Rising from the Liberal Squat

I was so pleased tonight to receive an email from my sister, Darcy, in Richfield, MN, USA. She told me about her latest foray into the volunteer fields and I was thrilled. She epitomizes much of what is happening to Americans lately and it gives me great hope for the future of this great nation. Check out http://www.operationiraqichildren.org/ and tell me what YOU think of it. I think it's one of the best kept secrets of the war on Islamic terror today...a secret because you don't hear about it on the alphabet media outlets at all...not that I've seen anyway. Americans volunteering for the future of a people that they only recently got introduced to but who they feel great compassion for. What is even more touching is that these folks are doing what no politician can do with government aid. They are giving a personal touch to the love that is shared between all freedom-loving peoples.

As I noted in an earlier entry, I had a very troubling time after returning to the States from Viet Nam where I spent 1968-69 as a young Marine sergeant. It was a time when I came of age but it was also a time when the Liberal Left in this country was in a heavy squat delivering the most pungent bovine scat imaginable. Their self-loathing was expressed in violent America-hating and resulted in immeasurable harm to those of us that had become lovers of liberty and justice and had volunteered to serve our country. We had learned it from a healthy study of our country's origins and had formed strong commitments to it and a love for it. We weren't ashamed, but many were. Michael Savage (http://www.homestead.com/prosites-prs/index.html) calls them "Red Diaper Doper Babies". They were primarily products of the parentage of communists of the 30s when this country struggled with the Great Depression's demands on capitalism to reform. Pure capitalism had to reform, but it certainly didn't have to go to the extremes of the Stalinists or Maoists to do it. We blended in a little socialism and fixed a few loopholes. Laissez Faire Capitalism was unrestrained opportunity for abuse and human nature being what it is, there were abuses. It's just a good thing that we didn't get a full-blown Soviet system out of it.

It is indeed time for us to rise up and wipe the bovine scat from ourselves and tack toward a new era of loving what America stood for at its inception...takes some education, but it would be worth every hour spent.

Religious Extremism? I Doubt it!

"We do not live in a secular country. There are all sorts of people of faith that place moral values over personal freedoms. They are not all "wacky evangelicals." They are people who don't like Howard Stern piping a hard porn show over the airwaves and wrapping himself in the freedom of the First Amendment. They don't like being told that a young girl does not have to seek her mother's counsel about an abortion. They don't like seeing an eight-month-old fetus having his head punctured and his brains sucked out. They don't like being told the Pledge of Allegiance, a moment of silent prayer and the words "under God" are offensive to an enlightened few so nobody should be allowed to use them."

That's a Kevin Dowd quote from http://www.opinionjournal.com/best/?id=110005962 wherein the always 'right on" James Taranto has presented a pleasantly straight forward and entertaining opinion. It gets a bit tiresome hearing the idiots of the press and academia try to compare the "right wing Christians" with the radical Islamics of today. Go figger. If the above beliefs are the equivalent of Islamic terrorism, then the Pope ain't Catholic...and a cat ain't got a climbing gear.

I sure have enjoyed the Wall Street Journal Opinion Page these last couple of years. They have such insightful and scholarly writers...and funny. I pain when Taranto takes a day off. He's my favorite.

Viet Nam Put to Rest (Burying the Ignoble Warrior)

I heard a fella call a talk radio show yesterday that said he was a Viet Nam veteran and that the war was finally over for him with the elections this year. I can't say how much that spoke to me. I was in the US Marine Corps from 1966-70 and saw a year in Viet Nam from 1968-69. I felt the emotions of the times and was terribly distraught for years about the nasty treatment by our countrymen. The whole election experience this year has been like group therapy. Kerry got whacked by the Swift Boat Veterans for Truth (way to go guys!) and moral issues ruled the day. I'm waiting as I write for results of the Washington state gubernatorial race that may go for a republican. I'm encouraged. And it may be the military absentee ballots that sway it. That's great news.

Kerry spoke with the anti-American crowds with Hollyweird celebs for punctuation (for that is all they really are, functioning) and did much damage to me and my fellow military volunteers...patriots...of that era. I joined the Corps (when it was the least popular) for ideological and moral reasons...in as much as I understood them at the time. " Duty, Honor, Country" were not bad words then for many who went to war...only for the likes of John Kerry. As a Marine, I thought '"How could an officer leave his men after only four months "in country" and with such trivial "wounds?"' Marines don't leave their comrades (alive, wounded OR dead) on the battlefield. This guy was nothing of the quality it took to be a noble warrior. I'm inclined to remember him as the "Ignoble Warrior". He stood for all that I despise in a man...cowardice, opportunism, moral relativism, nacissism and Frenchism...the Frenchism like that of holding court for the likes of Yassur Arafat, that bloody, pedarastic terrorist, in a Paris hospital when all the civilized world should be happy he is leaving us (LEFT us...as I've just read). It reminds me of the meetings Kerry had as an inactive duty Navy officer (treasonous by a less tolerant society) with our enemy representatives in Paris during the Viet Nam war after he returned to besmirch the honor of all his "brothers" that he left on the field of battle. What a pathetic opportunist.

At any rate, his demise in the election brought a cheer to my heart and I'm sure that was true for many others of my ilk. It has wiped the spittle from the faces of us returning vets at last. Thanks, America.

Conservative Republican Union Man?

It's been quite a ride these 40 odd years since I was first introduced to political ideology. I remember thinking for a time when I was about 16 that my father was a communist because he was an official in the John Birch Society (mid 60s). The Media at that time was socialist and doing so well what it tried to do in this election cycle...twist the electorate their way with disinformation. I decided to join the Society and sleuth the organization. Well, I soon found out that it was just a conservative, America-loving educational movement that was a threat to the socialist elements in the US political scene and I lost my fears of it. Through my association with the Society, I learned much of what now resides in this little brain bucket about the founding fathers and the Constitution. For that I am grateful. Interestingly, it was part of the propaganda then to call it communist (even though it was staunchly anti-communist) because the Left really saw it as a threat. The Birchers met in "cells" according to the Lefties and that made them suspect. The "cells" were actually just study groups in homes that met together to discuss and share information about what was going on in the US and the world relative to the communist movements. It has since degraded from in-fighting and lost its savour. Too bad. It was also a tough job to keep the kooks from speaking for the Society from time to time causing great consternation for all involved. At any rate, enough said about it...just that it was my initiation into US politics.

With that conservative background, I had the good fortune to add a bit of socialism. I jointed the International Brotherhood of Electrical Workers in 1976 (after 1 year of law and 4 years in the Marine Corps...one in Viet Nam) and started at the bottom of the apprenticeship @$3.45 per hour. A little humility is good for the soul...a lot is even better. I gained an appreciation for the working man's environment and saw the need for representation in the workplace. I also recognized the great benefit to the construction industry of having readily available and trained workers to hire and lay off whenever it was economically convenient. It was more efficient than hiring and then maintaining a skilled workforce through tough economic times. The workers shared the burden of the slow times. I have a list of hirings and layoffs that would stagger the average person but seem mundane to the other "boomers" like myself.

Add to this my faith and the plot thickens. I suppose the liberals would now consider me the typical red-stater...ignorant and a Bible-thumper. I remember early on in my Christian experience that I thought that unions were demonic and that I must "obey the authority over me" and not pay attention to the union. Many Christians today in the work force think that way too. It caused (and is causing) great disruption in the workplace. I did a good deal of thought and prayer about that and have come to realize that the "authority over me" is the agreement between the union and managemant and if I abide by it, then I am doing the best thing I can to be to respect proper authority.

With those seemingly irreconcilable differnces of ideology, I come to this place. It's a place that's not so odd, really. There are many of us closet Christian conservative union members that were thrilled with the outcome of the elections this year. Though the Democrats have pushed for union issues, they have also sold out the moral questions and have used my wages through dues and taxation to buy votes to put in folks that keep doing the same. I find myself in the Republican camp because they most closely represent the moral standards that I am committed to. Most closely. Not completely. Like most folks, I would that they would see things my way and make a special blend....like a Starbucks brew...of political dogma. Fat chance. We all want things our own way...human nature thing.

North by Northwest (or just plain North)

Ain't it great. I can hardly keep from smilin all day long lately. Bush won...won big. Like so many others who watched national news and the polls that were so relied on for a sample of things to come in the early hours of the election night, my wife and I were terribly depressed thinking that Bush was destined to lose. Dang. Who'da thunk it. The mainstream media got me (us) again...and we thought we were smarter'n that. Anyway, after a short while, all that disappeared when the results started coming in. What a thrill it was. We were giddy and spent lots of time bantering with each other on ideas to help the distressed liberals. One idea that surfaced was to go to a website that I found offering small plastic compasses for about $5/dozen and send them to liberals that wanted to move to Canada in protest. The compasses were doubly appropriate because they had a pointer (needle) that was red on the southern half. The compasses could help the liberals know where to go and where not to go with one needle. I just wish I was better at marketing this stuff real fast like. Hmmmmmm. Anyway, I guess we shouldn't be too concerned about all this...liberals are fond of threatening and then just not following through.