Sunday, August 02, 2009

Birthers and the Ploesti Strategy

If you like history, read this post, which describes the Ploesti bombing.

Even more interesting for our purposes is this section:

Up to that point, “strategic bombing” had been perceived as a way to strike cataclysmic blows at the enemy’s few most critical holdings – basically, the idea was that if you could knock out just a few such ultra-high-value targets, the damage to the enemy war effort would be immediate and almost decisive.

That was tried – at Ploesti, in the celebrated British “dam-busters” attack in the Ruhr, and in the horridly-costly Eighth Air Force B-17 raids on what was thought to be the panacea target of the German ball-bearing-production facilities at Schweinfurt.

But it quickly became clear that this strategy was wrong. The losses were far too excessive (they would quickly render the bombing squadrons inoperable due to lack of men and planes), and the attacks were unable to produce anything even close to the expected decisive results

...Chastened, American strategic bombing commanders completely changed their strategy. Rather than hitting the big “glamour” targets, they began to hit seemingly less-important targets. By suffering much lower loses in the effort, the bomber groups were able to maintain a very high tempo of operations – and aircrews gained experience and became very, very good at what they did. The vast European transportation network – so critical to the Axis war effort, and so obviously critical to Germany, with its “inside position” – was so vast that it was in toto indefensible.

The new strategy, while not spectacular, was frightfully effective

"Birthers"? You say, looking for a connection.

The eminent journalist-turned-blogger, R. S. McCain, points to the error of the birthers' ways--which is precisely the "glamour" strategy described above and badly executed at Ploesti, eerily similar to the Mena airport/Vince Foster (etc., etc.,) tactics.

And you, Dear Birther Kook, are getting between me and my revenge. If you think you're the first, you're wrong. You are the inheritor of a long and sorry legacy of time-wasting triviality, of a sort that I encountered as soon as I swore my oath of vengeance against the Democrats.

Hey, pal, ever heard of Mena Airport in Arkansas? You know, the place where Columbian drug lords imported tons of coke to supply the habits of Gov. Clinton and/or his brother Roger and/or the hordes of nymphomaniac coke whores who flocked to the cocaine-fueled orgies in Hot Springs with Bill, Roger, Vince and Hillary.

...the Mena-obsessed Kook Corps was frustrated in its ambitions. Why? Because the Clintons' personal private army of assassins finally rubbed out Vince Foster, a/k/a, The Man Who Knew Too Much

Given that politics is war (mutatis mutandis), the lessons here should be clear.

There is no "silver bullet" with Obamamamama. He will stand or fall based on a large basket of issues, right and/or wrong decisions, and perceptions.

And he's giving us a cornucopia of goodies to use in the attacks. Why settle for just one?

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