By DR. LARRY MOSES
No one asked me but… Last week I drove 160 miles round trip to see a movie. No, it was not American Sniper. However, it was the top grossing movie of the week.
It was a fairy tale. No, not the life and times of Barack Obama. It was Cinderella. It was not a bad movie, but one must wonder how it will make it. There is not a swear word in it. There is no nudity. I don’t even remember a single kiss, maybe at the end when the Prince and Cinderella are standing before their kingdom after they are married.
Is it a great movie? No. However, it is one you as a family can go see and be entertained.
No one asked me but… Speaking of fairy tales does the world seem a fairy tale to you or is this just something I am experiencing? In the fairyland that has taken over the White House, the President ignores the election of Benjamin Netanyahu of Israel. However, he made a congratulatory phone call to the President of Iran within hours of his election, as if it were a real election.
I understand he does not like Netanyahu, but Israel is our ally and Iran our avowed enemy. To the Iranian government, America is the great Satan that they must destroy. Someone has given the President the wrong scorecard. While he is filling out his NCCA Final Four bracket, he needs a scouting report on foreign policy.
I agree with the President that the present chaos in the Middle East is the result of America meddling in the affairs of Middle-Eastern nations by encouraging, supporting and in some cases taking military actions to dispose the dictators controlling those countries. By accepting the fairy tale that American ideals of nationalism, freedom, and respect for one’s fellow man can be super-imposed on a culture that has neither the background nor the desire for these ideals an entire region has been driven to chaos.
Middle-Eastern countries do not strive for American ideals. They strive for a theocracy which denies many of those ideals. The people of these countries are comfortable with the oppression of women, the throwing of homosexuals from rooftops, the beheading of Christians, and tribal loyalty over nationalism. If you do not believe this is the case, look to the Muslim communities throughout the Western world. These Muslim refugees do not demand the rights of Westerners; they establish their own communities and demand the same harsh and bigoted laws of the country they have fled. These people did not flee oppressive governments, they fled the poverty brought on by those governments.
While many of the ideals that Americans claim to hold dear have not been fulfilled, they are nonetheless goals for which Americans can and do strive.
The mistake Americans make is in seeing the value of these ideals. They have decided it is their obligation to spread them throughout the world. However, the cultures of the Middle East don’t hold these “truths to be self evident.” Since the people of the Middle East are comfortable with religious oppression, it should not be judged as wrong by people outside that culture.
If a country moves aggressively against its neighbor, who is a friend of America, we should act.
However, we should not be stirring up rebellions within countries just because we don’t like their form of government. The mistake Saddam made was leaving his borders to attack Kuwait. The mistake America made was leaving Saddam in power after Desert Storm.
It was a mistake to leave the removal of Saddam to Bush II. Bush II based his aggression against Saddam on the fact, denied by Bush’s critics, that Saddam had weapons of mass destruction. The fairy tale that those weapons did not exist belies the fact that those weapons have been found and being used by ISIS against the Kurds.
The President may not like Benjamin Netanyahu but Israel is the one true friend in the Middle East who shares the principles of a free people with America. I understand that a pacifist and apologist, as is President Obama, is frighten by a warrior. But when push comes to shove with Iran, Israel may be the only one we can depend on. If we lose Israel, we will have lost the entire Middle East.
The more you read about American foreign policy, under President Obama, the more one believes that policy should begin “Once upon a time…”
No one asked me but… It is good to see that our Representative Cresent Hardy is busy in Washington, D.C. He has introduced a bill that would restrict the federal government from purchasing additional land until the government balances the budget. The last time the government presented a balanced budget was 2001. One of the biggest fairy tales of all is that the federal government will one day again balance the budget.
Assemblyman Hardy stated that a $29 billion backlog of maintenance by federal land agencies is evidence that the government “has bitten off more than it can chew.”
This bill will not pass Congress. But even if it did, it would not affect the lands in the State of Nevada. There is no need for a federal agency to purchase land in Nevada, because the federal government already owns the land. If the government decides to turn the land into a National Park, a wilderness area, or even a nuke dump, they don’t need the permission of the people of Nevada.
While the BLM may hold meetings to discuss how they dispose of the land in Nevada, it is not required. These talks are merely to make it possible for the BLM to carry on the fairy tale that the people of Nevada are involved in the disposal of Nevada land.
The only protection for the people of the State of Nevada is to get the federal government to return the undeveloped land to the control of the State. Maybe we could get the President to champion the cause of the people of Nevada as he does the Islamic states. However, that may be the greatest fairy tale of them all.
Thought of the week…. “The emperor is naked!” The parade stopped. The emperor paused. A hush fell over the crowd, until one quick-thinking peasant shouted: “No, he isn’t. The emperor is merely endorsing a clothing-optional lifestyle!”
-James Finn Garner
