So When did the Cuban Missile Crisis become Kennedy’s “Victory?”

That Khrushchev swept the floor with Kennedy during the Cuban Missile Crisis was mainstream conservative conclusion throughout much of the Cold War. Richard Nixon and Barry Goldwater, for instance, represented opposite poles of the Republican establishment of their time.... but:

"We locked Castro's communism into Latin America and threw away the key to its removal," growled Barry Goldwater about the JFK’s Missile Crisis “solution.”

"Kennedy pulled defeat out of the jaws of victory,” complained Richard Nixon. "Then gave the Soviets squatters rights in our backyard."

Generals Curtis Le May and Maxwell Taylor represented opposite poles of the military establishment.

"The biggest defeat in our nation's history!" bellowed Air Force chief Curtis Lemay while whacking his fist on his desk upon learning the details of the deal.

"We missed the big boat," complained Gen. Maxwell Taylor after learning of same.

"We've been had!" yelled then Navy chief George Anderson upon hearing on October 28, 1962, how JFK "solved" the missile crisis. Adm. Anderson was the man in charge of the very "blockade" against Cuba.

"It's a public relations fable that Khrushchev quailed before Kennedy," wrote Alexander Haig. "The legend of the eyeball to eyeball confrontation invented by Kennedy's men paid a handsome political dividend. But the Kennedy-Khrushchev deal was a deplorable error resulting in political havoc and human suffering through the Americas."

William Buckley's National Review devoted several issues to exposing and denouncing Kennedy's appeasement. The magazine's popular "The Third World War" column by James Burnham roundly condemned Kennedy's Missile Crisis solution as "America's Defeat."

Even Democratic luminary Dean Acheson despaired: "This nation lacks leadership," he grumbled about the famous “Ex-Comm meetings” so glorified in the movie Thirteen Days. "The meetings were repetitive and without direction. Most members of Kennedy's team had no military or diplomatic experience whatsoever. The sessions were a waste of time."

But not for the Soviets. "We ended up getting exactly what we'd wanted all along," snickered Nikita Khrushchev in his diaries, “security for Fidel Castro’s regime and American missiles removed from Turkey and Italy. Until today the U.S. has complied with her promise not to interfere with Castro and not to allow anyone else to interfere with Castro. After Kennedy's death, his successor Lyndon Johnson assured us that he would keep the promise not to invade Cuba."

In fact Khrushchev prepared to yank the missiles before any “bullying” by Kennedy. “What!” Khrushchev gasped on Oct. 28th 1962, as recalled by his son Sergei. “Is he (Fidel Castro) proposing that we start a nuclear war? “But that is insane!...Remove them (our missiles) as soon as possible! Before it’s too late. Before something terrible happens!” commanded the Soviet premier.

So much for the gallant Knights of Camelot forcing the Russians’ retreat. In fact, the Castro brothers and Che Guevara’s genocidal lust is what prompted the Butcher of Budapest to yank the missiles from their reach.

Considering the U.S. nuclear superiority over the Soviets at the time of the (so-called) Missile Crisis (five thousand nuclear warheads for us, three hundred for them) it's hard to imagine a President Nixon — much less Reagan — quaking in front of Khrushchev's transparent ruse a la Kennedy.

The genuine threat came --not from Moscow—but from the Castros and Che. “If the missiles had remained, we would have fired them against the very heart of the U.S., including New York. The victory of socialism is well worth millions of atomic victims.” (Che Guevara to Sam Russell of The London Daily Worker, November 1962.)

“Of course I knew the missiles were nuclear- armed,” responded Fidel Castro to Robert McNamara during a meeting in 1992. “That’s precisely why I urged Khrushchev to launch them. And of course Cuba would have been utterly destroyed in the exchange.”

Castro's regime's was granted new status. Let's call it MAP, or Mutually-Assured-Protection. Cuban freedom-fighters working from south Florida were suddenly rounded up for "violating U.S. neutrality laws." Some of these bewildered men were jailed, others "quarantined," prevented from leaving Dade County. The Coast Guard in Florida got 12 new boats and seven new planes to make sure Castro remained unmolested.

JFK's Missile Crisis “solution” also pledged that he immediately pull the rug out from under Cuba's in-house freedom fighters. Raul Castro himself admitted that at the time of the Missile Crisis his troops and their Soviet advisors were up against 179 different "bands of bandits" as he labeled the thousands of Cuban anti-Communist rebels then battling savagely and virtually alone in Cuba's countryside, with small arms shipments from their compatriots in south Florida as their only lifeline.

Kennedy's deal with Khrushchev cut this lifeline. This ferocious guerrilla war, waged 90 miles from America's shores, might have taken place on the planet Pluto for all you'll read about it in the mainstream media and all you'll learn about it from Kennedy’s court scribes, who scribbled Kennedy’s Missile-Crisis “victory.” To get an idea of the odds faced by those betrayed Cuban rebels, the desperation of their battle and the damage they wrought, you might revisit Tony Montana during the last 15 minutes of "Scarface."

SOURCE

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The Folly of Resentment

by Theodore Dalrymple

There is one group of people whom it is morally permissible to hate, and of whom in these times of speech codes it is allowed or even obligatory to speak hatefully: namely, the rich. This is rather odd when one thinks of it, for economic resentment was ultimately responsible for more deaths in the last century than racial hatred. Yet to be a racist is to put yourself outside the pale of decent society; to be an economic egalitarian is to establish your generosity of spirit and profound sense of justice.

Perhaps this is because this world’s rewards are not distributed according to anyone’s idea of how they ought to be distributed; that is to say, in accordance with anyone’s individual scale of values. They seem rather to be bestowed capriciously and not in accordance with merit. Some, of course, have merely inherited their wealth; others have made it in ways of which we do not approve or even despise.

Not all rich people are well-behaved; indeed, they can be tactless, offensive, vulgar, and tasteless. When Mr. Ambani built his domestic skyscraper in Bombay I was appalled not by the expenditure (though I had walked through the slums of that city) but by the complete aesthetic worthlessness of what he built. To spend a billion dollars on a house and to detract, slightly, from the beauty of the world is, in a way, an achievement; but one of the functions of the rich is to preserve and increase such beauty. These days they don’t make a very good job of it; the rich these days seem often to have no better taste than the poor. One has only to consider the relative prices on the art market to understand that of all personal qualities, good taste is the rarest.

Still, hatred of the rich, which people do not hesitate to express as if it were a virtue to do so, rests fundamentally on two human connected emotions, both of them unattractive: envy and resentment. It also rests on the primitive notion of an economy as being a cake of a fixed size to be sliced up according to some plan, just or unjust as the case may be. On this view, a crumb in one man’s mouth is a crumb taken from another man. Poverty is the result, therefore, of wealth: which is true enough if you define poverty as being a certain percentage of the average or median income, as is all too often done. If you define poverty as the lack of subsistence or even physical ease, it is quite otherwise.

In France, President Hollande, who during his campaign said (as if it were a sign of decency) that he did not like the rich—the rich of course being those who had more money than him—imposed a 75% tax on people earning more than a million euro ($1.3 million) a year. Initially, the Constitutional Court rejected this tax because the constitution forbids confiscatory taxes (France has an unfortunate history in the matter of confiscation), but the president stuck to his so-called “principles,” or at least to his election promise, and taxed the companies that paid their employees more than one million euro a year.

This has enraged French football (soccer) teams, who pay many of their players more than one million euro a year. The football teams are therefore going on strike, for if they cannot pay their players more than that amount, the best of them will simply decamp to neighboring countries.

The regime of bread and circuses such as is now regnant in most Western countries is dangerously dependent for its stability on its circuses, and of all the circuses in Europe football is by far the most important. The Times of London, for example, devotes far more of its space to football than to foreign news, and no public figure would dare avow a lack of interest in football for fear of appearing to be an Enemy of the People. When I listen to conversations in the street, football rivals in importance difficulties in love affairs. A strike by football teams is therefore a serious matter; if it lasted or resulted in permanent damage to the standard football played, it could lead to social unrest.

I would be dishonest if I did not admit that I find the amounts of money paid to sportsmen grotesque; but their incomes, I am afraid, are a reflection of the importance millions of my fellow citizens accord to sports. To object to their high incomes is therefore to object to the taste of the masses, of which their high incomes are merely a reflection. Personally I would much rather the masses had a taste for my books and articles.

To judge by the commentary on French websites (which seems to be in concert with opinion polls), the French public is very much in favor of high taxes on footballers, whose incomes they very much resent even while it is their own interest in, even obsession with, football that drives up those incomes.

(We think of the French as a nation of Left Bank intellectuals, but the daily sporting paper, L’Équipe [The Team], has a circulation larger than nearly any national daily newspaper, and one that is holding steady, unlike that of the other newspapers.)

Why do the French—80% of them, according to some polls—want the footballers to be more highly taxed? Here is a fairly typical, though slightly more articulate than average, comment: Si, si il faut tenir sur les 75% et aider les nécessiteux avec l’argent des vaniteux et des footeux. (Yes, yes we must hold to the 75% [tax] and help the needy with the money of the puffed-up and of the football players.)

The effect of resentment on the ratiocination of a perfectly intelligent man is here evident. First he assumes that an economy is a cake whose proceeds can be redistributed without any effect whatever upon the size of the cake to be redistributed; and second he supposes that a euro taken by the state from the pocket of a footballer goes straight into the pocket, without any deduction by a greedy or inefficient state, of the needy (that is to say, in a country such as France, those who would like a larger flat-screened TV than they already have, or the latest iPhone).

The 75% tax appeals to similar low emotions as racism: I am poor because they are taking from me something that I deserve to have. It used to be said that anti-Semitism was the socialism of fools, but socialism is the anti-Semitism of intellectuals.

SOURCE

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ObamaCare Doubles Premiums for Young Women

Because it’s not really about Sandra Fluke’s birth control. It’s about funding another expansion of the welfare state. It’s a tax hike looped through private companies. It’s wealth redistribution through the back door with a government mandate.

The vast majority of the population will be screwed by ObamaCare. A small number of people with medical problems who have jobs will benefit, but it would have been far easier and cheaper to pay to cover them. This is still about the Government Class and its insatiable welfare lust.

War on Women? The young women targeted for this in ads don’t benefit from it.

Healthy young women will see their premiums rise by an average of almost 200 percent under Obamacare, with increases occurring in all 50 states and the District of Columbia, according to a new study.

Earlier this month, the American Action Forum released an analysis that found the average 30-year-old male nonsmoker would see his premiums rise 260 percent.

Using the same metrics, the organization found that the Affordable Care Act (ACA) would be just as harsh on women trying to purchase bronze level plans, the cheapest insurance available in the marketplace.

Overall, states averaged a 193 percent increase in premiums for 30-year-old female nonsmokers.

For example, a woman earning $31,597.50 would receive a 23 percent subsidy, totaling $653. However, her yearly premium would still be $2,186, compared to the $218.47 penalty she would incur in 2014 for not having insurance.

Welcome to ObamaCare. You’re doing your part to subsidize an unsustainable welfare state.

SOURCE

There is a  new  lot of postings by Chris Brand just up -- on his usual vastly "incorrect" themes of race, genes, IQ etc

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