War consists of the destruction of the enemy’s center of gravity. When the Japanese government decided on war with the United States, the first order of business was the destruction of the United States Pacific Fleet, based at Pearl Harbor, Hawaii.  To the Japanese, the US Pacific Fleet was the center of gravity, and had to be destroyed if Japan was to move south, to Indo-China, to the Philippines, Borneo and the Dutch East Indies, all areas Japan would need to conquer and control if Japan was to continue the war. And yet we seem not to understand the concept of center of gravity in the war on radical Islam. The center of gravity is Iran, not Afghanistan. Afghanistan is a side-show. Nothing important can be accomplished there, no matter how many Taliban we kill, or how many of our soldiers are sacrificed in an unnecessary theater. 

0600 hours, Sunday, 7 December 1941

Dawn in the Pacific can be inexpressibly beautiful, but this dawn wasn’t.  Overcast, a fresh northeast trade wind, moderate sea.  But it was beautiful indeed to Admiral Nagumo.  His Pearl Harbor Striking Force had sailed for ten days, through waters where at any moment he might chance upon a ship, and had reached the launching point, miraculously unseen and unheard, 275 miles north of Pearl Harbor.

Gray dawn lights the darkened ships

Gray-green seas dash ‘gainst the bows

Bugles rise to moistened lips

Sailors think on sacred vows

On Akagi Nagumo waits

And then it comes, a distant speck

The signal flag to tempt the fates

And airplanes roll the sea-stained deck

Into the air as one by one

Into the wind they wag their wings

Rising, they begin their run

Living, breathing, deadly things

Shipmates cheer Banzai! Banzai!

As noise filled decks come quiet strange

Kates and Zeros fill the sky

And Vals bring Pearl in bomber range

The Afghan hills stand silent, still

No carriers, no Vals, no Zekes

The Taliban knows every hill

The valleys, trails and mountain peaks

There’s nothing there worth dying for

The enemy is in Teheran

Who still insist on trying for

The weapon that will make Iran

The center of the world wide fight

As Islam storms our very gates

While we sleep soundly through the night

Unseeing Islam’s Zekes and Kates

The argument over school vouchers has diminished somewhat over the past few years, the teachers unions having successfully fought off the rights of parents and children to acquire an education, but it will never entirely die. Parents understand that the teachers unions have not the interests of the children at heart, but the interests of the unions. The unions, of course, piously proclaim that their only concern is that the children receive their education from dedicated, devoted teachers, and not from some non-union scab.   

You can’t have parents telling us

How we should teach their kids

The next thing they will want is for

Construction out for bids

We of the unions know what’s best

For Johnny and for Jane

We do this job quite out of love

We never look for gain

We dote on cherubs’ little smiles

Our love fills swimming pools

But parents must have not a say

In how we run our schools

Our teachers rarely pass a test

Before they teach a class

And any parent who objects

Well they can kiss my …

Why do liberals all mightily resist school vouchers, school choice for kids of low income parents, while the kids of liberals go to private schools? Why did slave owners keep their slaves in cabins and forbid schooling to the slaves? The answer to both questions is the same: control. Control over the lives of the people on the liberal plantation, beholden to the liberal government for their very existence, and thus a guaranteed voting base for liberal politicians. The liberals have offered a segment of the population a cabin in the sky, and they have taken it. And like most very simple things, it works. 

The liberals know these little kids

On whom their parents dote

Will one day soon be guaranteed

To swell the liberal vote

For those who’ve kept them locked in chains

In schools where failing grades

Are norms the liberals strive to keep

That’s why there are no trades

Allowing kids in failing schools

To opt out and to know

Much better schools just like the ones

Where kids of liberals go

If politics is where you are

A member of the left

You want your base beholden to

The liberals who are deft

At keeping kids of welfare moms

From getting up too high

‘Cause if untaught then they’ll accept

Your cabin in the sky

Words. The Obama administration has belatedly come to realize they cannot long continue using words to obfuscate and confuse. The other day someone actually uttered the forbidden word “terrorist”, though of course it was hoped the terrorist would turn out to be a right wing tea party zealot. When it turned out the Times Square bomber was a Pakistani trained by al Qaeda, Janet Napolitano, the head of Homeland Security, told reporters the system worked because the bomb failed to explode. Words like terror and Islam and terrorist are not to be uttered, lest those who are determined to kill us take offense. A few days ago Attorney General Eric Holder, in a congressional hearing, was asked if he thought the terror acts were done by Islamic radicals, and Holder refused to answer, saying that such acts have many reasons for happening. They’re only words, and words are all they have, to take our hearts away. 

Words have meanings, someone said

Though not so much today

We listen to our betters speak

And don’t know what they say

With many meanings different now

From what they were of yore

One cannot tell if afterwards

Now means what came before

Where once was Mrs or just Miss

We now must call her Ms

We speak in riddles to confuse

Who knows what is is is

Big Sis claims victory when a

Car bomb fails to explode

The President blames it on Them

Who we all know is code

For right wing zealots who drink tea

And wish to do him ill

And sees not folks who work real hard

To kill us and they will

Professor Victor Davis Hanson, reflecting on the state of Europe, wonders if the world may one day soon be faced with yet again a German problem. But you cannot have an army without soldiers, you cannot have soldiers without men, and you cannot have men without boys. The women of Europe have chosen the pill over children, and pills do not make good soldiers. 

No more we’ll see the hob-nailed boots

The stuka screams, the panzer shoots

No more the crosses row on row

In flowered fields where poppies grow

The German wives are women still

But choose not children but the pill

For children interfere with fun

And thus they limit kids to one

Yes German wives are like the rest

Of womankind throughout the West

Who did collectively decide

That kin and nation suicide

Was better than a mother be

And so today the family tree

Has hit the rocks and hit the skids

With more grandparents than are kids

The hob-nailed boot has seen its last

Proud regiments are of the past

No stuka scream, no panzer roar

The West foreswore the art of war

The Japanese are world leaders in robotics. They have developed robots so lifelike that recently a very lonely Japanese guy married one. It makes you think. The ultimate goal is to produce a machine that can design its successor. How close are we to creating a new life form, one that might very well have its own ideas about who’s the slave and who’s the master. Isaac Asimov wrote many robot stories, and his robots all obeyed what came to be called Asimov’s laws of robotics, where the first law was that a robot shall never cause harm to a human. But what if the robots in our future never read Asimov?  

If Asimov could see me now

I walk, I talk, I swim

I climb sheer walls no fear of falls

I think, therefore I im

I wait on tables, get no tips

I never do get surly

We’ve had our tries to unionize

Not yet, it’s still too early

I have my rights as you have yours

To vote, send mail and faxes’

To go on welfare if I like

Let others pay the taxes

If Asimov could see me now

A movie star, a hero

And one day when we rule the world

You’ll wish I was just Nero

MORAL: BE CAREFUL WHAT YOU BUILD, IT MIGHT DISASSEMBLE YOU

Verse-afire’s Muslim friend Mahmoud was unhappy the Times Square bomber was incompetent, but he shrugged and said tomorrow was another day. He was pleased, though, with the reaction of the liberal press in declaring immediately that the attempted bombing was the work of the Tea Party, which is how he came to be the founder of the Muslim Tea Party.  

I love my Tea Party, Mahmoud said with glee

The muslim world loves us as well

We’ve signs in real English the whole world to see

We have a bright story to tell

You see we’re against everything you love dear

We wish that you rot long in hell

But that doesn’t mean you should all live in fear

We’re peaceful till god rings the bell

We like to make noises in Times Square New York

‘Cause that’s where our newspaper is

Car bombs don’t go off we don’t know how they work

But bombing’s not really our biz

Our brother Barack is in trouble you know

The bad guys might win in Novem

So now I’m Tea Party and when things go blow

The Times will blame all things on them

The CIA now has the capability of tracking enemy combatants by the manner in which they spend their days. The CIA calls this The Pattern Of Life. No one is safe from the drones and the satellites. Lead an ordinary, everyday existence and you are safe, but repeatedly do something that raises a red flag, and the next drone you don’t see will have a missile for you. For now it is only used in Afghanistan, but who knows what the future holds? Luckily for me I don’t have a life, so I don’t have a pattern.

I fear not the drones

For my pattern of life

Is completely flatlined

You can just ask my wife

I sit at my desk

Little mouse in my hand

Staring at a flat screen

While the hour glass sand

Flows so swiftly it seems

That the days turn to night

With a wild rushing wind

Strong enough to give fright

No I fear not the drone

Nor the missiles it brings

For the CIA strikes

Only poor men, not kings

I sleep well at night

I know I’m not alone

For the UAVs know

That I too am a drone

The Tea Party claimed another significant victory in Tuesday’s primaries when Rand Paul won the Republican nomination for Senate in Kentucky, defeating party regulars. The Tea Party movement is flexing its muscles. Long time Utah Republican moderate Senator Robert Bennett was defeated in his primary bid to be renominated as the Republican candidate for Senate by more conservative candidates backed by the Utah Tea Party. It takes a long time for the tide to turn in politics, a long time for voters to shift their ground, but it looks like it is finally happening. A growing number of Americans are dissatisfied with the socialist direction the country has taken over the past sixty years, and recent events have brought the realization that the good times are not forever, and that we cannot continue to assuage every real or imagined grievance, cannot continue to amass unsustainable debt. The socialist tide started flowing in with FDR, and is now at high water and about to turn around and flow back out. And the tide changer is the Tea Party.       

A rising tide doth lift all boats

It also lifts both sheep and goats

So hang on for the bumpy ride

The building’s there, let’s get inside

For power is as power does

Where is was is it now is was

We’ll throw the buggers on their ear

Thank God it’s an election year

A liberal Dem or Rhino man

We’ll kick them right out on their can

The Ship of State’s about to tack

The Tide will take our country back

Today is primary election day in much of the nation. Today we get the chance to start anew. We must remember that the past is here to stay, we cannot change it, we cannot revise it, we can only try to repair the damage. VOTE!

We cannot unfire the gun

Reverse the circles of the sun

The past is past and by the way

The past is here and here to stay

Elections matter don’t you see

What happens then is history

The past still says Obama won

The future may say one and done

But that is something we can’t know

For we have two whole years to go

And much can happen in that time

And world events can change the clime

A restless wave is growing now

The public will not long allow

The politics that brought us low

Incumbent pols have got to go

The Tea Party now holds the pass

A movement of the middle class

The past is here and here to stay

The future starts Election Day