• Greetings from Paris and Le Hotel Bristol By Richard C. Young
• Ben Carson Opposed Iraq and Afghan Invasions By Richard C. Young
• Good Fences Do Make Good Neighbors By Debbie Young
• Good Morning from Le Hotel Bristol, Paris By Richard C. Young
• Steve Jobs and NEXT By E.J. Smith
• 3 Winners, Second Debate By E.J. Smith
• It’s a Mad, Mad, Mad World By Debbie Young
• Neocon Nonsense By E.J. Smith
• Presidential Debates Intelligence By Richard C. Young

Debbie and I are at Le Bristol, Paris just a few blocks down from Élysée Palace, the official residence of the French president. During the last French presidential election, we were able to stand directly in front of the Élysée’s front-entrance gate while celebrity interviews were underway. Later on, with no real sense of urgency the National Police (NP) asked us to move on. How things in Paris have changed. Last evening on the way out to dinner at the Plaza Athenee (La Relais Plaza brassiere ), the NP rerouted our walk away from the street we had often taken in the past, which is now closed to auto and pedestrian traffic. As rain began to fall, we ducked into a doorway to await its passing. In front of us were two loaded NP police vans and a couple of far from inconspicuous “plain clothes” cars sitting on stakeout for god knows what. Down on Rue du Faubourg Saint-Honoré, police barricades prevented any movement in either direction near the presidential residence.

So you get the picture of change. “Official” Paris seems to be on high alert this morning due to a combination of recent tragic instances instigated by Paris’ radical Muslim population and the recent European wave of “economic immigrants” from the Middle East and North Africa. I recently posted a formula from ex-Cia operative Michael Scheuer for dealing with the immigrant wave.

Angela Merkel is telling members of the EU that Germany is willing to take in one million of the Middle Eastern and North African Immigrants. Among the many problems here is that Merkel will not be able to sort out potential ISIS infiltrators nor be able to prevent this radical group from sifting into any other EU country because of the open border policy instigated by the formation of the EU. For years, Europe’s far right nationalistic parties have been up in arms because of the immigration problem. Marine Le Pen is stridently vocal in her party’s (FN) demands to seal French borders, deport radical Muslim troublemakers, and pull France out of the EU. Le Pen has support all over Europe from emerging nationalistic parties, headed by Geert Wilders in the Netherlands.

On our way into Paris from Charles De Gaulle Airport yesterday, our driver told Debbie and me how “worried” he is about the burgeoning Muslim immigration crisis for France in particular and Europe in general. Patrick’s perfect English had us thinking he was from the U.S., mais non, he was born and raised in Paris and is fluent in four or five other languages. Today we look forward to speaking with an array of French citizens in the hospitality and small business community as well as local Parisian residents and travelers from around the world. We will be able to get an even clearer sense of the tone on the immigration and radical Muslim issue and what it means for France, Europe in general, the euro, and the fate of the EU itself.

Dr. Carson, in a letter to George W. Bush before Bush started the Iraq War, urged President Bush to use his “bully pulpit “ to say that within 10 years the U.S. would become petroleum independent. Dr. Carson reasoned that such a strategy would be preferable to war and that the moderate Arab states would be terrified and, to keep America off such a track, would hand over Osama bin Laden on a silver platter.

Dr. Ben Carson is a conservative star on the rise, but at least one of his policy ideas might cause the Republican leadership to do a double-take. In an interview with The Daily Caller, Carson said he opposed the invasions of both Iraq and Afghanistan.

The famed neurosurgeon and rising conservative voice said he sent a letter to President George W. Bush sometime after the attacks of Sept. 11, 2001 and before the U.S. invaded Iraq in March 2003.

“I actually wrote President Bush a letter before the war started and I said, you know, what I would do is I would use the bully pulpit at this moment of great national unity and, very much in a Kennedy-esque type fashion, say within 10 years we’re going to become petroleum independent,” Carson told TheDC.

“And that would’ve been much more effective than going to war because, first of all, the moderate Arab states would’ve been terrified. And they would’ve handed over Osama Bin Laden and anybody else we wanted on a silver platter to keep us from doing that.”

Read more here.

NRO’s Kevin D. Williamson has an uncomfortable question for you: “If you were the citizenry of a European country without a large, unassimilated Muslim minority, why would you want one?” In the Times of London, columnist Melanie Phillips writes that the onslaught of displaced people “will alter the cultural balance of the country for ever.” And, as right-wing Dutch leader Geert Wilders laments of the “Islamic invasion,” it is “an invasion that threatens our prosperity, our security, our culture and identity.”

Kevin Williamson refers to Robert Frost’s poem “Mending Walls.” Frost, writes Kevin, is “America’s underrated policy guru,” who advises in his poem “to never knock down a fence until you understand why it was put up in the first place.”

Something there is that doesn’t love a wall,

That wants it down. I could say “Elves” to him,

But it’s not elves exactly, and I’d rather

He said it for himself. I see him there

Bringing a stone grasped firmly by the top

In each hand, like an old-stone savage armed.

He moves in darkness as it seems to me,

Not of woods only and the shade of trees.

He will not go behind his father’s saying,

And he likes having thought of it so well

He says again, “Good fences make good neighbors.”

Kevin continues:

The European Union is one of the great fence-demolishing projects of our times, and it is not without its merits. There are some persuasive arguments for governing the movement of European capital, goods, and people under a very liberal regime; and, given the unhappy history of Europe in the 20th century, there’s a heaping helping of idealism at work, too, and as William F. Buckley Jr. once observed: “Idealism is fine, but as it approaches reality, the costs become prohibitive.”

Kevin then asks another question: “What is the U.S. going to do about the crisis?”

We may look back (some of us conservatives with red faces) on George W. Bush and his nation-building democracy project, as unimpressive as that strategy appears in retrospect, and foreswear another adventure on those lines. But what’s the next big idea? Donald Trump dreams idly and daftly of seizing Iraqi oil fields; Senator Rand Paul is working very hard, without much in the way of persuasive results, to get his native libertarian non-interventionism to jibe with the realities of ISIS et al. The mainstream Democrats have settled upon the philosophy that they don’t need a philosophy, because everything that is wrong with the world is, and forever will be, George W. Bush’s fault, and, besides, somebody somewhere in Kansas is being rude to a homosexual or an abortionist.

Peggy Noonan, in a separate column in the WSJ, has questions of her own: “Do we not have a right to control our borders? Isn’t the refugee wave a security threat? ISIS is nothing if not committed to its intentions. Why would they not be funneling jihadists onto those boats?”

Good fences do make good neighbors, as the Germans are so rudely discovering. “What lessons do we Americans take from this,” asks Kevin Williamson. Read more here.

This morning’s Le Figaro’s headline: “Les migrants font voler en eclats L’espace Schengen.”

Schengen refers to the 26 country European agreement to eliminate passport and immigration controls at their joint borders. The agreement allows citizens of these 26 European countries to travel in and out of these 26 countries as if in one country.

The thinking then was that Schengen zone countries cherished the right to migrate internationally sans limitations. It was thought that such free movement formed the basis of fundamental human rights.

No Mas! Shengen is a product of the pre-middle-eastern invasion and dislocation. The Afghan, Iraq and Libyan invasions, sharing little in the way of consideration for unintended consequences, has led to a veritable tsunami of fleeing Islamic immigrants. Here in Paris the tone has changed and changed fast. French citizens have awakened, as have the Danes, Hungarians, Pols, and certainly the British.

The European Union and the euro are now at risk due to Germany’s Angela Merkel’s setting no cap on the horde of Muslim immigrants being allowed into Germany. This “wide open” borders position is being angrily contested by much of Europe and is fast leading to what is almost certain to be an acrimonious European immigration showdown.

When I was at Babson College I had an internship at a start-up company. At one of our retreats we watched the following video featuring Steve Jobs which I was reminded of reading this WSJ article.  I recommend it to anyone thinking about going into business. I also can’t help but think there was an Apple Inc. with Steve and then there’s all the others.

Greetings from Exeter, New Hampshire where I’m embedded in a three-day precision scoped rifle course at Sig Sauer Academy. I’ll have much more for you on this incredible education in future posts, but the reason I bring it up relates to last night’s second GOP Presidential debate.

One of my fellow students in the course is a police officer in Spain. He’s spending a month in the U.S. and will be training for three weeks at Sig Academy. It was my job to introduce him to the group and what he told me about his work and the mess his country is in is way beyond what I was expecting. He showed me pictures from the riots and explained away the seconds to me in the following video. He said it makes Ferguson look like nothing.

I bring this up because the candidates in last night’s foreign policy debate don’t have real time, boots on the ground experience of what it’s like living in countries boiling with tension and unrest like Spain and Greece, or Iran for that matter. And if we want to be the policemen of the world, fighting civil wars we don’t understand, who’s going to pay for it? Why not look at foreign policies that work?

Switzerland stays out of other people’s wars. And well-armed families will meet foreign boots on the ground barrel first. It’s that self-defense mindset that’s needed for our foreign policy.

I love the way Dr. Ben Carson talks about foreign policy. His answers are thoughtful and well thought out. He’s not gunning from the hip. And when he speaks, especially last night, you can hear a pin drop because he’s not yelling and people care about what he has to say. I think his character is his strongest asset.

I also like how John Kasich did last night. He looked and sounded like someone that has experience and the temperament to reason from a position of strength especially with countries we disagree with. I liked his answer on Iran, being tough, but engaging, and verifying.

Don’t hate me for bringing up Rand Paul, but I thought his answers were right on the money. He’s the most versed on the Constitution of any of the candidates and his comments on the 14th Amendment where excellent. We all know he’s at 1% or so in the polls. I didn’t like how you know who (starts with a “T”) singled out Rand Paul at the outset saying Rand shouldn’t even be on the stage. Guys like Rand keep the conversation going, which is what we need. There’s still a lot of time left on the clock.

Every candidate on stage last night had his or her foreign policy talking points and what they’ll do. But sometimes when it comes to foreign policy, and self-defense, it’s what you don’t do that helps you survive. And that’s exactly the type of mindset we need in our next president. Because we aren’t that far from the problems my friend from Spain is dealing with at home.

Has the world gone mad? On one hand we have a Republican candidate who is the former host of “Celebrity Apprentice.” On the other hand, we have a 74-year-old Socialist who seems to believe “federal revenue is created by pixies.” Both candidates are polling about 30% for their respective parties. Then, course, we have another Clinton and Bush vying for the White House.  

Talk about mad. The British Labor Party has cast its lot with a leader who would foment “the overthrow of capitalism.” The Syrian refugees crisis is unhinging European liberalism, and the Islamic State is destroying history, “while the pope is giving speeches on climate change.” Meanwhile, Janet Yellen “presides over what is literally a central bank black box.” 

What’s going on, asks Daniel Henninger of the WSJ: 

In the U.S. and Western world generally there is a spreading sense of weak or poor political leadership. Because he sits as president of the United States, the lead nation, Barack Obama bears responsibility for much of this madness. His conduct of the presidency, more than all the other pilloried persons in public life, led us to Donald Trump and Bernie Sanders.

Clearly madness releases one from the burden of responsibility, writes Mr. Henninger. But the hope is that as 2016 approaches, reality will set in and individual thought will replace the madness of crowds. Read more here from DH, who suggests that you might want to keep your gas tank full in case it doesn’t.

One take-away from Thursday night’s marathon debate was the anti-Russian sentiment. But what is Russia doing that is so offensive to us? Is Putin’s support of Syria’s Assad and against ISIS not in our best interest? ” The neocons want Assad out. But then what? “Those giving us this advice are the same ‘cakewalk war’ crowd who told us how Iraq would become a democratic model for the Middle East once Saddam Hussein was overthrown and how Moammar Gadhafi’s demise would mean the rise of a pro-Western Libya.” Buchanan continues:

When have these people ever been right?

What is the brutal reality in this Syrian civil war, which has cost 250,000 lives and made refugees of half the population, with 4 million having fled the country?

After four years of sectarian and ethnic slaughter, Syria will most likely never again be reconstituted along the century-old map lines of Sykes-Picot.

Partition appears inevitable.

And though Assad may survive for a time, his family’s days of ruling Syria are coming to a close.

Yet it is in America’s interest not to have Assad fall — if his fall means the demoralization and collapse of his army, leaving no strong military force standing between ISIS and Damascus.

Indeed, if Assad falls now, the beneficiary is not going to be those pro-American rebels who have defected or been routed every time they have seen combat and who are now virtually extinct.

The victors will be ISIS and the Nusra Front, which control most of Syria between the Kurds in the northeast and the Assad regime in the southwest.

Syria could swiftly become a strategic base camp and sanctuary of the Islamic State from which to pursue the battle for Baghdad, plot strikes against America and launch terror attacks across the region and around the world.

Prediction: If Assad falls and ISIS rises in Damascus, a clamor will come — and not only from the Lindsey Grahams and John McCains — to send a U.S. army to invade and drive ISIS out, while the neocons go scrounging around to find a Syrian Ahmed Chalabi in northern Virginia.

Then this nation will be convulsed in a great war debate over whether to send that U.S. army to invade Syria and destroy ISIS.

And while our Middle Eastern and European allies sit on the sidelines and cheer on the American intervention, this country will face an anti-war movement the likes of which have not been seen since Col. Lindbergh spoke for America First.

In making ISIS, not Assad, public enemy No. 1, Putin has it right. It is we Americans who are the mystery inside an enigma now.

Nothing is learned in these early going debates as to who may become the next president. Early polling results have a habit of throwing off misguided information. However, candidates can offer intelligence on their various positions and can also harm themselves with ill-advised pronouncements that come back later to bite. With this disclaimer in mind, a few items of interest and omission popped up in the recent Republican debate.

I heard nothing about junking the tax code, lock stock and barrel. I heard nothing about America minding it’s own business in terms of foreign policy and misguided foreign interventions, nation building, and counter-insurgencies. I heard no strategies of substance on the subject of quelling the horde of Islamic immigrants sweeping, tsunami style, into Europe. Nor did I here much concern regarding German Chancellor Angela Merkel’s pronouncement that one million asylum seekers might find their way into Germany this year, a rate five times the number last offered by Germany’s interior minster. The birth rate of North African and Middle Eastern immigrants is well known to be a multiple of the birth rate in Germany.

I heard nothing definitive on the returning of immigrants who have, in recent years, entered America illegally. And I have heard more than is needed on giving these illegals a track to U.S. citizenship.

I did here Jeb Bush give kudos to brother George for keeping America safe during President Bush’s White House residency. And did this Jeb pronouncement not receive among the best audience support of the evening? Well just who did the audience, never mind candidate Jeb, think was responsible for getting America entangled in a 12-year misadventure in Iraq that has led to over 4,000 American servicemen killed and tens of thousands of more wounded, many tragically disfigured for life? And wasn’t it George Bush who saw to it that Saddam Hussein, murderous tyrant that he was, was hanged to death, thus leading to the destabilization that exists in Iraq and Syria today. For years Saddam, and for that matter Libyan dictator Muammar Gaddafi, had done a pretty good job of keeping the lid on in two of the world’s most combustible regions. Neither President George Bush nor President Obama appears to have given much thought to the old foreign policy theory of unintended consequences as written so prophetically by former National Security advisor Brent Scowcroft. As to keeping America safe, preposterous and an insult to all of our servicemen and their families.

As you know doubt have read, Carly Fiorina was the hit of the evening. First off, the bar was set pretty low following Jeb Bush’s little foray into revisionist history. Second, one’s view on candidate Fiorina is positively skewed by the fact that the lady is a fine speaker and clearly (and commendably and very un-Sarah Palin like) had done some solid homework. Once said, Fiorina quickly tied on her War Dogs bonnet suggesting that America should quit talking to Vladimir Putin, immediately begin rebuilding the Sixth Fleet (based, yes, in Naples, Italy), conduct military exercises in the Baltic states, and move troops in and out of Germany. And it was Fiorina who has sternly announced that on her first day of White House residency she would place a call to Israel’s Benjamin Netanyahu. It is Fiorina’s view that the Obama administration has made the world a more dangerous place by the way it has treated Israel.

As I write this Debbie and I are around the corner from the Israeli embassy here in Paris. In front of the embassy’s compelling looking gated entrance, it is full-scale lockdown mode, featuring armed guards wielding automatic weapons, a presumably well-equipped riot-type van, and an ongoing auto-search program near the embassy. The Israeli installation clearly is deemed to be a significant security risk. While Israel’s embassy looks to be patrolled by remnants of Sly Stallone’s Expendables, at the nearby Canadian Embassy, there is the feeling of summer vacation with Jan and Dean out front. Israel is an international lightening rod, and as former CIA bin Laden unit chief Michael Scheuer points out has little in the way of any common national security interest with America.

It is important to note that, with the single exception of Rand Paul, who has made a hash of his foreign policy position, the other Republican candidates should be lumped along with Carly into the War Dogs camp, but certainly not with such vengeance.

As to the other candidates, Trump was typical blustering Trump. Dr. Carson (an individual to be admired) noted that he had been opposed to both the Iraq and Afghan adventures. Rubio and Kasich did not hurt themselves. The others, why bother?

Net, net, Trump, Fiorina, Bush (who will prove to be far less hawkish than the Jeb he is currently showing us), and Rubio appear to still be in the hunt, with Kasich on the fringe, looking to be perhaps a last man standing candidate or the obvious VP choice. I like John’s background and the values he could bring to the office of President.