I was wrong. For years, I've argued that our government should pay more attention to South America. Now Hillary Clinton has -- and, boy, is it ugly. With tragic back-to-back earthquakes dominating the headlines from south of the border, a desperate ploy by the hard-left Argentine government -- backed by Venezuela's Hugo Chavez -- threatens to shake the continent's political landscape. And Secretary of State Clinton, during her whirlwind tour down south, managed to outrage our British allies and assist despised President Cristina Fernandez de Kirchner in her family's assault on Argentine democracy. Clinton's diplomatic malfeasance in Buenos Aires wasn't an accident. She spoke for President Obama, who loves Third World liberation rhetoric and seems to think Britain's still colonizing his family home in Kenya. Here's the backstory that our media's ignored:

Last week was not a good one for proponents of social re-engineering of the U.S. military.  They had been buoyed by the previous week's congressional testimony of Secretary of Defense Robert Gates and Joint Chiefs Chairman Admiral Mike Mullen, widely seen as evidence the Pentagon was prepared to accede to President Obama's demand that avowed homosexuals be allowed to serve in the armed forces.  Now, however, four other members of the Joint Chiefs of Staff have weighed in, and all bets are off on the idea of experimenting with - and possibly breaking - the All-Volunteer Force.  One by one, they poured cold water on Mr. Obama's agenda of homosexualizing the US military.

The President has wrestled control of the health care debate away from Nancy Pelosi and Harry Reid by finally introducing his own plan. Unfortunately, the White House's proposal includes everything we found untenable about the old Senate bill - only this one is even more expensive! This is what you might call putting "perfume on a pig." What's in this "new" proposal? It has the unpopular (and arguably unconstitutional) individual mandate that forces people and employers to purchase health insurance - only this time with much harsher fines on employers who choose not to go along with another expensive government mandate. It has provisions that will make employers think twice before expanding their workforce. It has cuts to Medicare Advantage, a popular program which allows seniors to pay a little more money out of pocket for better coverage. And, of course, it still has sweetheart deals - only this time they've been extended even more.

On Feb. 17, I joined a group of prominent conservatives assembled for the purpose of unveiling a document dubbed The Mount Vernon Statement. It was intended to emulate an earlier articulation of the principles that unite the right issued 50 years ago at the Sharon, Conn., home of William F. Buckley Jr., known as The Sharon Statement. The Sharon document advocated victory over totalitarian Communism.  By contrast, the Mount Vernon document made no mention at all of today's totalitarian ideology - what authoritative Islam calls Sharia - or the threat it poses to America, let alone declare that victory should be our purpose in dealing with this menace. Still, the Mount Vernon Statement is a paragon of robust national security-mindedness in contrast to what took place in the succeeding three days at the annual Conservative Political Action Conference (CPAC).

The capture of Mullah Abdul Ghani Baradar -- the Taliban's equivalent of Gen. Stan McChrystal -- by Pakistani agents and CIA operatives is a big win. Subordinate only to Mullah Omar, the Taliban's CEO, Baradar ran the Taliban's military operations in Afghanistan. Responsible for the upgrade in insurgent tactics -- fighting smart, rather than just fighting -- he also created the Taliban's hearts-and-minds campaign. For two weeks, he's been under interrogation by Pakistan's Inter Services Intelligence agency. The CIA's also involved in the questioning on some level -- but the ISI always holds back some chips. The grab won't affect the ongoing fight for Marjah in Afghanistan, but the loss of Baradar's operational savvy could degrade future Taliban operations. And if he sings -- as we're told he's doing -- it could be the biggest anti-Taliban bonanza since 2001. Or maybe not.

Sarah Palin, who is considering a run in the 2012 Republican presidential primaries, is using her public platforms to reassemble the coalition of security hawks, social conservatives and blue collar workers that propelled Ronald Reagan to the White House in 1980. Her support for Israel serves her in building support among both security hawks and social conservatives. Unlike Obama's empty protestations of support for Israel, Palin's support is obviously heartfelt and therefore will not diminish while Obama remains in office. And as Palin becomes stronger, her ability to influence the US debate in a manner that constrains Obama's freedom to intimidate Israel into allowing Iran to become a nuclear power will rise. In spite of Palin's extraordinary support for Israel, the American Jewish community overwhelmingly rejects her. As Jennifer Rubin noted in her article, "Why Jews hate Palin," in Commentary magazine, Jews disapproved of Sen. John McCain's choice of Palin as his running-mate by a 54 to 37 percent majority. The sneering broadsides published against Palin by leading American Jewish writers are legion. In her article, Rubin gives a number of reasons for American Jews' rejection of Palin.

In a breathtakingly cynical example of playing politics, the White House just accused Republicans of playing politics over its Miranda-rights Christmas gift to the crotch bomber. With fumbling terrorism czar John Brennan walking point, administration spokesmen attacked those who believe that treating would-be suicide-bomber Umar Abdulmutallab the way we handle shoplifters harms our national security.  With its desperate counteroffensive on this issue, the White House is struggling to recover from the PR debacle over the decision to award Abdulmutallab (and other terrorists) rights to which they are in no way entitled. The White House position is a PR blend of lies, half-truths and ignorance. Let's strip out the politics and lay out the facts from an intelligence professional's perspective:

As the administration fiddles and fumbles with its soft- on-terror policies at home, one Obama-blessed campaign abroad is hitting al Qaeda and its franchises hard: the drone war. Drones work. They kill terrorists. Important terrorists. And we don't have to squabble about where to put their shredded bodies on trial. For all the billions poured into Afghan pockets, the continuing giveaways to well-connected contractors, the abuse of our military as glorified aid workers and terrorist targets, and the general strategic incoherence in Washington, we're getting this one thing right. On Tuesday (2/02), an up-the-ante wave of attacks fired 18 missiles from Unmanned Aerial Systems. (UAS is our term of the week for drones.) The strike hit a terrorist stronghold, killing another dozen or more militants.  Cool.  Very cool.

One of the key objectives of the Tea Party people is the strict enforcement of the 10th   Amendment :  "The powers not delegated to the United States by the Constitution, nor prohibited by it to the States, are reserved to the States respectively, or to the people." As an early 1960s vintage member of the then-new conservative movement, I remember us focusing on the 10th amendment during the 1964 Goldwater campaign. It has been a staple of conservative thought, and the continued dormancy of 10th  amendment enforcement has been one of the failures of our now half-century-old movement. As the Tea Party movement in so many ways seems to represent the 2.0 version of our movement, I am thinking about the 10th  amendment anew. It strikes me that the best way to revive the 10th  Amendment is to repeal the 17th Amendment -- which changes the first paragraph of Article I, Section 3 of the Constitution to provide that each state's senators are to be "elected by the people thereof" rather than being "chosen by the Legislature thereof."

What do Haiti and Afghanistan have in common, other than the presence of our military? They're both profoundly failed states that we pretend just need the right encouragement. We told ourselves that in Somalia, too. And we soon may be telling ourselves whopping fibs about Yemen. Or Pakistan. Failed, failing and outright fake states come in different flavors, from societies in which tribes remain more powerful than struggling governments to those that are gang-plagued and anarchic. There's no single solution to the problem. But we and other successful states typically stand in the way of any solutions. We -- and the locals in failed or failing states -- would be far better off if competent powers engaged in a form of triage, categorizing them into:

The rising cases of home-grown Islamist Radicalism in the US and the several terror plots that were discovered in 2009 in the US are alarming. The five Moslem students who went to Pakistan to wage Jihad against their own country, the Fort Hood Massacre, and the latest Christmas airline terror attempt are just a few examples of many.  In trying to understand this trend in the first year of the current Administration, one should question whether some actions of President Obama are perceived in a way that is encouraging the Jihadists to intensify their attacks on the US. Firstly, from a cultural perspective, the Arab world resonates with appearances of strength and weakness.  Some of the actions of President Obama that could have been perceived as weakness by the Jihadists include:

Google may have the backbone Congress lacks: The Internet giant is standing up to the Chicom bandits in Beijing. Why would a for-profit company threaten to pull out of what the investment gurus (who brought you the housing bubble) insist is the greatest market in the universe? There are three reasons, though only two have been recognized:

[Many TTPers have expressed concern over the recent (12/17/09) Amending of Executive Order 12425 granting certain "privileges, exemptions, and immunities" to the International Criminal Police Organization or Interpol. We are pleased to have TTPer Brent Moody, former Deputy Assistant Secretary for Enforcement at the Treasury Department address these concerns.] Mr. Obama's EO12425 has created considerable paranoia within the conservative blogosphere.  Email alerts and warnings entitled U.S. placed under Interpol authority and jurisdiction by Presidential Fiat and suchlike have become widespread.  I believe the brouhaha over revoking certain exceptions from exemptions for Interpol and its officials from the International Organizations Immunities Act (IOIA) - exceptions instituted by President Reagan - is based upon misperceptions of what Interpol is and by whom it is staffed here in the US. [See Addendum for texts of both]