1619 Project

The New York Times has decided to rewrite our history books and indoctrinate our children with something called the 1619 Project. I was warning my granddaughter to look out for this brainwashing when my daughter, her mother, piped up saying that she has read about this project and found it worthwhile. To see what this 1619 Project really is, it is best to go to the source: NY Times explanation. Read and reflect, then we will go on.

One of the first pushbacks to the notion that our 13 colonies revolted against England in order to preserve slavery was published in The Atlantic magazine (of all places) which quotes many historians disputing this NY Times smear ... see: NY Post critique.

Next, that flaming liberal, Andrew Sullivan, pushed back even harder in the New Yorker magazine (of all places) ... see: Andrew Sullivan critique.

Enough? So The NY Times begins to backtrack on their absurd claims ... see: Legal Insurrection blog post. But, is this enough since much of this liberal propaganda has already been insinuated into the curriculum of many of our school systems? Probably not.

So, the Trump administration is pushing back by promoting the 1776 Project ... see: 1776 Project.

But, has the damage already been done? My test will be if my daughter, after she reads this blog, changes her tune.

STAND UP FOR AMERICA!

Our National DNA

Everyone is born with good DNA and bad DNA ... and we unfortunately cannot change the poorly-coded ones ... autoimmune diseases, mental illness, breast cancer, alcoholism, dementia, cystic fibrosis, sickle-cell anemia, flat feet, etc. All curse us ... counterbalancing our genetic gifts ... good looks, creativity, robust health, athletic prowess. Some day we might be able to order up the good genes and fix our bad ones ... but, for the nonce, we must live with what we are given in the lottery of life. As Trump would say, “it is what it is.”

Such it is with nations ... all have good history and bad history ... the equivalent of their DNA. And to emphasize our nation’s bad history ... slavery, the trail of tears, Japanese internment camps, segregation ... and down-play our good history ...World War II, our Bill of Rights, emancipation, civil rights ... is as silly as trying to sue your parents for your bad genes. Those that want to remake the United States into a different nation by erasing or rewriting our good history and accenting our errors are either naive or have something more sinister in mind.


STAND UP FOR AMERICA!

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.

Powerline Pic

K is for kook and Kaepernick ...

Headlines

Buttigieg finds friends on Fox as he calls out ‘grotesque’ Trump attacks

Google may just have hit the ‘kill switch’ on Huawei’s global smartphone ambitions

WASH POST: Americans increasingly migrating to Mexico ...

Trump calls for Biden-China probe

O’Rourke stocks campaign with Obama and Clinton alums

Trump is accelerating Europe’s political and economic reset

Yosemite looks like snow globe with summer just around the corner ...

Rapper Offset says strict abortion laws are ‘slavery’

Rocket attack near U.S. embassy in Baghdad

Trump says tariffs are causing companies to move out of China

ICE to move 225,000 illegals across country ...

Kamala Harris: ‘America’s economy is not working for working prople’

American Exceptionalism

Sometimes I ponder “why America?” This country is unique in its combination of free-market capitalism, individual self reliance, entrepreneurial spirit, democratic republicanism, battlefield courage, guaranteed freedoms, conservative values, and patriotism. Our Declaration of Independence and Constitution provide a backbone to our exceptional ethos that has managed to propel the United States to a pre-eminant position in the world ... and kept us there for over two hundred years.

Yes, there are other countries that have some of these ingredients ... but none that I can name that have them all. Even our original sin, slavery, is disappearing in the rear view mirror ... to the disappointment of those who prosper by milking this racism cow.

Which bring us, dear readers, to a perplexing question: why do so many short-sighted politicians want to fundamentally change this successful formula?

Sins of the Parents

The Alamo

If dreamers are not responsible for the immigration crimes of their parents, the Alamo or even the Mexican-American War, then why are current-day Southerners responsible for the Civil War, slavery and segregation policies of their ancestors? Can we require that any DACA recipients first to denounce their parents' crimes and their country's former aggressions before any amnesty may be granted? And then also can we obliterate all the Hispanic place names and landmarks in the Southwestern U.S.?

Seems fair ...

Headlines

These headlines are real ... they have all been discovered on Internet news sites. Guess which ones came from Politico?

Busted: West Point cadet convicted of drug dealing ...

Trump's $1T[rillion] infrastructure plan could wind up in a ditch

US Special Forces take out entire ISIS team, assaulting Syrian base that trains rebels

Trump: USA ready to solve N. Korea problem without China

Chinese firm halves employment costs by hiring army of robots ...

Fitton: Documents confirm Obama IRS targeted conservatives

Washington Post's Trump coverage among Pulitzer winners

Judge rules Texas voter law is discriminatory

Slavery returns to Africa: Migrants sold on open marker in Libya ...

Trump vexed by Assad's motivation for chemical attack

Tillerson: Russia must chose between Assad and the U.S.

Report: Foreigners now account for 61% of federal arrests

Full Circle

I guess if you live long enough, you will see most everything. After the civil war racists found ways to substitute segregation for slavery ... separate schools, separate drinking fountains, even "Colored only" waiting rooms. It took over a hundred years to roll back these Jim Crow laws. Can we all sigh in relief that this discrimination has been mostly driven out of our town square and school rooms?

Hold on there Pilgrim! It appears that millennial snowflakes are trying to roll back the clock! University of Michigan students are now trying to get their administration to establish black-only enclaves at their school where people of color are protected from the exigencies of our "white  privilege" society ... see: The College Fix Story.

How is this any different from "Colored Only" waiting rooms?

Headlines

These headlines are real ... they have all been discovered on Internet news sites.

Reuters: Top US spy agency does not back CIA on Russian hacking

Obama Farewell: America still hasn't overcome slavery ...

Google spins off self- driving car business to Waymo

After talking with Trump, Bill Gates likens president-elect to JFK ...

Ivy League [UPenn] students replace Shakespeare's portrait with black feminist poet

More intelligence officials are disputing CIA's claim of Russian hacking

CEO of NYT calls on social media companies to subsidize MSM ...

Records: 37% of Detroit machines COUNTED TOO MANY VOTES ...

Man kicked out of Six Flags for looking like Santa ...

SpaceX pushes back first manned flight until 2018

White House 'deeply disturbed by Aleppo situation

DOE won't provide names of climate change staffers to Trump team

Our Redemptions

It seems to this political observer that the United States has been wallowing in political redemptions for quite some time:

We elected a sex-crazed, Addison-inflicted Irishman as president to prove that we were really really sorry for how we had treated Catholics during their great migrations here.

We elected a fuzzy-thinking peanut farmer as president to prove that we were really really sorry for the mistakes we made in Vietnam and for that crooked leader we had recently ousted.

We elected a former alcoholic, born-again Christian as president to prove that we were really really sorry for the lascivious antics of our previous White House resident

We elected an unvetted Muslim-leaning mulatto as president to prove that we were really really sorry for our slavery past and for tolerating Jim Crow laws.

Now we are poised to elect a blatantly dishonest, money-grubbing lesbian as president to prove that we are really really sorry that it took so long for us to treat women as equals and "not that there is anything wrong with that."

What can possibly be next for our country to redeem with our presidency?

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.

Iconoclasts

Now that the Confederate flag has been banished from our national psyche, is it time for other icons of America's checkered past also to be eradicated? Ashleigh Banfield, a lightweight anchor at CNN, has just suggested the the Jefferson Memorial in Washington, DC might not be a fitting tribute to our third president who owned slaves ... see: LA Times Article. In the current liberal frenzy to erase our past, I'm reasonably certain that such idiocy may soon be seriously considered.

And as long as we are expunging all traces of slavery's history, can we now force William Jefferson Clinton to change his middle name?

His High Horse

Our puke of a president spoke at the annual National Prayer Breakfast this morning and I think that I am again agast by how un-presidential he always is. Here is an excerpt from the apologia he gave to this religious crowd:

And, first, we should start with some basic humility. I believe that the starting point of faith is some doubt -- not being so full of yourself and so confident that you are right and that God speaks only to us, and doesn't speak to others, that God only cares about us and doesn't care about others, that somehow we alone are in possession of the truth.

Him? Humility? Not full of himself? I have yet to see one iota of humility in this man … he who claims he can make the seas recede and our planet heal. To me it’s a wonder that his head didn’t explode as he spoke these pious words! But. the heavens didn’t part and lightning didn’t strike him down, so he was able then to pontificate further:

Humanity has been grappling with these questions throughout human history [those who seek to hijack religions for their own murderous ends]. And lest we get on our high horse and think this is unique to some other place, remember that during the Crusades and the Inquisition, people committed terrible deeds in the name of Christ. In our home country, slavery and Jim Crow all too often was [sic] justified in the name of Christ.

A little reading of history will reveal that the crusades were 800 years ago and were meant to recapture Christians’ most holy places from the Muslims … and the Inquisitions, however shameful, were 500 years ago during the time that Spain was retaking its land from the Muslims. And those who even know a smidgen of slavery’s shameful past will recall that Muslims were the primary slave traders in Africa. And, in the meantime, Christianity has experienced a fundamental reformation, slaves in this country were emancipated 150 years ago and Jim Crow laws were overturned 50 years ago. But, brutal slavery is still a widespread and evil blot practiced in the Muslim world.

And ISIS, in the name of Islam, is committing heinous acts on a daily basis! Not 800 years ago … not 500 years ago … not 150 years ago … not 50 years ago … but NOW! And it would, I think, have been very appropriate, nay necessary, for President Obama to have augmented his idiotic moral equivalencies with a call for a reformation within Islam. But he won’t praise or even acknowledge to the slightest those Muslims who have so advocated recently … see: A Modern Crusade.

If you wish to read the entire transcript of this Reverend Jeremiah Wright's protégée’s pap pronouncements please go to: Christian Post Article. 

But first take a healthy dose of Pepto Bismol.

Afterward: For more strong words on this matter from John Hinderaker see: Powerline Blog.

Liberal Solutions

Why is it that so many liberal solutions to societal problems don't work? Now liberals generally are not stupid ... nor are they, I assume, trying to make matters worse. But all too often their well-meaning solutions to imbalances in our society end up costing a fortune and destroying an existing working mechanism. What is that old saying ... if it ain't broke, don't fix it?

It isn't difficult to come up with examples of these liberal failings here in the United States  How about their insisting on dealing with terrorists inside of our criminal justice system? How about their not enforcing many of our immigration policies (George W. Bush included)? How about their continued diminishing of our military hegemony? How about their expansion of our welfare system beyond reason? How about their creating of mechanisms that encourage voter fraud? How about their self-serving roiling of race and gender relations? How about their attempts to overthrow our gun freedoms? How about their penchant for deficit spending (ditto George W. Bush)? How about even their continued attempts to centralize powers away from the people?

To be fair, there are occasional liberal ideas that do work ... at least for a time ... like social security, and some reasonable welfare benefits. (Many might also claim that the roll-back of slavery and the Jim Crow laws were liberal wins ... but it was just the opposite.) But, when such successes are accomplished, liberals double down, triple down, and even quadruple down until such benefits are crushed under their inherent weaknesses.

The Race Card

Let me see … the United States freed the slaves about 150 years ago and, in the process, sacrificed over 600,000 of our young men. It also stopped school segregation and Jim Crow laws about 60 years ago. And, as an act of atonement, it has long encouraged racial preferences to be used in employment and education. It has had two black Supreme Court justices, two black Secretaries of State, one black Attorney General and multiple black Presidential cabinet secretaries and top-level advisers, many black Senators, Representatives, state Governors and city Mayors, and numerous black corporate CEOs, university Presidents, sports personalities, movie/music stars, TV poobahs, and other millionaire glitterati … and now the U.S. has a black in the highest office in the land … its President … all elected, appointed or appreciated by a population which is, by its majority, not black.

One would think that these many enlightened accomplishments might begin to remove the stain of slavery from the American psyche (our original sin as so aptly described by Condoleezza Rice.)  But no … we are still racists. Not only are whites racists, but we are often compared to the Klu Klux Klan … itching to scare the black man into submission with a burning cross. We are an unrecoverable and vile form of humanity who cannot be reformed or forgiven for the sins of our forebearers … even beyond the seventh generation (the seeming Biblical limit of sin’s legacy.)

Recently, Michelle Obama, in a high-school graduation address, told her starry-eyed audience that they still hold secret prejudice against the likes of her … see: here. And Attorney General, Eric Holder has let go with both barrels. First saying that anyone who opposes President Obama’s policies is guilty of “quiet prejudice” … see: here. And then, paradoxically suggested that colorblindness is not the way to end discrimination … see: here.

I guess playing the race card in politics has become second nature to many on the left … particularly when your pile of accomplishment chips is so diminished. But, I for one am more than ready to call the left's bluff.

Continued winning at political poker requires a lot more than just bluster … and a race card.

Why Christie's a Republican

In his speech to the Republican nominating convention Governor of New Jersey, Chris Christie, revealed why he is a Republican.  Of course he didn't say it in so many words, but he did reveal a key guiding principle of his life.  He said that his mother told him that, if he had a choice between being loved or being respected, choose being respected (see: Politico Story).  In many ways this mirrors a theme that I have been espousing of late -- Democrats govern with their hearts and Republicans govern with their heads.  And there is no clearer distinction to be drawn between the consequences of these two styles than Christie's success as New Jersey's governor.  He took a state broken by the dewy policies of Democrat Jon Corzine and his many Democratic predecessor governors and, in a few short years, has begun to bring this state back to fiscal solvency.

Clearly not every Democrat eschews logic in their administrative styles, but enough of them prosper by pulling the heart strings of their voters for me to comfortably make this generalization.  Too many Democrats denounce the economic self interest which is fundamental to capitalism as "greed."  Too many Democrats denounce any criticism of Obama's policies as "racism."  Too many Democrats denounce a belief in the traditional family unit  as "homophobia."  Too many Democrats denounce a desire to see people achieve their greatest inborn potential as "slavery."  Too many Democrats denounce right-to-lifers  as "sexists."  Do you see where I am going with this?  Using pejorative labels to silence your critics has been a strategy of those on the left for too many years now.  Listen to Christie ... it's time for Republicans to stop trying to be loved and go for respect instead. 

I actually think Romney gets it.