Quotable Quote

My wife found the following on Facebook ... and it was so on the money, I had to share it. I hope its author, George R. Halsey, a friend of a friend, doesn’t mind. ...

“I understand what it means but I wonder if racism really benefits the racists. It’s really a great burden. For 90% of the white people in the south who could not own slaves or large amounts of real estate, slavery meant poverty for white people. In the North it benefits no one I believe. There is a political group who stoke up racism among disadvantaged whites to make sure they look for solutions in the wrong direction and not where the power is.”

Interestingly, one of the reasons that Abraham Lincoln’s father was an abolitionist was that he could not find work in the slave-state Kentucky and had to move his family to Illinois.

STAND UP FOR AMERICA!

Afterward: There is an interesting parallel between the reaction to slavery ... and the push back against very cheap Chinese labor arising out of globalism. Me thinks things are not over yet.

Living Life

Greatness comes not just from the person, but from the circumstances that a person is required to negotiate. Abraham Lincoln may not have left quite the same legacy if he were president during the Roaring Twenties. — Anon.

The Template Test

"It's a Barnum and Bailey world, just as phony as it can be" -- E.Y. Harburg and Billy Rose

When the cerebral David Brooks of the New York Times looked over Obummer in 2008, he knew he would make a good president because of "the crease in his pants." Chris Mathews was equally smitten with this candidate because he "sent a tingle up his leg." And Joe Biden was sold on Obummer when he recognized him as a "clean, articulate, bright Aftrican American." (This quip also got him a cushy job for eight years.) These three political decisions were made not on studied judgments ... but on the basis of feelings. Templates were held up to this candidate and he passed their quick profile tests. Unfortunately, these template judgments were wrong. Obummer has been one of the worst presidents in a long unfortunate history of simps, scalawags and scoundrels who have occupied 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue.

Of course, there have also been great men who have been President of the United States. But, using the template test, many of them would not have passed muster. I'm thinking particularly of Harry Truman, Andrew Jackson and Abraham Lincoln.

What happens as a result of voters' preference for using templates to pick presidents. Obviously candidates are preened, poked and posed into predetermined templates in the hope of getting elected. A very good example of this is Hellary Clinton. If one compares what this woman was like as Secretary of State ... frumpy, disheveled, detached, almost lazy ... to what she has become today. Clearly her handlers have reshaped her into a slick robotic presidential candidate ... both in appearance, demeanor and rhetoric. This remake is designed to appeal to voters who can't be bothered to look beyond her staged appearance ... her template. To me, this artifice of reforming candidates into templates is so Hollywood, so tinsel town, so Lady Gaga ... that I want to flee to someplace genuine, like a petting zoo.

I think I'll stop here ...

Reparations

Hillary Clinton, if she loses the Iowa caucuses and the New Hampshire primary to Bernie Sanders ... which now seems likely, she will need to stop the bleeding in the South Carolina primary. This means that the black vote there is very critical ... sooo, what better way to energize this voting block than to promise them something. What might this bribe be? How about money channeled through the age-old political promise of slavery reparations ... see: Breitbart Article?

Now I don;t know how the polling goes for reparations, but, if Hillary embraces this cause like she has gun control and Obummer's record, she will be lucky to carry two states if she is the Democrat nominee.

As far as reparations are concerned, Abraham Lincoln,when confronted with the huge causalities occurring in the Civil War, believed that this bloodshed would continue until there was an equivalence to the prior suffering of the slaves in his country. If this was enough reparations for Lincoln, it is so for me too.

Truth

"Truth is beauty and beauty, truth."  -- Keats

(This blog entry is only tangentially related to the Rathergate movie, Truth.)

Truth is an elusive elfin sprite. She is a Tinker Bell caught in a typhoon of ignorance, self-serving mendacity, superstition and media obfuscation. And often when this genie is captured in a bottle, she turns to dust with new information. This is because truth in one narrow context may not hold in a broader milieu. For instance while "turn the other cheek" may be fine for the individual, it may not be the best policy for a nation. But universal truth-telling is essential for truly successful governance ... and it is a very rare commodity these days in Washington.

Thus I am currently inclined to use veracity as a yardstick to measure our roster of candidates for president ... and, to me, the greatest truth tellers are Jim Webb, Ben Carson, Chris Christie, Carly Fiorina, and Marco Rubio. Donald Trump might make the list if he constantly didn't engage of puerile put-downs of his Republican rivals. Guess who is on the bottom rung of this believability ladder ranking.among this bunch of wannabes? And, surprisingly, the one who captures my heart and my brain on the top rung is Dr. Carson ... for no other reason than he is willing to tell truths that go against the media meme ... and not back down when challenged.

Yes, my current favorite, if elected president, would find himself in a hornet's nest of backbenchers and backstabbers. But somehow I feel that he, like Abraham Lincoln, has the perspicacity to surround himself with learned deputies who would help him through the gauntlet of incompetence that is Washington.

In fact, if Ben Carson were lucky enough to make it as the Republican candidate, I would suggest he choose as his campaign's motto ... "The Truth Teller."

A House Divided

There are more than a few political commentators who are mewing that, since the majority of Crimeans (but not the 96% as the recent voting indicated) believe that this part of Ukraine should be reunited with Russia, who are we or others to object? Interesting point … but then one must also ask why were not the Confederate States allowed to secede from the United States back in the early 1860’s? Why cannot all or part of Montreal split from Canada whenever it chooses? If Scotland soon votes to depart the United Kingdom should this be opposed or even penalized in some way?  Venice, from Italy?

As long as we are exploring the notion of national self-determination, why cannot Chechnya or other predominately Muslim republics secede unopposed from the Russian Federation? Isn’t what is good for the sow bear also good for the boar bear?  Why are not Tibet or other western Chinese provinces allowed to go their own way independent of Bejing’s tight control?

And how about the real poser … what if large portions of the American southwest, including California, now that they are predominately Hispanic, vote to rejoin Mexico?  Should this be permitted … or even encouraged? One could argue that this might significantly shift the United States’political balance rightward … and also relieve much fiscal stress on other neighboring American states.

President Abraham Lincoln once said, “A house divided cannot stand.” But as that other U.S. President, slick Willy Clinton, might have added, “It all depends on what your definition of ‘house’ is.”

Time Travel

Almost three years!  That is a very long time for a deteriorating old man (me) … and for a rapidly disintegrating country (the USA) to endure. President Obama has almost three more years of malignant mischief-making in which to vex many of us with his folksy haughtiness, his managerial inattention, his foreign-policy screw-ups, his self-righteous preaching, his corrupt posse, and his profligate spending. I think Ann Coulter hit the nail on the head when she said, “If Obama was trying to destroy this country, what would he be doing any differently?”

But in a very strange way what President Obama is now bulldozing may end up being beneficial for us.  His reign of destruction (aka, "hope and change") may be similar to the early twentieth-century Dadaist art movement and its raucous nihilism ... which fostered some of the most innovative art in centuries.  His attempted razing of many of the pillars upon which this country was founded and prospered has caused many of us to rethink our purpose and rededicate our lives.  The Tea-Party movement is symptomatic of the grass-roots resurrection of what was once great in America. There is, I believe a creative cleansing to take place among the rubble of what Obama is now working.  

Many in the current establishment and media can't or won't sense this resurrection ... but our younger generations will soon compare what we have become to what we once were ... and re-learn those things to be cherished. I firmly believe it's in our DNA. Just as Abraham Lincoln talked about a “new birth of freedom,” I judge that we will be, once our Fearless Leader leaves office, ready to rid Washington of much of the political pollution that persists there.  Of course all may not be repaired, but I pray that enough will be fixed that our country might have another few hundred years of freedom-loving and innovative time travel ... which isn't, I think, what Obama had in mind.

Afterward: If what I am herein predicting does indeed come about, I suspect that some historians of a liberal bent ... of which there are many ... will say that this was what Obama was about all along. Note to any future readers ... don't believe it!  

Be a Clown

 

In the proud tradition of mocking our President, a rodeo clown at the Missouri state fair donned an Obama mask while he was doing his rodeo-clown antics … see: CS Monitor story.  The consequences have been Orwellian and, to me, frightening – this unnamed clown has been banned for life from the fair, the rodeo announcer and Rodeo President have resigned, and the rodeo clowns there have be asked to take sensitivity training … see: Washington Times story.  I say Orwellian because we all have seen many Nixon masks, George W. Bush masks, Ronald Reagan masks, etc. worn by past protesters of Presidential policies … most of which were well within Constitutional boundaries (both the past policies and the protests).  I even recall seeing political cartoons of Abraham Lincoln depicting him as a monkey.

Now we have a President who is shredding the Constitution with his extra-legal changes to Obamacare, his non-recess appointments of key governmental positions, his immigration law over-rides, and his numerous other circumventions of our founding charter … and we, the people, cannot protest these actions?  What is going on here?  Even Harry Reid can go on the radio and slyly ask if Congressional resistance to Obama’s actions is because he is African-American … see: The Blaze story.  This is not just playing the race card … the American people are now playing 52-pick-up with the entire race deck.

Many, including myself, believe that the legacy of white-guilt has had a great deal to do with electing Barack Obama twice to the White House.  And now this slavery stigma seems to be allowing him to slip the consequences of what, for any other President, would be anathema … and even (gasp!) impeachment.  Obama can sail the ship of state onto the reef and a too-large part of the American public will declare this good seamanship.  To me, his foreign and domestic policies have both been unmitigated disasters.  Yet there are some reading this blog posting who, seeing this criticism, will label me a crypto-racist.  This is an unfortunate consequence of what Condoleezza Rice has called our nation’s “birth defect,” slavery.  Will we never erase this stain?  Must we let Obama and his sleazy coat-tail riders destroy our nation in order to save it?

I cannot answer this question … perhaps if we were to send in the clowns?