His aircraft was shot down by American interceptors and he died. Yamamoto, the commander-in-chief of the Combined Fleet, who commanded the Japanese victory at Pearl Harbor, had studied at Harvard University giving him an inside knowledge of America. His death was a major blow to the Japanese military during World War II.
I bring this up because I believe that had he been alive in October, 1944 at the Battle of Leyte Gulf, in which Gen. Douglas MacArthur's return to the Philippines was hanging by a thread, the allied victory may well have had a different outcome.
(I read as much as I can about that battle because my late father was serving aboard the aircraft carrier USS Princeton - shown at left - when it was sunk there on Oct. 24, 1944. He was blown off the hangar deck by a massive explosion and survived several hours in the water – sharks below, Japanese zeroes above – before he was rescued.)Regarding the ongoing War on Terror and the recent death of the top Al Qaeda commander, Osama bin Laden I believe the action by US forces who killed him has much the same military and historic significance as the death of Adm. Yamamoto. In both cases our military eliminated highly intelligent, highly skilled enemy commanders who also possessed first-person knowledge of America.
Democratic President Franklin D. Roosevelt gave the order to kill Yamamoto much as Obama gave the order to kill bin Laden, but you don't see a lot in the history books about Roosevelt appearing before the nation's media and taking credit for the death of a top enemy commander - as Obama did.
Don't get me wrong, I'm no fan of Roosevelt's either, despite the fawning obsequiousness of many modern Republicans who either don't know the nation's history or think we don't. Roosevelt's economic policies are widely believed to have extended rather than ended the Great Depression, his threats to expand the number of judges on the Supreme Court so he could have his way in social engineering issues were nothing short of extortion, and his expansion of the Commerce Clause of the US Constitution was outright theft of the right of individuals to reap the benefits of their own labor - in my opinion.
But he still had the good sense to let the military do its job, and gave credit where it was due. Obama on the other hand got so much negative press for taking credit for the operation by US Navy SEALS, and a photo of his Administration officers in the Situation Room where he looked like the least important person in the photo, that it upended the uptick he got in popularity polls.
Even though the Constitution has been amended so no American president can ever serve more than two terms, unlike Roosevelt's four, it is hard to imagine how Obama expects to serve a second term with his overall disapproval – negatives – hanging strong at 50 percent or more.
Some friends were talking the other day about Obama's stabbing Israel in the back by siding with Palestinian terrorists who want to return Israel's borders to where they were in 1967 when the entire Arab World tried to push the Jews into the Mediterranean Sea. They were saying there will be a monetary reaction from the Jewish lobby which voted heavily for Obama in 2008 but will likely not invest much in his re-election bid now.
Personally, I don't think it matters, and I believe Obama knew that before he betrayed Israel. Of course, considering that he started off his administration by bowing to the King of Saudi Arabia, maybe he thinks shafting Israel is just business as usual, not a betrayal.
But if you go back to the column I wrote on Friday, March 18, 2011, about how the OPEC countries invested trillions on Oct. 10, 2008 in an attempt to crash our stock market you'll see why I don't think Obama cares about the Jewish lobby. In my Oct. 11, 2008 column I suggested that the Pentagon try to determine who may have had trillions of dollars at their disposal to make such a devastating impact on our economy. The market moved more than 2100 points that day, including 400 points in the last 15 minutes of trading, which would have been impossible for individuals, or even corporations to achieve.
Only a consortium of countries with a grudge against the US and enough money at their disposal could have pulled off that attack. The Pentagon hired a consultant who researched the trades that day and later revealed that OPEC countries, using the glut of profits they made over artificially inflated oil prices during the previous year were the likely culprits.
So – what has been going on with oil prices lately? Yes, indeed, they are again rising as they did three years ago. I'm sure that some of the increase is due to the actions of unscrupulous speculators, but the real profits are going right where they did in 2007 and 2008 – into the pockets of OPEC producers.
National level political pundits have been saying for months now that Obama is building a $1 billion "War Chest" to buy off enough poll workers across the country to ensure that he gets the most votes on Election Day 2012. So where is he going to get that money if he keeps moseying along, angering the various political, ethnic and social groups that joined to get him elected in the first place?
Let's put this into perspective. $1 billion is a lot of money but it is only about 5 percent of the amount spent on Oct. 10, 2008 to manipulate the stock market. Now that a pro-terrorist president with some very odd ideas about a social, financial and military agenda for America is in office, it will take far less to keep him there than it did to get him there.
I don't think the Republican Party is much help at this point either. I'll write more about that in another column, but it hasn't escaped any observers' attention that the American Terrorist Media is going out of its way to discredit, by any means, fair or foul, any GOP candidate who isn't on a preapproved short list.
Nonetheless, some very persistent, very capable, very intelligent, very knowledgeable candidates are refusing to be cowed by the coming onslaught of negativity and are proceeding with their campaigns. At the same time, some of the media favorites are bowing out, much to the chagrin of the self-anointed king makers who had already selected them to be sacrificial lambs over whom they could eulogize after the 2012 election that they ran a good race but Obama was simply too popular for them.
I think Obama is going to get all the money he needs and a lot more to run any kind of campaign he wishes without regard to cost control and it won't matter to him one bit if none of it comes from Jewish Democrats or their supporters. In fact, I bet he already has his $1 billion, with much more on tap if he needs it.
Life in America for the next 18 months is not likely to be a picnic for us, but it is my hope that enough Americans will be sufficiently fed up with his anti-United States agenda to get out and vote Obama out, in numbers large enough to offset any tampering with polling place scanners, and regardless of whether the king makers are happy with our choice.
