Posts Tagged ‘morality’

“Death Fell From the Sky”

Monday, May 30th, 2016
Death Fell From the Sky

Death Fell From the Sky

It is the terror of not being able to do anything but fall on your stomach and hope the bomb won’t land on you. It’s the helplessness and terror of sudden visions of a ripping sensation in your back, shrapnel coursing through your chest, total blackness, maybe death.

In the morgue, the bodies were laid on slabs in the grotesque positions in which they had died. Fear contorted their faces. Their clothes were blue-black from incendiary bombs. One little girl in a red sweater, barefoot, still clutched a piece of jump-rope in her hand.

These statements are from the reporting of Elizabeth McIntosh, from an article she penned in December 1941, though it wasn’t published until seventy-one years later, as editors thought the account too graphic and morbid for publication at the time.

On Friday, our arrogantly ignorant, anti-American president spoke in Hiroshima, Japan, calling the dropping of the atomic bomb an unjustified act. The full text of his speech may be found here.  This article is my response to the Traitor-in-Chief, whose treacherous anti-Americanism, immoral collaboration with America’s enemies, and his continuing contempt for facts, history, justice, and reason, must be refuted.

On December 7th, 1941, the United States came under attack by the forces of Imperial Japan at Pearl Harbor, Hawaii.  Somehow, the President of the United States, himself a native of Hawaii, apparently managed to grow up for some part of his childhood without bothering to learn the history immediately available to him.  Somehow, he managed instead to adopt an alien sense of justice and moral standard that are in direct conflict with the facts, and the historical record.  I am ashamed that this man is and has remained president for the last seven-and-one-half years.  I am disgusted by his moral equivocation.  I am not going to permit his lies, delivered in Hiroshima, to go on unanswered.  Barack Obama is a treacherous arrogant enemy of the United States.  He ought to be removed from his office for his high crimes and misdemeanors, and if our government was not populated by malingering charlatans, if not before, certainly after his remarks in Hiroshima, his removal would be under way.

When the B-29 bomber opened its bay doors high over Hiroshima on August 6th, 1945, its pilot Paul Tibbets at the controls, releasing its revolutionary and deadly payload on an unsuspecting city below, it was not an act of even questionable morality, never mind evil, but instead, the unmistakable response to an act of cowardice and evil that has provoked it less than four years before.  It was an act in the name of morality, the morality of the most generous people on the planet, who had been attacked, watched their countrymen killed, and who finally responded with the ultimate weapon mankind had yet produced.  That moment, when the searing flash of the first atomic weapon deployed in combat exploded over the city of Hiroshima, Japan, was the instant at which America fully realized its creed of defending the unalienable rights of mankind, beginning with those of her own citizens.

By the accounting of my moral standards, it is never justifiable to initiate the use of coercive force or to levy its threat unless and until the credible threat or enactment of same is introduced against you.  For this reason, the American doctrine has always been imbued with the notion of self-defense.  By tradition and the philosophy that guides it, Americans do not go out into the world looking for fights in which to engage, instead generally waiting until somebody initiates a fight with us.  This doctrine is thoroughly represented in our criminal code, our military doctrine, and our history as a nation.  It is not to say that America has ever been a perfectly faithful practitioner of that position, but it is to say that it remains the dominating idea in our culture and our government, despite many attempts to reverse or to change it. On August the 6th, and again on August the 9th of 1945, America applied the moral exclamation point to this ethical premise.

Barack Obama has attacked America’s moral foundation with the assertion that the dropping of the atomic weapons at Hiroshima and Nagasaki were acts of those who he deems to have simply rationalized the violence of nuclear weapons.

How easily we learn to justify violence in the name of some higher cause.

The cause of justice is a higher cause.  The purpose of defense of one’s life, one’s property, one’s family and neighbors, along with one’s country is a higher cause. To suggest that the dropping of the atomic bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki was less than fully, morally justified is to proclaim that a United States President ought to unnecessarily prolong wars and make wasteful use of the lives of the men and women of the Armed Services.  Had they been ready sooner, we’d have been equally justified in using them on Germany as well.

There are several facts that Obama and other anti-Americans ignore in their shrill contempt for the use of the atomic bombs. One is that estimates suggested that an actual invasion of Japan would cost America the lives of more than a million additional service-members, and that the cost in total deaths to the Japanese people, their soldiers, sailors, airmen, and civilians, may have been as many as ten times that number.  Ending the war rather more quickly actually saved millions of lives.

As a practical matter, the United States Government had produced exactly three bombs, one of which was tested at the Trinity site in New Mexico, of the implosion type that was eventually used on Nagasaki. The “Little Boy,” dropped on Hiroshima was of the simpler “gun type” device, basically propelling a plug of Uranium-235 down a short gun barrel into a sphere of Uranium-235, the two combining to achieve a super-critical mass and thus cause the nuclear fission chain-reaction. Little Boy contained almost all of the U-235 we had managed to produce by that point at the Oak Ridge facility.  The “Fat Man” device dropped on Nagasaki, and its test-twin at Alamogordo, New Mexico, was a Plutonium 239 device, and it was tested because it was a highly complex device using shaped explosive charges to compress a collection of Plutonium wedges inward toward a central point, where the Plutonium would likewise achieve super-critical mass to begin the chain-reaction resulting in the detonation.  In short, it was not as though we had manufactured a stockpile of these weapons at the time, because it was very difficult to refine the Uranium in sufficient quantities to provide enough for a gun-type device.  Plutonium was easier to produce, although production of the substance still took time, and was still being ramped-up.  After “Fat Man” fell on Nagasaki, it would be a month or more before the United States would be able to employ another, had it become necessary.  Thankfully, Japan finally surrendered after realizing they could not prevail against such an awesome weapon.

There are other facts often overlooked or ignored by modern historians and folks with a political agenda to their appraisals of our use of the atomic bombs.  These mustn’t be left out, because out of context, the atomic bombings are not so easy to understand.  The question is often asked, for instance, “Why did we not bomb Tokyo rather than Hiroshima, since Tokyo is the capital city, from which leaders directed the war effort, and where Emperor Hirohito had his seat of power?”  The answer to this question ought to be obvious, but apparently, our education system does a poor job of making such things understood: If we destroyed Japan’s leadership and hierarchy of command, who would surrender?  Who would be in charge?  Who would effectively “turn off” the war from their side? Instead of an orderly surrender, we might have faced instead the prospect of uncontrolled, disorganized resistance that would go on for years or even decades.  By permitting the command structure of Japan to survive, we preserved the ability to have their own hierarchy issuing the orders to surrender to all the forces and ordinary citizenry of Japan.

Another fact ignored by political propagandists is that Japan had conducted atrocities far in excess of anything ever done to Japan by American forces. Millions of people, primarily Chinese, were butchered under the auspices of the Japanese high command. To suggest that the atomic bombings had been “inhumane” demands that we ignore the incredible cruelty inflicted upon millions of people by the Japanese.

Another sickening premise argued by ludicrous leftists like President Obama, and indeed touched upon in his Hiroshima speech, and it is the idea that all civilians are “innocents” in war.  This is nonsense.  Civilians are not innocent if they support the activities of a cruel, despotic, war-making government.  If those civilians feed the machine of unjust war, they are parties to the injustice.  Civilians who are actively opposing the evil regime in question are as close as one gets to “innocents in war.”  For instance, if during WWII, we bombed a site in France, in the process killing inadvertently a number of members of the French Resistance, that would be the unfortunate killing of innocents.  On the other hand, when our bombers dropped thousands upon thousands of bombs upon Germany, hitting their factories, but in the process killing a number of civilians, those civilians were not “innocents” because they were active participants in the operations of the oppressive regime.  “Innocents” in a country being commanded by brutal dictators, irrational thugs, and other forms of human vermin have a responsibility as humans to participate in their own salvation and their moral responsibility for making war upon the regime is manifest.

Naturally, the leftists currently running the United States are interested in defaming the long-standing American concepts of morality with their own broken standard.  Obama’s assault in Hiroshima on the philosophy that has under-girded American foreign and defense policies for centuries is a clue and a key to the bankruptcy of leftists generally.  Indeed, our entire society had been framed by these moral concepts, so that when Obama and his surrogates in media undertake to demolish them, it is fundamentally an attack on the United States of an ideological as well as philosophical character.

As the nation marks Memorial Day, remembering our dead, let us go forth in solemn remembrance and embrace the moral underpinnings of our nation that had made it the greatest and most free in the history of man, knowing and fully understanding the moral superiority of Western values, and knowing with certainty that we had been right, logically and morally, in dropping the atomic bombs on Japan to hasten the end of a war that claimed many millions of lives around the globe, and many at the hands of the cruel Imperial Japanese leadership, who had no problem whatever with starving and torturing prisoners, marching them into oblivion, skewering babies like sausages with their bayonets, and murdering civilians in conquered territories as they pleased.

Most importantly with respect to the United States, the Japanese launched a sneak attack against us at Pearl Harbor, killing thousands of Americans, sending large portions of a battle fleet to the bottom, like the USS Arizona, that is still visible beneath the waves if you visit the Memorial bearing its name.  From that moment, when Japanese strike aircraft and fighters appeared over Hawaii that morning, the morality of what the United States would ultimately do in August of 1945 had been answered and endorsed, by the ignominious Japanese who had precipitated it.  Responsibility for the deaths of those at Hiroshima, Nagasaki, and indeed everywhere anyone else died in combat with Imperial Japan rests solely and forever with that regime, and those who empowered it. Death indeed “fell from the sky,” and when it first fell was on American territory, on December 7th, 1941.  Everything that followed was the rightful answer to that day.

As we remember the fallen, it is appropriate that we likewise remember the nature and circumstance in which they perished: They died in defense of a moral premise, observed uniquely in America among all other nations, that Justice must prevail, and that the evils which attack it must be opposed by all those worthy of its standard.  May we remember them, and remember that ours is a nation founded upon a moral premise unlike any before it, that we may preserve that moral standard long into an uncertain future.

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Posted in Barack Obama, Featured, History, Leftist Cabal, Leftwing Media Loons, Liars, News, Politics | 4 Comments »

The Advocates of Surrender

Sunday, September 29th, 2013

What they do best…

In the last several weeks, the number of analysts and columnists who have advised Republicans to accept Obama-care as the law of the land has been on the rise.  One after the next, they claim in low tones that if only we will accept the fate of Obama-care “for now,” when Republicans re-take control of the Senate and the White House, we will be able to repeal Obama-care and replace it with something slightly less disastrous.  Their prescription boils down to “elect more Republicans,” but I must confess that this “solution” leaves me a bit flat. After all, what good are Republicans, and how will they be elected in greater numbers if there is no effective difference between them and their supposed opponents?  Instead, I have come to interpret such advice differently, because I can rely on history as my Rosetta stone: “Quit, surrender, and capitulate in a battle you cannot win because we haven’t the energy or will to fight it.”  What all of these pragmatists ignore is the moral component of this fight.  They forget or choose to ignore that Obama-care will have very real and often lethal consequences for Americans.  It will destroy lives, families, and businesses.  Even assuming we might elect more Republicans in future elections, that will not restore or repair all the lives that will have been shattered by Obama-care, and to ignore this in order to justify surrender is an impeachment of all those who advocate it.

Let us consider the first victims of this strategy of appeasement and capitulation.  Already, more than one-hundred-thousand American workers have had their hours slashed in order to get below the “part-time” threshold as defined in Obama-care as thirty hours per week.  If you had been a part-timer working thirty-six hours weekly, to get below the threshold, your employer will likely cut you back to twenty-nine hours.  Having been schooled prior to the advent of the US Department of Education, I know that this cut represents a loss of roughly twenty percent of one’s wages.  If I approached you and demanded that you surrender twenty percent of your weekly wage, you’d rightly punch me in the mouth.  Which twenty percent of your income are you able to live without?  This feature of Obama-care alone will result in more people subsisting on the welfare state, and more people thrust down the income ladder into poverty.  On what basis can one claim that we should permit this until we elect a few more Republicans to help us undo it, when Republicans have sufficient power to stop it now?

Consider the Americans who will not find jobs because of Obama-care.  Small businesses won’t be hiring despite having been the well-spring of seventy percent of new jobs in America for most of my life.  More dependency.  More poverty.  More burdens for taxpayers.   It means more shattered American lives.  In the case of the young who are entering the work-force, it means arrested development in an economic sense, and it will result in more wretched conditions in young families, who generally need the health-care the least, since they’re generally healthier, but who will be held to pay for the health-care of others.  What sort of hay-wire moral compass must exist in the Bermuda Triangle that makes real lives disappear into a sea of uniform numbers in Washington DC?  This is abominable, but what makes it all the more ghastly is that there are those who don’t mind the tragedy if it somehow helps to elect more Republicans, though they can’t tell us why this would happen.

Imagine that the purveyors of temporary surrender are correct, and that despite any clear reason, Republicans are able to take over the Senate in 2014, and the White House in 2016, giving them the power to fully repeal Obama-care if they so choose.  What consolation will this be to the Americans who have their lives cut short by a denial of life-saving treatment, or to their families after they’ve gone?  How many more Americans will not be treated until their various afflictions become lethal because the wait for treatment had become insufferably long?  How will electing more Republicans at some future date help to save them from now to the time of the supposed elections and mythical future repeal?

Barack Obama offers “if it will save only one child’s life, we must act” as justification for gun control, but such a view of Obama-care is not forth-coming despite his own cold, calculated prescription for Grandma to “take a pill.”  He knows, as Congressional Republicans know, that Obama-care will lead to the deaths and suffering of millions.  They even know it will not substantially change the number of uninsured, and we already know by virtue of our own premiums that it is already driving up costs.  Nothing is good or right or moral about this program, and yet the advocates of appeasement and surrender continue to insist that we ought to just swallow hard and wait for a moment that may never come, particularly for those who may not now live to see it.

The advocates who tell us that we must wait on such a moment are of the same mind as those pragmatists who would not rise in opposition to slavery.  They’re entrenched, but paralyzed with fear.  They label their opponents “radicals” and “extremists,” and they cast aspersions at those who still revere Barry Goldwater’s 1964 declaration that “extremism in defense of liberty is no vice.” It’s small wonder that they rise in anger to the well of the Senate to bemoan their comparison to the likes of Neville Chamberlain: It’s not so much a matter of comparison as it is an identification.  They claim to fear a destructive civil war within the Republican party, but what they won’t mention is that they have been waging it against conservatives for decades.   They demand a return to the party of Nixon, Ford, Bush and Bush while what the country urgently needs is a return to the party of Reagan and Lincoln.

I am willing to wage a civil war within the Republican party, because by my estimation, it’s already begun, and there is no way to repair it to my satisfaction by any other means but naked, political warfare.  The evidence is in, and there can be no realistic expectation that the surrender-monkeys – the Vichy Republicans – are up to a needed fight, because when it comes to identifying one’s adversaries, they are nearly indistinguishable from Democrats, too frequently collaborating with them.

We must defeat this impulse to surrender, because our country and the lives and fortunes of millions of Americans are very much at stake.  To take the advice of the surrender lobby is to attempt to defer a fight, the costs of which are much too high to ask a people to peaceably bear.  If they will not engage now, we must battle on without them, and fight them too, or first, if they evince themselves as an obstacle to victory.  There is a deep moral crisis in the Republican party, and it issues forth from the mouths and keyboards of these advocates of surrender because they expect to avoid the consequences of capitulation.   For the rest of us, who know there can be no escape or safety in delay, this war must be our urgent endeavor.  While they defer engagement in order to save a supposed electoral victory in a future that may never materialize, we are fighting to save the lives and liberties of real Americans in the here and now, and it’s a battle we dare not lose because it’s as much for the soul of a nation as for the individual souls we’re fighting to save.

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Posted in Activism, Featured, GOP Establishment, News, Obamacare, Surrender Lobby | 3 Comments »

The Morality of the Left

Saturday, September 29th, 2012

What the Left Seeks

Listening to Mark Levin on Thursday evening, I wondered if the Great One fully understood quite what he was saying.  He went on a bit of a rant about the immorality of the left, and their willingness to bankrupt the country in the name of their Utopian dreams, but as I listened, I began to realize that Dr. Levin doesn’t understand the root of the left’s central motive.  As I listened to him damning their behavior and tactics, cursing the statists as immoral, I think he missed the whole truth.  You see, it isn’t that the left is immoral, or even that they are amoral, but instead, the left adheres to a completely different moral system with an alien motive at its root.  There are all sorts of moral systems, some religiously based, while others are entirely secular.  The question is always: What is the root of one’s morality.  For most people, morality is an expression of their fundamental values, and this is where the difference manifests.  Some have noticed that the left seems to readily ally with the Islamist front, both domestically and internationally, and to the degree this is true, it is because they share a central value:  Theirs is the morality of death.

It’s easy enough for most Americans to understand that the militant Islamists value death over life, and indeed, one of their now-deceased leaders made the matter plain:

“We love death. The U.S. loves life. That is the difference between us two.” – Osama bin Laden

Osama bin Sharkbait was at least honest about it, but even had he been inclined to lie about it, his actions and those of his cohorts would still make the truth obvious.  Theirs is a system of morality that places the value of the paradise in death they pursue above the value of anything here on Earth, but since guaranteed entry into paradise is only obtained through martyrdom, they are quite motivated to pursue both through mass murder in suicidal acts of monstrous proportions.  Their rabidly single-minded pursuit of this end gives rise to the grim spectacle of a mother raising her children to be future suicide bombers.  This is a value base so thoroughly removed from what we in the West would consider “normal” that we have a good deal of difficulty accepting that any person, never mind a loving mother, could so callously send her children to their deaths. In falling prey to this naive view, it permits us to overlook the fact that the equally rabid left is no less committed to the cause of death, though they don’t seem to be strapping-on suicide vests at the moment. Or are they?

What separates the virulent statist left from the garden variety “liberals” is that they are equally willing to impose death and mayhem, to include mass murder, if it is in the service of their aims.  It is true that the average “liberal” is what might be termed a “useful idiot,” inasmuch as he or she is unwilling or unable to form the thoughts necessary to consider the ultimate meaning of their advocacy, so that they become true tools of the more virulent sort who happen to know full well what it is that they intend, and why.  It’s at this point that some of my more moderately conservative friends will interrupt me to suggest that I really couldn’t possibly believe this of some of my fellow Americans, and yet I will be blunt with you as I am with them: I not only believe it to be true based on the logic, but know it to be true based on their actions.

The drooling left composed of the dictatorial thugs-in-waiting are much more discreet in many cases, and much less honest than bin Laden about their aims.  They know that many of their useful idiots would abandon them if they fully understood the meaning and intent behind their actions, so that while they are no less enamored of death than their Islamist friends, they are much less willing to state it openly to the hearing of the world.  The left’s intelligentsia cannot wait, however, to inflict their vision upon the rest of us, and it is chafing them something terrible to wait to see if Obama is re-elected.  If he is, we might well expect them to try to have their way, and depending upon how you read this President, he may not be the least bit unwilling to go along or even lead them.

I am asked for evidence, and so I will give you a few morsels, of which you are already aware, but that you have permitted yourself to set aside as evidence of intent.  I would ask my readers simply:  What is the meaning of a mandated health-care law that destroys the private insurance market, imposes government-run death panels, decides who will get treated and under what conditions, and holds all people who work to pay for all people who do not?  What is the meaning of a health-care law that will, by its sheer budgetary gravity, wreck the whole of the health-care delivery system of the United States of America, that for all its flaws, had been the most modern, the most capable, and the most thoroughly life-giving implementation of health-care anywhere on the planet, and had provided more treatments, cures, and therapies than any other on the entire planet?  What must be motivating any person who knows this will be the result of their system, and yet goes on with it in what we perceive as defiance of the naked truth?

I allow that we conservatives perceive their desires as being in spite of the facts because I firmly believe, and indeed now know that this isn’t the case at all:  They know their system will result in disaster.  They know their economic practices are lies intended to destroy the country.  They know that their view of criminal justice merely lets criminals off the hook, while making their victims doubly accosted.  They know all of this.  I speak not of the useful idiots, who don’t know much of anything except that they want their “Obama-phones” or “Cash for Clunkers” or “EBT cards,” or their truckload of free contraceptives, or whatever they’re after on any particular occasion.  Instead, I am talking of the cloistered, ivory-tower intellectuals of the left, who fancy themselves geniuses of social organization, but who without the forcing hand of government could not assemble an afternoon tea for lack of practical knowledge and experience.  These are the people who sit about thinking over the problems of what to do with millions of intractable, un-rehabilitated conservatives and capitalists once the statists finally attain their end-to-end control.  Their answer is the same for this problem as for any other: Death.  Kill them.

When it comes to the environment, the radical left tells us in coded language that the Earth can only happily support some fifty to one-hundred millions of us.  What they do not state is their intention to reduce the global human population to that number, and the way to accomplish that will be…what?  They also tell us we must reduce our energy consumption, but how is that to be done without reducing our condition and standard of living?  If our standard of living is an expression of the pursuit of life, what must be the intention at the heart of the desire to diminish it?  What you will find as you study the radical left is that their every policy is not merely anti-American, but anti-human, and anti-life.  It is not merely the unborn who they wish to abort.  Their blood-lust knows no bounds, and their hit-list stretches to the limits of the globe.

You might readily understand how the Islamic Supremacists values agree with their actions, as well as their words, but you might still wonder what sort of value system constructs the ethos of the left.  You might not understand why their anti-human reflexes translate into anti-American sentiments.  These are people who seek the finality of death, not because they imagine themselves in a paradise accompanied by some arbitrary number of virgins, but because at their heart, they hate themselves in the most fundamentally thorough way.  These are the people who hate their own lives with the passion of the radical Islamists, but who lack the courage of their convictions.  The best analogy might be the depraved, maniacal man, who murders his wife and children before turning the gun on himself.  In a social and psychological sense, this is the motive of so-called “intellectuals” of the left.  It is as irrational as the distraught young woman who aborts her child because she cannot bear the thought of giving the child up for adoption, to live on without her in the care of other parents.  This, she pleads, she does from her heart, a motive she claims is born of motherly love(!)  but what motivates it is something else entirely: “If I can’t have you, no one will.”  We once institutionalized people of that mindset, but now they serve openly in government, and we have a society that has been rigged to produce bumper crops of them.

You might argue that I had been wrong about all this, and that the evidence lies in their “compassion” for the poor as expressed through their welfare state.  It is true that there is evidence within the welfare state, but it supports my thesis, and it can be seen in the manner in which the welfare state is funded, administered, and executed.  As lavish as our welfare state has become, it still represents a degradation in moral underpinnings that is lethal.  When a welfare recipient’s morality is reduced to “I want what I want because I want it, and somebody should be compelled to provide it,” what you’re really witnessing is a human being who has had their entire purpose in self-efficacy replaced with a government hand-out.  This person may be free to move about, to speak, to worship, and to own their persons, but they are no longer free. At the same time, all those Americans forced to pay for the welfare state do so only at the point of a gun, because it is to their own gruesome detriment to have such a monstrosity in existence.  Their standard of living is reduced, which means that their lives and their trajectories are diminished, advancing the leftists’ cause of accosting their lives. There is a reason that every socialist or communist revolution begins with its aim of destroying the “middle class.”

The favorite target of the statists is “the rich,” and they pretend that there is some natural dishonesty implicit in the accumulation of wealth.  They set about to destroy wealth wherever they find it, for the pleasure of having done so, but their reason is the same: An unending hatred of life.  A person of wealth has made it easier to sustain his or her own life against the circumstances nature may impose.  Wealthy people are every bit as subject to cancer or other diseases, but their wealth enables them to fight on against it with a greater arsenal of weaponry.  More treatments are at their ready disposal, and in the end, barring some unforeseen accident, their lives will be extended.  The truth is that we all have a finite amount of time, but what wealth permits any of us who obtain it to do is to extend that time marginally, but also to more thoroughly enjoy such time as we have, enjoy more frequently the company of those we love, and to pass along such wealth as we leave unused to our heirs and to the causes we value.  In that sense, the value of our wealth can live on in perpetuity.  One could argue that such men as Bill Gates obtain a sort of immortality because the foundations they establish can theoretically go on as long as society endures.

The institutional left abhors that notion.  The sort of people who comprise the hard-core left will never obtain wealth by creative, life-giving means.  Instead, they must trick and coerce, and the ready vehicle for such schemes is government.  It is this reason that has always led leftists to seek positions in governing authority.  They wish to be able to impose their schemes, and the pile of bodies they leave in their wake is a historical proof of my thesis.  From Stalin’s “Five-year Plan(s),” to Mao’s “Great Leap Forward,” and now Obama’s “Forward,” they always have the same approach, and the identical means as their tool: The naked force of coercion and the threat of death.

When a man lies about his infidelity, you can easily guess his motive is to conceal the truth from his wife and to preserve his reputation.  When a man lies to all the people of a country about the results of his course of actions undertaken on behalf of the country, you might guess his motive had been to conceal his failures, while preserving his job.  When a man lies to the country about the whole body of his intentions, attempting to disguise not merely what he has done, but what he is going to do, you must wonder about his motives.  If a man’s plan is to destroy the wealth of a nation, and the evidence lies in his past performance, and in his continued advocacy of the same policies, there can be only one possibility:  The destruction of the country is the object that man seeks.

Ladies and gentlemen, you have been told that the radical left is immoral, but I caution you that they are immoral only by our standards and values.  By the values they hold dear, they are perfectly consistent, and unflinchingly “moral.”  Barack Obama doubtless views himself as a moral paragon, because in his system of values, diminishing America is the good.  America has been through most of its history the country of life.  America had been that place and that system of laws and morals in which men and women have been free to establish their own futures, by their own efforts.  It was this self-efficacious characteristic of the American culture that had made ours the most prosperous nation on the planet.  For you and I, who hold life as a value to be pursued and cherished, America had been our place.  Millions of immigrants from around the globe have come here, most in pursuit of that same basic value system.

The morality of the left recognizes in that America an enemy that must be defeated.  It must be throttled.  It must be diminished and bankrupted and ultimately abolished.  What they value is death, and for more than two centuries, America had been death’s most lethal opponent.  A life-giving prosperity had spread slowly across the land, but it spread only because its people had valued life.  In its relations around the globe, the United States had gone to war many times, always in the name of punishing the wicked, and always in the name of life and its prerequisites: Justice and Liberty.   It is sad that by his twisted moral standards, Osama bin Laden recognized in America a simple truth its own people have too often neglected:

“The U.S. loves life.”

 

What kinder compliment could he have paid our nation?  He thought it a smear.  He believed life a trivial matter. It’s among such men that life is always a disposable quantity, particularly the lives of others, and it’s why when Barack Obama says “there will be bumps in the road,” your curiosity should be piqued.  Those “bumps” are lives, Americans, but he dismisses their deaths as “bumps in the road.”  What moral system permits a man to view his countrymen in this way?  What kind of ethos views life as a trivial matter?  If you wonder why the left has an obvious affinity for the Islamic Supremacists, wonder no longer.  While the Islamists do not hide their contempt for life, the leftist intelligentsia seeks to conceal it lest their useful idiots recoil in terror at their motive. That is their grim secret.  That is the truth all their euphemisms are designed to shade. If you wish to defeat them, you must not hesitate to unmask them.

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Posted in Conservatism, Ethics, Featured, Global Jihad, Leftist Cabal, News, Politics | 6 Comments »

Impositions of Morality: Arguing With Lefties

Sunday, February 5th, 2012

A Different Approach

Over the course of your political life, if you’re a conservative, you have probably run into an issue or ten where the focus is a matter of  morality in some way.  Abortion is one of the issues, and if you happen to favor a prohibition, you will be attacked as some sort of Neanderthal who wants to impose his or her morality on others.  I’m sure you’ve all heard this, and in some contexts, I suppose a few of you may have said this, and it is the standard answer leftists use when you touch on an issue where they are fearful of being undone.  One of the problems for conservatives is that too often, we cede this ground without a fight, not challenging their claim, and not contradicting its basic premise either.  This is the kind of bumper-sticker argument that frequently appeals to the young, and if we’re going to beat the liberals, this is one instance where me must learn to fight fire with fire.

You can almost write a script of the order of remarks in such a debate, wherein you have a liberal on one side, and a conservative on the other.  My approach to these sorts of debates is now much different than it was two decades before.  When I see that such an argument is imminent, I now take the step of a preemptive strike:

“Don’t you agree that as individuals, it is wrong to impose our individual moral standards upon others?”

Upon hearing this issue forth from your mouth, the liberal inevitably thinks victory is already achieved, and they smile (either inwardly or outwardly) as they wait to close in for the kill:

“Yes, absolutely, I believe that.”

It’s now your turn to smile. Show all of your teeth.  Whatever the subject, be it abortion or welfare, or anything in between, this is your moment to pounce upon them with vigor:

“Why do you then impose your morality by virtue of the tax code?”

They may look at you in confusion, as the formula is somehow “off.” They don’t have a scripted recipe for this ready, and it’s not in their 1-2-3 Half-Bake Liberal Cookbook. They almost immediately and reflexively turn to the next best thing:

“No I don’t! What are you talking about?”

Take your time, as you already have them on the ropes, and do to them what they ordinarily try to do to you: Badger and mock them.

“You think rich people should pay a higher percentage, right?

“uh, yeah…”

“You believe people should be able to deduct child-care expenses, right?”

“sure, I uh…”

“Mortgage interest? College tuition?  Their children?  Their government-approved home improvements?”

“well, I, uh, look, that’s not what I…”

“That’s the truth of it, isn’t it, and you’re imposing your morality at every turn! Why?”

“It’s the right thing to do…”

“According to whom?”

“Well, everybody…”

“You don’t speak for everybody! Who are you to speak for everybody and place your own view above all of theirs? What sort of moral superiority do you practice?  What sort of person are you anyway?”

If they’re not crying by now, it’s because they’re frozen.  If you’ve done this sort of thing to one of them in front of a crowd of their friends, all the better.  By now, if they’re not looking for their blankets while sucking their thumbs, they soon will be.

Now you might say that this may work with the tax code, or with welfare programs, but you might ask me how it could ever work with abortion.  That’s easy too, but remember what their game is and how you must defeat it, and the answer is that you must always take the initiative from them without having seemed to have done so:

“Don’t you agree that as individuals, it is wrong to impose our individual moral standards upon others? I mean, you wouldn’t want somebody imposing their will on your right to life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness, right?”

Again, they will be a bit disarmed at this point, because you seem to be saying something not so controversial, and they will generally agree pleasantly.

“So given that, if somebody were to impose their estimation on the moral value of your life, that would be horrible, wouldn’t it?  Nobody should have that right, should they?  Nobody should be able to say to you what your life is worth, or whether you have a right to it, right?”

“Of course not. It’s preposterous! You can’t do that to people!”

They may even throw in a little indignant  grand-standing to prove their commitment to this argument.  Then it’s your turn:

“So then why do you do it?”

“Huh?”

“Why do you impose your estimate of another human’s worth on those persons and call them disposable?”

“I don’t!”

“You’re in favor of abortion, aren’t you?”

“That’s different! That isn’t even a person!!!!”

“According to whom?”

“Well, everybody, science, law, ROE V. WADE you know, EVERYBODY!”

“You now speak for everybody?”  (Rinse and repeat.)

Now you may on occasion run into the slightly more sophisticated liberal, who has thought these things through a little more than the average, and when you do, they’ll try to switch the context back, but don’t let them. Stick to your premise, and your context, and even chide them for so doing.  Mockery is permissible, and in fact, preferred.  If you have a really smart one on the line, an admitted rarity to be sure, since most liberals I know add an automatic one-hundred points to their actual IQs, just remind them of a few things worth noting:  Screaming  “everybody” and “society” or “government” and “science” does not constitute an escape clause from this moral proposition.

This is because a moral system or standard that references third parties for their alleged validity cannot be valid.  For instance, saying “the law says…” is of no value, since you can write a law that says anything at all.  Saying “science” is meaningless because for every possible position there exists at least one scientist somewhere who disagrees, and his name just might be Galileo.  To say “society” is to argue a falsehood since none can claim to speak for “society” or “everybody” and in most cases not even “all those present”(unless you’re in a room full of liberals.)

You might say, “but Mark, but Mark, God is a third party! Are you ruling God out?”  Yes, in this context, I am afraid I am, for at least one very good reason:  Who can claim to know God’s mind?  If you use this argument, they will throw that back in your face mercilessly, and in logic, they have a valid point.  You might then wonder, if you haven’t already, “but Mark, how can you claim rights that come from God?”  I don’t, and if you read my arguments in this blog carefully, you will have noted I make no such arguments.  This is because lefties will naturally throw at me: “How do you know? Can you prove it?”  Of course, at that point, I would be stymied if that were the basis of my argument.

Instead, I rely upon something the founders described as “self-evident.”  They described it as “Nature, and Nature’s God.”  You see, whether there is a respect in your heart or not for the existence of God, you must admit of the existence of Nature, being part of it, and in it at all times.  It is the context and the environment in which you exist, and in which any such argument takes place.  There is no avoiding it.  If you believe in God, you naturally believe He created all in Nature, and Nature itself, but even if you do not believe in a God, you cannot deny the existence of, well, all existence.

Now you still may ask how I argue that with a liberal who insists that rights are not a natural construction of our universe but instead a figment easily removed by the government or a mob.  They extend their view most particularly to property in all its forms, since it is their peculiarly disclaimed objective.  Waive at them your billfold, or your purse, and ask them if they’d like its contents, all else being equal.  If they stubbornly answer “No,” you can ask them why they insist government take it for them.  If they answer “yes,” you need only say: “Come and take it if you can.”

That’s all the proof of your right that you need, but it’s also the proof of their depravity.  For all their baseless argumentation, what they really condense into is a tribe of primitives with clubs, willing to bash in your skull, in order to get their way, just the same way as their ancestors, and every other miserable statist who has ever lived.  Over the years, we’ve yielded far too much ground to them by permitting them to pretend morality only has one side, and only a few applications.   Like your own ancestors, who civilized this world and wrested it from their kind, perhaps only temporarily, your answer must remain the same: “No.”

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The Deadliest Sin

Sunday, August 28th, 2011

Let's Talk About Five of Them

I was asked today by one gracious writer what I thought was the worst problem we face as a country, and I hesitated, but then answered unreservedly.  Of all the things that confront us, none are more corrosive, intractable, or widespread than that which I consider the deadliest of all sins: Greed.  You might wonder if I hadn’t slipped a gear and shifted into liberal-loony-land with rants about erroneously defined greed, but if you’ll permit me, I’ll be glad to explain.  No other human failing leads to more suffering.  It has been true through all of the history of mankind, and it is to be found in Western civilizations greatest texts, but one of the worst problems about greed is that nobody seems to agree what it is.  It’s my intention here to offer you my own definition, so that you may measure it against your own, and draw your own conclusions.

I hold that greed is the desire for the unearned in material, prestige, reality, or spirit.  In truth, you could simply say “the unearned” and let it go at that, but for the fact that many will neglect the other aspects and focus solely on material matters.  Let’s consider one of Western civilization’s great texts, and examine the Ten Commandments: Four are with regard to man’s relationship with the Almighty, but six are with respect to man’s relations with other men.  Of these six, five could be reduced to a single concept using the definition of greed I’ve laid out.

  • You shall not murder.
  • You shall not commit adultery.
  • You shall not steal.
  • You shall not bear false witness against your neighbour.
  • You shall not covet your neighbour’s house; you shall not covet your neighbour’s wife, or male or female slave, or ox, or donkey, or anything that belongs to your neighbour.

I realize you might wonder how greed is related to murder.  One who commits that act does so for some purpose, but what is it that makes it an expression of greed?  Sometimes, that motive is robbery.  That’s plain enough.  Sometimes the motive is to silence the victim.  This is a  desire for an unearned reality.  Sometimes, a murder is committed for sport.  This is to steal a life for one’s own pleasure, and therefore clearly an act motivated by greed.

Like murder, adultery seems a little challenging on the surface, but under closer examination, it fits the same criteria. People who commit adultery do so generally not wishing to be discovered. This permits them to pursue the pleasure they seek, while maintaining the appearance and respectability of a faithfully married person.  The person who wants this obviously wants what has not been earned, or once earned, discarded and forfeited by their own choices.

Stealing is clear enough.  It doesn’t take rocket science to see the application of greed as a motive in theft.

Bearing false witness is just another way of saying “lie.” To lie to another is an attempt to fake reality. It has widespread applications, but the desire for a false reality is clear evidence of greed.

As with stealing, covetousness is also clearly a matter of greed.

Having established these as instances of behavior driven in some way by greed, let us now consider together the motive of a person who wishes to live without effort and at the expense of others.  Is it not greed?  What of the politician who seeks the prestige of an office and the votes it takes to arrive and remain there without providing the actual service for which he or she was elected?  Is this not greed?  What of the rich man who defrauds his many customers, lying about his products and services to gain more than he would had he been honest?  Is this not greed?

Let us now consider what is not greed.  Is it greed for a person to wish to keep what one has earned by his or her efforts?  Is it greed to wish to be able to employ one’s talents in pursuit of profit?  Is it greed to charge a customer what they are willing to pay for precisely that which they expect?

Do situational ethics come into play?  For instance, we all agree that theft is wrong, and clear evidence of greed, but is it still greed if one were to steal a loaf of bread to feed one’s starving family?  Here is where some controversy will generally arise, because there are those who will say proudly that they will do anything to provide for their families, to include begging, borrowing, or stealing.  Conveniently omitted from that list of “anything” is murder, but you can bet that for some, its omission is a matter of pleasantry but not fact.  My response is that theft is theft, and while you can wrap it up in the pretty bows of necessity all you like, if you resort to theft, you are a thief, and by definition, greed is your motive.  You are seeking the unearned.

You might well wonder how I came to this topic, among all the things people have emailed to me today, and I suppose I owe an explanation.  Simply put, I was asked by a friend about a teen-aged child’s desire for a cellphone.  Apart from all the other reasons I tend to oppose the widespread issuance of cellphones to children, one that has stuck with me these last few weeks was the story from early 2010 about cellphones as a new welfare benefit available to the poor.  Those under the mistaken impression that the poor are somehow incapable of greed really ought to get back in touch with reality.  Much as my friend might like to get his teen a cellphone, he can’t afford one, and economics has ultimately answered the question.  Apparently, however, this need not be an obstacle, unless you happen to work for a living.

What sort of culture have we become when a man who works 60 hour weeks cannot afford a cellphone for his kid, but we now see the government issuing cellphones to others, gratis?  My friend is now in the position of paying for somebody else’s cellphone, but he can’t afford one for everybody in his own family who he thinks may need one.  Ladies and gentlemen, you may wonder why I would wish to talk about greed, and being Sunday morning, this may be one sermon more than many of you are willing to endure, but I must ask you again:  When did the unlimited wishes of the poor become a command to which we must all now answer?

This isn’t merely an entitlement mentality, but a sheer, unrestrained form of greed.  Our government and its bureaucrats now coerce or extort companies to provide free Internet service.  What else, that you or I pay for, is to be issued to others “for free?”

You and I know there are no free phones, no free Internet, and no free lunch, yet we are permitting more and more people to become accustomed to free everything.  Is a cellphone now an indispensable part of the “safety net?” Is Internet service too? We know by now that education, food, shelter, health-care, utilities, and even transportation are part of this widening net.  Where does it end?  Free video games?  Lottery tickets?  Travel allowances?  Vacations?  Golf clubs?  Green fees?  Pet food?  Pet-care?

As I said, the list is endless, and all I want to know is this:  How much of what I have earned will I be forced to do without so that others may have every wish fulfilled and every “need” met?  I think it’s long overdue that we began a national discussion.  I don’t know anybody who would not offer help to those in desperate need, but most I know are tired, exhausted and weary from providing the unlimited wants of those who never seem to manage to earn anything, except lately, a growing contempt.

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Downgraded America: We Warned Them

Saturday, August 6th, 2011

Not All Vultures made it into Frame

None of the events of Friday night are the slightest bit surprising to economically-aware Americans.  Economists warned you. For my part, I warned my own readers repeatedly, and Governor Palin warned you too.  On the Thursday before the debt ceiling surrender, Sarah Palin tried to cajole members of Congress to a firm stand.  A simple respect for logic screamed a warning in your minds from which there was no means of escape.  We all knew this was coming and we all knew it would be humbling.  Responsible Americans heard the warning loud and clear, but when they relayed the stark warning to Washington, the DC-Axis pretended not to hear the din, or castigated their critics and defamed them as terrorists.

None of this is news to you, who’ve been reading this blog.  If you’ve tuned to Beck, Limbaugh, Hannity, or Levin, among lesser lights, you cannot possibly have missed this.  Governor Palin warned against the irresponsibility of inaction, on her own Facebook page and during Fox News appearances.  Millions of thoughtful Americans made it clear that the Budget Control Act didn’t go far enough.  Washington sneered at them, and Speaker Boehner told Republicans to “get your ass in line.”   President Obama, for his part, continues to mouth aimless, meandering platitudes.  His Treasury Secretary, Tim Geithner, promised repeatedly that this would not happen.  Happen, it has, and now America can count on even worse economic news. It’s going to take real, solid, unwavering leadership to restore all that has been broken in the last three years, and more.

America is not dead, but the policies of Barack Obama, combined with the moral diminution of our nation, have taken her down to her knees.  Appropriately, many Americans have noted our position and prayed.  I know faithful conservatives who prayed daily for the President and the Congress to find the courage to do what was necessary and proper to safeguard the fiscal and financial state of our Union.  As in all things, such prayers may not be answered on a schedule most convenient to mankind, but this doesn’t mean Americans should despair and surrender their country.  At least three years of mostly Keynesian solutions combined with innumerable reflexive statist proposals have brought us to this.  The shocking truth is this: Barack Obama is not fit for the presidency, and neither are any who timidly sided with the Budget Control Act and its additional blank checks for Obama.

On Thursday, when the Dow slid over 500 points, the chattering class told you this was about Italy, and Europe generally.  While there is no denying that these had an effect on the markets, what’s inescapable now is the conclusion I offered you on Friday morning:  The market is revolting against three years of an impossible policy of borrow-and-spend and its immediate implications for our own economic future.  It also signifies the bankruptcy of a philosophy rooted in early 20th century progressivism. Last night, as the S&P downgraded our credit rating, the truth became apparent.  What we witnessed on Thursday was the movement of smart money in response to an impending threat.  All day Friday, the White House worked to stave off this downgrade until the markets had closed, hoping to take advantage of the cooling of passions weekends often provide to nervous markets.  They succeeded in large measure, and it was not until after the last echos of the closing bell had faded into memory when the first tremors from Washington began to move the earth beneath our feet.

This isn’t an ordinary event, yet in the hours leading up to its final exclamation point, the narrative from Washington had already begun to work its way into the media at large: “This is no big deal. There’s no crisis. There’s no reason for panic. It won’t mean higher interest rates.”  Any who have been deceived by past admonitions to abstain from worries should now carefully consider the sources of those remarks.  All needn’t be lost, but we, the American people, must resolve and plan to repair this, and it will take a coalition-building servant of tremendous dedication to lead us in bringing this economy hard-about.

We shall see up and downs; rises and falls, but we must measure the course ahead with care, and not turn to panic or despair.  We will have a chance to begin setting this right when the elections come mercifully upon us in November of 2012.  It is for this coming political season that you must preserve your devotion, energy, and passion.  Any silly liberal can(and will) run screaming into the night in fear and trepidation.  We must be what we are:  The solid foundation upon which this nation still rests.  We must have steel spines and strong constitutions.  Each of us.

To restore what has been wrecked by the ultimate drunken-drivers, we’ll be faced with challenges as few of us will have known.  That doesn’t mean certain failure, but instead only that we must give it our all.  Given the character of my audience, as I have been so fortunate to come to know it, I am well-versed in their capacity to do what is right, rather than what is easy.  We’re coming to that crossroad at which we will now be compelled to choose what sort of nation we will be.  Will we accept endlessly-mounting debt, at each increment yielding a bit more liberty and a good deal more of the futures of our children?

I am reminded of Patrick Henry’s famous speech, and encouragement may yet be found in the fact that our situation is not yet nearly so dire as the one he described.  We are not imminently at the point of arms, and there’s no reason we need ever be if only we will make full use of our power in the political battles before us.  Substituting political decisions in place of that context, let us remind ourselves of his staggering admonition:

“They tell us, sir, that we are weak; unable to cope with so formidable an adversary. But when shall we be stronger? Will it be the next week, or the next year? Will it be when we are totally disarmed, and when a British guard shall be stationed in every house? Shall we gather strength by irresolution and inaction? Shall we acquire the means of effectual resistance, by lying supinely on our backs, and hugging the delusive phantom of hope, until our enemies shall have bound us hand and foot? Sir, we are not weak if we make a proper use of those means which the God of nature hath placed in our power. Three millions of people, armed in the holy cause of liberty, and in such a country as that which we possess, are invincible by any force which our enemy can send against us. Besides, sir, we shall not fight our battles alone. There is a just God who presides over the destinies of nations; and who will raise up friends to fight our battles for us. The battle, sir, is not to the strong alone; it is to the vigilant, the active, the brave. Besides, sir, we have no election. If we were base enough to desire it, it is now too late to retire from the contest. There is no retreat but in submission and slavery! Our chains are forged! Their clanking may be heard on the plains of Boston! The war is inevitable and let it come! I repeat it, sir, let it come.”

We needn’t go further than to admit that our situation is not nearly so desperate.  We have no need of arms, but instead we have a desperate need of people to rise and challenge our adversaries in politics.  Our adversaries names are not only Obama and Reid and Boehner, but also John Doe and Joe Sixpack. We must look to our own homes and hearths and know what is in and amongst us.  We must mend the fences between neighbors. Go out this day and find one honest person, and tell them what you propose.  For my part, I will do so also, and this is what I shall say:

There is no avoiding the truth any longer.  We must reform all that is broken with the people in Washington, and if it means replacing them all, every one, then we must do so, as many as we can, in the coming elections.  We must find diligent and honest servants, and we must advocate their cause in our own names.  We must seek out such leaders as we’ll need, starting most immediately amongst ourselves.  We can choose leaders to help guide us at the top, but no leader can carry on her back the combined weight of the world’s problems.  A leader must find equally firm character in those who will be led, or their purpose is in vain. Where shall we start?  Where have we Americans always started?  In our families, among our neighbors, in our churches, and in the town square are the first steps Americans have always taken toward reform, because we know that for reformation and restoration, this healing tide must flow from within us.

Be of good cheer, despite the screaming headlines. Be solid for those who will need your resolve. Be mindful that when you advocate on behalf of a candidate, or an issue, those who are truly undecided will be watching not only for the logic of your argument, but also for the manner in which you make it.  They who have sat too long straddling the fence, half in terror and half in comfort at the prospect of dismounting their perch will need to know they’re stepping onto solid ground. We must be that solid ground.

What must be recognized is that this downgrade isn’t a cause, but an effect.  We must see even the debt that has brought us to this debacle also as an effect.  The cause at the root of our troubles doesn’t lie with the various issues we see emerging in our time, but with something fundamentally broken in what we’ve allowed our country to become.  There are great dangers ahead, but none of them need destroy us.  None of them ought to be the cause of our demise.  They will mostly be mere effects of what actually threatens our republic.

Glenn Beck had it right in his 8-28 project of 2010, when he said that we must restore our honor.  The “fundamental transformation” we must find cannot originate in Washington.  I’ve been interested to watch, as the new campaign season approaches, who is and who isn’t taking firm and public stands on these arguments in Washington, or elsewhere.  I’ve been watching for signals that an honorable and courageous candidate for President will emerge, and while there have been some hopeful signs from a few of those who have announced, I believe the best is yet to come.  Who shall lead us?  You’ve already had a hint.  On the 28th of August, 2010, before a multitude assembled, she spoke not of politics but on the real meaning of American honor:

Who Shall Lead?

“We will always come through. We will never give up, and we shall endure because we live by that moral strength that we call grace. Because though we’ve often skirted a precipice, a providential hand has always guided us to a better future.

And I know that many of us today, we are worried about what we face. Sometimes our challenges, they just seem insurmountable.

But, here, together, at the crossroads of our history, may this day be the change point!

Look around you. You’re not alone. You are Americans!

You have the same steel spine and the moral courage of Washington and Lincoln and Martin Luther King. It is in you. It will sustain you as it sustained them.

So with pride in the red, white, and blue; with gratitude to our men and women in uniform; let’s stand together! Let’s stand with honor! Let’s restore America!”

Many will have failed to notice that Governor Palin had been telling us this all along.  Some will pretend not to have heard it, not wishing to confront that which they know lies within them.  The Obama disaster isn’t the cause of our troubles, but instead has merely exposed the source of our disease.  Ridding ourselves of his disastrous economic and social policies will not, by itself, repair what is broken.  As Sarah Palin pointed out to the assembled hearing of a multitude, “It is in [us].”  We must repair ourselves from the inside, first, and that means honor and integrity in all we do; in our families, among our neighbors, in our churches and our workplaces we must become as honorable as the names of our cherished beliefs demand.  At every junction, at every intersection in which one must choose between what is comfortable and easy, or that which is more difficult but right, we must be the people who will choose the latter.

It’s your country.  You choose.  I’ve asked what sort of freedom it is that you seek.  Did others think that by avoiding the choice, they would avoid the consequences of not choosing?  Surely not.  What your comments and emails reveal is that my readers and millions more have chosen, and I thank you, but there is much work to be done.  Let each of us go to it.

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Posted in Barack Obama, Business, Economics, Politics, Sarah Palin, Tea Party | 18 Comments »