Every time you hand over $3.47 for a Slurpee to that clerk at Fast Mart while you're filling up with gas, never forget the person you hand that money to is a Worker, not a Taker. She's part of the 70%, not 30%.

It doesn't matter if she's a Democrat, a trollop or a lounge lizard. Or even a Stupid. Being a worker often can trump all those others holdbacks. She's one of us because she connected that one extra dot, Job=Money=Stuff. So there is a common sense, moral person in there, just waiting to be found. (Pascal)

Every time you leave a $10 tip for a $30 meal at O'Charley's, don't just leave it with a smile. Remind that waitress that it is the Democrat who most often leaves only a dollar and loose change, and rarely a smile. It's the Democrat who scowls and snarls and sends the food back because it's too rare, too done, the lettuce not crisp, all the while blaming her for the kitchen's mistake.

It's the Democrats who throw pots, pans, vases, and curses, and almost never a compliment...unless there's something in it for them. And it's the people you are handing that money to who usually find these facts out first, only they don't know they are Democrats or "from the government there to help" but rather, thanks to the popular culture, they are told these are greedy capitalists.

Job One is to find a gentle, easy way to remind all those people just who the real impediments in their lives are. Do that and they will come.

The message really is that simple, and it is all about just getting it out there to the right people in the right way.

Toward an effective ground game

In 2010 I did a series of articles about "walking back blue numbers" in even the bluest of  districts, and also "walking forward red numbers" everywhere.

You may also recall in 2008 I worked with some small business owners here in central Virginia asking them to push voter registration among their employees. I thought the small business boss (the same "rich" guy Obama believes doesn't pay enough in taxes) is the best vehicle to reach out to the mostly 18-25, unmarried and unregistered worker. Warn them what might happen to their jobs under Obama.

It did, for by 2010 about 20% of them no longer had jobs, and one of those businesses is no more.

In 2010 I moved that idea into the Rotary Club/civic organizations circuit where small business meets and sell this message directly. From the feedback I received not much was made of that idea, I suppose, so here we are 60 days away from the most fateful election ever to face this "under-God" experiment in government, and things are pretty much the same. We still have several million targets of the Obama administration who still have never been made aware of that bullseye on their back, even as many are now sinking, with no map to find a way out.

What to do, What to do?

Now, if you're like me, you get 50 emails a week from the tea party-this, or the united against- Obama that, each with a teaser about the outrage of the week, then, sign this petition, oh, and if you get a chance, send us some money.

I knew a Baptist preacher, my brother''s father in-law, and possibly the worst golfer I ever knew, who always carried a second sermon in his coat pocket just in case, just in case, one lost soul might stroll in some Sunday night...car broke down, in need of a loan, maybe even salvation...and sit down on the back pew. Like Rev Ames, I'm always looking for those who haven't heard the words of liberty and independence, and try to find new ways to bring the subject up without sounding preachy, or like a Hari Krishna at the airport.

I don't want to belittle what those internet groups do, but the fact is, their model really isn't directed at 1) finding and 2) communicating with those people. That's always been the problem with those otherwise fine organizations who have us on their mailing lists; their ground game. They are mostly sermonizing to the saved.

And I'm always a missionary at heart.

You see, in some respects, the whole purpose of this nation's founding are those who are the hardest to reach, for as we've seen with the 23 million unemployed so far, most in fact are of the same income category as that FastMart clerk, or the waitress who works for tips or those kids who tear out old insulation in buildings.

A job in the private sector is the greatest of all threats to Obama and the Democrats, which is why they have worked so hard to get rid of so many. Private sector workers all, high school graduates at best, many Christian, but a lot not so much, the Democrats like them being right where they are now, out of work or on the edge. Democrats strive to ensure that they will not see a bright sky in their future, or in their children's. It was always their plan to put them just where they are. Once safely tethered to the government welfare train, these people will never be heard from again. They are not the "middle class" Barack Obama speeches about;  his middle class sits in a cubicle in a government office building and scribbles notes, plays on-line poker and watches porn.

But neither are they easy for Romney or the GOP to go after, for their campaign money is targeted for traditional media, and all the people who can be reached that way. That's why I published America's Epitaph, Death by Skinflint last year (also available in PDF, on request). While I don't agree with this strategy, and believe some money should be directed at an unconventional ground game to capture as many of these people as possible, I do understand how campaign funds are husbanded in this regard.

But it does require some coordination and planning, even brainstorming, to develop a ground game. Finding and getting these people on the registration roles may yet save the Republic, so I was happy to see that Ralph Reed and the Faith and Freedom Coalition are also going after these unregistered citizens. FFC's mission is to go out and find, and register, an approximate 6 million unregistered Christians, a major undertaking we all agree.

Why I point this organization out is that they go after a group most Establishment Republicans don't, and not entirely because they are Christian, mind you, but because they also are likely poorer than most, like that FastMart clerk, or on the Democrat plantation. It's simply hard to draw a cost-benefit analysis that justifies much expense in going to get them.

But  this is also why I am a missionary, not a blogger, for there are many clever ways which allows creativity and  street savvy, and little money, to find those

I ask each of you to go to this page at the FFC site, click on your state and email a link or copy of this article to the people who are FFC's state representatives. A personal note from you would also be nice. Just tell them we we'd like to know about their ground game and share any information they can share.

Those who have Given up looking for work have not given up looking to vote.

We need to send this message loud and strong to Obama. And we need to send signals to the poor Christian folk in the ghettos that help is coming, and a way out is coming for their children. We gotta go find them. It's our duty.

Never forget that the greatest duty of the citizen that makes it up the hill is to reach around and give a handshake up to someone still climbing. That is what separates us from the Beasts and keeps this Republic moving.

For that waitress, I like the calling card, (tip card)  aka business card, containing a simple message of encouragement, hoping someday she too can be a big tipper like me. No words need be exchanged, just a simple note which she will put away in her purse. For store clerks, a simple, "If you're not registered to vote, your job future is less certain, as will be your children's."

Make up your own.  It's non-confrontational, effective and polite.

Just because of who you are, they will know, and they will come.

Actually, it is more telling to start with all the people who WILL NOT vote for Obama this time then work our way down.

Some general considerations, by the numbers:

In 2008, a total of 129 million people voted for the two major party candidates, 53% Obama, 46% McCain. That represented an increase of 10 million from the 2004 election. Of registered voters, 71% voted, a modern-era high. That is the wave Obama is riding… or thinks he is.

In 2010, a total of 91,000,000 people voted in the midterms, with roughly the same split in favor of the GOP, also a modern-era high in turnout. This is the wave conservatives are genuinely riding.

Obviously, something has to give, or, more likely, already has given.

Just for the sake of argument let’s assume that Romney will get at least as many votes as John McCain, or 60 million. That’s the “Even Reince Priebus Could Get 60 million Votes” floor this election. In fact, it will likely go up as McCain caused at least 5% of the conservative base to stay home and this time they are roaring back. So let’s say the GOP has a rock solid 48% right now, not counting any enthusiasm factor whatsoever. (Obama had almost 100% of the enthusiasm in 2008, and with an opposite spin, seems to have it all in 2012 as well, but that’s another story.)

But by comparison Obama enjoys almost no rock-solid numbers this year. Of the 69m who voted for him in 2008, I can’t begin to establish where his sure-fire floor may be. Not even in California.

This is territory pollsters don’t like to go, in part because it involves a lot of intangibles, and quite frankly, they can’t count intangibles.

But the intangibles tell quite a different tale, and quite frankly, puts a lot more states in play than any pollster is counting, for all the intangibles stack up against Obama.

You will find Obama losing significant voters across the board in groups that swung heavily in his favor in 2008. I know this is happening, you know this is happening, so  when polls tell us that Obama gets across-the-board failing grades in leadership, foreign policy, economic policy, yet remains popular, or has 270 electoral votes nearly locked up, we know there is a disconnect between the polling and voter reality. Pollsters don’t know how to measure “enthusiasm” or “outrage” or “momentum.” Or even where to look. What they don’t know about voter attitudes this year, as in 2010, is incalculable.

How it will likely show up in hindsight will be called “suppressed voter turn out,” only here’s the rub, it is Obama who is suppressing his own turnout.

Both camps’ media advertising is directed to some extent to suppressing the other guy’s turn-out, i.e., “Don’t vote for that guy” ads. He’s too sneaky, dishonest, oily, felonious.

The advantage Romney has is that Obama, just by getting out of the bed in the morning and doing what he has always done for 3 1/2 years, and not doing what’s he was supposed to be doing for 3 1/2 years, is suppressing a far greater number of his 2008 voters than Mitt Romney ever could with slick ads.

So, Who Won’t Vote for Obama a second time around?

The Buyer’s Remorse Vote

The common theory among conservatives is that a no-show is a vote for Obama. But in fact, a no-show from an Obama voter in 2008 will be a vote for Romney, and this will occur in the millions this year.

Using the old Yogi Berra aphorism, if people don’t want to vote for Obama, there’s nothing he can do to stop them.

Pollsters get this about 75% right, for the largest bloc of Buyer’s Remorse Voters will be the vaunted Independents (not to be confused with “moderates”) who voted for Obama in ’08 and have already solidly changed their minds. And nothing can change it back, not even Mitt’s friendly acquaintance with a ewe named Maggie one summer at 4-H camp (as Harry Reid will allege within a few weeks.) Obama spends a lot of time trying to dissuade this group from voting for Romney, but only on the theory that Mitt will be just as lousy as he is. That’s the best pitch he has. But independents are the best-versed voters around in the realities of the political economy and they won’t buy it.

But there is much more to the Buyer’s Remorse crowd and this is where pollsters and media alike don’t get it. To understand this you have to recall what was known back in the ’80s as the “Wilder Effect,” named for Doug Wilder, former black governor of Virginia. If asked, no one, NO ONE, ever said he wouldn’t vote for Doug Wilder (a man I know and personally like). Even anonymously, most people will try to avoid any inference of racism by speaking harshly of any prominent black man.

Actually opinion suppression, the Wilder effect is in full play today, among all groups, but especially among public sector employees; federal, state, county, city and school. As we already have seen with the Wisconsin recall election, almost no school teacher or union member dared express publicly any preference for Scott Walker (even though he had saved their jobs in many cases), but they sure did show up election day.

Pollsters would be wise to trim as much as 10% off the top of every public sector voting model they have, and attribute it to Buyers-Remorse, and rack it up to the Wilder Effect.

The “You Didn’t Build That” Vote

This may well be the largest untapped bloc of anti-Obama resentment in America, which stretches across every voting group who largely supported him in 2008.

Arguably the most self-damning comment Obama has ever made as president, a direct slap in the face of what really is, the heart and soul of the American Dream, to be able to build a thing from scratch and be your own boss, Obama mistakenly believed he could get a pass just as he did with his “spread the wealth” comment to Joe the Plumber in 2008.

Obama never did well with the private sector small business voter anyway, so probably feels there is no great loss here. But the manner in which Obama telegraphed his “You didn’t build that” was a deep slap at a large portion of his base, for it exposed a deep-seated belief in Obama that this is not so much as how things are as how things thing are going to be. How things have to be. And even the poorest of Americans find that repugnant.

Obama has misunderestimated the American people, including a large portion of his own base.

The whole ideal of America is predicated on the idea that a man can strike out on his own to try anything he wants to try. Virtually everyone in America wants to be his own boss, and if he can’t be, he holds out hope that his children can. And mothers are stronger in this conviction than dads.

America was built by a nation of free holders who owned a piece of land. They ran their farms like businesses, if only to churn out a few dollars a month profit. It would be the post-Civil War industrial era, seeded by millions of immigrants from Asia and Europe, that a landless working class would outnumber this privately owned business sector. This is where Obama’s teachers stopped reading history, for then, against all the laws of Marx and Engels, within two generations the vast majority of those immigrants also owned a piece of land, a store, or an empire. And “They Built It,” not Wilson, not FDR, not LBJ.

Working for another man’s pay is a relatively recent phenomenon in America, arising mostly out of the Great Depression, when a man clung to a job as he would his mother’s breast. That a man can indeed “Build it” is ingrained in even the poorest of America’s psyche.

Which calls to bear the great unwritten law inside Obama’s “you didn’t build that” comment. Every communist contract with the poor and landless of a country starts out with this: We will give you schools, but you can only read what we allow you to read. OK, they say. We will provide you decent housing, but you can only live where we say you can live. OK. We will provide you jobs, but you can only work at what we want you to work at. OK.

But the communists always have a fine print in their contracts which reads “This contract shall also apply to your children and your children’s children.” I can’t say why, but the poor of Nicaragua found this fine print and quickly threw the communists out.

Obama let this communist fine print cat out of the bag out in Roanoke, Virginia. While pleading to the have-nots to get even with the haves, he let it be known that he intended to get rid of all haves except for the approved state class. He wasn’t saying “You didn’t build that” but “You won’t ever get to build that,” and for a group far larger than his tiny mind can ever know that is language that is contrary to everything they hope for their children and their children’s children to achieve.

The Women’s Vote

In 2008 Obama won the unmarried female vote 70-29, while McCain won the married women’s vote 57-42, giving Obama a net 56-43 margin. Many say, this group actually carried the election for Obama.

Besides diminishing numbers among mothers, even single parents, and state workers, since 2009, 766,000  of those women who voted for Obama have lost their jobs. Moreover, half of the 7.5 million new jobs/voters coming on line since he took office are women, and most of these can’t find meaningful work, with or without a college degree. And then there are those student loans. Voter registration among this age group has shifted to the GOP. So, Obama’s numbers here are due to fall across the board among women.

The Blacks who Won’t Vote for Obama

Here’s where the math gets sticky, for African-Americans will still vote for Obama in the same 95-5 ratio they do in most elections But as many as 20% will not show up this year. More, if they could get away with it.  Since most never knew that Martin Luther King was a Republican, or that it was the GOP, against strong Democrat opposition, that pushed the Civil Rights Acts through, blacks still won’t vote for a Republican, no way, no how.

Inner city blacks are truly captive and almost have to vote, even if they don’t want to, for someone will surely show up to drive them to the polls. And someone else will look over their shoulder, or even punch the card for then, while the Black Panthers stand guard outside to make sure no cameras can chronicle these atrocities. But rural and small town blacks, who go to church more often than city folks anyway, are getting an earful these days about Obama and gay marriage, a thing they find more noxious than poorly prepared poke.

And far more than women, blacks have been hit disproportionately hard by rising unemployment, and it is beginning to sink in that after 40 years of promises by Democrats, things really haven’t gotten any better. Moreover, blacks at every economic level have an uneasy relationship with the new gays rights movement. For one, blacks raise precious few gay males or females (raising suspicions that maybe gayness is indeed environmental, not genetic), and two, have just about had it up to here with gay inferences that their getting beat up at bars while cruising for good looking sleep-overs is somehow remotely akin to their getting burned out, strung up or having dogs sicced on them for trying to vote.

Expect 15%-20% lower turnout by blacks this time around, and expect about a 1%-2% uptick to the GOP, to boot.

The Catholic Vote

Like Jews, there is a large “non-practicing” Catholic community in America who have always been pro-contraception. But that does not translate to pro-abortion, as many believe, nor to pro-state mandated contraception. The Mother Church is still the Holy Mother Church, and the Obama Administration attacks on the Church are broadly seen as just that, an attack on the Church and the freedom of religion. In much the same way it is believed that the state leaped the wall of separation to steal the word “marriage” from the world’s religions, it is also seen that the state has now tried to steal from the world’s religions (Catholic, Jew, Baptists, etc) who built the first and arguably the best heath care facilities in America, their right to run those facilities according to their faith.

They all should be saying to Obama, “You didn’t build that. We did.”

The Labor Vote

I already mentioned the “Buyer’s Remorse” vote among government employees at every level. I affectionately refer to these as skirt unions, SEIU especially. A couple of years back I asked the question if the rank and file of the “guy unions” (AFL-CIO) knew that their leadership had almost all gone communist? Trumka, Hoffa, the lot of them. A crook or a thug, they can understand, as long as the work rules were square, and pay above average. But a communist, I doubt it.

Because of other issues, such as the war on the Church, and the triage certain unions are employing to dispossess some retirees from benefits, and a general love of America and that promise that some day their kids can build something on their own, I think we may see another large swing to the GOP by the rank and file this time around, as they did with Reagan in 1980. Watch Joe the Plumber in Ohio-9. A working stiff, the local Dems and Marcy Kaptur have beaten him up for being a working stiff, while claiming they represent the working man. The rank and file are beginning to see that their union bosses will have no pull in Washington for the next several years, and they will be wise to take matters in their own hands and elect people who will work with them rather than for the union headquarters around the country.

The Jewish Vote

As goes Israel so goes all but the most communist of (non-practicing) Jewish voters in America. Plus a few retirees in south Florida who really don’t care that their grandchildren will have to pay for their cozy excesses today. Expect Obama’s Jewish vote to drop 20%.

The Youth Vote

Obama just doesn’t have this sector as wrapped up as he thinks he does. True, as students they had full run of the vigor and stupidity of youth, but after graduation, with bills piling up, mom’s cooking again, and dad’s bitching again, “Well 7-11 is better than nothing, after all you chose to get a degree in Sociology, how about helping out around here a little?”…no way they’re going to blame George W Bush. But in keeping with their public school educations, they will have to blame someone. Expect a lot of them to blame Obama, which will be many’s first step toward recovery.

And of the new youth, those who have been eligible to vote only since Obama was inaugurated, the majority are registering Republican. This is not the win he expected.

So, Who will Vote for Obama?

The Dependency Vote is holding firm, mostly because they will be forced out of bed, force driven, and force-walked into the voting booth. If not, 20% will stay home.

The Promiscuity Vote- The always reliable promiscuity–free contraceptive vote, law school vote, New York Upper East Side vote, and scattered divorced women around the country who have seen their net worth diminished and the courts unwilling to jack up their ex’s alimony payments. But even the promiscuity vote took a slap in the choppers, thanks to Sandra Fluke. Now they have a name. Across the rigid pro-Obama women’s spectrum, there are fissures of stress and anxiety. Even diminished self-confidence.

The Sangerite Vote, Environmental Wacko Vote and Gay Vote – As weird, unnatural, contradictory coalitions are always doomed to do, these may split over Obama, especially if a Green Party gets any traction. And about gays, Obama’s mistake was in believing that this group’s voting power matched their money. When he dumped five million black Christian’s votes for less than a dollar a vote from the Gay-Hollywood coalition, my first thought was that Obama is going to take it on the lamb and head to Brazil, in exile. Too bad Chick-fil-A is not on the GOP ticket.

The Big Business-Wall Street Vote- They think themselves pragmatists, but represent the almost complete burial of what used to be known as “business ethics” from the corporate community. And to think, we always thought Gordon Gekko was a Republican. Yeah, and Oliver Stone is a Franciscan.

The Apparatchik Vote, as mentioned above, diminishing somewhat, but upper management in government is firmly locked into the current power scheme. Also the first to be fired if Romney wins. If only these fascists could keep the trains running, they’d have some hope of holding onto their jobs.

The Wannabe Apparatchik Vote (about 25% of the Occupy movement), they’ll vote for anyone who will give our poster boy, above, a job telling us how better to live our lives.

Bottom Line:

So, if there were only gays and lesbians, horny single white women, p***ed-off black women, secure GSA employees and other associated criminals in Ohio, Virginia, Nevada, Florida, and Pennsylvania voting, I’d say Obama’s got a lock on this race.

But by my accounting, except for California, Hawaii, Washington and Oregon (thanks to Elizabeth “Squaw” Warren, even MA’s not a lock) the rest of the country is nothing but swing states.

Obama has suppressed at least 20%-30% of his expected vote and he cannot seduce even a fraction of new replacements.

#I’m just saying.

Is Obama inciting the poor to take what they think should be theirs to his political advantage?

There is an interesting convergence of notions here in the wake of "The Dark Knight Rises"...the film, not the murders.

In "The Dark Knight" an evil man (yes, named Bane) takes over Manhattan (Gotham) by telling the people of Gotham that the rich have taken everything from them so they should take it all back. Then he holds the city hostage for about six months so they can do just that. What follows is a season of pillaging of all the rich folks' homes, where the looters found, to their dismay, that Central Park West apartments didn't have any bigger flat screens than they already had, and that the shoes in the closets were all leather, not a Nike to be found. And who eats caviar when Lays Potato Chips and moon pies can be had at the corner bodega? So they just tore everything up, and strewed it all about, especially since there were no longer any rich people to fence the stolen minks and jewels to anyway? With no dentists they couldn't even give their girlfriends diamond inlays for their front teeth.

"Water, water everywhere, but not a drop to drink." (Coleridge)

Clearly, what they did not do was seize the rich folk's businesses, which created all that wealth in the first place. Remember how Robert Mugabe gave his cronies all the white farms in Namibia, turning a nation that fed Africa into its leading basket case? We know that when the poor break out, and the rich break up, there really isn't anyplace to go, except into chaos?

Do you suppose Obama the mountebank knows this?

In his now-infamous "You Didn't Build That Speech" in Roanoke (and yes, it did cost him the election) Obama seemed to be stirring the same sense of entitlement among his audience (mostly on the public teat anyway) that Batman's enemy was doing, with the same ulterior motive...destroy just so you can own the ashes.

Some have suggested that Obama was indirectly inviting these people to take to the streets, store fronts and malls and start taking what is rightfully theirs, a la Rap Brown in the 60s.

That remains to be seen, but it is worth some thought and preparation.

Flashmobs

In this vein, some are also trying to equate the string of flash mob thefts around the country at malls and stores with this political sentiment of entitlement.

Judge for yourselves. This in Portland, this somewhere else, and this also somewhere else. (h/t LadyImpactOhio)

We can view this in one of two ways, since teen gangs have been running through malls since the 70s, looking for a little excitement and any opportunity to snatch and grab. They are either kids looking to get over or are they are part of a larger strategy that capitalizes on their predilection for easy theft?

You see, this sense of entitlement that Obama was speaking to has been around for a long time and has always existed on the edges of outlawry. It's why highwaymen robbed stagecoaches, and why pick pockets actually went to "schools" to learn their trade. At both ends of the economic spectrum there has always been a wannabe leisure class.

Much of the modern welfare state has always been, in Butch Cassidy's words, the "If they'll just pay me what they're paying to have me stop robbing them, I'll stop robbing them." unwritten contract. It's a bribe-price paid to keep the poor quiet and on the plantation. Much of Obama's base is being paid up front not to be outlaws. The Democrats have seeded, watered and fed them like an annual bean crop ever since the Republicans handed them over to the Democrats in 1968 after Dr Martin Luther King (a Republican) was assassinated by James Earl Ray (a Democrat).

(I've never been able to figure that move out, but it was clearly a seminal event in GOP character development.)

It's too early to know whether these hooded kids are just opportunistic sharks or cunning velociraptors (from "Jurassic Park") gaining in skill and knowledge as they get bigger and stronger. But we recognize the strain, both of the seeds, and the planters. So they should be watched....and tagged, as one does a bird in the wild.

You'll also notice no one seems to be interested in stopping these kids. There are reasons for that, as will be outlined in a deterrence piece I'll have a hand in writing later, only not here.

My friends over at Great American Zeroes have taken this "tagging" as a deterrence on as a project. I invite you to start looking in there from time to time. They have been working on tactics to impede the Occupy crowd for several months now, and this flash mob idea could be a variation of that theme, all based on the idea that authorities, whether cops in a city park or clerks in a clothing store, will do anything to avoid injury, including letting them do it again and again and again, ensuring they will only grow and grow, not go away.

GAZ is looking at these tepid little flash mobs as a potential for far worse things later in the year. So should you.

In Augie D'Onofrio's latest piece, "Government Has a Face, Find it and Use it" he mentioned some counter strategies being developed which I believe can be used to insure kids who steal will not be able to use the things they steal, and may even walk out of the store a bigger loser than when they walked in. I'll let them explain this in future postings, as I plan to add a couple of paragraphs about flashmobs in their list of applications.

But prepare yourselves, at least psychologically, about what might happen this year. Or the next four years, after we win. We haven't had widespread rioting in America since the 1960s, when Stokely Carmichael, Rap Brown and the original Black Panthers fanned the flames. Maxine Waters has boasted she can put them in the streets anytime she wants. Ordinarily a stupid woman, on this account I believe her.

If we can get out in front of this, we'll see if they can stand being around themselves once they do.

Once upon a time I made a lot of money doing nothing more than graphic timelines of events and people all engaged in a single endeavor, just to see who did what, and in what order, and asking why. It's a terrific analytical tool.

From the moment Fast and Furious went public in Dec 2010, after the murder of Border Patrol Agent Brian Terry, the story became so political, with so much dancing and sidestepping by administration officials inside ATF and the Department of Justice, no wonder a whole category of crimes involved have been overlooked.

In fact, all the serious ones.

As I have often argued, facts don't lie, and the politics often resolves itself if you simply lay out in simple terms the crimes, who planned them, who carried them out, and who, for whatever reason, collegial loyalty or mutual dirty fingerprints, tried to cover them up.

We all know something of Fast and Furious. It was an ATF plan to allow guns purchased from gun stores along Mexican border states to "walk" into Mexico, where they could lead American and Mexican federal officials to drug cartels buying the guns. (Only I'm not sure if Mexico was dialed into this plan.)

These purchases occurred in 2009-2010, approx 2000 guns (semi-automatic assault-looking rifles and pistols), approx $1M, or average, $500 per weapon. Not a $32 Saturday night special in the lot. The ATF lost track of 1400 of them, over 70%, costing them their ISO-9000 certification.

We know that a couple of ATF agents in Phoenix began to complain about the operation because they were not allowed to make arrests as per standard ATF procedures, before the guns got into the hands of criminal end-users. (The actual details as to how guns were to be traced, and arrests made, once they got into criminal hands, is a mystery to me since, with 70% untraceable, it must have been pretty shoddy. But I'm getting ahead of myself.)

But intentional, accidental, or incompetence, in the end it shouldn't matter.

In Dec, 2010, Agent, Brian Terry, was likely shot and killed by one of two of these 1000 weapons along a smuggling trail in southern Arizona. (I used to try cases near there, in Bisbee.) Strangely, the killers left the two F&F guns laying on the ground at the crime scene, then fled. One man is being held for the shooting, but there is no conclusive proof either of the F&F guns fired the fatal round (according to the FBI, a wholly-owned subsidiary of the Department of Justice.).

Again, it shouldn't matter.

When this killing occurred, news of the Fast and Furious plan quickly went public. They couldn't keep a lid on it.  Within 30 days the Federal District Attorney for Arizona, Dennis Burke, ended the Fast and Furious operation by filing a sealed multi-count indictment against the people who were used as straw buyers in the Phoenix area on behalf of drug cartel members, way back at the front end of the operation. There were 20 named people, and I link to that indictment for informational purposes. Read it for all it doesn't mention, and crimes it doesn't list. All but one were charged with the principal charges of 1) Conspiracy and 2) Dealing in Firearms without a License, citing 90 separate incidences in 2009 and 2010.

The first named buyer, Avila, though not the biggest buyer, was the man who bought the two rifles found at the scene of Agent Terry's death. This past April, he and two of the other named defendants pleaded guilty to the two main charges. and face up to 10 years in prison, I assume based on a plea deal that will become evident at sentencing, and possibly later at trial of the remaining defendants in September.

During Avila's allocution, no mention was allowed to be made of Agent Terry's death, or of Fast & Furious, or the two guns. Follow the linked Fronteras leads to other stories, which shows that Agent Terry's family had sought to be listed as victims in the Avila 20 case, that petition denied by a Tucson Federal judge in Jan 2012, then accepted an informal deal with the new federal prosecutor to withdraw in Feb 2012. Their reasoning: "The request would have opened the possibility of turning the smuggling case into one against the Bureau of Alcohol Tobacco and Firearms."

If you throw the Department of Justice into the mix, that is precisely the point. They should be.

I'll tell you why.

The deaths of hundreds of Mexican citizens and Agent Terry were a direct result of acts certain people within ATF, and possibly DOJ, caused to happen.

As long as this case is about the smuggling of guns by straw buyers, and not the intentional or irresponsible placing of guns into the hands of criminals, the real crimes go unaddressed and unpunished. It is my conclusion that the ultimate government purpose now, both in this trial against straw buyers, and in the series of dodges and stalls before Congress, is to hide a series of crimes in which the government was the principal instigator.

My view is that enough crimes were committed, from day one of Fast and Furious, that had timely indictments been made, the need to spend millions of tax payer dollars in finding out about a potential cover up would be unnecessary.

The State of Arizona could still lead in this regard.

The Crimes: First things first.

When a man enters a gun store, several laws come into play, not only one. It's like every young Catholic is taught, there is more than one sin in a lewd thought. And both state and federal laws apply.

And violation of some of those laws can be "more criminal" than others.

First, a buyer must prove he is qualified to buy a gun. He must be of age, a legal resident or citizen, be free of a felony past, and finally, he must, in writing (there's a federal form for it) that the purchase of the gun is for his personal use, and not for resale, or the use of another.

As a buyer, it's a crime to lie about those things, and it's a crime to transfer the weapons purchased. These are the principal charges against the Avila 20. There is no mention that it was the ATF who so easily placed those guns into the straw buyers' hands in the first place, or that, but for the ATF, the buys would never have taken place.

There are other crimes, NOT MENTIONED in the indictment, placing certain duties on the selling end of the transaction.

So, for the store owner, it is a crime to ignore the falsehoods of buyers or the likelihood they will transfer them for still other criminal purposes.

With this many guns being purchased, especially considering the damage they could do (these weren't hunting rifles), ordinarily the gun store owners would be indicted as well. Of course, they weren't here because they were working with/for the ATF. That was the plan. They had been immunized of the crimes they committed. But these were crimes, nonetheless, a point everyone seems to forget. Up to a point, the government can forgive the trespasser, but never the trespass.

But as Eichmann found out, at some point the crime becomes so inherently dangerous, or manifestly heinous, a simple "I was only obeying orders," or "the DOJ said it was "OK" won't do.

Remove the ATF from this buy-sell scenario and simply replay events. The guns would never have been sold in the quantities that they were sold in the first place.

Without the ATF covering their backs, if a buyer makes multiple purchases of guns, such as these, the gun dealer has (at a minimum) the duty to report it to ATF who would then follow it up to ascertain if the guns were for personal use, and locked away in a safe somewhere.  That's routine, for many law-abiding citizens make multiple gun purchases. (State law usually controls this, as only this week Virginia repealed a one-handgun-a month-law that had been in place for nearly two decades. There is no federal law limiting the number of weapons one can buy in any given period.)

Most of the Fast and Furious purchases were in the range of 5-to-10 at a time, enough to raise suspicion to any seller of ordinary sense.

What's at stake for the seller: The dealer's duty to report, or deny, the sale is for his own protection. This duty is based in common law as well as general state criminal laws ranging from accessory before a crime to negligent homicide, for he knows that if he places dangerous instrumentalities into hands he believes are likely to use them for a criminal purpose, he could face criminal charges as well.

Example: If my brother rushes up to me asking for my pistol, because he has just caught his wife in bed with his best friend, and I give it to him, then he does the dirty deed to one or both of the dirty-riders, am I also culpable criminally?

Yes. At the very least, wanton endangerment. But don't forget civil penalties, especially if I live in a mansion and my brother in trailer park. The gun dealer can be sued for damages, just as OJ Simpson was, his store turned into a flower shop bought by two Greenpeace volunteers at public auction.

So, why weren't the gun store owners sued, by not only the Terry family but the myriad of Mexican families who had loved ones murdered, each of those guns traceable back to a single transaction with an individual gun dealer? Where are the ambulance chasing Jose Edwards of the southwest? Where are the radio and TV ads in Sonora, asking victims' families to call 1-800-GUN-SHOT (Si usted o algún ser querido...)

The bottom line is that while ATF and their magic immunizing needle can immunize the store owners, but they cannot erase the crime.

So while we have charges, even guilty pleas for a series of nickle and dime conspiracy and illegal transfer violations, suddenly no one is responsible for up to 300 deaths, including one American, Arizona citizen named Brian Terry.

Suddenly these deaths were  just one big Oooooppps. A paperwork malfunction.

Knowingly providing weapons to people one knows were intended for use in crimes is a crime, and, at some point, cannot be immunized. That point is found among individuals within the ATF, standing alone, or individuals inside the ATF, standing shoulder to shoulder with individuals in the Department of Justice who told them all this was OK.

At the very least, wanton endangerment works, which I prefer, since it has already been proven, requiring no intent, not injuries or dead people. Just putting them in harm's way is enough.

At the DOJ's end, at the minimum their failure to act as officers of the Court and indict and prosecute crimes that are squarely in front of their face. Like wanton endangerment, evidence, as it unfolds can increase this to full-blown cover-up and collusion.

Either way, these are giant steps past "ooopps."

Figuring this out is really simple.

It began with a Plan. Fast and Furious began with a  Plan, and it would be written down. Agents on the front line would not be read into the overall Plan, but only their compartmentalized role in it. I assume Issa has seen this Plan, and the many operational addenda that various action offices added, as well as the legal findings and rules of engagement provided by the District Attorney or one of his minions, (Cunningham or Hurley).

Together, on paper, they would have approved a Plan which, BY LAW, was supposed to prevent the guns falling into the hands of criminals who would likely use them in the commission of crimes....operations that were designed to achieve certain goals with legal parameters drawn.

If not, the Plan was fatally flawed from the beginning, sort of like when the committee designing Chevrolet's back in the 70s required the engine block to be lifted out in order to change the plugs on their new and advanced Monza.

If not, the crimes began that day, and every fingerprint on it bears some responsibility. Let a jury sort it out.

But as so many ATF officials testified (contradictory I might add) there was never any intention to allow the guns to actually walk into the hands of criminals. The fact that 70% did proves that 1) they lied or 2) the Plan was as incompetently put together as the loan package for Solyndra.

Both have criminal consequences, for in determining whether intended or unintended, accident, bad luck, blithering indifference (after all the only persons likely killed would be Mexicans) or incompetence, these things matter only to degree: whether the perpetrators get 1-to- 5, or 10-20 years.

So then, why did the federal prosecutors chase after a bunch of 5 year penalties for making false statements, leaving the wrongful death of a federal agent (and hundreds inside Mexico) unindicted, when they had the guns that did it, and knew the store owners and buyers who began the chain that put those guns into criminal hands? Why did the feds go after the 5-to-10 and ignore the 25-to-life charges of knowing accessories before the fact of murder.

In all likelihood, why  federal prosecutors did not bring charges relating to the crimes committed with these weapons, including wrongful, death, would have been to admit a theory of crime in which they themselves participated, and perhaps even launched.

Follow me here. The bone of contention that arose early between field agents (such as whistle-blower John Dodson, in Phoenix) and supervisor (David Voth) is that they were allowing the guns to walk into the hands of criminals, even as this, according to reports, was contrary to stated ATF policy as enunciated by higher-ups in congressional testimony. Somebody was lying.

In the ordinary world of dog-eat-dog career bureaucrats, front line decision-makers would have been dumped on and indicted quickly, and that would have been the end of it, in early 2011. This is not what happened. In fact, a couple of key actors were moved and maybe even promoted.

I am convinced that these guns did not walk due to a couple of rogue operators. At certain levels ATF managers believed that, just like the store owners, they were immune from all of the most serious consequences of their actions. Now this belief could have been based  in the divine right of bureaucrats (not likely) or due to the notion, obtained from the local DA's office, or higher up, that their conduct was protected.

From the approximate time the Avila 20 indictments were handed down, (Jan 2011) and the more serious crimes (which still cannot be mentioned in court, and presumably before any jury) were buried instead of being pursued, the ATF and DOJ have been moving in concert. At 18 USC 371, this is known as "Conspiracy", yet another offense.

Now, none of these federal agents are killers, I'm sure. But many are cynical careerists. Bureaucrats, who will quickly reorganized their priorities when something goes wrong, so as to protect their careers (and pensions) first. Especially if forfeiture or jail time may be involved.

What we cannot afford to allow to persist is the belief among many federal officials that they can be immunized simply by an OK from a federal lawyer once a crime becomes manifest, and I submit this was long before the death of Agent Terry. (A time line would likely prove this.)

This is the real lesson from Fast & Furious; that federal law enforcement agents and Department of Justice officials believe they can forgive themselves of any crime.  After all, it was Barack Obama, on the advice of Eric Holder, who ordered the assassination of an American citizen, then told the world it was legal, a righteous shoot. It wasn't. Yes, he may have pardoned himself, but we've been watching this sort of imperial sense of legal immunity since Waco, and the people simply cannot permit its government to continue to write their own get out of jail free cards, as if they were 16th Century nobility.

So in the end, the current federal case against 20 defendant straw buyers (US v Avila et al) in Phoenix is being prosecuted by co-conspirators to the crime, with the express purpose of keeping their roles out of it.

So what do we do about it?

Now, I'd love to see Darrell Issa move to ask for a special prosecutor against the ATF and DOJ on these criminal charges, as the criminal case has already proved itself. My suggestion is that Issas and Grassley do a full-blown Timeline, with documents, publish them privately, like the Warren Report, stating the case from the angle of wanton endangerment.  Go to the floor of the House and do a 30-minute power point, then let it be known that the next administration will chase these crimes and unindicted co-conspirators once the Obama regime, and shield, are dissolved. Let them know now, Rep Issa, Sen Grassley.

And the state of Arizona is not without it own power to shake the 'simmon tree either, although it has waited a long time. Virtually every major crime I've mentioned here is an Arizona crime, too. Agent Terry was an Arizonan. And I'd bet prosecutors in Sonora would like to see a little justice brought on behalf of all the families in Mexico and would be happy to work with Arizona prosecutors.

You'll notice I haven't said much about Eric Holder.

I'll drop the Nixon analogy where all the criminals in the Watergate break-in were offered lighter sentences, even a week at Disneyland, if they'd just help nail Nixon's behind to the White House garage. After all Nixon's crimes were much more serious than the deaths of 300 people. They were so serious you might have thought he'd have sold secret rocket technology to the Chicoms...no wait, that was Bill Clinton. Yes, now I remember, it was his enemies list, which, at last report, was one-one hundredth the size of Barack Obama's.

In any case, such political escapades are unseemly.

Just do it right, go after the crimes, and everything else will fix itself.

How George William Curtis’ “Doctrine of Liberty" eventually was dumped by the side of the road by the American academy is a tale I’ll try to briefly relate here.

But more importantly, the real story is how it survived outside the academy and remained in the popular culture nearly half a century afterwards, thus, saving America.

You see, after about nearly fifty years the Doctrine of Liberty is back, shaken from atop a spice cabinet, where it had been buried away in an old coffee tin, shaken by the same thing that prompted its drafting in the first place; the specter of tyranny in the face of liberty. Someone, maybe Coolidge, maybe a high school history teacher named Morgan, I can’t say, safely stowed it away there, so that it could be resurrected at a later date. I suspect many hands over many years.

But for almost a century the Doctrine of Liberty  protected American civilization despite the best efforts of the academy and the political class to bury it. And arise it has, just as the Founders willed it, to finally finish a job on their behalf Curtis insisted had to be done in order for the American dream and the Constitutional blueprint to come to full bloom.

Yes, they say the Constitution is old and stale, and that whole Yankee Doodle thing really tiresome. Even embarrassing to hear, some modern Yankees say. That was so yesterday, and we’re so much more hip now. Actually that was also said in 1913, again in 1932, and again in ’39, then in ’48, and ’60 and ’69, then ’76, again in ’92 and of late, Ought Nine. It seems that all that has been repackaged in the last 100 years have been the Constitution’s nay-sayers, not the Constitution. Nor its centerpiece, the ideal of liberty.

America as envisioned by the Constitution hasn’t even begun to stretch its wings, and with the rise of the modern Tea Party movement, we can see its true destiny being unfurled.

So just pause here and reacquaint yourself with where it all began, and thank this one unheralded man for causing this thing, that was supposed to have died 125 years ago, to live a hundred years past its expected shelf-life, just so we could bring it back to life today.

***.

In doing background on George William Curtis I found it interesting that he’s had no biographer. Yet, in a forty-minute address to Phi Betta Kappa at Harvard in 1862, to stir up support for President Lincoln’s Emancipation Proclamation, he would lay the foundation for what the common American man and woman for a century would be taught in school about what distinguishes this republic from all the rest of the world. Curtis laid out the ideal for the perfect (my words) pursuit of liberty, little knowing that in thirty years the academy he was speaking to would cast it aside for foreign doctrines, or that the common soil of America would gather it in, make it their own, water and nourish it for three generations.

Perhaps borrowing from de Toqueville, it was George William Curtis who hinted that there is such a thing as American Exceptionalism, and although he never used the term, he defined it just as Ronald Reagan described it 125 years later, as that “shining city on the hill," a light to all the world, for all people of all colors and creeds.

So stopping to think about it, I can understand why no modern academician would undertake to do a biography on this man who believed Negroes to be full-fledged members of the human community, even while they were still slaves. No Democrats believes that today, and scarcely only a few academicians, outside the occasional vagrant philosopher.

I’ll bet you didn’t know that George William Curtis was a co-founder of the Republican Party. He was heavily involved in its first run at the presidency under the Great Pathfinder, John C Fremont.  In politics he would be called a bit player, say, like Peggy Noonan, only instead of writing speeches he gave them.

Curtis was most admired for his unbending convictions. He was, as they say, above politics. Ending slavery was not an end to Curtis, but a necessary step toward an even higher moral end, one which he considered to be entangled with the destiny of the United States; to become that perfect beacon of hope for the common man and woman everywhere. He never minced words on what he considered the end game.

He even recognized the natural enemies of this new human destiny, liberty. Only in his time he painted them in the political demagoguery of the slavery question, paying little attention to the newer enemies of liberty just rising across the Atlantic, or even the ancient enemy of free men everywhere, the divine right of kings.

***

After the war, high-mindedness in America hit an all-time high. After all, the government had sent over half a million men to their deaths to rescue an enslaved people almost none of them had ever seen.

At the same time, waves of “new people of color” began piling ashore from the Mediterranean, eastern Europe and Asia. Olive skinned and garlic smelling, with strange sounding names in curious garb, carrying a motley of religions, and a valise full of woes. None of them were particularly tasteful to the protestant Anglo-Saxon sensibilities that had been on these shores, oh, one-two generations longer.

These immigrants' long process of assimilation to become American began totally immersed in a culture of suspicion. They were not liked and encouraged to live off by themselves, thus the Irish slums of New York, the Polish slums of Chicago, the Italian slums of Passaic and the Slovak slums of Toledo, all creating the first fields to be harvested by what would become the modern Democratic Party, the party of the oppressed laborer.

Even in 1896 it was understood you could not be both an American first and a Democrat, you had to choose, and the politics of anti-capitalist opportunism did its dead level best to steal these people away from the American dream, and lock them into a cradle-to-grave patronage system, which we call the “plantation” today. While secure, its always seemed to be only half as nice as what the fellow who took his chances with this new world was making for himself. (At this point listen to Antonin Dvorak’s 1893 New World Symphony, to understand how a visiting central European saw America in this period.)

Early on (within two generations), the new immigrant to America had to choose if he would send his kids to college, or build a business, or pass his secure job at the factory, or down at the fire house, onto his sons.

For half a century most of the immigrants stayed in that factory for a generation only, then opted out and became Americans anyway.

But in the most curious of ways.

The Uneven Coming and Going of the Doctrine of Liberty

Everyone knows the Law of Generations, that it requires three generations for the family getting off the boat “to be American” (ser americano). The saying goes that if the Democrats can get you and keep you in generation one, and ensure that your circumstances will never change, they can keep you forever. And you will have a friend, and an enemy, for life.

 What saved America and all those people whose names ended in -ski, ‘ini,–loff, -stein, or –chez, from this dreaded fate was Curtis’ Doctrine of Liberty. Because of it, just too many people were able to escape the seine net waiting for them at the docks.

That same same fate confronts America today, only now it has the active participation of government.

The Academy

While Marxism and a type of capitalism America never quite fully knew, dueled against one another in Europe, for almost a generation in American academe (roughly 1867-1890) the Doctrine of Liberty held sway in those same hallowed Ivy League halls where Curtis first made his persuasive argument in 1862, the seat of highest learning in America. It was de rigueur everywhere to uphold the honor of that crusade against slavery. No one dared tear that down so long as there was a recent memory of so many men having died to achieve it.

But memories fade. That law of generations, you know.

As we know, the wealthiest of post-war Americans, many who profited from the war, began sending their sons to Europe to study, only to find there, while roaming the coffee houses of Vienna, Heidelberg and London that none of the rubes back home in Gary or Pittsburgh or even Manhattan had really ever delved into the deeper intricacies of the human condition as had a whole bevy of German intellectuals, including Hegel and Marx.

To them, it all made sense to view humanity from the backdrop of a thousand years of history instead a hundred. Besides, it was nouveau, camp, it set them apart. And they brought it home, much like a young girl might bring a new dance back home to Laramie after a year of finishing school in New York.

To them the plain talk of the Founder’s day, even as they spoke amongst themselves (The Federalist), was almost childlike in its reasoning, but even more so in its diction. There were no hard words to look up. No ideas to diagram. No list of begats to cite; Wittgenstein's corollary to Malek’s postulate to Hegel’s first law. Everyone, yes everyone, even common yeomen, could understand what came out of the Founder’s mouths. Where’s the profit in that?

What they were initiated into in Europe was a secret code, a language all their own, and with it their own unique place in the sun, just like their dads back home, who were that very night donning belts, miters and purple gowns, swapping secret handshakes and codes in the Mystic Order of the Grand Crusaders or somesuch.

Only not quite like pop. This secret language they brought home enabled them to establish themselves at several universities, to teach this new arabesque to young minds also wistful for a secret language and handshake who could then take it forward to yet further frontiers, breaking down the bastions of ignorance, and simple language, and all the commons; common purpose, common weal, common sense, common law, even common good.

Being a Christian, I never cease to marvel at how a theologian can torture with mysticisms such a profound and simple invocation “Love thy neighbor as thyself” (Matt: 22:39) while other philosophers will just wet themselves with the dialectic diagrammatics of the Greek aphorism “Know thyself."  What we know, in hindsight, is that German philosophy considered itself the natural heir to Greek philosophy, and then went about taking the simplest concepts and turning them into several millions (mostly secret) words just to prove than the BMW is the best engineered car in the world, but only available to less than one half of one percent of the world’s population.

Connect the dots. The German approach to philosophy (and intellectualism) mucked the world up in such a wondrous way through the nineteenth and twentieth centuries that a hundred million souls, give or take, would die simply because they couldn’t tell their left from their right, as assigned by their newly self-appointed  intelligentsia.

And as a side note, John Robert’s swing vote in the Affordable Care Act decision did nothing to impede this slide into dialectic chaos.

So, by the Wilson Administration, 1913, “progressive” education had taken over higher education in most of America. The Doctrine of Liberty literally, as already mentioned, was assigned to an old coffee can atop the American curio cabinet.

The American Street

They say the greatest compliment that can ever be paid to a composer is to hear his song hummed or whistled on the street by ordinary men. Of all the great composers, probably Mozart enjoyed that compliment most. And what New York cabbie couldn’t rip off a few notes of Verdi or Rossini?

The tune George William Curtis composed for the delicate edification of the Phi Beta Kappa Society in 1862, and summarily dumped from the national playbill around 1888, was hummed, whistled, and sung by American school kids for almost a century, in some places, into the 1960s. K thru 12. I know, I was there.

Curtis, himself an intellectual, was speaking past Phi Beta Kappa to generations of school teachers and students, immigrants, workers and ordinary people. After all, they were the ones who were supposed to make it all work. Not Harvard. And he was saying a thing that is as deeply philosophical as Aquinas’ Summa, yet so easy to contemplate that even the Chink, the Gook, the Slope, the Dago, the Wop, the Mick, the Hunkie, the Raghead, the Polack, the Kike, Hymie, Hebe, and the N****r, could understand.

The great loss is that today, almost no one in academia can.

American public education never had a Woody Allen moment when suddenly American educators stood up and said the official language of America is Albanian, but in the 1930s, they tried.

Their war on the institution was more insidious, measured by the generation not the year, and the starkness of the contrasts can only be told when one looks at an American textbook for children in 1900 and one today…especially in the absence of words containing more than three syllables. (This is not because children can’t understand them, or even spell them, mind you, but because teachers often cannot pronounce them.)

It takes time to trickle these ideas down, and broadcast them far and wide.

So, as the academy flipped, the grass roots American public school system resisted. This was in large part because they were locally run, the PTA wielding great power over administrators, teachers, even text and content. And through the PTA, local churches held great power, (which I largely consider a good thing).

From 1870 thru the 1930s students were largely taught the three R’s through textbooks, often shared by row, purchased by the board according to how much they could afford. History, especially American History, was taught from the few library books on the subject, but from 4^th grade on, and depending almost entirely by the wit and enthusiasm of the teacher, herself monitored and supervised by the local parents. Teaching history was intuitive, and that’s what was sought most in teachers, for back then they knew words with four syllables.

I still remember the story of Earl Hunnicut, a coal miner in my town, so famous for his loud cursings the mine company had to change its shift hours just so kids leaving school would not cross paths with him as he squatted, chewed, spit and cussed down by the company store every 3 PM, Monday through Friday. His son, Gary, was my classmate, and it was on his account one night he stormed the PTA meeting, still in his work duds, the gymnasium filled with parents, the school officials up on the stage. Earl barged in, stomping down one aisle, wanting to know why in the goddam hell his effing kid couldn’t be taught not to say “ain’t”…goddam it!

My mother fell away in a dead faint, according to my dad. Blasphemous heathens always did her in that way.

But Earl’s mission was plain…he didn’t want Gary Wayne to have to go into that mine, and these people held the only road out.

State-approved standardized textbook didn’t really appear until after the Second World War, but even then, many school districts in many states had reading committees to put their own seal of approval on textbooks by letting teachers know what they did and did not approve.

I can’t mark the date, since I was in college in 1964, but somewhere in that time frame Curtis’ Doctrine of Liberty finally succame (Isaiah Thomas) to the march of progressive public school education. All the barricades had been brought down, local control, the many churches, even Earl Hunnicut.

But what remained was not inconsequential, although not a one of us ever heard the name of George William Curtis. I knew his Doctrine of Liberty sixty years before I ever knew his name, and when I stumbled across his Orations and thumbed through them, I stopped at this one only because of the audacity of this title. I read it, and recognized his words immediately, as old friends, from the 4^th Grade, then the 6^th, then the 11^th, and even vacation Bible school.

The modern movement called the Tea Party is made up, in great part, of people of that generation, many having had the wisdom to augment what the state taught their children with their own remembrances of a time when not just language, but ideals, were simple, so simple a child could understand them…

...and many others with the regret they hadn’t.

As they read and learn anew what has been around for so long, we all owe a great debt to George William Curtis, who probably summarized it all as well as anyone can, and kept the flame alive as the seeds of statism were broadcast, top-down, over the land.

Note: For those of you strong enough to actually read this all the way through, if you'd like a PDF copy of Curtis' Doctrine, just contact me at siccm@thesandsinstitute.org. It will be available at Amazon.com in Kindle format, and it would help if you would tweet that out as well.

The hard truth of President Obama's usurpation of legislative authority over immigration by offering a green card to under-30 "children of illegals" who have lived and schooled here for several years, is that most people are for it. It's popular, not just among the Latino community. But everyone.

Point for Obama, most analysts say, and the Latin American vote is likely to pile up in Obama's corner in several key swing states, my own (Virginia) included.

Now, this assumes that the legal Latinos will switch their vote from "nea" to "yea" because of this "gesture" (that's what it is, folks, a gesture), notwithstanding their own communities' suffering under the heavy hand of Obama's regal, management-from-the-top economy.

(Like the Chinese, Latinos are inveterate from-the-bootstraps, bottom-up capitalists, and will leap at any opportunity to improve their economic lot. That's why so  many illegals come here in the first place, to get that first leg-up. Leftwing "handlers" such as La Raza, who got their spurs organizing labor in the California fields, know that newly arriving Latinos must be immersed into the welfare system quickly, as the Democrats did with the blacks with civil rights legislation, or they may lose their political support. So their vote in bad economic times is never a sure thing.)

What Obama did last week he told supporters only two years ago he couldn't do...legally or constitutionally. He was right then. But he rolled the dice and it seems to have worked, in part, because the "apparent" goodness of it trumps the illegality. It was good politics, and as we've seen with Fast and Furious, all the pundits, including the inimitable Dr Krauthammer drop even the pretense of outrage that once again the law has taken a back seat to political grand gestures in a campaign season. Remember how they all waxed euphoric about what a great liar Bill Clinton was?

Obama timed his order (it's been partially operational at ICE for several months)  to coincide with his expected defeat in the Arizona immigration case before the Supreme Court and the efforts of Sen Marco Rubio to forge a consensus for legislation that would have made legal what Obama has now done illegally. Obama did not want to be upstaged by a potential running mate of Romney's. Nor did he want a piece of legislation today that was more narrow that the original Dream Act, which he swears he'd sign today if laid on his desk. He does not want a narrow legal act today, filled with common sense goodness, but one that expands the power of government as the original Dream Act does.

It's a bait and switch.

So Romney's path is clear. He needs to come out hard by saying there is a right and wrong way to achieve a good thing. The president's chosen path was was wrong...illegal and unconstitutional, and he can even provide video of Obama saying the same.

That while we want to do the right thing, we need to adhere to the constitutional process, for by allowing presidents to circumvent law, we're subsidizing that being done again, and again, and what's worse, we diminish the people's power to rise up in righteous indignation to undo it in the process.

I am quite sure President Obama wanted to create yet another precedent here for executive action in lieu of constitutionally mandated legislative action, just as he did when he ordered the execution of an American citizen on foreign soil, under the authority of a "finding" by (you guessed it, Attorney General Holder). And no doubt, history will show, he authorized the illegal sale of guns to drug cartel killers in Mexico in the same manner.

Romney doesn't need to editorialize, as I have just done here, but I think the American people will agree fully that a good thing should be fully debated and done legally, through the Congress, rather than by the hand of an imperial president. Since ICE long ago stopped ordering those children to be deported, there is no hurry. Let's do it the constitutional way.

We can't subsidize illegal acts, so don't sugar-coat it, Mitt.  Call the president out on this. This is not a time to be afraid of laying this card on the table.

You're too young to remember, but I was a freshman in college (1964) when they found the bodies of three young civil rights volunteers in Mississippi. While the Vietnam War raged people interested in desegregation in the South watched this case closely.

It took three years to bring most of the principals (Klan members) to trial and conviction, and the case is still open for a few remaining suspects.

In 1988, the film "Mississippi Burning" (a very good film, and probably where Bill Clinton saw all those churches in Arkansas being burned) was released, provided some background to the real investigation. The story centered around a young FBI agent-in-charge, played by Willam Dafoe, and an ex-sheriff from Mississippi, acting as a consultant (played by Gene Hackman). It was their interplay about investigative priorities, the FBI agent treating the murders as part of a larger cause, Hackman treating it as a murder investigation, that set the stage for how those cases were eventually handled in real life.

(If 60's Klan members look remarkably like modern day union thugs, don't blame me. My apologies to all their mothers.)

You see, they had to try to get convictions where doing harm to black people in general and civil rights workers in particular, didn't cause too much of a stir in the criminal sense. It was political, as folks saw it.

In fact, unable to bring murder charges in state court, the men were charged with violating the three students' civil rights. It required the Supreme Court to reverse a hostile federal judge and reinstate the indictments, just to get the case to trial.

Finally, in 1967, the men were tried before a segregationist federal judge named Cox, a former college roommate of powerful Sen John Eastland, one of the original Dixiecrats. Judge Cox did everything in his power to assist the defense. But in the end an all-white jury convicted seven of them, receiving, from Judge Cox, prisons terms from 10 to four years.  The Judge in rendering his decision, said, "They killed one n*****, one Jew, and a white man-- I gave them all what I thought they deserved."

So, in a segregated society where race was political, it was murder, not politics, that got those men convicted and imprisoned.

Back to the future.

Fast and Furious was a crime from the outset, for it attempted to do a thing that was illegal from the very beginning. No manner of executive order could have legalized it. It was a crime of federal law and international law, for while only two Americans were murdered by these weapons, nearly 200 Mexican citizens were also.

Before it was a crime of murder, it was a crime because it induced others to commit crimes, beginning with the illegal transportation and sale of those weapons.

Considering the crimes, today, the ATF and Department of Justice should be named  as un-indicted co-conspirators in Mexico for those 200 deaths, and any enterprising Sonoran prosecutor in Hermosillo should already have indictments on file for the ATF officers, by name, who authorized those guns to walk into his jurisdiction.

The first crime was committed when those guns were sold to drug cartel buyers in the US, or, when those guns traveled across the border into Mexico in American protective custody. The second-through-two hundredth crimes were committed when those guns were used to kill innocent citizens, including two American federal agents.

Their names were Brian Terry and Jaime Zapata.

Today, the Democrat Party is attempting to frame the entire Fast and Furious investigations by Sen Grassley and Rep Issa as politics; an attempt to embarrass the president and his attorney general.

And they seem to be getting away with it. None of the mainstream news networks carried this story when it first broke, or followed it these past 16 months, so they have a viewership who knows little or nothing about Fast and Furious. (Yes, "uniformed liberal" is a redundancy.) So it easy for them to portray this series of events now, over a year later, as a political, rather than criminal, event to those same sad sack, ignorant viewers.

Sadly, the right wing media is assisting the Dems in this endeavor. Fox analysts spend all their time talking about the consequences of Obama's executive privilege decision, and what this investigation might do to his election. They only mention the family of Brian Terry to put an exclamation mark on the politics of the case. And mention Jaime Zapata not at all.

Even the GOP in Congress, instead of being snot-bubble mad about the stalling tactics of Holder these several months, and the murder investigations he's impeding, are all too eager to play to GOP type, and rush to the microphone to say "We are not playing politics, so there, nyaahh" when that rush to the microphone is their chance to put a jolt into all those liberal viewers who know nothing of this case.

This is murder, on a large scale.

The GOP should exhibit nothing but moral outrage at not only the manner in which the DOJ (and ATF) have handled the case...I think they promoted two of the ATF principals and moved them to DC...but at the indifference by the Democrats about the underlying murder these guns have brought about.

These are crimes. These are murders. Let the political  cards fall where they may. Was it criminal intent or incompetence, or both? Probably both. Let the Democrats play politics, and let them tell the 20% or so lamebrains out there who actually listen to them, and their mouthpieces at NBC et al. When the stupid stay stupid, nothing changes. Just make the Democrats play defense.

If it bleeds it leads, and in Fast and Furious, murder should lead.

Then justice will be done.

And where they are joined is neither political nor philosophical. It is psychological.

This is important to understand, because Karl Marx's followers first hooked up with him  psychologically, not philosophically, and many (but not all) libertarians are libertarians for the very same reasons.

Libertarians,  the Gnostic constitutionalists

If you don't know the Gnostics, they were a 2nd Century Greek Christian movement. And if you don't know the Greeks of the early days of the Roman Empire, they had only recently lost their own empire (Alexander's, in the west and south) as Rome was building hers to the east and north. At the time, the Greeks fancied themselves the only true intellectuals in the Roman Empire, and looked upon the Romans as philistines.

Worse, Greek bitterness ran deep since they lived under both the protection and thumb of the Romans. They hated having to look up to their lessers. (Hold onto that thought.)

When Christianity began to spread around the near east, they assessed it, then tried to restate it in such a way that was more pleasing to their own intellectual sensibilities. In other words, the Gnostic gospels were made hard to grasp for the ordinary Ioe the Plvmber in Rome, Gaul or Alexandria.

But that was the point.

The Gnostics wanted a Gospel only the initiated could understand. You see, the Greeks had a big, big problem with Christ's general notion that it's best to come to God as a child in order to see the Kingdom of Heaven. "Suffer the little children..." was an idea they just couldn't accept for it meant they must accept an equal station with, you know, C-students. So they conceived of Christianity developing in another way, with themselves as the intellectual shepherds of the Church.

(We see this all the time. Even the tea parties have been invaded by this thinking.)

But hold that thought, too, for that is precisely how many libertarians see the Constitution today, for they have an equal difficulty in accepting the Founders' proposition, "Suffer the common man to come unto liberty."

Libertarianism is an intellectual discipline of self-attainment. It's a personal belief system, which is why it can never translate into national policy, or even a real political party. Still, as such, it is a pretty good discipline when viewed through the prism of the Constitution.  I know and admire many Libertarians, none of whom carry any of the condescending arrogance I will speak of here.

Libertarians and conservatives both cling to the Constitution, but the former sees "my" rights (and interests) being protected, while the latter consider the rights of all men. The other guy.

Actually, the Founders were clear on this point, just as Christ was clear about coming to God as a child.  Each of the Founders was an elite it his own right, but they wrote the Constitution and the Bill of Rights with the other guy in mind; the little guy, the common man. Jefferson made it known that it was the Homer Simpsons of the world he had in mind when he wrote that self-evident line into the Declaration, "that all men" can pursue life, liberty and happiness...without the supervision of their betters.

In doing this, the Founders established the "psychology" of liberty, which is one of reciprocity, for they set aside their own high opinions about themselves in order to create a system of government that would provide thousands of different roads for men less smart, less clever, and unread, to pursue, already knowing where the road led. Jefferson was considered a traitor to his class, in fact, just for believing that someday Tom the Tinker's kids could grow up to be just like him.

Which some of Tom's kids did.

Sharers and Tellers

This is what distinguishes the conservative from many libertarians still, not to mention an awful lot of faux conservatives parading about as being oh, so very much smarter than we are. Where elitism dwells, true conservatism cannot long abide.

But harkening back to the Greeks, one has to wonder why it is they were wired this way? Genetics? Is there an "elitist gene"? I doubt it. But what we know is since we've seen this  phenomenon under so many different intellectual and social banners, from Greeks to Gnostic Christians to French royal houses, to Karl Marx to Yale's Psychological School...

(New Yorker, 1936)

...to modern "elitists" and the little "l" libertarians,  it has to be one of the hardest itches to scratch man has ever borne. Even more than sex, I'd wager.

With some, it is a compulsion, impossible to control, a true psychological impairment.

So it is then, that the ideology of the Left is entirely based on a psychological need for status, a personal ideal of self-attainment. Wait, I just said that about libertarians.

It is this condition that joins at the heart the modern elitist pissant with the founder of the communist movement, for it was that same inner vanity that compelled Marx to try to elevate a class (the worker) of people he neither knew, nor felt any empathy for, nor would ever dirty his hands to get near. He had to rescue them only to elevate himself.  (Marx did the 19th Century version of searching the internet for a way to make a name for himself, and beat out MySpace, by coming up with FaceBook....but only for college professors.)

Marxism was always about Karl Marx and the secret supplications of his heart, which explains why it caught on like wildfire with so many low-paid academicians just like him, and why, over time, (tragically) it captured the minds of so many of the world's down-trodden, by offering them a paradise it not only could not deliver, but never had any real intention of trying.

For thousands of years the world's smart people have been divided thus: Tellers and Sharers. Both are equally smart, but while one is exclusivist in telling people what to do, or how it is, etc, the others are content to simply teach, and listen and persuade. One is wise and humble, one is foolish and arrogant.

So now, you can understand Ron Paul

Ron Paul is the enigma of this GOP campaign season. Unlike 2008, when he could only gather less than 2% of the GOP electorate, suddenly he's swimming in double-digits. He may even win Iowa they say.

There's a real down-to-earth reason for this, and that reason isn't that he has all the answers to America's bad economy brought on by Obama, for his cures are pretty much in keeping with the rest of the GOP candidates, with the exception of ending the Federal Reserve...which requires congressional action...which, by any account, he'd be least able of the entire group to pull off.

What's behind this sudden surge in Paul popularity?

Actually, it isn't sudden, as Paul easily won the CPAC straw poll in Feb, 2011, and came in a close second behind Michelle Bachmann in Iowa at 27% in the spring. Paul's rise coincidentally began as soon as others saw his potential for wrecking, coincidentally about the time of the massive American blowback to Obamacare, and the fearful certainty that Obama would need help from outside the party if he was to win a second term.

So, right now, Ron Paul has strong support among many on the Left, only, they have no intention of seeing him president. It's in the role of spoiler the Left wants to see Paul succeed.

Now, in fairness, I doubt Ron Paul knows this, or even many of his long-time supporters, since, especially from the Left, a Paul supporter is so easy to fake. Just dress up.

As the Dem's used to say about GW Bush, "Once you know what he's all about, he's an easy mark," and Paul's vanities are easy to stroke.

Let's just say that Paul's camp has been infiltrated and probably for two years at least.

How do I surmise this?

There is only one way to square Ron Paul's strong adherence to the Constitution on issues of domestic, especially fiscal, policy and his near-treasonous positions on American foreign policy since WWII. There is a common thread, which no one seems to look for.

How can one read and understand the Constitution down to the last tittle, yet restate American history in foreign affairs as blasphemously as if he were Jeremiah Wright himself? (Paul would be at least as slow as Obama to defend Israel, and probably for the same reasons, and if you don't believe me, ask him...and watch how he deflects and parses.)

There is a common thread here, and actually I've already alluded to it. Ron Paul knows the words of the Constitution, but either doesn't know, or has re-shaped in his own mind, a la, the Gnostics, its meaning and purposes as designed by the Founders.

He's a Teller, not a Sharer.

Ron Paul loves the Constitution, but only as he envisions it in his mind, to suit his purpose, and not as it exists in the hearts and souls of other men and women. To the people he is indifferent.

The missing link becomes apparent as he ventures over into foreign policy, where he suddenly makes up law out of whole cloth, a thing practiced by the Left every time a Republican has been in the White House since Nixon.

In fact, Ron Paul's "anti-imperialist" stance on America,. in substance,  is Marxist-like to the core....not just rhetorically, but spiritually and psychologically.

He states that water-boarding is torture. He doesn't preface it with an "in my opinion" but rather it is  torture by operation of law, yet there is no law, no court ruling, no string of cases, that suggests any such thing. So where did he get his law? Well, he got it the same place the Left got their indictment for Bush and Cheney for their illegal invasion of Iraq in 2003...a position Paul also takes...even though the Congress authorized it, and the courts, including the Supreme Court have held to be perfectly legal; that the Legislative branch and Executive branch can make war in this fashion rather than an open declaration, as laid out in Art I, Sec 8, and which Paul insists is the only way.

So when Rep Paul says the president acted unilaterally and illegally, what is his authority?

In his own mind, that is the answer, which is where elitists from the Greeks to Marx to modern times get all their authority, that's where. "This is how I want things to be, so this is how they are."

But Paul has gone the modern Left one better, for he has declared all American adventures, from Vietnam to Korea, and certainly Granada thru Afghanistan to be illegal invasions and subsequent occupations. Even our presence in Japan and Germany, 65 years after the end of hostilities, and long based on treaty (also considered to be the law of the land), Paul chucks that out and instead, calls America "imperialist".

Authors note: Quite frankly, I don't care if Ron Paul can produce unlimited quantities of gold through alchemy and bail the whole damned world out, I've already had to suffer through two presidents who've gone around the world apologizing for the hundreds of thousands of white crosses that litter other countries' countryside, monuments to the men who died saving their ungrateful hides.

And who continue to do so. We are the only country in the history of the world that has ever laid down our lives for our brothers, and while I can appreciate men who disagree, I cannot abide men who say, without knowing one damned thing, that these were simple acts of imperial aggression. It is the height of arrogance and stupidity to suggest we are just like the 16th-19th century Spanish, French, English, Germans and Dutch, trying to carve an empire.

Ron Paul's gnosticism is easy to spot. In his written works he speaks of the Constitution and liberty as shining cities on the hill, but only as what they mean to him, and not to the ordinary citizen, or to human kind. He is not a sharer. He is a teller.

In the debates he wags his winger and tells. In his speeches he tells. He never singles Barack Obama out as a good, bad, or and indifferent thing, but rather dwells on "things in government" he personally finds offensive.

The only thing he takes offense is the personally assault on his sensibilities, but never the assault on ours.

When he speaks of the Constitution, he doesn't speak lovingly of a wonderful ideal, but rather, like the Gnostics, of a deep mystery which he has been able to unlock and reshape. He is absolutely devoid of any love for America, but rather loves the perfection he finds in his own interpretation of its Constitution.

His love of the Constitution is a form of self-worship, so, when he speaks, he sounds more like a scolding know-it-all, talking down to all of us, conveying that he really doesn't like being bothered by having to explain all this stuff to we simple minded dolts yet one more time.

(If you pay attention, you find this same pattern of condescending patter in Newt Gingrich, as well, which, while it may be cute when leveled at the media, as he does now, will take on a totally different image altogether when a President Gingrich...hope I never have to write that line again...comes before the American people telling us what dumbies we are as well. Yes, both Paul and Gingrich would be almost Obama-esque in the way they look down on the American people at president.)

The Politics of Ron Paul

In all likelihood, Ron Paul has about the same support base now as he did in 2008, under 2%.  Of the 8%-12% he's polling nationally, more than half is probably of the Left who will leave when told. There are also those malcontents who are disenchanted with the GOP in general, but who will probably come back if a conservative gets the nod, and those who, as they have with Newt, mistaken his arrogant condescension as blunt straight-talk. Paul's core, the infamous Paulbots, are still about 2% (5% in Montana). (He has, also acquired new legions among many under-educated, based on race and anti-semitism, but who I doubt the pollsters could find on a bet, and who also are too illiterate to find a polling place, or even know how to register. But how they came to be Paul supporters is a true mystery.)

Again, I doubt Ron Paul knows all  this. Like a king, he listens only to his Wormtongues, and not the people outside the court gate. After all, he's a Teller, not a Sharer. I can find no reciprocity in his words or his tone.

So, once he has done his job of splitting whatever conservatives he can, he may or may not make a third party attempt. But Obama's minions will not be among them. Obama will need every vote he can get, and he can spare none to prop up Ron Paul in the general election.

My best guess is that in the end Ron Paul won't matter next November, but better he should be driven away now. Call it gnosis.

I don't fear Ron Paul ever becoming president, nor do I really fear a third-party run, where his support will dissipate. What I don't like is a man standing up as a Republican-appealing-to-conservatives (a party I don't like very much, but a brand I very much admire) and saying scandalous lies about his (my) country.

Ron Paul is no more a Republican than Barack Obama is a Democrat. Both carry another membership card in their wallet, and while not signed by the same founder, that have a common origin.

Posted at UnifiedPatriots.com http://www.unifiedpatriots.com/2011/12/11/ron-paul-where-libertarianism-and-the-left-are-joined-at-the-heart/vassarbushmills

Proof #1 :

Tuesday, a businessman named Bob Turner, with no prior political experience, handily defeated a Democrat in NY's 9th district, replacing disgraced amateur porn star Anthony Weiner as the district's congressional representative. It is the first time a Republican has held that seat since the 1920's.

Was this a repudiation of Obama, or the state of the current Democrat Party, or of Weiner? All of the above I'd say, but in that order.

While the GOP is crowing, trust me the district did not suddenly change party affiliation. The day the Democrats can find a pro-Israeli, fiscally responsible candidate, they will vote for him. But that will be awhile.

In the meantime Bob Turner will leave his mark, and that mark will be one that Herman Cain has helped pioneer.

Proof # 2

A couple of weeks ago Jeffrey Toobin wrote a lament  in The New Yorker that Justice Clarence Thomas wasn't so stupid after all. He and his buds had totally missed it. In fact, Thomas is the stealth intellectual on the Court, and thanks to the Left's snide derision on him, he has been able to work some serious magic under the radar screen for years.

Affirming Toobin's angst, Walter Russell Mead wrote about his painful admission at American Thinker, (an important read) and went on to say that Thomas was quietly and effectively removing the "scaffolding" the New Deal leftists of FDR had built around the Constitution in the 1930's.

Think about it, a Supreme Court as we knew it in the days of Coolidge.

Herman Cain is doing the same somewhere else

This is my analysis only and in no way infers any collaboration with Mr Cain or his staff.

I've met Herman Cain twice and like him very much. In every category, yes even foreign policy, I place him at 1, 2 or 3 in the current field of GOP candidates, even considering a later entry by Sarah Palin into the field.

Most of all, I like his "type". I've said this many times.

Most media analysts rank Cain low alongside the other candidates, always based on their own self-generated conventional rules of analysis, pre-2010 (BCE), which generally reads: A person from the private sector, with no political experience, is not electable.

Bottom line: Herman Cain doesn't measure up to their idea of a president based on years and years of accumulated evidence based on a template that no longer exists.

Herman Cain's brief reply to this rule (from the South Carolina debate): "How's that been working out for you?"

More succinctly (from me) how's that been working out for America?

Herman Cain represents a type of problem solver America needs very much. The nice thing about him he isn't just out there promoting himself. He's also selling the broader notion that the best ideas, experience and leadership for a post-2010 America (A.D.), at all levels of government, can be found in the private sector where problem solving is still a resume enhancement.

At the recent Florida debate, Mr Cain laid out his idea of reforming the federal bureaucracy, EPA in particular. (This has been a pet cause of mine for many years, as an original bureaucracy-buster.)  He wants to form commissions made up of their private sector "victims." This a crackerjack of an idea.

Moreover, it is also an idea no other candidate on the dais that night could ever have conceived. Nor their staffs. It's a purely private sector concept.

There isn't just sanity in this idea, but it also involves a long over-due reckoning and a reminder to the bureaucracy just who works for who.

But that is just one kind of scaffolding Herman is removing.

Could Herman Cain also be removing the American media's scaffolding around campaigns.

What I find even more interesting is the way in which he has designed his campaign. Again I say this as an observer outside his campaign.

A little history: The media has always been engaged in political campaigns. But in the days of two city dailies there was never a pretense of objectivity. Newspapers were partisan as hell. But national radio networks announced the news without commentary and even early television, can anyone remember John Cameron Swayze at NBC?, simply read the news. Let the newspapers have at it with partisanship, for facts, the people needed to come to CBS, NBC or ABC.

CBS and Murrow changed that, for by 1960 the media had become an unobjective player in the Kennedy-Nixon race, only I doubt many people knew it at  the time. They were no longer about facts.

Part of the scaffolding it built was, of course, "the debate" system, which Nixon won on points, but JFK won on glamor. Another key element was the ability of the media to control, magnify or bury a candidate and his image, such as JFK's obsessive womanizing, which, had it been known publicly would have driven Kennedy from the race. The media did know and decided it did not fit their designs for him...just like 2008, 48 years later... so they buried it.

In 1960 the national media became propagandists, and for twenty years went about purging its ranks of mouthpieces that even hinted an adherence to a journalistic code.

From 1960-2008 the American media has essentially been in charge of the election process. With Watergate they were given cause to believe they could run a president from office (1974) and tried but failed again to do in both Reagan's and Bush II's tenure.

This didn't mean that Republicans couldn't win, mind you, but they had to play the game according to the a template. And heaven help the president (or any public office holder) who bucked them while in office.  Only Reagan actually defied them, but it was not in his campaigns. It was rather his bypass of both the Congress and the media by taking his case for cutting taxes directly to the American people.

Even conventional conservative media analysts didn't like Reagan's "tricks", I think. Reagan was not a "type" they wanted to see more often in Washington. By 1992, and the accession of Bill Clinton, the scaffolding the American media had erected around the election process was considered as sacrosanct as the liberal Court decisions built around the Constitution since 1936.

Since then, every successful candidate for every office had to be filtered through the media prism. They had the power of political life and death.

Enter Herman Cain; a funny thing happened in South Carolina.

All the conventional media people who watched that debate came up with the usual observations about the candidates' performance (neither Romney, Perry nor Bachmann were there). Cain did okay, they all said. All eyes were on Tim Pawlenty, the only first tier candidate of the lot (RIP).

But then pollster Frank Luntz did an after-debate poll among a group of South Carolinians, and on a show of hands Cain won unanimously.

What the hey?

Yes, this astounding unfiltered reaction by real people gave Herman an unexpected bump in both the polls and media attention, which naturally meant he had to be tripped up. And Cain stumbled on a question about our military position in Afghanistan, then Islam in general and the issue of a mosque in Tennessee, or so they said. He spent a lot of his time saying "I didn't say that, but did say this," which we all recognize as the wreckage of another media drive-by shoot-down.

His campaign settled back into second tier according to media and national consultants.

Mmmm, could be. (Bugs Bunny, Warner Bros)

What no one considered then is that Herman probably gained a quarter of million votes with what he said about sharia law and that mosque, only there was no Frank Luntz there to take the count. But Herman counted, I'm sure.

I recently wrote that while Ron Paul has probably read more books on American foreign policy, once briefed on a situation, Herman Cain has an inner compass Dr Paul doesn't, and is therefore twice as qualified to act on it.  Reagan had that quality, as well.

And Herman seems to be able to convey this quality in everything he says. For people in the audience, it is sensed more than spoken.

In more recent debates, Iowa (FoxNews), then the Reagan Library (NBC) and last week in Florida (CNN), Herman regularly gave time back to the moderators. He was talking to someone different than the people Michelle, Mitt and Rick thought they were talking to. Herman doesn't waste his time restating his resume to the cameras, or pleading with the cameras every time he speaks that he is qualified to be president.

Does Herman Cain know something the media doesn't?

It does seem that Herman Cain is merely speaking at the cameras (and the media) and not to them.

He is speaking to someone else.

This was also a quality Ronald Reagan had.

This is a giant crap shoot for Herman Cain, and a lot depends on things I'm not privy to such as the strength of his grass roots operations. Or money.

But Herman Cain seems to be convinced that he can use the media megaphone provided by them and speak to a group of people the media is quite unaware of, in a way they are quite deaf to, about things they don't even believe are important.

By doing so Herman Cain is undoing their scaffolding around this entire process.

So for this reason especially, I want to see actual votes counted before Herman decides it's time to cash in his chips. For if Herman does well in Iowa, New Hampshire, South Carolina or Florida, he will have proved a major point that future candidates can use to minimize the power of the media in declaring any person's worthiness to be president.

He will have started tearing down a scaffold that is every bit as inhibiting to American liberty as the one FDR built around the Supreme Court 80 years ago.

I like this a lot.

And he may yet win.

Sometimes, when I see Ron Paul speak, I think, "Too bad." He is so comfortable in his clothes. He could care less about the "everything is presentation, presentation, presentation" theater of politics.

Ordinarily I'd like that.

During the Clinton years Paul was a beacon for constitutionalism in a period that was similar to this one in many ways; a corrupt regime and a constant attack on the Constitution. So, his inconsequential "no" votes on foreign aid and any kind of American adventurism abroad (Clinton wasn't too adventuresome in most things foreign, including bin Laden when he had a chance) were really of no moment to me. I liked Ron Paul.

Paulians Are Another Thing

Disagreeing somewhat with Erick Erickson at RedState, as to whose followers are the more rabid, Ron Paul's or Sarah Palin, I've gone a couple of levels deeper with Paulians. Ron Paul has far more truly sick people in his camp than Sarah, of which I've yet to find any of their stripe.

Paul bussed in load after load of what looked like college kids to the CPAC event in February, just so they could vote for him in the straw poll...which he won handily. He did the same in the recent Iowa straw polls, invalidating that poll as well. (I'm not sure of the political strategy there, but think it's comes from an unhealthy strategy.) From the looks of their ill-fitting suits, shirts and ties, and having talked to a few, and listened to still others milling around, I'm not sure I've ever saw that many ill-informed and socially uncomfortable college kids in my life. Size 16 collars wrapped around 14 1/2 neck's. Polyester ties. College kids or kids playing hookey?

The Kids

During the 2008 campaign I spoke with some small business owners about talking to their wage-and-hour employees about becoming registered, and to explain to them the political realities of what was about to happen if Obama were elected. I repeated this in 2010, only to a smaller crowd, as most of those businesses had laid off almost half of their workers.

Most of those kids were also 18-24 years old, still dreaming of finding a really sweet Honda Prelude they could fix up. $8-$12/hr range. Most were white, most high school graduates, all with a mechanical aptitude, and no fear of work. With a scrub brush, strong lye soap and a No 10 wash tub they'd have looked a lot like Ron Paul's kids at CPAC.

They were, still are, America's largest unregistered voting bloc. And they are all legal Americans, born and bred.

And highly suggestible. Most kids' introduction to politics is thru on-the-job osmosis. Kids that age tend to listen to people they admire on the job. Chat. In small business that is often the boss, if he's a good one, which is why I proposed the project.

But neither the GOP nor conservatives have shown any interest in bringing them into the fold.

Enter the Paulians. In 2009 about 20% of those kids lost their jobs and are now in various stages of disaffection. Their belief in the system, not to mention a lot of self confidence, had been challenged.

What I couldn't accomplish with a little seminar put together by their bosses, Ron Paul's people is now getting through a recruiting system similar to the way a drug distributor builds up his street corner peddlers. This is how community organizers recruit in the inner city, and the same way the Klan would recruit disenfranchised farmhands in the Great Depression.

The most malleable mind in the world is the disaffected youth, with a pack full of grievances, and a chip on his shoulder, a victim. And what Paulians are offering up to them sounds might tasty...a little bit of get even, with a dash of attaboy, and a pinch of greener pastures over yonder. Put in a pot and bring to a boil.

Most wouldn't know Ron Paul if they saw him on a postage stamp.

Now, in all honesty, I can't blame Ron Paul for any of this. I can't even say that he is a mastermind behind it, for above all things, he doesn't strike me as a person who want to be a cult figure. But he is anyway, so if I'm wrong here, I'm a 100% wrong.

Thanks to Bernie Chumm I've been able to construct a makeshift Paulian command structure. What I don't have clear in my my mind is an end game. For Ron Paul becoming president isn't it. He's supposed to upset someone's apple cart, and I have every reason to believe it is a conservative or Republican. His troops seem almost ambivalent about the Left.

Somewhere in Paul's ranks is a cadre of educated (I think) older (I assume) Grand Kleagles who are true believers of Paul but with their own list of grievances against the world. They have access to money. And the internet, when allowed, they operate like a flash mob, and stampede comment sections with lonnnng-winded inanities, with the only purpose to overload it and run off sensible comments. They are politics' Watchtower Society, for as soon as they show up, people are shooed away.

This is a seminar tactic. It is not spontaneous. It comes from structured guidance. And when coupled with other bizarre activities, such as stuffing straw poll ballot boxes, which have no real political purpose other than to market the name Ron Paul, not the person, and certainly not the philosophy, you have to ask:

What are the real purposes of these acts and how do they fit into the overall Paul presidential campaign strategy?

I have to leave the search for that answer up to people who know more about Paul than I do. We we have a rule here that there are no pure voters. But Paulians seem to be an exception. Some are so impure, as with the Left, we really don't want to reach out to them.

I hate saying this, but this is triage time, and they deserve as little of our concentration as possible.

Isolationism Begins at Home

Having just defiled Paulians, I will now speak to Dr Paul's good name as well, for a  singular reason, stated below:

Charity begins at home, and justice begins next door. (Dickens, Martin Chuzzlewit, 1844)

Home, the Nation

For isolationists before Pearl Harbor, in an era much more Christian in America than now, there was still little moral hand-wringing among American political leaders about the conduct of tyrants and barbarians abroad. We were insular, it was argued. We have our own cake, it was argued. And we were coming out of a Great Depression. It was assumed the United States could stay afloat on any rough sea, in part because we were protected on each flank by two of them.

It wasn't our responsibility, even as Christians, to rush to the aid of those unlucky enough to be born Slav, Jew, Gypsy, then Norwegian, French, Czech, etc., just to name a few.

The moral equation was of secondary importance to the leaders of a nation about to burst out of the Great Depression. Glenn Miller's "In the Mood" was the song of age, not the "Song of the Volga Boatmen".

Home, the House

But in America there has always been an older interpretation of this moral equation, where Home is actually the individual house, the smallest building block of America.

The American House was defined by a man and woman (yep) in a complete home. While the female is wired to protect the nest, the male is wired to see threats to the home from a greater distance. It's the male who (historically) was more apt to sally forth and go next door, or to the edge of the town, even to the edge of the sea to defend the larger nest, be it the town, valley, or even country.

The American husband and wife knew reciprocity and mutual defense long before the politicians did.

Home, the Nation

As I explained above, until Dec 7, 1941 America was essentially an isolationist nation, involving ourselves in few foreign adventures before then. (The coming war, World War II, was no adventure.) But to some extent World War I, the War to End All Wars, was. Our ultimate involvement in it was by a progressive president's design in the name of a global world government that would emerge once the dinosaur royal tyrants of Europe and Turkey were eventually vanquished.

We didn't have to get in, but to suit Ron Paul's single requirement today about foreign wars, Congress did declare war on the Central Powers, and our presence there brought the war to a speedier end, at the loss of 117,0o0 of our men in under six months.

I suppose there would have been a kind of moral happy ending on that account at least had it not been for the Versailles Treaty, almost ensuring the next war would come, which it did, 20 years later.

Before that was the Spanish-American War, which was a true American adventure, a war brought on by jingoistic newspapers and not any real American interests. It too was a "declared" war, fitting Dr Paul's litmus test.

But interestingly, this war also put on display another aspect of American Exceptionalism which has escaped Dr Paul's notice.

You see, as a result of that war we acquired the Philippine Islands from Spain. Puerto Rico, too.

A good case against American adventurism in Cuba can be made anytime, but the acquisition of the Philippines established the United States as the carrier of a dogma unheard of in human history, for no sooner had we had taken possession there, we set about building the political institution to set her free.

This had never been done before. The Philippines were acquired in 1898 and were scheduled to join the community of free nations in 1942, just a few months after Pearl Harbor, when the islands were overrun by Japan. They then gained their independence on July 4, 1946 at the cost of a million of their own people and several thousand American lives.

Not bad for an historic first.

No nation had ever taken a land in conquest then promptly set it free.

Ron Paul's non-interventionist policy was always anathema to conservatives. National Review was my earliest link to Dr Paul and they derided Paul in part because of his resistance to the post-WWII emergence of the US as a world super-power, and de facto protector and defender of freedom worldwide....as a counter balance to Soviet, Marxist, designs for world dominion.

It was both as a geo-political and moral stance America assumed.

Our post-war position vis a vis the USSR and Soviet expansion, including support of the Republic of (South) Vietnam, had at its core this  noble principle of protecting freedom and democracy as well as a geo-political necessity.

Congressman Paul looks upon the liberation of Iraq as a waste of good money. It was an illegal war, as well, he thinks. We've been international busy-bodies.  He has managed to blame America for Islamic hatred of the West in Iran, which proves, even as he tries to project being well-read, ahead of the others in this regard, there is a deep hole in his ability to interpret and analyze. He is missing that "one thing" that defines what makes America special. So, even as Herman Cain, for instance, is reputed to read much less, because he does possess that "one thing" he can make a quick study of every event, past and present, historical, philosophical, economic and quickly assess it in its proper context.

That One Thing, the Moral Component of Home

The husband and wife team from the individual house, mentioned above, comprise a moral component of going to the aid and defense of neighbors which precedes American foreign policy by a century at least.

I can't say who started it, possibly Abraham Lincoln, whose "adventure" of ending slavery spawned a half-century of the "Doctrine of Liberty" ruling American political life.

This moral component of America coming to the aid of people under the boot of tyranny extends to this day.

Our policy was simple and understood by all. We do what we can, where we can, from Radio Free Europe, to quiet support for the conquered peoples of eastern Europe for fifty years, to Granada, to Iraq. We have always supported affirmative assaults on tyranny by any means possible. And ff we can tie an American interest with freeing a bunch a people militarily, by God, we'll try it.

From 1860 forward it has been American policy to extend a hand, and sometimes our neck, on behalf of the downtrodden and tyrannized. And that policy began in the American home, where real charity begins, and reciprocity taught, and not the Congress.

American "interests" have never been the same as European interests, or Asian interests. We are not in the business of acquiring new territory. We are not hegemonists (regional spheres of influence), as the old European imperial powers were, and as the USSR, China, and "caliphate" designers are.

Even our Monroe Doctrine was to restrain European hegemonism in the western hemisphere, not foster our own.

We conquered two barbarous regimes in 1945, then by 1952, promptly gave then back. Unheard of in human history. Unmatched for success as well.

I'm guessing the only morality Ron Paul can see in American military action is that formal declaration of war...thus justifying three  less-than-noble wars.  While it would be nice, just to keep the hair-splitters at bay, to have that formal declaration, the fact is that all American "adventures" have been authorized by Congress, and such quasi-declarations have  consistently satisfied the constitutional requirement in the Courts' eyes, as late as 2003 with the invasion of Iraq.

But not Mr Paul's.

He rails about our unconstitutional adventures as a narrow-minded Christian and Muslim might debate, each thumping their respective Holy Book, saying "It is written, it is written", then walking away, shaking their heads about what an idiot the other fellow is. There is no moral compass in his arguments.

I suggest Ron Paul practice his art in a biker bar, by correcting everyone's English.

In the end, Congressman Ron Paul is not a breath of fresh air and honesty in this campaign, but an uber-orthodox prig, a 19th Century European orthodox fussbudget, closer to Metternich, or more recently Madelaine Albright, running hither and thither getting treaties signed, making sure all the i's are dotted and t's crossed, then walking away, assuming they were all self-enforcing.  He hasn't wrapped himself in the Constitution but in cynical view of Americans.

Ron Paul's hair-splitting legalism refuse to allow him to consider any moral component in American foreign policy. Inasmuch as the broader war we now find ourselves engaged is a war between two polar ideals of morality, good versus evil, Dr Paul is astoundingly disengaged, pounding on the letter of the Constitution as if it were a 1939 Ford Truck Owner's Manual.

He could never have recognized the "new template" being served up in the Philippines. He could not draw any conclusion from these liberating events; freeing slaves, freeing Pacific islanders, freeing Europeans, or freeing tyrannized Arabs.

Ron Paul is the dinosaur here. Not the American Doctrine of Liberty.

Crossposted at UnifiedPatriots.com

I was one of the earliest to do a national interview with Herman Can, on New Year's Eve. You can fine me now at UnifiedPatriots.com, a new conservative activism site.

Only last week I wrote a piece The Next President, Seeking a Legacy of Leadership, in which I responded to a commenter with:..I’d love to be able to talk to many of the candidates…

…and lo and behold, a member of Herman Cain’s staff calls to ask if I’d like to talk to Mr Cain.

So, on New Year’s Eve we sat down for a teleconference, and Mr Cain was nice enough to give me almost an hour. For background, I met Mr Cain once before, in a private meeting in July as part of a group who briefed him on GOTV (The Concord Project) and the Precinct Project, both well known subjects here at RedState.

This is the first of two parts, as I’d like to deal with Mr Cain’s views on leadership in this piece, and whether a man from the private sector is qualified to be President, in the second, which is a hot-button issue with me.

I won’t do a bio here, as Mr Cain is already well known at RS. You listened to him and shook his hand if you were at the RedState Gathering in September. His speeches are all over the internet, and I suggest you watch one…and compare. (There’s a reason for this.) His reputation as a corporate executive is also legend, having pulled a national company (Godfather’s Pizza), back from the ashes and to good health in the late 1980’s, where it remains today…along with a second generation of leadership who earned their spurs under Mr Cain’s tutelage. Godfather’s had all but been written off by its parent company when Mr Cain was brought in to perform major surgery. He understands “rescue management”.

We’re almost the same age (I’m 8 days older), and both of us come with a history in the private sector. He’s much more photogenic and phonogenic, though I know more cuss words in Russian, and probably more of the dark alleyways of the Left. An imposing man, when I met him in July, I thought “What a wonderful juxtaposition” standing next to Barack Obama in a debate, for even in the finest cut of clothes Barack Obama can barely fill out a suit, while Herman Cain can go bear hunting with a switch. It would be like Mr Peepers standing next to Rosie Grier; a Chevy Volt next to a Humvee.

But before I met him, I watched him as he did a radio show at the Americans for Prosperity Conference the day before he gave his speech. You can always tell a lot about a person based on how they interact with people. He is genuinely congenial, with an infectious laugh, which also means he was polite enough to laugh at my jokes. And he makes eye contact, which many of you may think is trivial, but is of great importance to both the student and practitioner of leadership. I watched his speech at the Americans for Prosperity event in July and he received standing cheers. Not an ovation, mind you, cheers.

As a note, it’s way above my pay grade to presume any potential candidate is Grade A presidential material. They have their own people who do the handicapping for them. One of my main interests in Herman Cain, even a long time ago, was that whenever his name was mentioned as a possible candidate, the caveat was made; he had never had any “public management experience”. I had been told, even here at RS, that he could not win the nomination or the election. Why? I asked. “Because it had never been done before”. Case closed.

That will be Part II of this interview.

With those things in mind, I prefaced our talk with two observations: 1) That having executive management experience, even in government, does not automatically qualify one as a leader, as there are “intangibles” that make the distinction between management and leadership more clear, and 2) a point I’ve been trying to drive home here for over a year, and that is, if we are to win…really win…we have to be a movement that lasts a generation, not just a blink of a decade. That requires not just leadership, but a legacy of leadership, all of which requires new templates and new definitions so the next leader in the White House can stay on the Right course.

During this interview Mr Cain gave me his input on what he considers important in the leadership role. He starts out with an acronym for what he calls his operating principles of problem-solving; WAR:

WORK on the right problem

ASK the right questions

REMOVE areas that present barriers

…then went onto say that in “Healthcare Deform” the President and the Democrats in Congress

…were working on the wrong problem, which was to make a power grab of 1/6th of the American economy, having nothing to do with fixing any problem in the American health care system……which (he went on) is 80% healthy and fine.

I pointed out that in the private sector one can be a dictator, whereas in the government, the leader must be able to create the political will in others to go along with his solutions, as well as deflect those who have every intent on seeing him fail. His answer segued perfectly into the “intangibles of leadership” capped off with an example of stunning simplicity to prove his point:

“At Godfathers I was a benevolent dictator”…(which places him somewhere between Don Rumsfeld and Dick Cheney, which seemed about right considering the hard choices that had to be made at Godfathers)…you have to identify and remove impediments early on, while keeping everyone else energized and optimistic about the mission…

…then went on to mention President Obama’s embarrassing comment to Sen McCain at the Healthcare roundtable, where he reminded McCain, “I am the president.” (I won, dammit, not you.)

The worst thing a leader can do is remind everyone he has the final say-so. Everybody in the world already knows he’s the president.” (VB: Indeed, what a childish…and psychologically revealing thing to say.)

The biggest problem America faces today is a lack of leadership…in the White House, in the Congress, and in the federal government.

The Intangibles of Leadership

Then Mr Cain went to the heart of the “intangibles”…

What many people forget is that the president, beyond being head of the party and chief executive of the government (VB: these are essentially management positions)…he is the spokesman for the People. He is their chief advocate. His principal customers aren’t Congress or his party, but the People. In fact, he is the only national advocate they all have. (VB: This is how Reagan was able to get his agenda passed in a Democrat Congress, by taking his case directly to the people.)

It’s the president’s job to inform them about the rights and duties of citizenship, and the true purposes of government, to create an attitude of self-confidence in their own abilities, to know that all the answers are found within themselves.

There is no Department of Happy in Washington.

Make sure the American people know what we’re doing, why we’re doing it, and how we’re going to do it.

To all the wonks out there, the obvious may have escaped you, but in order to accomplish these things one must first establish a relationship with the people. A face to face relationship. Sometimes I think that this sounding so simple is why so few executive managers try it, but indeed it lay at the heart of leadership. Of course you have you back it up with skill and knowledge, as Mr Cain laid out in his WAR principles, but as every Vietnam vet forward knows, a unit coming home intact often was a result of the intangible personal touch of that one commanding officer, who knew each of his hundred men, and had looked each of them in the eye. Soldiers in the field dreaded those “salutin’ demons” like the plague, for they were often the cause of many casualties.

Mr Cain told it this way, from an episode he had with the front office receptionist when he was head of the National Restaurant Association.

She came into my office one day and said she was a little discouraged and thinking about going back to school. “After all, the job I do here is really nothing”, she said.

When I first went to the NRA I got rid of the automated answering machines and insisted that the first voice a person heard when calling would be a human one. (VB: How nice!) I told Lisa why she was there and that she was in fact our ‘director of first impressions’, as it was her voice that set the tone for everything else that went on for callers and visitors.

She walked out of the office a changed person.

There’s more to this than you know. I’ve been in a lot of executive offices. All executives know intimately that lady just outside the door, the personal secretary or personal assistant. But few actually know that person in the next cubicle over, often not even by name. In the elevator that person might even get the “thousand yard stare”, which is what the Indians called the way the British ignored them on public streets in colonial times. If you look for it, you still see this everywhere…no one making eye contact, or any kind of personal acknowledgment. It’s not just that the boss knows you exist, but cares, that instills in people the urge to follow.

Many people thought that Barack Obama had this special ability to connect. But a close look at his eyes tells you otherwise…and that cast of indifference is slowly being engraved all over his face. He just couldn’t fake it very long. That look of indifference has long been associated with the face of government in general and bureaucracy in particular. It is often equated with disdain.

If the People are not part of the equation in restoring the Constitution and this American dream, then I will say, no matter how managerially capable, that man or woman will fail, for they will not have summoned sufficient support from the American people to complete their principal mission, let alone pass it on. To me, that thousand yard stare is a disqualifier, unless, using Erick Erickson’s other qualifier…that guy gets the nomination anyway. Then I’ll vote for him.

But I’d rather go down with a leader, than rise with a manager.

The Legacy of Leadership

Moreover, there will be nothing to pass onto to the next generation of leaders; that continuity of leadership.

As I wrote earlier (above) I specifically mentioned Ronald Reagan, and my sadness that he had left no conservative legacy to his successor. Mr Cain, who has written three books on leadership (see them at Amazon.com), was quick to grab this notion from me, mentioning…

(that his “legacy” at Godfather’s) is the current generation at Godfather’s, set in place by me, and it is still a good, profitable company.

In the private sector one of the principal jobs of an executive is to insure a continuity of leadership. Great leaders leave the organization strong enough to move forward.

In Washington, my job would be 1) to get the country on the right track 2) Put the right people in the right places and 3) Identify and train the next generation of leaders.

I know, the devil’s in the details, and when we talk about intangibles, there’s always a shortage of details. And there aren’t handbooks on these details.

But when Ronald Reagan took on the Marxists while they were primarily stationed halfway across the world in Russia, he used those intangibles, went to the American people and brought the Evil Empire down, with both an awful lot of technical insider-management-details (i.e., he picked good people) and one-on-one leadership. For when crunch time came, with Gorbachev at Reykjavik, he fell back on “intangibles” no one can put down on a resume or list in a book, but which it seems, both the American people and the Soviets knew he had. The Marxists blinked.

This is in part a response to Hugh Hewitt and the rather harsh manner, as yet unearned, toward the Boehner strategy about the current CR's in Congress. To make it personal right now is wrongheaded; for one, it burns bridges that cannot be rebuilt. The Tea Party movement is in the ascendancy right now in Congress and America, but it is not yet the majority. The Left wishes to see it disappear into irrelevency, so why make all the easier for them by driving a permanent wedge in the GOP...at least until all the cards have been played. That will come soon enough.

See my companion piece on the last CR vote at UnifiedPatriots.com

I think of the new freshman in Congress differently than incumbents, and although they will run in 2012 as incumbents, I will continue to think of them as “newbies.” This is because, for the most part, they come to Congress under a new understanding, with a new Compact (a Covenant?) with the people who elected them. If they do well, the next class, and the next, will come to Congress under this same new Compact, and thus will a new Congress (and nation) be built.

That, and not beating back Obamacare, is The Plan, at least how I see it.

These newbies come as citizen-legislators, not professional politicians, and one of their biggest jobs while in office will be to stay that way; as hard as rocks, unbending as oaks, as mean as snakes, and as innocent as new driven snow. (Yeah, I know, why not throw in chaste, non-smoking and teetotalling too.)

My point in writing this is, after 2, 4, 6 years – will you, the citizen-voter, the tea party citizen, be able to tell the difference? Or will you just automatically write them off as inside-the Beltway crooks as you have the last several batches? I say this because sixty days in, quite frankly, a whole lot of you are beginning to sound like what you really want in Washington are whipping boys, and not citizen-legislators.

So, do you know how to take the true measure of these men and women? You too, are being tested.

Recently this new Compact was explained to me as “We the people sent them there with our Plan to repeal Obamacare.” I don’t entirely buy that, for quite frankly the country can survive Obamacare, but it cannot survive the underlying financial mess that Obamacare will help push over the cliff.  Philosophically and constitutionally, Obamacare is the greatest assault on individual freedom in American history, but if it went away tomorrow, we would still be twenty or so months away from total economic collapse.

So, this ‘Compact with the People’ has to be far more extensive than Obamacare. Our congressmen must be expected to both walk and chew bubble gum at the same time.

Newbie Congressional Baggage

In order to work, this new ‘Compact with the People’ must be defined by the newer kinds of “baggage” those new Congressmen bring to Washington.

I use this term because this is how all those Washington insiders (the old incumbents, and long-time staffers), see the newbies; insiders, who over the years have become a bit jaded about all this rah, rah, love of country stuff. To them it’s just a job…about which they long ago lost any sense of its real purpose.

So, let’s look at the “baggage” a newly elected citizen-congressman comes to Washington with. Our freshman might have run a successful business for years, had hundreds on his payroll, been secure in his financial affairs, balanced budgets, hired, fired, and been loved by his employees. Or he could have saved lives (a doctor, a retired cop). Still, on his first day in Congress, he doesn’t know anything of importance in their political world. All that stuff he does know, and no one in Washington doesn’t know, or doesn’t care about, is “baggage.”

Still this baggage is what it is all about. Newbie baggage consists of many elements having nothing to do with policy issues such as lower taxes, budget restraints, spending cuts, or repeal, repeal, repeal. Underlying all of these issues are standards of character; integrity, honor, fealty, strength, backbone, and yes, common sense…things long since departed from Washington and the halls of government, and things that will forever and a day separate these newbies from a goodly number of their own party, and the vast majority of the opposing party. (Note I did not include “loyalty” as there is nothing more loyal than a Democrat to his vices.) They must wear this around as a badge, like a beanie.

In the end, it is the presence of these bedrock traits, not the end of high taxes or Obamacare, that will save us as a people…while their continued absence will condemn us. Just know this.

So, this is a commentary on the “baggage” new congressmen must carry to Washington…and a reminder to Tea Parties, it is baggage you/we all wanted them to carry. You/we wanted them to be a tabula rosa, a blank slate. You/we wanted honesty and integrity more than knowing the ins and outs of Capitol Hill, or the “ways of politicians” as old-timey preachers used to  say. You/we wanted an ability to lead and to know when to follow. You/we also wanted a greater understanding of the private sector economy, of meeting payrolls and balancing books, instead of the funny-money accounting they do in government where the books never have to balance.

So cut them some slack as they they go about using this “baggage” in a commonsensical manner in order to right this ship of state listing heavily to port. For we certainly don’t want them to throw this baggage away. Instead you need to get a sense of the strong forces in Washington to strip them of it. As Moses Sands once said, it would be like me in room filled with a bevy of lovely ladies, all unclothed, and a bottle of Bushmills at the other end of the room. What to do? What to do? (He exaggerated, of course, still, that’s how I got my name.)

But first, they must all take each others’ measure. Common sense dictates this… and it doesn’t happen overnight.

So use some common sense about the very criteria you/we, the Tea Parties, established about the kind of people you/we wanted to send to Washington in order to fix this mess.

For what this baggage is also comprised of (we hope) is a new way of communicating with his constituents; no more of the lofty language of the Beltway, designed to obfuscate more then edify. No more of the secret code language of the club.

What this baggage also includes is a core set of principles…yes, lower taxes, smaller government. But above even those are the defining standards established by the Founders; a reverence for the Constitution and its design, an integrity and honesty of purpose about his mission, and his responsibilities to his constituents.

Which means you didn’t elect your congress-critter to simply call back and get your collective advice on every little vote of procedure or substance, especially since, only sixty days in, they already know that “we the people” are many voices, not one, and often discordant voices, some saying “gee” while others are saying “haw”.

The federal government is no different than a board of directors who have watched their company go from the greatest company in the world to one on the verge of bankruptcy and total collapse. Your congressman is but one of 435 members of the board. Brand new. Ask Ross Perot how easy it was to fix General Motors….especially since he didn’t play well with others either. He came, stayed and departed – an army of one. GM went on to further decline and eventual collapse.

One of the things that distinguishes the House from the Senate is the simple fact, in the House, you cannot be an army of one.

An army of one can neither lead, nor follow. Look at Ron Paul. It drove him mad….sort of.

Common sense tells me the first thing a “newbie” congressman does, with all that baggage, is to take the measure of the other 434 members, many of whom have been there for decades. Ours have only been in 60 days. But yes, votes do take place, even before they can do this. As a rule they will be partial to the R and biased against the D. I would. And what they will learn first is how strong they are, who they can rely on, and who they cannot. On this, they cannot rely on any instruction from you/we. This is all eyeball-to-eyeball stuff, trust me.

This is the part where you/we throw them into the pool and simply tell them to swim to the other side.  Sink or swim. So, again, cut them some slack, they’re still dog-paddling.

What we cannot afford to do, Tea Parties, is brow beat these men because they have not violated their own personal codes of good sense by listening to you-of-so-many-tongues (what’s the Shoshone name for this?)  instead of their own notions of good common sense.

Remember, these newbies are but the first of many. So, don’t screw the pooch. Make them afraid, but don’t make them hate you like a scolding fishmonger’s wife.

I can find no profit for our cause to go around damning men before they’ve actually earned it.

This will probably be the first in a series of observations on this subject. Actually, we talk about it all the time here, but the time is nigh that we actually start separating the wheat from the chaff, and deciding what to do about it.

As you'll be able to tell, below, I've got my minner bucker, my seine net, my waders, and my best flannel shirt on. I'm wearing my night fishing clothes today just so I can get in the mood for writing about a bunch of people who look at us as if we'd just crawled out from under a stump.

I just read EE's 2009 post, One Way Street, that contained a list of GOP backstabber's who'd lost to Conservatives in primaries, then sided with Democrat in order to hand the general to someone else. It seems Scozzafava wasn't the first, or the only. EE begs the question, What to do? What to do? About them? About it?

The natural inclination, and we all have them, is to get even in a big way. Run 'em out of Dodge, many say, and trust me, there are dozens of ways that are just as legal as ACORN hiring a bus to bring protesters to congregate in your front yard in order to do that. (We won't discuss that here...today.) Only one problem, is that really the right thing to do? You know, for people like us who carry both a Bible and the Constitution around in a canvas sack, and sit under a big oak, reading 'em, while trying to chew a apple with our one good tooth. It's important we keep our jaws set straight.

What to do? What to do? About them?

The truth is, we do need to make a concerted effort to patch things up with true "moderate" GOP'ers if we are reclaim the Party and the brand. We need to stake out a common ground. And there is a process. But the trick is in divining who's a true moderate, and what "moderate" even means anymore in a world where pro-choice more often as not means pro-murder. The Left may have high-jacked the dictionary, and we'll take that back in due course, but in the meantime, we can't give into less noble thoughts, and sacrifice our integrity on the altar of revenge. In other words, we can't go around hanging innocent men just because their idea of moderate isn't the same as ours. We've already been down this road with "liberal".

Personally I'm beginning to think some of these so-called moderates are actually deep-cover Lefties, which makes our task even more difficult. After all, The GOP ain't that hard to infiltrate, (they do it here on RedState, too, have you spotted any?) if you can get three, maybe four slogans down pat, remember not to say "m-f-ing" every time you say "Cheney" (moderate Republicans always use "g-d'ned" for Cheney, everybody knows that), and can tie a Windsor knot. If you can teach a Leftie to tie his shoes, black wing tips, color coordinate his ties and socks, and select better Egyptian cotton pin stripe shirts, you can teach him to walk and talk just like Linc Chafee. Then no one, at least inside the Republican establishment, will ever be the wiser.

I have some ideas as to how to run these people through a filter, actually a seine net, only Lefties don't know what that is. Our own sense of fairness requires we do this because we need to make common cause with genuine GOP moderates, while at the same identifying just who the hog-suckers are, so we can throw them out. As with the John Wayne rule about always throwing the second punch, my own beliefs require that I hang no man without first having a fair trial, which, in politics, can require only a minute or so. The first step in that trial is extending the right hand in friendship, the second, a quick statement of faith, sort of like the Apostle's Creed, "I believe in the Constitution of the United States. Do you?" Of course, even old Clewfoot himself would answer "yes" to that. So, then, "Why do we disagree, then?"

Then, let him hang himself. By the way, this is how Bernie starts many of his disputations, from what he calls a "cold start". It's like walking up to a total stranger, being introduced, and the first words out of his mouth is "Hello, I'm in the Lord, are you?" Now some of you would break into the biggest smile, and say, "Why, honey, bless your soul. Of course I am." (Lefties can't fake that yet, as the smile has to be instantaneous. That momentary pause while trying to remember their lines gives them away every time.) But a lot of people would turn heel and quickly about-face, "a 360" to Maxine Waters, and take off in a southerly direction. The far larger number of you (us) regardless of your religious temperament, would think "What impertinence!", politely smile, then say, "If you'll excuse, I just saw a woman drop a dime over there."...especially now that gay men are beginning to introduce themselves in this same way. I can still hold my ground, and a firm hand grip, and smile, but do worry that soon i will meet a "Hello, I'm Brenda, but I used to be Bill." We all have our limits.

But in politics, especially if the introduction is in a political context (only Rush Limbaugh goes to CPAC to talk about golf), these things need to be revealed and early on. It's not that hard to get a moderate to open as to just what moderate means to him...or what's wrong with the Party, which, by and large, is us.

So just how do we get off on the right foot with "moderates", knowing first off, their differences with us as much, if not more, are cultural and class-based than political?

Much like the Left, they are defined by what they hate, and what they hate (and you can take this line down a hundred different tracks) is the idea that their party may someday be run by a bunch of "red throats", retired factory workers and millionaires who dress like Rodney Dangerfield. Reagan invited you in, and we like your vote, and all, but please, just go over and stand in that corner and be quiet. And for godsakes, try a little Right Guard there, fella. Nice suspenders. Those Vasque boots? Red Wing? Never heard of them.

Of course, nothing about this is true. Oh, they think it, all right. And they say it, too. Just register to any GOP website, never say a thing, and just read. You'll see. They'll be talking about us the same way we talk about them.

And where's the profit in that? Well, there's plenty of profit to the enemy, that's what.

It would be useful to understand what they fear, other than the obvious, e.g., getting their hands dirty if they shake hands. They hate (fear) the Tea Parties mightily, as much as the Left...which presents a dilemma to us here, for they actually think the Tea Parties want a corner office. The point is, no one in the Tea Party Movement that I know actually believes they are going to move right in and take over the day-to-day operations of the Party, even at the local or regional level, or in a campaign. That greeter down at Walmart is not suddenly going to expect a desk and a door sign. We spend a lot of time here separating the educated stupid (Leftie college kids) and the uneducated stupid (birfers and trufers) from people with good common sense, and these know it requires specialized skills, up and down the line, to accomplish anything as big as a political party or campaign. I never forget the story of T E Lawrence, when he took the Hashemite Arabs into Damascus in WWI ahead of the Brits and Lord Allenby, declaring the city to theirs instead of the Allies'. So, then, when the city's infrastructure began going south; water, electricity, hospitals, Allenby told Lawrence it was his city, so he'd have to fix it. He hadn't a clue. Even Patton kept old Nazis on the payroll in post-war Germany if they knew how to make the trains run on time. The Tea Parties have nothing to do with inside mechanics of running an office. They are about ideas that are over 225 years old, and well proved.

But enough about them. Just look at the talent here at RedState; lawyers, skilled journalists, political managers, military, science, technology, IT, and modern skills in management, government...you name it, it's here. And the GOP moderates know all this. They know "we" are their intellectual equals (though not class-equals in many cases), and believe we're in it for the same prize as they are, only working the other side of the street.

What this proves is 1) at one level this battle is about class, and they (and we as a reaction, as a dog who has been repeatedly kicked) believe they have it, and we don't; so 2) the way they rationalize all this talent that disproves their class theory, and which will be on full display at CPAC this week, is that we are just like them, i.e., in it for the power and political perqs. Finally, and this is the big rub, 3) they cannot fathom anyone placing principle above class, power and turf considerations, although Thomas Jefferson violated all three of those sacred icons of politics with one stroke of the pen. This proves it is they, not us, who come short in the political equation.

As they see it, we are competing with them in a struggle that is purely political and territorial. We threaten their turf. In the final analysis, for them the scraps from a table full of ruling Democrats (filet mignon) is still better than the swill we're offering up in our hog trough. We've all seen this. In Kenya, Kikuyu small businessmen in Nairobi live for the day that they might be noticed, tapped out, by some rich Englishmen, who will invite them to do business, thereby changing their lives. To them, luck is the only door, and after twenty years, try as we might, we could never convince them otherwise...without first giving them money. This is a worldview to many, so get used to it. What we have to consider, is what to do? What to do...with them in that state? What do they understand above all other things?

What we need to understand is first, that all kinds of self-proclaimed moderates live under the same umbrella. We are seeing all sorts of litmus tests being proposed for being a true conservative, or true constitutionalist (to a moderate these are not even close to being the same thing). I could make a list of ten things and never mention smaller government or lower taxes even as a footnote, so i know we all come at "conservatism" from a different point of view. Moses Sands tried to define it as a blueprint applying mostly to the common man, and a duty to us, "the protectors" as he tries to build his own little House with that blueprint. Simple enough.

In my view, we first cast our net then throw out the hog-suckers. Conservatism simply cannot co-exist with socialism, fascism, progressivism, modern liberalism, whatever you want to call it. And to be perfectly honest, while we have our elites (a good thing, in my view, I have already spotted several here at RedState), it cannot co-exist with elitism, and the condescension and disdain it has (and shows) for people it considers beneath them, for the Constitution is clear; it was written for the common man and woman, the C-student, the fellow down at the bottom of the hill about to begin his climb up. It was not written for those at the top, intellectually, economically, or that QuickPIck winner last week on the Power Ball...especially if they have forgotten that their House, too, began down at the bottom of that hill...as most Leftists and Libertarians seem to have forgotten. The elites the Constitution had in mind were those who stand at the top of the hill and offer, as a perpetual duty, that handshake back down the hill to those at the bottom. Moderate, old school, country club Republicans are not those elites. As Pogo said, They is us.

So, when we sit down with moderates who now run the GOP, the first thing we do is lay our guns...yes, our guns, not our cards...on the table. It's true, I've been to meetings, in America, that began with introductions, then everyone reaching inside his coat and pulling out his revolver and laying it on the table. The .38 revolver was standard apparel in the coal fields during the strip mine wars of the 1960s.

Since EE first wrote that piece back in '09, one major thing has happened. Our gun went from a .32 snub nose to a .357 magnum. Simple reason, Massachusetts.

Now, without getting into a "who's bigger" contest about who actually carried Scott Brown to victory there, what four weeks ago?, everyone knows that RedState and a host of bedrock internet conservative groups, including Tea Parties from around the country, made Scott Brown a national name and that contest a national contest long before the national media was forced to glom onto him. I wrote then that everyone would take the credit, or point the blame at that Coakley woman, never once mentioning the conservatives that actually turned the tables.

Of course, it was the people of Massachusetts (Massachites?) who delivered a victory to Scott Brown. And Scott Brown is a pro-choice MODERATE who picked up on several universal and conservative themes (the war on terror, Obamacare, the People's Seat) that brought a lot conservatives to the polls for the first time in years, and a lot of moderate people who simply liked the enthusiasm generated by, guess who?...us.

So, our gun is now bigger at the table when we sit down with GOP moderates, because, 1) we have proved we can deliver, and 2) we have shown that we are not so one-issue, red-throat as to turn our back on a genuine honest moderate, unlike those backstabbers EE listed in 2009.

Our bona fides are our deeds, not just our words. And the squareness of our jaw is proved by EE's sudden, and correct, tossing of JD Hayworth around midnight last night. Hayworth's getting out of bed this morning, noticing that his right leg's been chewed off, and will be calling damage control, oh, about now. (7AM, EST)

This too proves what we (you) can do, when you sent you whole minds and hearts to it.

So, what to do about moderates? Well, with that kind of power projected around the table, a big, big, gun, and that look in the eye that everyone knows you'll use it, you start finding out just what kind of moderate they are; honest, genuine, or whether they carry any left-wing ideology or elitism. (Pro choice is not a left wing tenet, pro-abortion...Sangerism...is. I'll try to get to that next week when I get back.)

Once done, then let them know we can help them, in a big way, or call down thunder on their heads. Their call. This is a politics the elites of the Republican Party understand very well. With that understood, as for the backstabbers of '09 and those still to come, I'm for taking names and let the cards (sic) fall where they may.

(I have to run, and apologize in advance that I can't answer any comments this week, but will try to catch up on Monday. I have to go see a man about a library. St George will be manning the station. Cheers.)

Lenin once said that he stopped listening to Beethoven because it made him feel weak. I guess I’m a philistine then, for when I listen to some Beethoven I can get really pumped.

Still, I understand Lenin’s drift. He wanted to be able to approach his “work” with total dispassion, and music can make the legs go a little bit wobbly at exactly the wrong time, especially when sending  people out to be shot. Music drives out indifference, and indifference to a lot of “human” things is a necessity once you get into socialist “management”.

Music has always had its revolutionary purposes. In many housing complexes in the Soviet Union, many apartments had little transistor-like receivers attached to the ceiling, through which music was piped in all day, martial tunes for the going-to-work, going-to-school hours, still others for the evening hours. You couldn’t turn it off, but if you stood on a chair, you could turn it way, way down, and then head to another room where you could turn up something loud like Prokofiev’s “Mercutio’s March”. After a day or two you didn’t even know it was there, sort of like listening to the same Baptist preacher every Sunday morning for twenty years.

In China, during the cultural revolution, cars and trucks with loudspeakers would run up and down the street spewing their own revolutionary music, adding to the general din of foot and bicycle traffic in a day when everyone wore drab little commie green suits. If you were walking down the street and you heard that music, very distinctive even to my tin ear, you knew to turn and go the other way. Don’t look for a “Greatest Hits of the Cultural Revolution” release on Amazon.com. anytime soon. There are still people in therapy there, trying to get that damned ringing out of their ears.

Our own revolts in America had their music, too, but alas, there’s no recording of just what “The Bonnie Blue Flag” or “Battle Hymn of the Republic” or “Yankee Doodle” might have sounded like with local bands and a crowd along a parade route, so we have to use our imaginations to try to blaze into our soul’s memory how people might have been moved at the moment. Film sometimes helps. Just know, it’s the “being moved” that matters.

Music is a revolutionary tool of the moment, whether “The Internationale” “Horst Wessel Song” or “Battle Hymn”, and it’s a hobby of mine to study the symbiosis between the music and that moment of “being moved”. Let me explain.

In the early 70’s I spent a lot of time running back and forth between Tokyo and Seoul. Seoul was a neat city in those early days of the Pacific tigers, bustling, but still made up of many neighborhoods without paved streets, running water, people still cooking in the front of their houses, in snow, the same place they tossed their night soil. A city of eight million, four million of which were exhaling at any given moment, the entire city smelled like kemchi…which to me, at least, was a fragrance I will never forget.

But Korea was still under authoritarian one-party rule. Martial law was imposed for weeks on end, usually disguised as threats of sabotage from the North, but most often directed at unions and students who didn’t like working conditions or authoritarian rule. And who wouldn’t like working conditions in Korea? As South Korean companies found out later, in the 80’s and 90’s, when they tried to export their management style to Indonesia and other cheap labor markets of southeast Asia…everybody. Most people don’t like being brow-beaten and yelled at, with the occasional lash across the back. You bet they didn’t like the work conditions.

And just outside the backside of the Naija Hotel there was a police barracks, where in the courtyard policemen trained in riot control; i.e, beating their own citizens. Their training was not defensive in nature, I know, because I watched them outside my window. This is where I learned that you should always be leery of any country that has a national police force. They mean no good, and over my many visits, I had seen goon squads pull up in a van, jump out and grab some student, hold him down and cut his hair on the spot…because it was too western at two inches…which despite being the opposite of Islamo-fascists’ hair length, was eerily the same.

One day, while walking down a side street near the old Bando Hotel, an old black Toyota sedan came down the street, stopped on the corner, and two men pulled out two loudspeakers and placed them on the top of the car. People stopped and turned to watch.

A song began to play. It was not traditional Korean music, but I could’nt understand either the language or even the styling; horns, orchestra, and a chorale somewhat like the Slave Chorus in Nabucco. Starting out slow and distant, then rising, as the words rose, many of the people began to sing along. They knew it. They’d heard it before. Rhythmic, even I began to hum.

Everything stopped for what, three minutes….and people sang…then I heard over my shoulder the sounds of sirens. I looked back up the street to see if they were coming toward us (they were…two police cars), but when I turned around, the street was once again normal, the people walking, heads downcast, the sedan and loudspeakers, vanished. (They must’ve been trained at Darlington.)

I think about that moment a lot, and am thankful I could witness it. I’ve since heard of such doings in the Eastern Bloc, especially Poland during the early 80s, but no one I know has ever caught that sort of moment on film. It was very powerful, for it reflected a solidarity, a strength of spirit of the people which, as the police cars proved, scares the bejeezus out of thuggish regimes.

Searching Tokyo music stores, I never found that song, but heard something similar in the 1980s, Ennio Morricone’s theme to “Sacco and Vanzetti”. I include it here, from YouTube, but found the CD released version a bit more powerful and more like what I heard on the streets of Seoul that day. I recommend that one most.

So, since then, I always search for new music…I’m very eclectic, as are my sons, who send me even more strange and wonderful sounds…with the notion 1) does it give me happy feet? a fairly recent discovery, 2) melancholy/nostalgia (”16 Candles” is getting kinda old, even if it was the first time…) 3) is it the song I want played at my funeral (listed here, by the way, my own death song…we all have one, you just don’t know it yet, so don’t blanch, or 4) is it the sort of song that could possibly cause people to gather together, shoulder to shoulder, to march, or maybe only wreck, as i witnessed there in Seoul in 1973…or can it enlist people over when they see something special they ain’t got?

I look for that kind of stuff. As I said, it’s a hobby, or as Art in Alaska says, in Vino Veritas, for it’s a great way to go through a bottle of chardonnay on a cold winter’s night.

If RedState permits it, I recommend they/you facilitate an exchange here…a legal exchange…just titles (go find it yourself) and links…for music is a powerful thing…so powerful that Lenin, the Old B*****d Himself, decided it best to deny himself. He knew its power. (As did Alinsky.)

I’m not an alarmist, but I think a strong pushback may be in our future. The politics have not yet turned in our favor. It’s always best to plan for Option B, praying it will never have to be invoked. (That’s a standard Cold War prayer, by the way.)

My view is that samizdat music, poetry, books, all these wonderful one-liners I read here, and other tools, while you still have those computer/internet tools at your disposal, (The Russians had to develop them on their own, like making biscuits from scratch) is something you store in you mental bomb shelter, should you ever need to call on them…once on the outside looking in. It can still happen, Sorry.

But more positively, I see here on RedState, and other places, great slogans, bumper-stickers, art, and yes, music…but the purpose should not be to share them selfishly among true believers as some special thing we share together, but rather as propaganda. Let the message go out to the people who think it’s still cool what that Hilton girl wore last night at the American Mucuous Awards. Share with the FM rockers. They aren’t that stoopid. Show them cool and they will turn about-face to be that cool, too.

Actually, only a very few, even Dr Goebbels knew that…but enough to create a shift. I saw it there on the streets of Seoul, remember.

I’d asked St George Frederick (you’ve not heard from him yet, but mid-30s, so more savvy than I am about the pop culture, looks a bit like that fellow on “The Mentalist”, Simon Baker) to make up a CD, but we’d worried about the legality. Napster and all that. So instead -these are a few of my recommendations, as starter.

By the way, my choices are not like the “resistance” music of my generation in the 60’s; Jimi Hendrix, Joplin, Canned Heat, et al. Getting “stoned up” on music isn’t exactly what I had in mind…but once again, we see the difference between how we see our Cause, and they see theirs.

These are not recommendations, just my favorites, but I think it is important that People of the Cause have their/your own music…and share it. Pass it around, if only locally. In the right place, and at the right time, as I witnessed in Seoul, it can have a powerful and antagonizing effect on the Enemy, and while I am lifted by events in Massachusetts, I have to keep my eye on a time when we will have to “communicate” differently, and more indirectly…just as men have done for a thousand years…through music.

And when they finally hang me, it would be nice to hear the rising sound of Morricone’s theme, wafting across the prison walls.

Many of you won’t recognize these songs, but in my estimation, if you want to take a song and make it the property of your Cause, as “insider music”, don’t make it The Who’s theme to CSI. You don’t want to find music that everyone has downloaded on their iPod. Find music you can make exclusively your own, if only in your own town. So, when you all gather on the Mall next year, there will be some common threads you can all share.

Villa Rides, Maurice Jarre, YouTube available, mp3- Amazon, Magnificent Seven, Elmer Bernstein, YouTube, mp3-Amazon, Caravans, Mike Batt, YouTube, Last of the Mohicans, James Horner,  YouTube, (There’s a chase theme in the CD which is even better), La Golondrina from The Wild Bunch, YouTube (not available on the CD), Ride To Agadir, Mike Batt, YouTube, (Few know this song, some incendiary lyrics, Batt is one of those “desert-loving” English), 1492, Vangelis YouTube, Henry V, St Crispian Day Speech, Patrick Doyle (the best half-time pep talk since Knute Rockne, the music stands alone, on the CD) Das Boot by Klaus Doldinger or U 96, YouTube available but there is a more claustrophobic copy out there

The aforementioned Sacco and Vanzetti, Ennio Morricone (I recommend the CD version), Libertad (Nana Mouskouri), Youtube (in French, also available in Spanish and English, the English the worst rendering to my mind. The Germans don’t have a word for Liberty I think, so unable to find in that language.)

Come Maddalena, Ennio Morricone (you could write an entire screenplay around this song), Praise the Lord and Pass the Ammunition, Kay Kyser, (some idiot Leftie made a parody film of Bush-Cheney, never believing anybody could actually have written such a song, even in WWII), available in mp3 on Amazon.com, The Lonely Bull, (El Solo Toro) Herb Alpert,

As for death songs, I choose Serpico, but couldn’t find this funereal song anywhere on YouTube. I found it on a Greek movie music CD from one of the companies that went down in the twin towers on 9/11. Greenfields of France, Davey Arthur and the Furies YouTube, an anti-war song, but a good sentiment. Almost any song backed up by cello is worth a listen.

God Bless America, Irving Berlin/Kate Smith, YouTube, mp3. What can I say?  Miss Kate says it all. Symphony #9, (New World), Antonin Dvorak…a wonderful paean to America, Movement #2 especially powerful for me. We’ll Meet Again, Vera Lynn/Dr Strangelove, YouTube.

Feel free to use this diary as an exchange site if RS does not provide one. I’d love to hear some new sounds, and comments.