www.dailycorinthian.com
Reece Terry, publisher
Opinion
Mark Boehler, editor
4 • Thursday, July 13, 2017
Corinth, Miss.
U.S. could become a net exporter Temperatures are high, but gas prices are low, reaching their lowest mark in a decade during the Fourth of July holiday. That is good news for consumers, families, and small businesses. Less pain at the pump can translate into more spending power for consumers, helping to boost the economy. Gas prices are not the only barometer for gauging the future of U.S. energy. Rising U.S. exports in oil and natural gas are an encouraging sign that America’s energy independence is within reach. The Energy Information Administration, an agenRoger cy within the Department of has pinpointed 2026 Wicker Energy, as the year in which America U.S. senator, could become a net exporter of Columnist energy. This development is particularly significant when it comes to our national security interests. An energy-independent United States could decrease its reliance on oil from volatile suppliers like Venezuela, which has been roiled by anti-government protests in recent months. As a net exporter, the United States could also help bring energy security to Eastern Europe and lessen the influence that Russia is trying to gain in the region by leveraging its energy resources. The Trump Administration recognizes the potential of U.S. energy. The last week in June was designated “Energy Week” by the Administration to draw attention to its energy agenda and pursuit of “energy dominance.” Two early items on the agenda have been the expansion of oil and gas exploration and the rollback of Obama-era regulations impeding the development of domestic energy resources. In March, President Trump issued an executive order for a review of the Obama Administration’s costly rules to limit carbon dioxide emissions. Although halted by the Supreme Court, these regulations had amounted to a job-killing war on coal and threatened to saddle Americans with higher energy bills. The President has also signed an executive order to initiate the process for offshore oil and gas development on the Outer Continental Shelf. Rather than picking winners and losers, the Trump Administration is seeking to put the interests of Americans first – with policies that promote economic growth and energy security. The Senate is also working to promote America’s energy future. Sens. Lisa Murkowski (R-Alaska) and Maria Cantwell (D-Wash.), who lead the Energy and Natural Resources Committee, have introduced a comprehensive energy and natural resources bill that has already been put on the Senate calendar for consideration. The legislation, titled the “Energy and Natural Resources Act of 2017,” follows the success of a 2015 energy bill that earned overwhelming support in the Senate. The 2017 legislation addresses a host of energy-related issues that cross party lines. Included in the bill’s provisions is the need for better infrastructure, greater efficiency, responsible resource development, and expanded access for sportsmen on federal lands. Such a broad and far-reaching bill focusing on America’s energy and natural resources has not passed Congress in a decade. Today’s efforts to remove harmful regulations and modernize our energy system promise to go a long way. America’s capacity to be a global energy leader is not in question. It is a matter of when our vast energy potential is unleashed.
Prayer For Today My Father, I pray that I may have wise judgment and use discretion in the choice of my work. May I remember that only that is genuine which is received and used for thee. Amen.
A Verse To Share “Enter through the narrow gate. For wide is the gate and broad is the road that leads to destruction, and many enter through it. But small is the gate and narrow the road that leads to life, and only a few find it. — Matthew 7:13-14
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Kim Jong-Un must go BY DR. GLENN MOLLETTE Columnist
I really don’t want to take my column space to write anything else about Kim Jong-un. There is so much going on in America and the world that I would rather write about. Here we are again with this idiot dominating the news in our country. I don’t think anyone has ever liked this weirdo. For the past decade we have simply brushed him off as the North Korea Kook. Former NBA basketball player Dennis Rodman has been there to play basketball and the dictator referred to Rodman as the highest-ranking diplomat to visit North Korea from the United States. Huh? Rodman is just a retired professional basketball player. He was a great player. In the last few years our country has had to take Jong-un in all dead seriousness. He has been test launching one missile after another with the hopes of achieving the kind of missile that would reach the United States. You see how much everybody loves America? I do think we have some friends. My wife and I visited France recently and everyone was very congenial to us in that country. Jongun is not a friend. I wouldn’t go to North Korea. Do you remember what they did
to Otto Warmbier from Cincinnati? They held him captive for 17 months and sent him home 99 percent dead in a coma. He died shortly after being returned to Cincinnati. No American should be allowed to visit North Korea. Is China our friend? Reports have come that China’s trade with North Korea has increased by 40 percent in the last three months. China’s slave wages and currency manipulation have not been a friend to our country the last twenty years. Is Japan our friend? They haven’t gotten over the two bombs we dropped on them during World War II. The bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki killed approximately 129,000 people. However they hit us first at Pearl Harbor. Jong-un is obviously not the kind of guy you want to hang out with but sometimes you have to. Should Trump send Rodman over to talk to Jong-un? He could say something like, “Sir, would you please stop launching missiles?” He could take him a signed basketball or maybe present him with 5-foot tall trophy. Why not? Do you think that would be stupid? Well, it’s stupid but sometimes you try stupid to deal with stupid. Next, Trump should invite him to the White House. Or,
meet him in China. I suspect he would feel very unsafe coming to America. Diplomacy must always be the first course of action. Trump or Nikki Haley, (now there is our first woman President) should try to spend a day talking to Jong-un. Buy him a coke, take him golfing, take him on the Kentucky Bourbon Trail and give him some of Kentucky’s famous brew. Maybe if he drank enough of it he would calm down. Or, he might start competing with China to buy some of the billion-dollar brew. By the way China now owns one of the oldest distilleries’ in Frankfort, Kentucky. This should be illegal. Once hooked on Kentucky bourbon then we tell Jong-un that we will not sell any to North Korea unless he settles down and stops being stupid. Rodman, Trump, Haley and even Kentucky Bourbon may not work. So what do we do with North Korea? My son spent a year in South Korea and we have over one hundred thousand Americans there now many of them our military. There are millions of good hard working South Koreans that love America. We don’t want them bombed off the planet and Jong-un is crazy enough to do it. Can we take out their missiles? Apparently we don’t
know where they all are. Taking out only a few would surely mean North Korea launching theirs and the result would be devastating to South Korea and maybe others. Plus, they would surely hurl one toward Alaska or even California. A cyber attack sounds like a good idea if we can really pull it off but how long will that work? Not forever. The problem is Jong-un, at least for the moment. He needs to be talked to. There should be a conversation. There should be an attempt at reasoning. Send Dr. Robert Jeffress from First Baptist Church, Dallas, Texas to tell him about Jesus. Try anything. The bottom line is if diplomacy doesn’t work then Jong-un must go. It’s a bigger job than sending a Navy SEAL team in to take him out. I don’t want to lose a bunch of our good soldiers in a mission that might be impossible. On the other hand I don’t want to lose an American city and 50,000 people in a nuclear bomb attack. We cannot and must not take that chance. Jong-un is on a mission of insanity and he must go. Glenn Mollette is a syndicated columnist and author of 12 books. He is read in all 50 states.
Trump is alone, but is he right? At the G-20 in Hamburg, it is said, President Trump was isolated, without support from the other G-20 members, especially on climate change and trade. Perhaps so. But the crucial question is not whether Trump is alone, but whether he is right. Has Trump read the crisis of the West correctly? Are his warnings valid? Is not the Obama-Merkel vision of a New World Order a utopian fantasy? At the monument to the patriots of the Warsaw Uprising, Trump cited Poland as exemplar of how a great people behaves in a true national crisis. Calling the Polish people “the soul of Europe,” he related how, in the Miracle of the Vistula in 1920, Poland, reborn after 12 decades of subjugation, drove back the invading Red Army of Leon Trotsky. He described the gang rape of Poland by Nazis and Soviets after the Hitler-Stalin pact. He cited the Katyn Forest massacre of the Polish officer corps by Stalin, and the rising of the Polish people against their Nazi occupiers in 1944, as the vulturous legions of Stalin watched from the safe side of the river. When the Polish Pope, John Paul II, celebrated his first Mass in Victory Square
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in 1979, said Trump, “a million Polish men, women and children raised their Patrick voices in a Buchanan single prayer. ... ‘We want Columnist God.’ ... Every Communist in Warsaw must have known that their oppressive system would soon come crashing down.” And so it did. The crisis of the West today, said Trump, is akin to what Poland faced. For it is about the survival of a civilization, rooted in Christianity, that has made the greatest of all contributions to the ascent of man. What enabled the Poles to endure was an unshakable belief in and a willingness to fight for who they were — a people of God and country, faith, families, and freedom — with the courage and will to preserve a nation built on the truths of their ancient tribe and Catholic traditions. Given the threats to the West, from within and without, said Trump, we need such a spirit now. What are those threats? “The fundamental question of our time is whether the West has the will to survive. Do we have the confi-
dence in our values to defend them at any cost? Do we have enough respect for our citizens to protect our borders? Do we have the desire and the courage to preserve our civilization in the face of those who would subvert and destroy it? “We can have the largest economies and the most lethal weapons anywhere on Earth, but if we do not have strong families and strong values, then we will be weak and we will not survive.” Trump professed confidence in the West’s will to survive. But whether the West still has the character seems an open question. Christianity is more of a dying than a thriving faith on the Old Continent. And as the churches empty out, the mosques are going up. Before our eyes, the West is being remade. In June, gays and lesbians celebrated in Berlin as the German Parliament voted to approve same-sex marriage. At that G-20 gathering in Hamburg, hundreds of criminal thugs went on a three-day rampage — rioting, burning, looting and battling police, some 300 of whom were injured. Were the autocrats of the G-20 — Xi Jinping of China, Vladimir Putin of Russia, Recep Tayyip Erdogan of
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Turkey, Narendra Modi of India — impressed with the resolute response of Angela Merkel — the media-designated new “Leader of the West” — to mobs rioting in Germany’s second city? At Harvard, Alexander Solzhenitsyn described what was on display in Hamburg: “A decline in courage may be the most striking feature which an outside observer notices in the West in our days. ... Such a decline in courage is particularly noticeable among the ruling groups and the intellectual elite.” Secularist and hedonist, New Europe worships at the altars of mammon. Handel’s “Messiah” cannot compete with moonwalking Michael Jackson’s “We are the World.” Once Europe went out to convert, colonize and Christianize the world. Now the grandchildren of the colonized peoples come to Europe to demand their share of their inheritance from a West besotted with guilt over its past sins that cannot say “No!” Patrick J. Buchanan is the author of a new book, “Nixon’s White House Wars: The Battles That Made and Broke a President and Divided America Forever.”
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