course, Mrs. Clinton later had him butchered for good behavior), and delivering precision weaponry on target during the first Persian Gulf War.  Aardvark enthusiasts might also tout the aircraft’s many innovative qualities, and we fully agree; the F-111 was the first warplane to employ the “swing wing” technologies, for example, later applied by Grumman in designing the Tomcat.

TRUE FACT: The legendary F-14 Tomcat did all its own stunts in the popular film “Top Gun.”

But here we are getting ahead of our own digression. Our purpose in mentioning the F-111 is to revisit the jet’s essential failures as a multi-purpose, money-saving aircraft.  And this means turning to a particularly distasteful subject, namely, Robert Strange McNamara.  Some of you, understandably, may not be familiar with the life achievements, or, for that matter, the very existence of Robert Strange McNamara, so let us swiftly review his storied career:

Brain Boy

Remember “Brain Boy” comics? Who knew Dell could do super heroes?

It isn’t everybody who gets a specific variety of logical miscalculation named after him, but Robert Strange McNamara received that dubious honor. The “McNamara fallacy” is best described by Daniel Yankelovich who nailed the phenomenon in his ’70s volume, Corporate Priorities: A Continuing Study of the New Demands on Business, writing:  “The first step is to measure whatever can be easily measured. This is OK as far as it goes. The second step is to disregard that which can’t be easily measured or to give it an arbitrary quantitative value. This is artificial and misleading. The third step is to presume that what can’t be measured easily really isn’t important. This is blindness. The fourth step is to say that what can’t be easily measured really doesn’t exist. This is suicide.”  These simple steps to disaster perfectly synopsize the managerial technique of the man they called the best and the brightest of two administrations.

Brain Boy

Even today, Americans with no recollection of 1958, probably recognize the name “Edsel.” The Edsel automobile was presented by Ford Motors as an automotive and design phenomenon that would rock the car industry, but it turned out to be a colossal failure, making the car’s name synonymous with epic marketing disasters. One reason the Edsel failed so ignominiously was Robert McNamara..

It wasn’t that McNamara had anything to do with designing the Edsel–he rather more could be said to have un-designed it. He demanded the abandonment of the dual wheelbases and separate bodies used in the first Edsels of 1958, insisting that all Edsels share the basic Ford platform and use the Ford’s chassis structure. This reduced the struggling Edsel to little more than a glorified Ford sedan with idiosyncratic ornamentation. Next, McNamara cut the Edsel’s lavish advertising budget, and then slashed it a second time. This drove a spike through the project’s already degenerated heart; the Edsel became quickly extinct.

On to Havana!

Freshly ensconced in Camelot, McNamara beguiled JFK with his genius and immersed himself in solidifying plans for the Bay of Pigs invasion, a plan developed during Eisenhower’s tenure that became operational under Kennedy. The idea was that 1,500 Cubans, trained and equipped by the Central Intelligence Agency, would be hurled ashore in Cuba, backed by powerful naval and air support.  But  McNamara’s penchant for economizing soon found flaws in the logistical structure of the original plan, resulting in a last minute change of location for the assault. Less aviation fuel and air time were required to support an invasion if it was staged at beaches bordering the Bahía de Cochinos (Bay of Pigs) in Las Villas Province, so it seemed only logical to make the shift.

But the last minute change had real-world consequences that were unforeseen by the Whiz Kid and his devoted staff.Paratroops sent ahead to secure vital arteries of supply found themselves dropping into swampland from which their heavy equipment proved inextricable. Offshore masses that reconnaissance photos dismissed as “seaweed” turned out to be impenetrable coral reefs that stymied attempts to supply the invasion by sea.  It didn’t help that the Cuban people proved disinclined to throw themselves immediately into supporting the invasion. While JFK’s refusal to commit additional American assets (which could easily have decided the issue) sealed the fate of the bedraggled invaders, a generous portion of blame for the fiasco was ascribable to Robert McNamara.

On to Vietnam!

McNamara in his personal Huey, counting bodies while touring Vietnam.

It is an odd illustration of their differences that while Kennedy was saving the Green Berets from extinction, his Secretary of Defense was busy deciding that all branches of the military should wear the same shoes, hats, and uniforms–to save money.  In fact, McNamara seemed oblivious of any considerations related to tradition, morale, or even warcraft, focusing entirely on arithmetical factors related to the bottom line. To his credit, he helped Curtis LeMay and Eugene Stoner clear the way for the Armalite AR-15, but one cannot credit his role in surmounting conventional opposition to the weapon that entered service as the M-16 without adding that he was also substantially responsible for its initial tendency to jam in the Southeast Asian climate. The failure to chrome the chamber of M-16s was a cost-saving measure of the sort McNamara prided himself on. As Christopher R. Bartocci wrote in Small Arms Review,  “The blame here goes not to the Ordnance Corp but to the ‘Wiz Kids’ on Secretary of Defense McNamara’s staff who made all the decisions. This micromanagement of money in resources and decisions was made by people who had not the slightest clue about small arms.” Or cars, for that matter–or the drawbacks inherent in swampy amphibious landing zones.

Besides attempting to make Vietnam a war of attrition in accordance with his mathematical instincts (though having no bearing on realities in the field),the debaucher of the Edsel turned his attention to advanced aircraft design.  It amazed McNamara that the Air Force, the Navy, and the Marines each voiced individual demands for a jet fighter. Waste, waste, waste, he grumbled.

Pontificating on the path to victory in Vietnam…

Pilot and copilot sit side by side in the F-111–handy for Sunday drives, not so good for dog-fighting.

Obviously, McNamara explained, one plane that satisfied the requirements of each of the relevant services was the intelligent solution–a thrifty resolution to the entire menu of demands packaged as one, rather than several aircraft.  And just as obviously, McNamara was wrong again. It wasn’t that the F-111 was a bad airplane, it was just too many varieties of “good” to be good enough. It served too many masters to make a useful home with any.  Significantly, A fighter variant, the F-111B, was not accepted for production although the Air Force used the F-111 to good effect through 1967, and used variants into the ’90s.

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Deja Vu all over again….

Lightnings burning brightly–by accident.

There can be little doubt that the McNamara method of masterminding haunted the F-35 from inception. Built to satisfy a plethora of service-driven demands, the aircraft came in overweight, under-powered, and over budget, and so expensively so that waves of F-22 Raptors might have been fielded instead.  But in the long run, is the deployment of the F-35 “Lightning”  another one-size-fits all, McNamara-style cluster flub with a stupendous price tag, or a boon to American air power where techno-wizardry and a basic Yankee willingness to spend the big bucks ultimately overcame a multitude of drawbacks?

Dems for close ground support…..

Smile! The A-10 remains a Democrat keeper.

One very real problem with the F-35 turns out to be the lobby for the A-10. No, nobody in congress (well, almost nobody) is dumb enough to suggest the Warthogs render the F-35s unnecessary, but the sentimental up-swell on the Hill sees the A-10s as too young to die. Sentiment aside, as Mike Stone writes at Reuters, “The negotiations over the A-10, which the Air Force has wanted to retire for more than two decades, show the extensive measures Democrats will take to protect their slim majority in the Senate.” If Democrats desperate to keep warplanes in service sounds a bit weird, consider that a base full of Warthogs contributes around three billion dollars per annum to neighboring economies.Thus, Democratic Senator Jack Reed, (e.g.) the chairman of the Senate Armed Services Committee, prohibited any A-10 retirements in his draft of the 2022 National Defense Authorization Act.

READ MORE…

Searching for Air Supremacy at Bargain Prices–WOOF forms the “Society to Preserve the Raptor” (and make the F-35 extinct)!

Howard Hughes defends his “Spruce Goose” project before congress– where was he when Obama killed the F-22?

How many times have we here at WOOF gone on record over recent months telling you that the F-22 Raptor’s cancellation was an act of idiocy, or worse, treachery at the highest levels? Well, we don’t know the exact number either, but a bunch, anyhow. And what else have we been telling you, Woofketeers? That the vaunted F-35 with which the Obama Administration told us they would replace the F-22 was destined for disaster in terms of cost overruns combined with embarrassing under-performance issues!  And believe us, nothing underperforms like a “multi-purpose” fighter, as Robert Strange McNamara proved when he single-handedly imposed the idea of the F-111 on each branch of the armed services back in the ‘60s.  Since early studies suggested to him that several services were looking for somewhat similar characteristics in a new aircraft, McNamara had one of his always-lamentable brainstorms and directed the services to study the development of a single aircraft that would satisfy all requirements. (He also thought every service should wear the same uniform, thus saving defense dollars!)  Thus convicted, Secretary McNamara ordered the development of the Tactical Fighter Experimental test aircraft (TFX) despite strong objections from the Air Force and the Navy, both of which begged to be permitted to develop aircraft suitable to their individual services, but no—McNamara and his famous whiz kids knew best. The result was an airplane that nobody really wanted, which did a number of jobs for a number of services, but did none of them particularly well, and cost more to replace than had it never been proposed in the first place. Secretary of Defense McNamara, who gave us the Edsel, the Bay of Pigs, and the concept of attrition in Vietnam, had done it again!

Robert Strange McNamara waxes contemplative; thinking up another catastrophe, or planning his future as a flower child?

The Obama administration might have learned a profound lesson from this debacle, if anyone in the Obama administration could tell a Piper Cub from a 747, or if anybody really cared to learn, but Vladimir Putin has assigned our President the task of disarming the American Republic (now that he has “more flexibility”), and the opportunity to spend massive amounts of non-existent revenue producing a miserably unsatisfactory aircraft is a twofer so far as Our Beloved Leader is concerned. There was a time, of course, when the Pentagon would at least kick against these encroachments on American security– a time when a few Generals and Admirals would have risked their careers to cry foul as this albatross was hung around Uncle Sam’s neck—but those days are behind us now. Today we have a Pentagon stuffed to the rafters (if the Pentagon has rafters) with yes men, sycophants, and political hacks who earned their rank by osculating the posteriors of liberal politicos and Presidents, and by honing the American military into the politically correct, multiculturally sensitive, sexually diversified organization it is today. These Metrosexual brass hats are the ones who pioneered such concepts as women and overt Gays in combat, and obediently labeled the jihadist rampage of Major Nidal Malik Hasan  “workplace violence,” the Major having celebrated multicultural diversity by shooting 14 Americans to death at Fort Hood while yelling “God is great!” in Arabic.

Chinese trainees wearing their top-secret anti-stealth hats prepare to thwart our technology!

This “new breed” of sociopolitically-sensitive American military planners has no qualms about running interference for a substandard flying machine if it scores brownie points with the current President and his coterie of Chicago mobsters and Marxists. Add to this the complicity of cooperative RINOs like John McCain in the senate.  That’s right, McCain unhelpfully spearheaded the drive to scrap the vital F-22 Raptor in 2009, convincing then-Secretary of Defense Robert Gates and, by the process of corrosive diffusion, Barack Hussein Obama, that the Raptor was unnecessary because it was intended to cleanse the skies of next-generation enemy fighters—an adversarial force that Senator McCain assured the new Administration simply didn’t exist. Of course, McCain’s rationale omitted the relatively abstract possibility that such an enemy force might shortly exist in the arsenals of Russia and China—it just didn’t seem to occur to him. And now, of course, both communist countries have had enough American technology leaked to them by the spies Eric Holder and Obama prefer to ignore in our aerospace programs that their own Raptor-style aircraft are rolling off the assembly lines. How good these planes may be is problematic, but that some super fighters can easily beat no super fighters is fairly obvious—possibly, by now, even to Senator McCain.

Russia’s stealthy super jet–look familiar?

Meanwhile, absent the Raptor, which cost 97 billion to date, the development of the “Lightning” staggers forward at a current cost upwards of one trillion dollars, much of which is being spent, even as we post this screed, on adding more and more weight to the aircraft’s design while simultaneously cutting down its maneuverability. Why? Because after all the compromises forced upon designers at Lockheed Martin (to enable the plane to serve its various masters in the Marines, Air Force and Navy), have been factored into the aircraft’s performance package, there just isn’t a lot of true blue performance left. Once upon a time, somebody like Curt Lemay or John Boyd would have spoken up and said “to blazes with this lemon!” But nowadays? Nowadays the Pentagon rewrites its own criteria for the F-35, dumbing them down so that their prize super-jet can eke out a passing grade.

LeMay would’ve used McNamara to test ejection seats, if Kennedy had only listened!

That’s what we said, Woofketeers, the Defense Department’s annual reports on weapons tests reveal changes to the official expectations of the F-35 “Lightning.” The military has clearly lowered the bar for their only remaining fighter-aircraft project, replacing all those criteria that the plane failed to meet with new sets of criteria adjusted to reflect the aircraft’s actual, and substantially less impressive, performance. Think of it as “No Jet Left Behind,” and the F-35 was “taught the test,” as it were. For example, the plane’s turn performance, once slated to achieve 5.3 “g’s” is now reduced to 4.6 while time for acceleration from Mach 0.8 to Mach1.2 has been lengthened by eight seconds. That may not seem like much of a difference, but in a dogfight it can mean an eternity. We could go on enumerating these instances of lowered expectations, but you’d get pretty bored, so suffice it that an eagle is sorely needed to maintain American air supremacy, and a turkey is in the works.

Proxmire: A Senator from Wisconsin waving a list! Too bad it’s just a reminder to water his transplants!

WOOF is well aware that sniping at defense projects is a favorite game of the liberal left, as personified most egregiously by Wisconsin Senator William Proxmire who once insisted to a devoutly anti-military media that Grumman’s F-14 Tomcat was a total boondoggle unworthy of further development.  The execrable scribbler “Herblock,” long everybody’s choice for most didactically unfunny political cartoonist in the history of that art, obligingly produced a Washington Post cartoon featuring a squadron of Tomcats flying along in formation with big lemons painted on their fuselages. Get it?

Cartoonist Herbert Block–winner of countless awards including WOOF’s coveted Golden Eraser medal for being the most sanctimonious and the least hilarious cartoonist in world history!

Well of course you do, its Herblock! You may never laugh when you read a Herblock cartoon, but you’ll always get it—like you get it when some weenie blows a raspberry at you: as unsubtle as it is uninspired, right?  Well, Herblock, before departing this life in 2001, won every award you can possibly imagine including three Pulitzers, just for being dogmatically, woodenly, left wing over the entire course of his bluntly dogmatic career—and yes, Clinton gave him the medal of freedom. We wanted to show you his F-14 cartoon, but it isn’t on line—possibly because it perfectly melds his utter lack of insight with his utter lack of wit…but we digress.

The magnificent F-22 Raptor–the only plane John McCain ever shot down!

The Tomcat, of course, went on to rule the skies for two decades and starred in its own Tom Cruise movie, Top Gun, while Proxmire got caught fleecing the taxpayer for his own hair transplants and eventually shuffled off to a nursing home—sorry evidence that Wisconsin hasn’t fielded an authentic senatorial guardian of the commonweal since 1957. Certainly WOOF has no wish to wax unduly critical of a developing weapons system in the fashion of Proxmire or Herblock, (shudder!), but where the F-35 is concerned, the case is plain. We are spending a fortune to produce an airplane that, in a dogfight with its perkier but short-lived predecessor, would be shot down in flames—and that is, metaphorically speaking, precisely the fate that should be visited upon the current avatar of this under-performing sky cow.  But, you ask, how can we be certain that this critique is not an unwitting simulacrum of the Left’s infamous attack on the now-legendary F-14 Tomcat?

Tom and co-star Tomcat– but the plane did all its own stunts!

It is certainly true, gentle readers, that all new weapons systems go through developmental setbacks—weaponological growing pains, if you will–no matter how advantageous to American interests the final product may be, and the Tomcat is a classic case in point. But the F-35 “Lightning” is more properly compared to the aforementioned F-111 Aardvark (the cognomen refers to the plane’s long nose) except that it appears to compare, even in this regard, unfavorably. After all, while the F-111, nicknamed the “F-one a lemon,” failed dismally to perform as a true fighter jet, and flopped as a Navy plane for all the reasons the Navy strove to make manifest to McNamara aforehand, it did in fact pioneer swept-wing technology and found a niche, if briefly, as a reliable low-level penetration bomber. For proof, you could ask Qaddafi  whom it pounded into numbed neutrality during the Reagan administration, except that despite his continuing neutrality, you may recall, Hillary (respectfully known as Her Magnificence in these cyberspacial environs), orchestrated his removal and torture killing in order to replace him with the jihadist extremists who proceeded to murder her friend, the American Ambassador—but we digress. At any rate, the Aardvark has many fans despite its failure to perform the majority of the roles for which it was intended, and it is difficult to imagine the F-35 performing as ably in any regard.

Moment of glory! The Aardvarks blow up the Libyan Air Force–greetings from President Reagan!

In fairness, the gob on the job with the F-35 Lightning program is Vice Admiral David Venlet, and it will come as no surprise to you, we wager, that Admiral Venlet thinks the F-35 rocks and rolls. Venlet testified only a month ago that he can patch up all the leaks in the Lightning project if only Congress will relax and allow him the time, the flexibility, and, of course, the money. Venlet warned that delay, program restructuring, or the imposition of timetables or criteria-based funding allowances would simply play hob with his process and sabotage the Lightning’s impending makeover. Venlet spoke truly when he declared that there are always “normal teething problems that you always find in fighter aircraft development that simply require good old-fashioned systems engineering, to fix problems as we find them.”  Admiral Venlet forgot to add, however, that sometimes, as in the case of the Convair F2Y Sea Dart, the McDonnell Douglas/General Dynamics A-12 “Avenger,” and the underpowered, carrier-aversive, Vought F7U “Cutlass,” the “teething problems” turn out to be terminal.

This Navy “Cutlass” found its niche–a playground in Wheaten, MD– proof that inadequacy happens!

So can the “Lightning” be saved from insanely-overpriced mediocrity, Admiral? Well, WOOF certainly hopes so—nobody would be more pleased than us to see the “Lightning” live up to its moniker—but there’s an awful lot that needs fixing here! Many of the worst obstacles to progress are the aircraft’s software which is so advanced technically that it simply doesn’t work. One case in point is the famous magic helmet that was intended to offer the pilot a live video feed and real-time sensor information, even, perhaps, to permit aiming and deployment of weapons in a manner reminiscent of Clint Eastwood’s psychic helmet in the movie “Firefox,” but the project engineers don’t have the bugs ironed out and Venlet said he has substituted a set of more reliable goggles as a stopgap measure. Oh come off it! Can you imagine Clint Eastwood wearing goggles?   Or SteveCanyon, or Chuck Yeager? Nah, it won’t do, Admiral—we need a working helmet.

Steve Canyon in goggles? Forget it!

The F-35 has also initiated its own Tail-hook Scandal—which is simply to say that its tail hook—the device that snags the arresting wire when landing on an aircraft carrier—doesn’t snag the wires. Now there’s a problem. Other problems include fuel venting (it either doesn’t or it does when it shouldn’t) and propulsion reliability, which is kind of self explanatory, right? Add to this concern the fact that much of the plane’s viability is based on its stealth component, and that the addition of stealth technology has a natural tendency to diminish other performance capabilities. One trades, in effect, agility for invisibility. But top scientists all over the unfree world are hard at work on technologies that defeat our stealth packages, and once they succeed, we will no longer enjoy the invisibility factor, though we will certainly retain the agility deficit!  Dohhhh!

The F-35 “Lightning”: Spotlight on poor performance at exorbitant prices–why bother, America?

Still, Admiral Venlet is adamant that this will all be okay if we only believe. In their financial assessment of the entire imbroglio, Credit Suisse opined that “DoD is clearly concerned that another major performance gaffe could cause Congress to truncate the F-35 program in favor of ‘alternatives.’” Well, WOOF says, bring on the alternatives—

Admiral Venlet–the gob on the job!

And we suggest the F-22 Raptor be produced by the hundredfold. Outrageously expensive? Zillions for defense, say we, so long as it defends effectively—and the Raptor could be financed by a small portion of what it costs to keep ourselves up to our ears in exploding electric automobiles, tofu-powered windmill farms, biodegradable solar panel units and other impracticable fantasies churned out en mass by “green industry” entrepreneurs who always receive zillions in stimulus funding before declaring bankruptcy!

Harley Earl brought the jet war in Korea to Anytown, USA!

So let’s cancel the F-35 before Our Beloved Leader finds a way to channel some of those hold-out stimulus billions its way and we wind up stuck with a fleet of winged white elephants!  Although on second thought, hey–  back when Harley Earl worked for General Motors, back in the days when Detroit made automobiles, remember?—he created a design revolution by producing cars that looked like fighter jets—setting off the whole tail-fin craze. Harley has left the building, sadly, but maybe Chevrolet could design a jet for the Navy? A jet that does for Naval Aviation what the Corvette did for the American auto industry? Oh—wait—that’s right. The Great Helmsman took over GM in 2009 to save it from the evil stockholders and placed it securely in the capable hands of the UAW so that they could scrap the fusion car and go straight to work mass producing the Volt.  So– who needs an electric fighter plane, right? Sorry! Our bad!

Okay, General Motors can’t redesign the F-35 until air-to-air recharging is perfected!

MISSILES AWAY! (Along with almost everything else we might need to protect ourselves)– but WOOF finds one area of defense procurement that’s armoring up big time!

Toward a more peaceful anti-missile system!

Remember that live microphone incident back in 2012 when President Obama urged  (then) Russian President Dmitry Medvedev to tell his master, Vladimir Putin, that he, Obama, could be a lot more flexible after his re-election? Well, Woofketeers, he wasn’t kidding! Of course, President Obama never does anything himself, because he might have to take responsibility for it—no, wait, he plays golf himself–and seemingly he shoots skeet himself, (who’d want to be in proximity of that event?) but for taking the heat on foreign policy disasters, Dear Leader now has the  dull-witted, Jew-aversive, pro-Communist Secretary of Defense of his choice (namely Chuck Hagel) enabling him to proceed shredding our defenses while hiding behind the proverbial curtain. With this arrangement, America can weaken itself with criminal rapidity and it’ll look like the squinty RINO with the Caligula hair style did it!  Proof that liberalization has spread like head lice through the Pentagon is evident from the fact that spokespeople for the

A browbeaten Bamster begs Medvedev for time, so he can get re-elected and be more flexible!

Department of Defense insisted that cancellation of the European-based missile defense system had nothing—nothing whatsoever—to do with placating the Kremlin.  In a perfect depiction of protesting too much, Pentagon spokesman George Little rushed to his podium to assure the press that “The missile defense decisions Secretary Hagel announced were in no way about Russia.” But Hagel has been speechifying about the genius of junking our missile shield in order to improve relations with Moscow for quite some time now. He even makes the case for getting the Russkies to love us by disarming ourselves in in his book, America: Our Next Chapter, which is awfully well written for a guy who failed out of college. But since those days Chuck has been mysteriously appointed Distinguished Professor in National Governance at the Edmund A. Walsh School of Foreign Service at University of Georgetown in Washington D. C  without so much as an associates degree. Pretty cool—so maybe that made him belletristic. And to be fair, Chuck did serve honorably in Vietnam winning several decorations in combat, (no really,he did) so maybe Georgetown University wanted to say thanks…but then,WOOF can think of twenty guys right off the top of our heads who served in Vietnam, fought in more battles, won even more impressive medals, and aren’t stupid—and nobody ever made them Distinguished Professors of anything, so what’s with that? The other possibility is that Hagel’s book was

Peter Kaminsky, Hagel’s ghostly expositor and food critic–say, that’s a Russian name, ain’t it pal? 

actually written by Peter Kaminsky, but just because that’s what everybody says doesn’t mean WOOF believes it. Peter Kaminsky? He’s a food critic, for crying out loud–one who sports disquietingly ornate glasses. So…a food critic in hincty glasses wrote America: Our Next Chapter? Maybe Chuck didn’t have the connections to merit Bill Ayers.  But we digress–the point is:  this week the ax fell on European missile defense.  No surprise given the fact that when he was a senator, Hagel stated that American missile policy should be sculpted to reflect Russian concerns, which may be the single stupidest remark the Secretary has ever made, even counting his hilariously block-headed utterances during his Senate confirmation hearing, but prophetic nonetheless. Barack hands the ball to Chuck, and Chuck hands it to the Kremlin. Wake up, America, and smell the borscht!

WOOF is pleased to point out that Representative Mike Turner (R-Ohio), one of the few congressional Republicans with the gumption to confront the Obama conspiracy head-on, was quoted in Foreign Policy as saying, “We watched the president state to Medvedev that he would have greater flexibility after the election. Putin later announced the terms of the agreement. You’d have to conclude that there was a deal. …”  Besides that, as we’ve just made manifest, Chuck Hagel has long taken the party line (Democrat or Communist, take your choice) that any indication of an American willingness to defend herself with an anti-missile shield will  prove unduly provocative to the eternally hypersensitive Russians. If that sounds dumb, consider that he has actually argued that missile defense “cannot develop in a vacuum…[but] must move forward on four parallel tracks: Technology, Congress, our allies, and the Russians.”  And the  Russians? Yes, they really ought to be consulted—after all, in most kriegspeil scenarios we’d be defending ourselves against their missiles! How did this maundering ninny hammer become Secretary of Defense despite the

Hagel at his hearing– hard questions. Hmmm.

most embarrassingly inept confirmation performance in memory–and despite being what John McCain accurately called the least impressive witness he had seen in his 26-year Senatorial career? Simple, Wooferians, the Democrat majority in congress, far more enamored of Liberalism than bothered by such anachronistic concepts as Americanism, enthusiastically handed the Defense Department over to this Red-appeasing, Israel-bashing bozo, assisted by the votes of four Republicans, one of whom, sad to say, was Rand Paul. And just to remind ourselves of how far out in la-la land Hagel truly is, let us review the statement from James Inhofe of Oklahoma, the ranking Republican on the Senate Armed Services Committee, who recalled for any with ears or brains that during his time in the Senate, “He [Hagel] was one of the only two that voted against sanctions for Iran [and] one of only four that voted against an effort to [list] the Iran Revolutionary Guard as a terrorist group.” Not only that, but when Hagel headed the President’s Commission on U.S. Policy toward Russia, he concluded that “…an integrated missile defense system between the U.S. and Russia is the most desirable outcome.”  Sure—that way we can jointly stop ICBMs launched from—oh—maybe Finland?

…and intelligence reports suggest that the Dutchie of Fenwick is assuming a more aggressive strategic posture!

So Chuckie goes to the Pentagon, and what’s his first move? Scrub the missile defense in Europe—just like Putin wanted. And what concessions will this win from Putin? Absolutely none, of course—it will only make him more ravenous, more emboldened.  Obama knows this, because at the outset of his first term he junked a contractually vouchsafed missile defense system in Poland and the Czech Republic, at tremendous cost of prestige and good will in that region—and got absolutely nothing from the Russians in return—no, not even a wan smile playing ephemerally across Putin’s sepulchral countenance. Nyet. Nada. Obama is not so dimwitted as to suppose that anything different will occur as the result of this act of American self-mutilation—it simply fits into his blatantly obvious plans for unilaterally disarming this nation, which he can pursue with greater abandon now that he in fact possesses the greater flexibility he promised Medvedev and Putin.

Russia’s Mr. Big: Vladimir Putin–Missiles? Heck, he won’t even go along with gun control!

The surest indicator that the administration intends to further gut the European defense plan is the frantic assertion from various “senior administration officials” who speak, of course, on the condition of anonymity, that “There is still an absolutely firm commitment” to the Central European missile defense system. But the White House  asserts that the remaining elements of the shield  have the sole purpose of protecting us from Iran—which seems unnecessary given President Obama’s recent assurances that Iran will not be allowed to develop a nuclear weapon, and pointless from a European standpoint since Ahmadinejad is nowhere on record calling Lichtenstein, e.g., the Great Satan. No, the whole idea here is to weaken the West and placate the Russian Bear. Consider: Stephen Pifer of the subversive Brookings Institute, who chirruped gleefully, “There is no threat to Russian missiles now! If you listen to what the Russians have been saying for the last two years, this has been the biggest obstacle to things like cooperation with NATO.”

Joyful Russian bears seem happy and carefree now that the oppressive threat of having their first strike missiles knocked down has been removed!

Listen, dear readers, and you listen too, Stephen Pifer, you unmitigated jobbernowl, we don’t want the Russians cooperating with NATO—and in any case, that’s not the objective. The objective is nuclear disarmament which the Russians will now pretend to engage in with us so that Our Dear Leader can strip our nuclear arsenal of its primacy while Putin’s government pretends to keep pace, thus achieving a marked strategic superiority.  These perfidies began soon after Our Beloved Helmsman’s first election. In 2009 he tipped his hand in that classic way of his, by assuring the people of Eastern Europe during a speech he made in Prague, that “As long as the threat from Iran persists, we will go forward with a missile defense system that is cost-effective and proven.”  All this as though Iran were the main reason to erect a shield against nuclear devastation, as if the people of Prague lost sleep expecting to be nuked by Tehran. In Obamaspeak, this spelled doom for the Eastern European missile defense plan, of course, first because the President avoided any mention of the adversary most threatening to that region and to America, so leery was he of implicating his brethren in Moscow, and secondly because he gave his solemn word, which is always the kiss of death. And in September of the same year, the White House announced that it “no longer planned to move forward” with the project. Sorry Poland!  Just kidding, Czech Republic.

America’s vaunted F-22 Raptors–both of them!

Other Obama era blows to America’s defenses include the Army and Air Force C-27J transport project. One billion dollars had been spent on research and development when the Regime dropped the hatchet on it. The Marines spent 3.2 billion developing their newest amphibious assault vehicle, the Expeditionary Fighting Vehicle—before the Obama administration ordered the program halted on 11 February, 2011. Next, the Obama Administration announced that America no longer wished to cooperate with its European allies in the development of the Medium Extended Air Defense (MEADS) program, and turned its back on its nonplussed partners Germany and Italy. And then there was the vaunted F-22 Raptor, hailed by most aeronautical experts as the finest fighter aircraft ever conceived, and voted into oblivion by the Democrat-dominated Senate (at Obama’s behest, naturally), placing 95,000 American jobs at risk in the process and eliminating from our arsenal all but a handful of these superb aircraft that are best suited to oppose top-notch jets of Russian or Chinese manufacture and less expensive to produce than the cumbersome F-35. Worse, the F-35 is a “joint strike fighter,” which sounds spiffy but actually betokens an aircraft that will underperform in every service since it is built to accommodate the demands of all. The last such fiasco was the F-111 “Aardvark”–the hopelessly multi-tasked brainchild of Robert Strange McNamara  need we say more?  To date the equally compromised F-35 has cost $400 billion while suffering technical faults, delays, cost overruns and other assorted difficulties that make it a budgetary nightmare and threaten to occasion its curtailment -and it’s the only egg in the basket, dear readers, when it comes to maintaining air superiority for our forces. Meanwhile, following two stunningly successful interceptions of test targets by their ultra-modern laser beams, Boeing’s 747-400F  missile-killing planes, which could have zapped enemy rockets during boost phase or at other points in flight, were all shot down by Obama’s budget cutters and have vanished from our nation’s defenses.

Boeing’s 747  400F Laser Planes call “mayday!”

So doesn’t this administration believe in any sort of military strength for America? Is it willing to allocate any funding at all for weapons acquisition in the interest of maintaining our national security? Well—yes, if you don’t put too fine a point on how you define such things. For example, you can sleep securely, can’t you, knowing that Homeland Security has purchased 1.6 billion rounds of ammunition? That s enough ammo, by the way, to keep a full blown war in two theaters of operation in progress for about 15 years.  You will sometimes read that these are “hollow point bullets outlawed by international law” but that’s a tempest in a teapot and a lot less weird than the sheer magnitude of the purchase. You can buy hollow point ammo at your local sporting goods shop (if you can find any ammo for sale these days!) and it is reasonable to suppose that any law enforcement agency might order some ammunition of this type—but there is no conceivable reason that any legitimate duties of law enforcement could require 1.6 billion rounds, even if the TSA  is preparing to spearhead a thrust into into North Korea in the event of war.

But that’s not all! The very same Department of Homeland Security also purchased almost 2,000 refitted, mine-resistant, gun mounting Maxx-Pro MRAP (mine resistant, ambush protected) armored vehicles (built to withstand mines, IED explosions, and heavy ballistic fire) in order to patrol American streets. And what sort of threats to our Homeland will the Maxx-Pros be alert for as they roll through Any Town, USA?  Bear in mind that the MaxxPro can carry a full squad of armed troops in its bowls, mounts an M-2 50 caliber belt-fed machine gun atop its cab, and often sports an Mk19 automatic grenade launcher that can chuck a fusillade of 40mm M430 grenades 1,500 yards.  Handy, obviously, for use inside airports or bus stations. Meanwhile, in the interest of public safety, please don’t own a gun, and if you must own a gun, for gosh sake don’t get one of those high capacity magazines, okay? Somebody could get hurt.

But seriously, shouldn’t the head of Homeland Security be able to explain the purchase of enough ammo to fight World War Three plus five times more armored vehicles than blunted the Tet Offensive? WOOF would like to see somebody on the Hill, maybe somebody on the House’s Oversight Committee, invite Field Marshall Janet Napolitano over to explain to the nation why she needs so much muscle—to do what? Stop terrorists from getting on airplanes? Search purses? Run over potential shoe bombers? Nah.

The new look in street legal–the Maxx Pro. Maybe this year’s model is better looking?

You may never have another opportunity to see WOOF make this assertion, dear readers, but the truth of what’s going on was boldly captured for all to gaze upon in   the subversive LA Times,which on March 14 published an OpEd editorial from the Southern Poverty Law Center claiming that conservative, male Caucasians who support the second amendment to the Constitution are worse than Islamic terrorists and must be clamped down on mercilessly. That’s right, the Times warned of citizens who “are white, right-wing Americans, nearly all with an obsessive attachment to guns, who may represent a greater danger to the lives of American civilians than international terrorists,” thus, “”These groups should be closely monitored, with resources adequate to the task, even if it means shifting some homeland security money from the hunt for foreign terrorists.” Just to be sure it was operating as a legitimate representative of the vox populi, the Times conducted a survey of its readers, asking if Americans should be worried about the proliferation of “patriot groups,” and even among those so mentally enfeebled as to read the LA Times, 96 percent replied, “No.” Apparently the Times’s readership is oblivious of the insidious threat posed by patriotic white Americans who believe in the Bill of Rights. But you can bet that the Southern Poverty Law Center isn’t—and neither is the Obama Administration—and neither is Janet Napolitano.  WOOF is kind of offended, actually, on behalf of Black patriotic Americans who believe in the Bill of Rights– doesn’t the LA Times feel threatened by them too?

WOOF knows plenty of such patriots, just as well armed and pro-American as their white brethren, and it seems kind of racist to leave them out of the harangue–but it must be remembered that the, the LA Times functions on that rarefied stratum of  propagandistic haze in which no Black American can ever be characterized as pro-second amendment, or  conservative, or in any other respect counter-revolutionary — for the Liberal Establishment Media realized long ago that if Black Americans became aware of such principled defections from their obediently Democratic ranks, a mass exodus might ensue– concomitant with the dawning realization that minority votes need not be squandered on a white leftist  elite that has never done anything to promote Black interests and retains Black fealty only by pandering, fear mongering, and showing up at election time to sing in Black churches. Such a split would spell the end of liberalism as a viable political con job. And that’s why the Times kept its criticisms segregated, so to speak.

Janet Napolitano–lost in thought.

The larger question remains: Is now the time for our tumescent government’s parasitic sinecurists to heed the LA Times’s dire warning and eliminate dissent? Time, in fact, for Janet Napolitano to gird her loins and mount her command Humvee, shouting a hoarse “Let’s roll!” to her paramilitary hirelings? Yes, the dark days may be almost at hand in which the only hope for true change and the establishment of genuine egalitarianism and comradely unification under the “O” spangled banner of  Amerika  may be that version of hope and change won by the collectivized blood and steel of an ever-advancing socialism–when true fairness and universal obedience can only be assured by unleashing a flood of drones, goons, and armored vehicles upon the denizens of this nation’s most treasonably obstreperous territory — the Heartland!

Or maybe WOOF is just getting a little paranoid–huh? We’ll readily admit the whole Chuck Hagel thing has us a bit on edge, and the 160 billion bullets and the armored, tracked vehicles, and the drones, and the FEMA camps–do you realize they’re actually there? And the whole business with Benghazi still totally unexplained, and a Secretary of State who is honored with a plaque in Ho Chi Minh City for his assistance in procuring a communist victory in Vietnam, and the whole gun grab thing in congress, and Jay Leno getting fired by NBC for making too many Obama jokes in his monologues,  but hey, National Health Care isn’t even here yet–  so let’s face it, we still have a ways to go before we really hit bottom, so, hang cool, Woofketeers. And in closing, rather than misquote James Tiberius Kirk (see recent story), we’ve decided to cowboy up and leave you with the immortal words of that storied and prescient stateswoman, Dame Margaret Thatcher: “This is no time to go all wobbly!”

PREDATORS ABOVE AND BELOW!

Premonitions of paranoia? Cary fights the commies in North by Northwest!

Oh wow, guess what the Left just found out? It just found out that President Obama is planning to kill American civilians with drone strikes! In fact, the Atlantic went to press with an article by Conor Friedersdorf, who is billed as a staff writer “specializing in politics and national affairs,” in which Friedersdorf chirrups, “All hail NBC’s Michael Isikoff, who has gotten his hands on a previously undisclosed Obama Administration memo concluding that, under certain circumstances, the U.S. government can kill Americans with drones.” Don’t stop laughing on our account, dear readers, we know, we know, everybody on the paranoid right including we here at WOOF have been talking about this fact for at least a year, but it isn’t “real,” until the leftwing news establishment trips over it, and now, seemingly, this is the case. WOOF even raised a ruckus when numerous ostensible conservatives and Tea Partiers freshly or not-so-freshly ensconced in congress voted much of the enabling legislation through with big National Security smiles on their faces, what, two years ago? In fact, Mr. Friedersdorf, not that you would ever lower yourself to such gaucheries  but you could have dialed up the most outlandishly paranoid, fringe-focused nut-cake broadcasts on after-midnight radio and heard people calling in who think they are under Martian brain-beam assault who honest-to-God knew more about this subject a year ago than you or the American Media Establishment know today!

Say, no wonder the Left doesn’t think we’re funny! When it reads our jokes about drone attacks in, for instance, our “about us” page, it doesn’t get them! That explains a lot!

Pow! Right in the kisser!

Now, please, don’t let us be misunderstood—as we here at WOOF are particularly sensitive to being misunderstood. WOOF is all in favor of killing terrorists with drones. In fact, WOOF doesn’t see why we can’t kill higher value targets like Kim Jung Un and Ahmadinejad with drones—why not? Ahmadinejad steps out for a short after-prayer constitutional, stretches, yawns, thinks a few vague, anti-Semitic thoughts, and (POOM!) a Hellfire missile hits him in the kisser. It could happen to anybody, right? In fact, WOOF believes that drones should just fly around killing terrorists all day long, like a kid plinking soda bottles with a .22. But where WOOF draws the line is when defense appropriations are jovially voted through with the understanding that this will also entail a program whereby the President of the United States can declare anyone a terrorist, including your mother or your Uncle Bucky, or us, or, Heaven forefend, Ann Coulter—and simply zap them with a drone strike. Doing so is arguably legal right now, did you know that? (Of course you knew that, we were really addressing that comment to Conor Friedersdorf.)

You know an issue is virtually volcanic in nature when it reaches those levels of perturbation at which the reliably bovine White House Press Corpse decides to disturb the perfect sunlight of the spotless mind of Boy Propagandist Jay Carney with one of those always-mutually-embarrassing enquiries that both sides wish were not necessary to broach—but which seem at least temporarily unavoidable. Why, politely wondered the Press Corpse, is the Beloved Helmsman, Infallible Navigator of the Ship of State, Protector of the Victimized Masses and President for Life, planning to kill Americans more or less as the whim strikes him?  Not to worry. Jay Carney replied that these were questions that touched upon complicated constitutional and legal issues, but assured the gathered herd that when it came to arbitrarily killing American civilians, “the president takes those issues very seriously.”  So alrighty, then.

Potential drone target? Don’t do it, John Brennan!

Even the subversive New York Times was onto this game some time ago, commenting back in May of 2012 that the President was assembling a “kill list,” and that of his ever increasing spread of potential targets, “Several were Americans.” The Times added that “Mr. Obama has placed himself at the helm of a top secret ‘nominations’ process to designate terrorists for kill or capture, of which the capture part has become largely theoretical.” That’s because drones aren’t very good at that, right? They just don’t do snatch-and-grabs very well.

Has everyone forgotten that American police forces are lately enthusiastic fans of drone surveillance? In some areas such as Orange County, Florida and Mesa County, Colorado, the sheriffs’ departments are utilizing drones routinely while refusing to discuss what types of drones they have aloft, where they are flying them, why they are flying there, and what they are equipped to do. The United States Air Force has also refused to issue information on where it is currently operating drones in this country, or why.

All of this became possible over a year ago, gentle readers, when the FAA Reauthorization Act swept through congress and was promptly signed by the Great Helmsman. This legislation cleared the way for widespread use of drones across the country for electronic surveillance, and experts anticipate that over 30,000 drones will be in the American sky by mid 2013.

Drone attacks are generally approved by the Right overseas.

In 2011 it was (slightly) reported, (The New York Times and Salon both ran cautious stories)  that the selection of targets “outside of war zones” was being refined, and the little cluster of power drivers around John O. Brennan (remember the name!) in the White House was newly tasked with drawing up prospective target lists for this, too. And to make matters truly disquieting, the names were now run by the State Department at a weekly White House briefings. Foggy Bottom at war—really—can it get much scarier than that?  But, as the NY Times confirmed in a July 15, 2012 article cheerfully entitled “Secret Kill List,”  President Obama placed himself at the top of this somewhat threnodial pyramid. In fact, in the run-up to the election, it may be remembered that the Times made quite a big deal out of how macho was our rappin’ preezy, personally scrutinizing the kill lists and barking out orders like Capone or Bugs Moran. This effort to depict the Great Helmsman (who also shoots skeet, by the way) as a kind of modern-day warlord was decried widely at the time as sacrificing security in the interest of the campaign…surely Watchdogs of Our Freedom cannot be the only ones who remember?

The subversive American Civil Liberties Unions’s not-unattractive functionary Hina Shamsi (she also of the subversive National Security Project) was familiar with all this

Shamsi speaks out–the ACLU puts on its best face.

back in September of 2012 when she wrote, “The president claims the authority to unilaterally declare people enemies of the state including US citizens, and order their killing based on secret legal criteria, secret process and secret evidence.” Where was everybody else at the time? Busy covering the President’s royal fundament while he headed for re-election, that’s where!  And it was on the most occultically fire-driven sabbat of the calendar year, Beltane, April 30, 2012(coincidence? We think not!) that one John O. Brennan, at that time Assistant to the President for Homeland Security and Counterterrorism,  gave a speech at the Woodrow Wilson International Center for [Subversive] Scholars in which he for the first time elaborated on the use of  selective targeting of Americans as a domestic option. In case you’re a fan of unrefined sophistry, Brennan offered up the rationale that domestic strikes against citizens would be entirely allowable given that “as a matter of domestic law, the Constitution empowers the President to protect the nation from any imminent threat of attack.” Especially, apparently, when the threat is—the nation? This is vaguely remindful of the old Vietnam era chestnut, “We had to destroy the village to save it!”

Brennan, obviously, cited the Authorization for the Use of Military Force (fondly known as AUMF) already passed by Congress in the aftermath of the original September 11 attacks in Manhattan, which authorized the president “to use all necessary and appropriate force” against any enemy supportive of the terrorism that resulted in 9/11. But look at the sinister confluence of factors this speech illuminated! First, we have the legislation enacted in the wake of the New York and Pentagon attacks, the interpretation of which may have been hesitantly entrusted at one time to the best judgment of Bush and Cheney, but was never conceived of as falling into the mischievous hands of the First Marxist and his Merry Menshevik Marauders! Then we have the placement of drone warfare at the President’s domestic disposal through the FAA Reauthorization Act. Finally, we have the Brennan speech at which the tenuous dialectic for domestic application of the kill list is enunciated, and who objects? A bunch of nuts on midnight radio shows and WOOF, that’s who! Nobody else gives a darn!

Not, at least, until we get to the “all hail Michael Isikoff” moment of this morning and his publicizing of the 16-page memo that somebody had the presence of mind to slip him—and this is newsworthy because? Well, because there is just something about a leaked memo that the Vast Monolithic Media Establishment finds irresistible. Indeed,

This type of domestic drone attack is customarily approved by the Left

WOOF hereby enunciates a basic precept of contemporary reportage (which word we use principally to annoy Edwin Newman, wherever he is): If you want something as widely known as possible, put it in a secret memo!  And the memo in this case says exactly nothing—nothing—that we didn’t already know. It states that you, gentle reader, may be ordered killed if you are considered, by the Administration, to pose “an imminent threat of violent attack” against the United States. But you may only be killed if capture does not appear feasible. Of course, what on earth that means is mootable in the extreme. Is capture infeasible only if you are traversing the snow-swept ravines of the Khyber Pass? Or is it equally so if you look like you are about to hail a taxi in Buffalo?  Who decides this?  And what does “imminent” mean, while we’re at it? Well, here we have the single spectacular insight offered by the 16-page document in Mr. Isikoff’s possession. Obviously, when most of us think of an “imminent” threat we tend to think of Iran, North Korea, a tsunami, or a madman breaking down our door at 3AM, or possibly the debt crisis. We think, in other words, of a danger with the potential to inflict immediate harm. It requires, really, the Obama White House to reconstruct the English language to an extent rendering such understandings obsolete. Here, quoted from the document, is this helpful bit of post-modern lexicography:

“Certain aspects of this legal framework require additional explication. First, the condition that an operational leader present [sic] an “imminent” threat of violent attack against the United States does not require the United States to have clear evidence that a specific attack on U.S. persons will take place in the immediate future.

(Okay, so it’s probably a good thing Edwin Newman is deceased because that would’ve killed him!)

Not that anybody minded blowing up Al Wacki –was that his name?

A third stipulation appears to be that the target be a ranking Al-Qaeda figure. But we know this is ridiculous because the administration is currently blasting targets all over the Middle East that are not Al Qaeda. Taliban targets are being hit, and “mowing the grass” attacks have been launched at crowds who appear militant. According to Global Research, over the past 4 years Obama authorized attacks in Pakistan that killed more than 800 people, only 22 of whom were identified as Al-Qaeda fighters.  So is the Al-Qaeda nicety just a third possible reason that you might be ordered killed? Or if it is a firm criterion, does it require only that Barack, Michelle, or Eric Holder so designate you?

And now, let’s put this brouhaha into a current political perspective, shall we? Or rather, let’s acknowledge that it has firmly placed itself in such a perspective, so we can ill afford to ignore it. Yesterday morning a “bipartisan group” of eleven Senators wrote themselves a letter—and they sent it to President Obama. They politely requested “any and all legal opinions” that uphold a basis for Executive Branch authority to “deliberately kill American civilians.”

Attorney General Eric Holder went on record endorsing the drone assaults, declaring that when the Administration launches a drone attack, “we are confident that we are

Chloe O’Brien could always be trusted to pick a drone target domestically–but we’re told she’s not real. Damn it, Chloe!

doing so in a way that is consistent with federal and international law!” Of course, this from the man who was confident that illegally running hundreds of guns to Mexican drug cartels so that they would be used to kill lots of people, preferably Americans, and make the 2^nd amendment look bad, was consistent with federal and international law, so he’s a known clown act. Jay Carney, boy propagandist, said at a his press conference today that the strikes were carried out ethically and legally—but when asked what legal criteria were applied to the strikes he said he had no idea.

Clueless in D.C.

So is there any reason to believe that these eleven Senators are going to have any more attention paid to their letter of yesterday morning than was paid to letters asking about “Fast and Furious,” or any other depredations visited against the Constitution by the Obama Regime? Well, actually, yes there is. Remember when we told you (above) to keep the name of John O. Brennan in mind? Well guess who wants to be CIA Director, WOOFketeers?  As a matter of fact, confirmation hearings are scheduled for Thursday in front of that classic oxymoron, the Senate Intelligence committee. And don’t forget Chuckie Hagel—the rascally anti-Zionist, anti-military Liberal who wants to be Secretary of Defense so that he can help Obama disarm the United States militarily as well as domestically. Chuckie did so badly in his original round of hearings that the Administration actually admitted its own dissatisfaction with his performance—which Lindsey Graham correctly described as “clueless.” This certainly doesn’t mean that Hagel won’t be nominated—why should cluelessness debar anyone from serving the Obama Administration? But it does mean his nomination is “imperiled,” as they say inside the Beltway, and this is no time for a spat over drone violence!

Central Intelligence Director-manqué John O. Brennan is, of course, Mr. Drone Program personified, and the leading philosophical light behind using it to zap his countrymen—so the subject is bound to come up. In fact, confirmation hearings for Brennan that do not require his indulging the committee in prolonged effusions of persiflage seem unimaginable—as does his failure to receive final approval once the likes of Lindsey Graham and John McCain have had their doubts assuaged by ample amounts of media attention.

John O. Brennan– next CIA director? He’d just better not have a mistress is all!

So stay tuned, WOOFerians—the games are just beginning! (Although frankly, it is never too early in these matters to prepare for disappointment!)  And remember, we were telling you the President was going to shoot at you with drones before Michael Isikoff ever suspected it!  We may be paranoid, ladies and gentleman, but we are accurately paranoid, and proud it!  And like we said at the beginning, we are not anti-drone, we are just personally opposed to being targeted by friendly fire at the behest of our Dear Leader. A long time ago, Georgie Patton explained this situation clearly when he said, “There’s nothing wrong with shooting, as long as the right people get shot!”  He forgot to mention that things get crazy real fast when only the wrong people have the  hunting licenses!

General Patton–please call your office!

SLOUCHING TOWARD WASHINGTON? WHO IS CHUCK HAGEL AND WHY CAN’T WE MAKE OURSELVES LIKE HIM?

What do you do with a problem like Chuck?

Who is Chuck Hagel, and why are people saying these awful things about him? He’s not a bad guy by all appearances, with a solid war record in Vietnam resulting in several decorations, two of which are purple hearts that he won without hitting himself with ricochets, a la John Kerry—and hey, Kerry’s going to be Secretary of State, for gosh sakes. Compared to the Ketchup Gigolo from Massachusetts, Hagel looks like Tony by-God Herbert! So why all the sudden cries of opposition to this squishily moderate, moderately intelligent and entirely pleasant chap from Nebraska—home of Henry Fonda, Dick Cavett, Fred Astaire, and all sorts of other inoffensive, pleasant folks?  We don’t really get it! A country that could accept putting Elena Kagan on the Supreme Court and seemed just fine placing Tim Geithner at Treasury, and still doesn’t seem to mind leaving Eric Holder to run amok at Justice, should have the hippy-hippy-shakes over the handsome Nebraskan with real-deal combat “cred” and membership in the Republican party? Did everyone suddenly get a case of the meanies?  After all, one might expect the execrable Barney Frank to have kittens over anyone to the right of Perez Hilton getting Obama’s nod, and of course a stalwart or two on the right will be offended by Hagel’s classically centrist naiveté, but what’s with the rest of the troops? Well, in fairness, it seems that Chuck has found time to offend almost every special interest imaginable in some way or another, albeit in a pleasant kind of understated Nebraskan way. Let’s review the doo-doo buckets he’s managed to place his Guccis in over the past decade or so, and to such an extent that all sorts of people on the left despise him as well as Conservatives and even and all sorts of middle-of-the-road Republicans for whom strong emotions are typically foresworn as rather unsportsmanlike.

Now first we have Hagel’s entirely moderate, entirely sensible, University-brand denunciations of the trade embargo against Cuba. Why, after all, should we continue those old hostilities when common sense recommends reading Fidel into the club and treating him to a few perks? He’s widely admired on the Left, and heck, Ted Turner worships

Never at a loss for Yankee supporters!

the guy—and all those Hollywood people like him, why not see Fidel as just another victim of Nixon and HUAC? We could bring him a cargo lift of Omaha Steaks and a few cases of Dorothy Lynch salad dressings, and that bald parrot guy who recorded that one good song once–Jimmy Buffet, that’s his name, right? He’s a big Castro and Obama fan—he could go over on the plane and sing about freedom, and fail to see the irony! See, there’s just nothing very shocking about this attitude—why almost all Nebraskans probably feel this way about Cuba—and most Rockefeller-wing republicans—the ones we now call “Country Club,” would be okay with it. So why can’t Chuck want to hug Fidel, too? Well, that hot headed young Marco Rubio, the somewhat conservative Senator from Florida, has let it be known he’ll resist Hagel’s nomination for DefSec unless Chuck reverses his position on the U.S. trade embargo. Stubborn, stubborn, stubborn! And we here at WOOF? Well, we wouldn’t personally endorse any Secretary of Defense who didn’t want to toss Fidel Castro naked into one of the dungeons he keeps all those Gay Cubans in—but that’s just us, and we’re known to be extreme.

Oh, and hey—speaking of Gays—they all seem to have a real problem with Chuck too, and we don’t just mean Barney Frank. The beef seems to stem from his fifteen-year-old assertion that James Hormel should be dropped from consideration as ambassador to Luxembourg because, Hagel said, he was “openly, aggressively gay.” To homosexuals who feel slighted by Chuck’s apparent reluctance to send a flamer into the diplomatic venues of Ruritania, WOOF says, chill! Good grief, it was only a few months ago that President Obama wouldn’t accept

Barney Frank is horrified–but is this sufficient cause to back a Hagel cabinet position?

the idea of Gay marriage, but he spent 24 hours evolving once the Gay vote seemed crucial to the survival of the Regime, and now he’s all for it—and who doesn’t admire a man who can transform himself spiritually with such sublime ease and philosophical dexterity? So why not assume Chuck will do likewise? He has already apologized for his remarks, and if his apology seemed raspy and generic, it may only be that he has not yet learned the correct technique of evolving. As soon as he comes to the necessarily de rigueur insights—you know, about evolving, and all—he’ll be every bit as acceptable to the LGBT community as our Beloved Helmsman, the man Newsweek Magazine (shortly before its long-overdue death) saw fit to apotheosize as our “first Gay president!” (Evidently Tina Brown didn’t know about James Buchanan, but that’s not important now).

And of course, as moderate Republicans will, Chuck tends to say unfortunately goofy, Network-worthy, University-issue type stuff—why, he even endorsed Barack Hussein Obama for the Presidency—but so did a lot of Republicans. But it rankles some,

Lindsey Graham–feeling feisty at the end of the day?

such as Senator Dan Coats (R-Indiana) who was heard to exclaim, “We watched Chuck take positions that are, frankly, many of them…to the left of Barack Obama.”  But that is a ridiculous charge prima faci, isn’t it? The man cannot do the impossible, can he? And dear old Lindsey Graham who sometimes takes time away from worrying about the invidious influence of Rush Limbaugh and Laura Ingraham long enough to squeak like a conservative, told FOX News’s Chris Wallace that “At the end of the day, there will be very few votes [for a Hagel nomination].” But that’s just Lindsey talking, and this is a man who, at the end of the day, still thinks he can get some lexical juice out of the phrase “at the end of the day,” and who, at the end of the day, always turns out to be wrong about what the day would bring—so why not just go ahead and accept the Hagelian Inevitability?

Okay, so we were really going to come out in opposition to Chuck Hagel here at WOOF, because we just can’t stand it when American politicians see centrist smarminess as obliging them somehow to excoriate the Jewish State and make goo-goo eyes at the homicidal terrorist sects of the Middle east—but then we thought—wait! Let’s be open-minded about this—you know, open-minded in a kind of Allan Bloom sort of way, that is, and let’s look at a some intelligent discussion on the left—maybe something about this whole Jewish issue –and let’s see what a scholarly, judicious review of the facts by a highly qualified scholar of the Left—maybe one who also speaks for a large portion of the Jewish intelligentsia both here and abroad, has to say about all this. And to paraphrase Tom Laughlin in Billy Jack, we tried, dear readers, we really tried!  But our efforts took us ultimately to the Daily Beast and an article by exactly the kind of writer we were in search of—and we were right back to Joe McCarthy and HUAC—can you believe that? And they say there’s no God.

Look, Chuck Hagel is going to be President Obama’s nomination for Secretary of Defense, and he’ll get the job if he wants it, because there aren’t enough rational Republicans in either house to deny The Great Helmsman his druthers in this matter (short of his picking Emily“Yolanda” Harris, maybe—no, she might get it too). And although WOOF has consistently advocated Ted Nugent for the DefSec position, we were almost willing to go along with Hagel. But what really changed our minds was reading the afore-mentioned Daily Beast column by Dr. Bernard Avishai. We don’t pretend to be able to keep up with Dr. Avishai intellectually. How do you keep up with the dianoetic output

“Yolanda” Harris could probably get a cabinet post these days–at least she’s sincere!

of a man who can write the sentence, “We knew for whom an unfair, impatient, insane America would not ‘be good for.’” Admit it, you’re lost too, right? But Bernard Avishai seems like an okay guy to us, albeit way to our Left—and who isn’t? He’s an important fixture at places like Duke and MIT, and International Director of a whole bunch of firms we don’t even know the acronyms for, and technology editor of the Harvard Business Review. Besides Harvard, he is also associated with numerous additional far-left groups and enterpises like The New Yorker, The New York Times Review of Books, Harper’s and a variety of other subversive publications, so when he dashed off a column for the Daily Beast, we tried to get some intellectual ballast out of it—we tried to find the common ground—to reach across the aisle—but all we learned was that Dr. Avishai thought Joe McCarthy was scary and bad, and he was proud that the American Jewish intellectual community, which was good in those days, resisted him. Warming to this remembrance, Avishai writes, “speaking of McCarthyism—the first thick book I read [he was very little, in his defense] was Louis Nizer’s My Life in Court, which was largely about the libel case of Quentin Reynolds against Westbrook Pegler, the impresario of the scurrilous Red Channels.” Right there we were lost again! Did Joe McCarthy secretly morph into Westbrook Pegler and once having done so, secretly publish the infamous pamphlet Red Channels? This is a particularly weird assertion, not only because Joe never actually impersonated Westbrook Pegler, whom he barely knew, but also because Westbrook Pegler didn’t publish Red Channels—it being mainly assembled by FBI agent Ted C. Kirkpatrick under the incautious oversight of Vincent Hartnett, who was in fact sued by John Henry Faulke, not by Quentin Reynolds. For the record, Reynolds sued Pegler for libel because Pegler called him a coward, not a communist. We think that some Straussian-style formulaic re-understanding of history is probably taught at the University of Toronto where Avishai got his doctorate; the kind of codified subtext in which nobody is really who it seems when it seems they should be, while they are often hinted to have interacted with those whom they never met nor were, but whom they might have met or even become had they been who they previously were not—maybe.

Dr. Avishai–some kind of Straussian code?

Naturally, Dr. Avishai lionizes certain defenders of liberty and the political center against the barbarous incursions of the McCarthyites. He offers us the names of a few of these valiant defenders. He mentions Arthur Miller, whose 1953 play, “The Crucible,” was a transparent slap at the House Un-American Activities Committee before which Miller had appeared as an invited guest, and we are reminded about brave little I.F. Stone who faced the forces of reaction like a mid-century David taunting the titans of militarism and paranoia.There was also, Avishai refelcts, Commentary Magazine, “before Norman Podhoretz lost his mind.”  Umm—okay—so we have here a salute to Arthur Miller, known communist, I.F. Stone,

Brave little Izzy–but we’ll always think of him as just good old ‘Pancake.’

known communist, and Norman Podhoretz who became a leading light of NeoConservatism and is therefore written off as insane?  Crypto-communists, it seems, are rational and brave, whereas neocons are nuts—and finally, Podhoretz is portrayed as having gone so utterly bonkers he seems to have taken the whole of Jewish intellectualism with him over to the dark side, because, as Avishai reveals, “…certain major Jewish organizations [he names the ADL, AIPAC, American Jewish Committee, Republican Jewish Coalition]—“are among the most consistent purveyors of McCarthyite-style outrages in America today.”  See, we thought when Arthur Miller didn’t tell HUAC that he wrote under a pseudonym for the Daily Worker and was a lifelong communist sympathizer, that was a “McCarthyite outrage”—or when I.F. Stone presented himself as feisty, free-thinking little “Izzy” just trying to “speak truth to power,” without mentioning that the commies had him on salary and his Russian intelligence codename was “Pancake.”  But then, who would want to admit that? Maybe you would tell somebody like Dick Cavett, “Yeah, Dick, in truth I’m a clandestine Soviet-style communist agent of influence– been one since the ‘30s in fact!” [but] “And back in Moscow they call me ‘pancake”? Nah—that’s asking a lot.

Arthur Miller and bride–living the daily horror of being a HUAC target!

So let us get this straight, okay Dr. Avishai! According to you, we need to have Chuck Hagel for Secretary of Defense because a lot of Jewish groups that you are no longer proud of don’t like him, and if they keep him from becoming Secretary of Defense, that’s a victory for McCarthyism. And this might happen because Jewish Americans formed a big conga line in the ‘70s and followed Norman Podhoretz (who lost his mind) to the partial right of the political landscape? And these Jewish intellectuals are the purveyors of McCarthyism today?  And the American Israel Public Affairs Committee is now somehow a McCarthyite cabal, because as you write, sir, “Congresspeople will tell you openly that AIPAC has become one of the most feared, and secretly loathed, presences on Capitol Hill.” (And say, if they’re secretly feared, why do these congress—uh—people, tell us about it “openly?”) And another weird thing, Dr. Avishai—did you notice that you never got around to telling us why we should actually like Chuck Hagel?  In fact you say you “won’t presume to go through the credentials that make Chuck Hagel fit for appointment as Defense Secretary…”

Transmogrified into Pegler? Say it ain’t so, Joe!

So darn it, our best efforts just led us right back to where we wound up after we began—(look, now he has us doing it!) You’ve almost single handedly persuaded us to oppose Chuck Hagel’s appointment as Secretary of Defense, Dr. Avishai—not that it’ll matter! It’s a mean season for us poor McCarthyites, Bernard. (By the way, may we call you Bernard?)  You might send a kind thought our way now and then. You might try a little bourbon and sympathy. Because the day hasn’t dawned that Lindsey Graham’s tapioca-like resistance can stave off the media-driven destructiveness of Barrack Obama –and thus Chuck Hagel at Defense bestirs the same atmospheric inevitability as flu season in this most hyperborean hour of the American winter. But we don’t care if it’s pointless, dear readers—heck, WOOF has never minded being pointless! WE hereby state our opposition to the appointment of Chuck Hagel as Secretary of Defense—why? Because Joe McCarthy and all those extreme pro-Israeli groups are the only thing between us and Louis Nizer and Arthur Miller…okay, we’re lost again, gentle readers. Just tell your congress “people” out there that you don’t want Chuck Hagel for DefSec—and just to be on the safe side, mention that Emily Harris is out, too!

Westbrook, if you weren’t dead, this stuff’d kill you, right?