The coup sure brought sunshine to Erdogan.

He’s up past 20,000 political prisoners to this hour — and keeps on rolling.

top-turkish-official-charge-campaign-against-isis-found-dead-shot-neck

Amazing efficiencies for any police state.

I too am an admirer of J.E. Dyer. No one of whom I am aware, offers anything approaching her expertise in military analysis.

That said, IMO her grasp of political and ideological considerations is less expert, though I do see her progressing on those fronts as well.

“Wondering if Obama’s approval rating drops below 40% when Iran tests its nukes.”

No. Not even if they test them on Omaha. [think of Michael Moore’s remarks after 9/11]

Obama, as polls have consistently shown has one virtually solid block of approval that is unshakable no matter what the outcome; probably since nothing could ever be his fault and whatever happens is more satisfying and better than if he had not been there.

Think about it for a moment. What could possibly befall the US during the Obama administration which would upset those whose aim was in fact to “fundamentally transform” America, and see it refashioned into something else for someone else?

The attack on the Wold Trade Center did what in the way of provoking conversions exactly? Helped to push our hostess and Ron Silver over the edge, along with a couple of comedians and social critics? That is to say, liberals who were naive enough to imagine that the ultimate aim of the liberalism of their fellows actually had something to do with the preservation and expansion of liberty and personal agency, rather than solidarity and the escape from the psychological anxieties and resentments provoked by personal moral responsibilities?

If you really hate your neighbor, some bitter clinger you despise for example, and whose selfishness and obsession with interpersonal boundaries is just impeding the arrival of the peace and justice millennium, you may find the notion of a “foreigner” killing him, quite to your liking.

http://www.frontpagemag.com/fpm/263536/hillarys-imam-robert-spencer

Opposition to Erdogan, although totally justified, doesn’t get us out of the woods WRT Turkey.

Not much of a silver lining, but I suppose possible.

http://atimes.com/2016/07/the-sick-man-of-europe-once-again/

http://libertyunyielding.com/2016/07/17/turkey-goes-off-rez-looks-like-natos-going/

“The key to understanding what just happened is the handful of things Erdogan did, immediately, that he didn’t have to do, as a response to a coup attempt by the military.

Until a few hours ago, we might have thought the prompt detention of more than 2,700 judges and prosecutors in the Turkish judicial system was chief among those. That’s a lot of judges and prosecutors to run out and arrest right away — within hours — after a coup planned by a rogue element in the military. It sure looks like someone was just waiting to execute an order on that one.

But the picture is clearer now. And it’s obvious that the most important thing Erdogan did was allow one of the government’s ministers to blame the United States for the coup attempt.

Erdogan’s corollary (not premise; corollary) to that completely unnecessary move has been that the shadowy Islamist cleric Fetulleh Gulen is behind the attempt (a proposition that looks iffy, at best), and the U.S., where Gulen has taken refuge, needs to turn him over to Turkey at once, or risk Turkey’s wrath.

Erdogan is using that corollary now as a justification to shut down operations at Incirlik Air Base, from which U.S. and Coalition warplanes fly for ops against ISIS in Syria.

But that’s not his major objective, or his biggest concern. Erdogan doesn’t give a rat’s patootie about ISIS, which is useful to him but far from essential. He wouldn’t issue ultimatums to Obama as a way of shielding ISIS.

No, Erdogan’s biggest concern is something hardly anyone noticed on this side of the Atlantic in the past week. It really matters that the “something” changes everything, from Erdogan’s point of view. As our vice president might say, it really effing matters.

That something is the disclosure that Obama is seriously planning to subordinate U.S. operations in Syria to Russia’s leadership.”
RTWT
(I would be interested in seeing if anyone else is following a writer with a similar, or persuasively different, analysis of the situation.)

Mises, Ludwig von (1927). Liberalism .
* * *
Churchill opined that “It has been said that democracy is the worst form of government except all the others that have been tried.”
There is usually some semblance of restraint from dictatorship, as long as the public insists on it, so all parties champion democracy even when they have won if it’s possible for the tables to turn in the next election.

Now, we have one party campaigning openly on shutting down the democratic process as soon as they win.