The other prophetic thing that I see about Waterloo that does make me think DeMint used the correct analogy is that all the cards were in Napoleon’s favor to win this battle. He figured he had about a 90 percent chance of winning. However, he lost the battle by having the worse communications that sent D’Erlon running around the field useless (think Pelosi) and Ney was completely unsupported and still fought with amazing bravery. He had no game plan that was clearly explain (think Healthcare) and when it was too late he drove his entire Imperial Guard straight into a trap. The thanks Marshal Ney got was to have Napoleon blame the whole debacle on Ney (he was thrown under the bus by Napoleon) and so I believe many Democrats will feel the sting of Obama’s narcissistic treachery. Hopefully, in this “sped up media 24/7 world we live in”, this will all play out and by 2011 he is on the way out defeated by a worthy opponent who will restore American democracy…..
Heaven knows we don’t want a Louis XVIII.

Now, wretchard….. ( or some Napoleonic scholar) let’s see which speech emerges when Obama confirms the worst of our fears about the economy and his failed bills and then we can call that his 29th Bulletin!!!!!)

Stalin loved it so much that he built a secret factory city tooled to American dimensions ( vs metric ) to reproduce B-29s.

A TU-4 still sits in front of Russian Air Force HQ.

When coupled with the Fat Man atomic bomb — thank you Oppenheimer — every American city could have been Nagasaki II.

Didn’t Stalin kill more Russians than Hitler and his military?
Russia declared war on Imperial Japan in August, 1945, to get the Kurile Islands, at a time when the defeat was certain. Nothing like waiting ’til the last minute.
Read the story about the B-29 forced down into Russian territory that was never returned. Can anyone spell Ilyushin copy?
tomw

For example, if one doesn’t often hear much about the USSR’s WWII pro-Hitlerites from anti-Stalinists, one also doesn’t hear much from pro-Stalinists about the mere-decade-previous Ukrainian Genocide, AKA the Holodomor.

The Emperor’s handling of Borodino is a powerful indication of Napoleon’s self- awareness that he was in over his head. The Emperor is often censured, (unjustly, I think) for passing up an opportunity to turn the Russian left, a move urged, among others, by Marshal Davout, his best general. However, Napoleon HAD to have a battle: he could not afford the possibility that the Russians (with their more numerous cavalry on better horses) would see the move coming and retreat, or anticipate him and smash his turning column.

Getting to Senator DeMint’s point, Waterloo is a poor analogy (anyway, it’a a bad one, Leipzig was the decisive battle of those wars, not Waterloo– Napoleon could have won his wars till Leipzig, but never after). A better Napoleonic analogy is possibly diplomatic — the disintergration of the French/Russian alliance from Erfurt forward. The Democratic alliance is under stress from two dimensions — on the line between the Blue Dogs and the Northern Liberals, and between the very rich on the one part, and the Unions and organized poor on the other.

In any case, Senator DeMint would do well to keep his mouth shut when he has these insights, and quietly work the fault lines in the Democratic political coalition.

Anyway, back to WWII. The U.S. was no. 1 in the world in oil production in 1940-1945, the Soviets were no. 2 right behind us. Churchill had a secret plan to bomb Baku and completely destroy the oil production there in case the Germans captured it in 1942. The Caucuses mountains and fierce Soviet resistance stopped them.

By 1944 the Wehrmacht was a mostly horse drawn army in both the West and the East, regardless of how elite the troops or Panzers were that we faced in the much more compact battlefield of Normandy. The hedgerows made the German forces we were facing look a lot bigger than they were, at least in terms of firepower, they were a force multiplier until we broke out in August 1944. The Germans though were substituting Panzer destroyers, Panzerfausts and 88s for truly mobile tanks. There just weren’t as many of them as in the East. While I cannot speak for the Luftwaffe and Kriegsmarine losses in the Med which were no doubt huge, the actual number of German troops in North Africa was an order of magnitude smaller than what they had deployed in the East in 1942. The numbers may have creeped up with the invasion of Sicily and then the Italian peninsula in 1943. Hitler always seemed to fear the West more than the East even though Soviet logistics were clearly more simple than for the Western Allies who were at the end of a 3,000 mile shipping chain. That’s why I don’t think it’s possible to make an apples to apples comparison between the Western Allies and the Soviets, the latter had no choice and were fighting on their own soil for most of the war. The Boys of Point du Hoc on the other hand didn’t have to go, but volunteered. Still, they died for the same cause, and there is no longer any ideological reason (save for downplaying the role of Baltic and Ukrainian SS volunteers and pogroms in the East to make those nations look better today) to denigrate the sacrifices of either side.

HD’s DC/PC becomes the new Lords of the Manor and the public (aka plebs; aka serfs) have to pledge their fealty to get benefits with which to survive.

Once it takes root the New Feudalism will be hard to reverse.

Bearing this in mind then two things are obvious about “Health Care Reform” and “Cap and Trade”; both these bills will attack every famiy’s standard of living by ever increasing costs and/or taxes, combined with decreasing quantity and quality of life.

We are in the begining of a cold civil war as evidenced by the Tea Party movement. To defeat the Obama democrats power-play these people must be fought at the local leval by clearly enumerating the dollar costs, and quality losses.