The Establishment, Rumsfeld, and McNamara

The Establishment is a collection of power brokers who rule America from the shadows.  Some power brokers lean Left and are the Democrat Establishment, some lean Right and are the Republican Establishment, and some are faithless and amoral and are disloyal to both parties; I will call this group the Neutral Establishment.  What many people describe as the Establishment are the servants of the Establishment or the institutions that serve the Establishment.  The book, "The American Establishment" by Leonard Silk and Mark Silk describes some institutions belonging to the Democrat Establishment as though this is all there is.

You might think that Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld and Secretary of Defense Robert McNamara were the Establishment, but they were just servants of the Establishment.  The problem with the Establishment goes beyond the Establishment meddling with our government, the problem lies in how they ruin the intellectual honesty of their servants, like Rumsfeld,  McNamara, and probably H.R. McMaster.

I encourage you to watch the documentary film, "The Unknown Known" starring Donald Rumsfeld, available on Netflix and Amazon.com.  He says that the "unknown knowns" are "things that you think you know that it turns out you did not know."  Even now he senses that this concept of the "unknown knowns" is important, but he does not understand it.  He talks at length about Pearl Harbor and how we suffered from a lack of imagination.  No, he got that wrong too.  As an example, consider General Billy Mitchell.  He proved that bombers could sink battleships.  His warnings were ignored.  This is an example of an unknown known.  See that it was known to General Billy Mitchell that bombers were a threat to our fleet, but the Establishment Admirals refused to listen, making his knowledge unknown to fleet operations.  This is a perfect example of an unknown known, but Rumsfeld did not see that.  Bill Mitchell rocked the boat so hard about neglect by the military of air power that he was court marshaled, convicted, and busted in rank to Colonel.  Billy Mitchell contradicted the Establishment's official line of thinking, which was intolerable.

Look at the cover of the video where the producer shows he does not understand the "unknown known."  What is on the cover is actually a description of the "unknown unknown", what you did not know you did not know.  The "unknown known" is a difficult concept, but I can explain it.

The unknown known is what is known to your employees that you refuse know, because you refuse to listen to any knowledge that contradicts the Establishment's official line of thinking.  This official line of thinking is called Groupthink.  Rumsfeld misunderstood the failings that led to Pearl Harbor even as he practiced the same mistakes on his watch.  Read the book, "The Memo" by Rich Higgins.  Mr. Higgins describes working in Iraq and trying to explain to Pentagon leadership how the U.S. could effectively counter the bombings from the Iraqi insurgency, but he was told that the Iraqi insurgency could not be mentioned.  The Pentagon was not permitted to admit it existed.  This is exactly how an unknown known is created:  reality is forbidden, only Establishment groupthink is permitted.

Later, Mr. Higgins, in the tradition of Billy Mitchell, insisted on warning America about the political warfare being waged against President Trump.  Rich Higgins wrote a memo that got him fired from the National Security Council by National Security Advisor H.R. McMaster.  This is amazing because H.R. McMaster wrote a book on how the Pentagon let down the nation in Vietnam:  Dereliction of Duty: Johnson, McNamara, the Joint Chiefs of Staff, and the Lies That Led to Vietnam.  McMaster knows truth is a problem in Washington, yet he fires a staffer for telling the truth.  I believe McMaster has had his sense of reality compromised in order to be accepted as a servant of the Establishment.

Vietnam was a disaster on many levels, but I believe we were in Vietnam because the American Establishment, the whole establishment, Left, Right, and Neutral, wanted America in Vietnam.  Presidents Eisenhower, Kennedy, and Johnson all served the Establishment in getting us into Vietnam.

The tragedy of Vietnam is best explored by beginning with the documentary, "The Fog of War", starring Robert McNamara and directed by the same man who made "The Unknown Known" with Rumsfeld, Errol Morris.

Please consider how Robert McNamara and Donald Rumsfeld, both smart men, could have been so disastrous as Secretaries of Defense.  Please consider the tens of thousands of American boys killed in Vietnam; consider the thousands killed and maimed in Iraq and Afghanistan.  Consider the hundreds of thousands of Vietnamese and Iraqis killed in these ill fated military expeditions orchestrated by the American Establishment.

No matter how smart you are, like McNamara and Rumsfeld, if you must sacrifice the truth in order to serve the Establishment and receive the financial and institutional rewards you want from the Establishment, then you will make a mess out of America's affairs.  Lies lead to problems.  Institutional lies lead to institutional problems.  And an American Establishment that rules from the shadows is an Establishment that is built on lies.

Lies at the highest levels of our government are a real threat to our Republic.  The American people need to recognize and value the truth.  If we can do this, recognize and value truth, then our best days are still before us.

The New York Times Has Been Lying to us for 100 Years

 Back in July of 2017 I published an article, "Is the Press Our Enemy? "  There I researched what left wing said about the American press.  Dr. Noam Chomsky gave detailed examples of how the press misleads us.  Walter Lippmann wrote a book in 1920, Liberty and the News, where he expressed his worries about a dishonest press threatening the foundations of our democracy.

What you should know today, in 2020, a hundred years after he published Liberty and the News, is that Walter Lippmann did a detailed study of the reporting done by the New York Times (NYT) about the Russian Revolution.  There is a good description in Wikipedia of  how and why he did this study.  Walter Lippmann and Charles Merz, an editor at the New York Times, studied thousands of articles written by the NYT about the Russian Revolution and they concluded that the NYT was biased and inaccurate.  Lippmann believed the poor quality reporting was due to an attitude of wishful thinking by reporters about the Russian Revolution.  You can see for yourself, and journalism students really ought to see for themselves, the detailed evidence presented by Lippmann and Merz in "A Test of the News," published on August 4, 1920 as a 42-page supplement to The New Republic.

You can read this online here:  https://archive.org/details/LippmannMerzATestoftheNews

You can download a PDF here: https://ia801902.us.archive.org/14/items/LippmannMerzATestoftheNews/Lippmann_Merz_ATestoftheNews.pdf

 During the Presidential campaign of 2020, the New York Times has continued its 100 year old tradition of lying to the American people.  I have been reading the NYT now for 47 years.  I can testify that the quality of writing style and technique made a noticeable downturn 30 years ago.  And I have seen in the last 5 years the editors and reporters at the NYT simply lose their minds when Donald Trump started running for President.  The NYT reporters might get right some simple facts about when a hurricane hits some city, but the NYT reporters seem incapable of providing honest coverage on our President and on the lies spread by his political opponents.  The NYT is not an institution that provides truth to our citizens, it is a biased and hostile opponent to a President who loves America and serves the American people.

The Sunday NYT has a section called "Sunday Review."  The entire Sunday Review section on October 18, 2020, "The Case Against Donald Trump," is anti-Trump propaganda intending to influence the 2020 Presidential election.  The idea of the Russians meddling with our elections is laughable when compared to the lies and manipulation of the New York Times editorial board.

It follows logically that if the NYT cannot be trusted to report honestly on American politics, then the TV reporters are even worse.

I encourage everyone to turn off cable and TV "news" coverage.  It cannot be trusted and it is abusive towards us by bombarding us constantly with relentless negativity.  At the end of the Vice Presidential debate between Mike Pence and Kamala Harris, a child expressed despair over the relentless negativity she saw on the TV "news" coverage.  It is unhealthy to our spirit and mind to be subjected to so much negativity. For your sake and for your children, turn off TV news.

Remember There Are Traitors

I was reading a book review of "Atomic Spy" by Nancy Greenspan.  The review is "‘Atomic Spy’ Review: The Soviets’ Secret Weapon" by Henry Hemming (May 1, 2020 online NYT).  It is in the Sunday NYT print edition on page C12.  Here is a quote from it:

Google “atomic spy” and the first name to come up is most likely Klaus Fuchs. As a result of the information he shared both before and during his work on the Manhattan Project, the Soviet Union created an atomic bomb at least two years earlier than it might have done otherwise. Fuchs’s name has become shorthand for a certain type of high-minded, mid-20th-century espionage, one in which well-educated and often well-off individuals in the West were inspired to spy by a quasi-religious faith in Marxism and the potential of the Soviet Union. Either they blinded themselves to the brutal reality of life in Russia at that time, or they saw it as a necessary stage on the path to political enlightenment.

While we here in Texas work to make America the best it can be, we need to remember that there are traitors in our society.  They exist.  They are real.  They are dangerous.  I bring this article about Klaus Fuchs to your attention because some of his traits are wide-spread in America.  Here is one of the key quotes from this book review:

"...well-educated and often well-off individuals in the West were inspired to spy by a quasi-religious faith in Marxism."  And there is this quote: "Either they blinded themselves to the brutal reality of life in Russia at that time, or they saw it as a necessary stage on the path to political enlightenment."

Russia has fallen as the Pole Star for Communism, but Communists and Socialists now call themselves "Progressives" and "Democrats" and still seek to overthrow our way of life.  How can well educated people still want Socialism?  There are many reasons, but key elements are a scoffing nature and an arrogance that makes them think they are better than everyone else, certainly better than the middle-class Americans Hillary Clinton called "deplorables."  Many Progressives, like Hillary, are staggeringly arrogant.

This is why the Bible is so important, so people can see that scoffers are unrighteous.  This is from Psalm 1 (ESV):
1 Blessed is the man
    who walks not in the counsel of the wicked,
    nor stands in the way of sinners,
    nor sits in the seat of scoffers;
2 but his delight is in the law of the Lord,
    and on his law he meditates day and night.
Americans must understand the difference between arrogance and righteousness.

Robert Canright

Trotsky in Mexico

If you are familiar with Communism, you have probably heard the name "Trotsky."  Leon Trotsky was the founder and commander of the Red Army during the Bolshevik Revolution.  You might have learned that he had to run for his life after Stalin took over and that Stalin's assassin finally found him in Mexico and murdered Trotsky there.

Here is a vignette, a depiction of Trotsky in Mexico.  This is from an article in the Sunday March 22, 2020 New York Times, Sunday Review section, page 6.  The online edition is dated March 21, 2020.

Lessons From My Grandma on Art, Sex and Life By Bret Stephens

 My father once asked his mother, the artist Annette Nancarrow, what she thought of Leon Trotsky. It wasn’t a political question. He just wanted her impression of the exiled Bolshevik, whom she had first met in Mexico City in the late 1930s, in the studio of her close friend (and, my father suspected, future lover) Diego Rivera.

“Well, I was surprised to see the leader of the proletariat so elegantly dressed,” she recalled, many decades after Trotsky’s murder by a Soviet agent in 1940. “His attire was impeccable, and I was particularly struck by the Parisian calf-skin gloves he took off of his beautifully manicured hands.”

The answer was vintage Annette. As a painter, she saw the part of the surface that revealed the inner man — the bourgeois fop within the fiery revolutionary. As a judge of character, she sensed why he had lost his power struggle with Joseph Stalin for control of the Soviet Union — people who take care of their fingernails don’t usually enjoy getting them bloody. And as a connoisseur of style, she appreciated good leather.

Here is a link to the article
https://www.nytimes.com/2020/03/21/opinion/sunday/annette-nancarrow-art-mexico.html

I have not said much about Communism, but I should.  The last time I wrote about Communism it was because the news media was pushing "resistance" and that made no sense until you study and discover that resistance is part of Communist ideology.  I wrote about it in this previous post:

What is this Talk About Resistance?  December 28, 2017
https://texasascendant.blogspot.com/2017/12/what-is-this-talk-about-resistance.html

Robert

Always Have Had Fake News

We have always had a problem with fake news.  Read what Thomas Jefferson said in a letter to John Norvell, 1807:
Nothing can now be believed which is seen in a newspaper.  Truth itself becomes suspicious by being put into that polluted vehicle.  I really look with commiseration over the great body of my fellow citizens, who, reading newspapers, live and die in the belief that they have known something of what has been passing in the world in their time.

These means we have always had fake news in this country.

I found this on page 210 of Lapham's Quarterly, Volume XIII, Number 2, Spring 2020.  The issue is labeled "Scandal."

Robert

You might read my earlier post:
Is the Press Our Enemy?   July 4, 2017
https://texasascendant.blogspot.com/2017/07/is-press-our-enemy.html

The Arc of History

You have heard the quote from Martin Luther King, "the arc of the moral universe is long, but it bends toward justice".  When he used it, he put it in quotes.  It  had been used by many people, but originated in a longer form by Theodore Parker, an abolitionist.  That might have made sense originally at the time of the Civil War, but after World War II and the rise of totalitarian governments, I would say the moral arc of the universe is bending towards Totalitarianism.  Here is a description of Totalitarianism:  "Totalitarianism is a ... mode of government that prohibits opposition parties, restricts individual opposition to the state and its claims, and exercises an extremely high degree of control over public and private life."

You can see that Hitler and Stalin traditionally fit this role, but when you think of the mind control practiced by radical Islam and its practice of killing all opposition, I think it is fair to put radical Islam in the same category as Stalinist Marxism: another totalitarian form of government.  Both the radical Islamists, like ISIS, and the Stalinist Marxists believe history is on their side and their victory is inevitable.

Here is a quote from the forward to Rise of Isis by Jay Sekulow:  "the Enlightenment dream of inevitable human progress grounded in the claim that we are all born free and equal in dignity and rights premised on hope that the arc of history bends toward justice, is now in tatters. This outcome fundamentally challenges Americans’ endless pursuit of individualism and tolerance. Readers of this book will discover that in our postmodern era, certain things are indeed intolerable. The failure to face the facts richly addressed by the authors of The Rise of ISIS: A Threat We Can’t Ignore, exposes democratic nations to the rising danger that they—perhaps misled by the persistent fecklessness of the United Nations and other institutions, which refuse to recognize the obvious threat to Western civilization posed by radical Islamist jihadists—will capitulate to the prospect of appeasement, disaster and death."

The quote is from Harry G. Hutchison, J.D., law professor at Regent University.  I agree with Professor Hutchison.  Based on my observations, the arc of history bends towards Totalitarianism.

I think Ronald Reagan said this in a number of speeches:  "Freedom is never more than one generation away from extinction. We didn’t pass it on to our children in the bloodstream. It must be fought for, protected, and handed on for them to do the same, or one day we will spend our sunset years telling our children and our children’s children what it was once like in the United States where men were free."

The arc of history might bend towards Totalitarianism, but we can stay free in America if we are vigilant.  However, how safe can we be if too much of the world is ruled by totalitarian governments dedicated to destroying our liberties?

Robert

The Reagan speech was "Encroaching Control," March 30, 1961.  It was an address to the annual meeting of the Phoenix Chamber of Commerce:  https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SDouNtnR_IA
You can access the entire forward written by  Professor Hutchison at this website: https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=2498269

Qualities for a President to Have

A college professor devised a list of qualities for assessing the effectiveness of U.S. Presidents:

1. Public communication
2. Organizational capacity
3. Political skill
4. Vision
5. Cognitive style
6. Emotional intelligence

Professor Fred I. Greenstein  mentioned these in his book, The Presidential Difference: Leadership Style from FDR to Barack Obama, 3rd Edition.  Of these he said emotional intelligence was the most important quality.  Dr. Greenstein said emotional intelligence could be measured by “the president’s ability to manage his emotions and turn them to constructive purposes, rather than being dominated by them and allowing them to diminish his leadership.” [1]

President Eisenhower was disparaged by the U.S. press, but Dr. Greenstein studied him and discovered he was very effective as a president.  You can read the professor's obituary [1] to hear more about Eisenhower.  That is quicker than reading his book, The Hidden-Hand Presidency: Eisenhower as Leader.

You can also learn a lot about Eisenhower by reading the book Three Days in January: Dwight Eisenhower's Final Mission by Bret Baier.  Besides describing how Eisenhower conducted business in the White House, the book gives nice, succinct biography of Eisenhower.

Encouraging good leadership is a key part of the Texas Ascendancy Campaign.  You can read related articles about leadership here:  Summary of Leadership Articles.  Our country desperately needs better leadership, and this need has been with us for years.  I started this Texas Ascendant blog back in 2008 after the financial crash of 2008 with better leadership as a primary goal of this effort.

From an individual perspective, the qualities for assessing the effectiveness of U.S. Presidents gives us ideas on qualities we might all want to include in our plans for personal growth.  From a larger perspective, as we seek to improve our pool of potential leaders we can consider this list in grooming and selecting our future leaders.

Robert

Reference
1. Obituary for Fred Greenstein: in the New York Times:  "Fred Greenstein, 88, Dies; Political ‘Psychologist’ Assessed Presidents"
https://www.nytimes.com/2018/12/14/obituaries/fred-greenstein-dead.html