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.

I have a little Red Star and cap and from time to time I put it on, so I can read a stream from the point of view of the Enemy.

About Sarah Palin, I agree with EE. Right now she is an asset to conservatism and its purposes. That she may be an asset to the Republican Party has yet to be revealed. She will reveal herself in due course, so speculations now as to what she might do or should do is uninteresting to me.

The Enemy sees her as Bad News Incarnate, and that is a Good Thing.

If she, or the Tea Party Movement strikes out as a third party, then they will see that as a Good Thing, in fact, a major victory, a major threat vanquished.

About the Tea Party Movement: from the very beginning we here (and I’m sure others) picked up vibes of a lot of private agendas by sponsors with money, organizers and self-appointed leaders. We saw millionaires reaching out to those same concerned citizens that have come to be known as the heart and soul of the Tea Party movement, and for that matter, America, as the Founders envisioned it.

Many envisioned a movement with themselves at the head of it. Call it vanity, call it the natural response of a person who pulled himself up by the boot straps and made $10 million, so now says to himself “I can lead.”

I can’t get into the hearts of those leaders. Some are as true blue as Job. Some are misquided, and some are out and out in it for their own vanities. Hell, do the math. In a city my size, there are at least a dozen, the Tea Party group sort of umbrella’ing the others. They have individual events where only 8-10 show up, and larger events where a few hundred turn out…and here in VA, there is nothing going on politically. They’re just staying active. This is also a Good Thing, and this the Enemy sees with disdain and fear.

From the beginning RedState has pushed a pursuit of local agenda, and participation, in part, because those are things that keep them active, involved, and “continue their education”, and establish a conservative base at the grass roots, while national or statewide politics are still out there in the future. This the Enemy also sees with fear.

The hope we (my group, but also RedState, I think) had is that by primary time 2010 most of these groups would have melded into hopefully one, but possibly 2, more defined groups, on a state or congressional district level. Since people tend to go with what appears to be winners, this a natural tendency. This is populism turning orderly, on its own accord. This the Enemy sees with even more fear.

But for this to happen (again, do the math) we also know there has to be some bruised vanities along the way, even in twelve short months. Some guys have already taken their balls and gone home…and some have set up sniping and the petty kind of back-biting that naturally occurs in office promotions. Some are not willing to take one for the team because, in their heart of hearts, they never were really in it for the team. We all see this all the time, only in different contexts. In this the Enemy finds Hope.

SO, with my Red Star cap on, I’m seeing these things unfold in a different way. For one, the Tea Party Movement was “unplanned” for and caught the Enemy unawares, and therefore has been able to create an energy they can no longer nip in the bud. But now, a year later, they are “planned for” and the first order of business is to sow discord among what the Enemy sees are natural divisions and fault lines in the movement as I just described above, with the ultimate purpose of spinning off into a Third Party, or simply causing thousands once again, as they did in ‘06 and ‘08, to stay home.

Never forget the Lawyer’s Prayer: Lord, I beseech You to stir up strife among these Thy children so that this Thy servant shall not perish. Amen.

(That many in the GOP may be praying this prayer as well I find a Bad Thing indeed.)

The Enemy is simply watching and practicing the fine arts of the world’s second oldest profession.

Keep this in mind, as you split the finer hairs of Sarah’s new doo.

Dr Thomas Sowell just published Intellectuals and Society. You can buy it from several places for under $20. With Thomas Sowell you can build a library on his books alone and not come out shorthanded on things philosophical, political, economic and historical. Just the process by which he goes about dreaming up an idea for a book must be an adventure. A great mind. (About this book, I have more to say at another time.)

Because I most want to understand the most primal instincts, the demon seed, that drives the Left's political soul, I first turn to Dr Sowell, and this book is a must read, considering we are now locked in a life and death struggle with intellectuals and academicians (they are not quite the same) who believe they know better how to manage our lives and order our society than we do ourselves.

There is nothing about the self-ordering of society that the intellectual likes. There is a reason for their belief. If we want to someday move "beyond politics" this is a thing we have to know if we are ever going to fix it.

Why Sowell's book is important is that it is an unflattering look at intellectuals and academicians BUT written by an intellectual and academician!

It is this irony that I want to raise, since, when an intellectual can point to an entire class of people and describe how they've gone wrong, he is also pointing at himself as being one who has gone right. This infers a crossroads which every intellectual confronts, and a direction he/she then chooses. Why do some choose the one path, while others the other?

Jump back about 130 years. In Bulgaria, many of the great meeting halls have a large painting on the wall of a group of perhaps 20 young men meeting in a wood, at night. Now their names mean nothing to us here, Xhristo Botev, Vasil Levski, Stambolov, but every June 2, at noon, sirens go off, and people stop and lower their heads in silent observance for those young men. Botev (age 28) was shot on that day in 1876. Levski was hung. Most of those young men were martyred and in village after village you will find tributes to their sacrifice.

They were all intellectuals...and while the Communists tried to morph them into socialists after taking power in the 40's, as the Cubans did Marti, and even though Marx was in vogue in western Europe at the time, he was not in vogue among these young men. What was in vogue was the freedom of their people, and while Karl Marx waxed eloquently about the plight of workers and the poor, trying to organize others to go out and organize them, these men wrote poems and essays about the beauty and dignity of the poor, and then went out and took up arms against their oppressors, in their behalf...for they were of them.

Step back another hundred years, and the Founders and founding of our country. Many (not all) of those people were also intellectuals. A few were not only intellectual turncoats, but class turncoats, coming from the aristocracy (i.e., Jefferson). But most of our founders, just like those young martyrs of the Balkans, were of the people.

Back to Thomas Sowell and intellectualism in American society, it seems clear that the seed that causes an intellectual to turn "right" is based on an entirely different vision of his fellow man, and himself vis a vis his fellow man, than the one who turns "left". A easy way to describe this is by imagining a college professor driving down the highway in his Volvo, and up next to him/her pulls a Mercedes Benz SLR, with the top down. If the professor is politically conservative, as I am, and the driver is an adult (I.e., daddy didn't buy it for him), he looks over and whispers "God bless America". I've done that a thousand times. I love to see success in other people. But the average college professor will mutter through clenched teeth "It isn't fair"...even though he's driving a $35,000 car and has a sweet gig at Moo U teaching kids to frown with their minds.

There you have it. Trust me, this sentiment goes back to Marx and well beyond. This sentiment is a mixture of intellectualism, usually ratified by (and within) the academy, and a self-perception of class that quite frankly, simply isn't shared by the rest of society. In Germany the medical doctor was so revered that to become "Herr Doktor" meant everything to one's social standing. Even artists aspired to have that "Dr" appended to the front of their name. Still, in the peoples' eyes they were always something less than a man who tended to the sick, a fact which today still explains why lawyers hate doctors in America. R-E-S-P-E-C-T.

"America the ideal" was supposed to change all that. In fact, it did for the longest time. But in the 1870s American scholars began studying abroad, especially in Germany, and while not so much coming under the direct spell of Karl Marx, they did become aware of Marx's philosophical underpinnings. Hegel is credited with inspiring many early American "progressives", and while never outwardly Marxist, paralleled him enough that the term "socialist" rolled easily off the tongue. In fact it was John Dewey, a member of the Socialist Party who first decided the use of the word "socialist" was simply a brand the Americans would never accept. So he recommended different packaging. From the beginning it was always a matter of fooling the people in America, a thing you really didn't have to do in Europe, as the people better understood (still do) their "place" in the bigger picture of things.

Around 1910, while Continental philosophies of the state (and statism) was slowly working its way into American academe, America had been marching forward, for over three generations to the tune of "the American doctrine of Liberty" as first espoused by the Founders, and finally ratified after that little issue, slavery, had been dealt with. For 40-50 years, from New York to the Kansas prairie, America marched forward with its eyes still gazed on the shoulders it stood on. We were still a nation of the people, for virtually no American did not have a dirt farmer, indentured servant, downstairs maid, mule-skinner, or at least one toothless illiterate in their family tree. So, for 50 years, every 4th of July, Americans, from Wall Street to Laramie gathered in public places, and held beer glasses on high, and yelled "Huzzah" for those wondrous grizzled oldsters of long ago who had set this magnificent table for them...and in Shakespeare's words, their names were "freshly remember-ed".

But that same period saw some major changes in both the American landscape and the American demographic. Industrialization made an awful lot of people rich...beyond imagination...and as with any new thing, it took awhile for society to catch up with its implications. What kind of rich? Well, in the 1970s I knew a fellow who had an uncanny knack for buying a Cadillac then spending another $10,000 on it turning it back into a Chevrolet that only a mudlark in east LA could appreciate. That kind of rich, coarse and garish.

That industrialization also saw wave after wave of foreigners arrive, mostly Roman Catholic from eastern and southern Europe on the east coast, which alarmed the Christian (Anglican) elites, who'd been carrying on a forty year "war" with the Irish papists already. So by 1900 or so, "what to do about the Catholics" had joined "what to do about the blacks" in the academy...but not as a religious issue so much as a social and cultural one, as in birth control and selective breeding.

The bottom line: You cannot separate progressivism, liberalism, statism, or non-Marxist (hah!) socialism (whatever you want to call it) from its original beginnings of modifying human society and denuding it of (what it perceived to be) its most onerous attributes, biologically, by eugenics (selective breeding), and strong social control and management. I am not from Virginia, but I am of the South, and I can tell you this is not unlike what old-timers here tell me was a common understanding among many whites about blacks in the 1920s-30s...breed the black out of them. Sounds a bit red-necky to be coming out of the University of Chicago, doesn't it? Still, it was the same.

Progressives are racist to the core, which is why I said earlier Obama and Reid will never be friends...and someday they will part company, and begin to draw down on one another...if they can only take care of us first.

But while they work out their last-man-standing scenario, we have to remember that America was always about the least men standing.

This will not come as pleasant news to you, but the common template of the intellectual is as I just described above, the European view. It is narcissist and elitist. For every truly inquiring intellectual there are ten who bask only in the glow of their own reflection.

Sowell pointed out that many of our greatest intellectuals became "political" far afield from their intellectual specialty. Bertrand Russell knew nothing of disarmament, but he did know he was smart, and listened to. The same for George Bernard Shaw. Some people even said Jane Fonda could act.

This self-admiring trend is ancient, and so dominant that we have to conclude it is the template for intellectualism. Even Plato (or was it Aristotle) defined a perfect world as one ruled by a Philosopher-King, a guy who just sat around on his arse, listened to the bio-rhythms of nature, and decided things in the wisest of way. As that never was the case in history, even in Greece, intellectuals have seethed ceaselessly since, still waiting for their chance to finally be in charge. Socialism in one manifestation or another is it.

The template for the intellectual has always been to define himself by what he hates. This is their demon seed. In the Merovingian Dark Ages, it was kings who ate their peas with a butcher knife that they hated. As royals began to fade away, by the 19th Century Germany it was the capitalist, and really has been ever since, although the nature of capitalism was itself changed in America, as has the declining quality of intellectualism and the academy.

On closer inspection, what the intellectual hates is the "unfair" success of people they consider beneath them intellectually, and by the own self-imposed ideal of status, socially....which means there in that demon seed also some correlative (birth-) right to rule, in Plato's and the best of all possible worlds. Or at least, be the boss.

On the other hand, there were always, from the beginning, those who took the other path, in far smaller numbers. People like Dr Sowell. Aquinas and Augustine both come to mind, both first- rate minds, and since there was no Constitution or America or doctrines on the dignity of Man laying around, they turned their lives and minds to God. But both bequeathed legacies and a lineage that run directly into the Constitution. In the arts, Vivaldi was a monk. Bach, Handel and Micheal Angelo, Christians. The same for Velasquez, whose art can still bring tears to anyone's eyes. How much of their art was simply to pacify the Church, i can't say. How many were true intellectuals? Look it up, make up your own mind. What we know about them all is their art does not reflect any hatred for their fellow man. Their vanities were, well, human and normal.

But when America was born it sent shock waves through the intellectual world, for it unleashed the greatest army of ne'er-do-well low-borns ever imagined, who in turn, first, found ways to prepare and keep food overnight, then put that food on every table in the land...without a single middle man in government getting to rake off a single penny in the process...take any credit. No author at university or the state house got to come out and take an encore for a railroad, an automobile, or airplane.

Intellectualism in America has fallen mightily. Oh, we still have our giants. But as Will Rogers once said, "When everything else fails, a fellow can declare himself an artist...and who's to say he ain't?" (I paraphrase.) I give you Bill Maher, the fair Jeneane Garofalo, Keith Olbermann, Sean Penn, and 40% of the liberal arts faculty at every college in America. Sowell says intellectuals are people of ideas, but today they have become people of feelings.

The four legs of Leftism are intellectual and academic in nature; the press (information), education (indoctrination and tapping out), economics (command planning), and legal (out-flanking the Constitution and the people's access of justice). What binds all four legs is that notion of intellectual superiority, and the self-appointed notion of class. In Nancy Pelosi we see it as divine right to rule. In Barack Obama we see it as way to get even (At least that is my guess right now.)

What we feel on our shoulders now is the seat of that stool, the bureaucracy...and underpinning it, the unions that support them.

This is why I will continue to define this fight not only in terms of intellectual classes, but in economic classes, State vs Private Sector.

This is not intended to be a dry academic essay, but rather a notice as to how it manifests itself on the street where you live. Every indecency in state and local government you see can be filtered down to this one theme. Today as cities and states are struggling with budgets (Virginia is constitutionally required to balance the budget, the City of Richmond already devising ways to cut critical services) politicians simply haven't the political will to even consider cutting entire programs or getting rid of say 20% of the bureaucracy...who also drive nice Volvo's...thereby shifting those jobs back to a dynamic job-creating private sector. Give them that will.

Our bureaucracy-buster, RPH, believes that that political will can only come from the grass roots....a grass roots with a plan and specific demands. If not, what we will see will be more front-line state workers who generally deliver needed services, sacrificed once again, in part as punishment to the people who brought this on by refusing tax hikes that would have kept their bureaucracies intact.

Now you can see the direct link between the civil servant (today and in Marx's 1940s) and the intellectual-academic class, and how best to impoverish a nation.

It's a terrible thing to have to eat one's words, and yes, I have grabbed that particular bull by the horns more than once, which, as Mark Twain once noted, give's a man ten times the knowledge as one who only read about it in a book. I can tell you that words of praise, when first uttered, are as sweet and mellifluous as fine chocolate, but when swallowed that second time are as bitter as bile.

Or how about lard?...or as the Rev Grady Nutt used to say, "That puts me in mind of a story."

The first night of my first winter in Russia i was introduced to the lady across the hall, a big babushka of a woman, legs like oak stumps, with that traditional scarf on her head, apron, and stockings rolled halfway down the calf. Her husband was a Great Patriotic War vet who had worked on Dodge trucks at Murmansk. In fact, that, and Benny Goodman were the only English words he knew. They had lost a son in Afghanistan in '84, and she had been asked to "mother" me those eight weeks.

That first night, after a long grind at the bank, I came in and was met by her grinning face, holding a big bowl of soup, filled with a barely warm broth, some sort of stringy meat (I can't name the poor beast), hard potatoes, a few legumes, and no salt. She sat me down to show me how to use the hard bread under a napkin, bread that was even harder than my mother's biscuits, which my brothers and I used to play toss with in the back yard. That hard. I would dip the bread, take a swallow, and she would stand there with her fists on her hips and say, "Da?" and I would smile and say "Da" until I had finished.

It was okay, but I could think of at least a half dozen ways to fix that meal up better, but not to be unkind, i was effusive with my praise, and she marched out the apartment beaming.

The next night I came in about the same hour, and she came over with a bowl of borscht. Now I'd had borscht before, and liked it, so gobbled this down, to the same chorus of "Da?"...."Da." Just as I was finishing up, she disappeared for a moment, and then back in she marched, with her husband, holding high a bowl filled with pudding, a bright berry on top of it. My eyes lit up, and I grabbed my spoon and took a big swallow, smiting that berry all in one bite....only to find out (I'm not sure whether my body or brain found out first) this wasn't pudding...but rendered lard or suet, in a gelatinous form that looked amazingly like something humans might actually want to eat.

"Da?" I held back a gag, and looked up and weakly smiled "Da." She stood there, like a fortress, then nodded to the bowl in the international language of "keep going". So, for the next five minutes, or maybe it was an hour, i can't say, i piddled and dribbled with that spoon, swishing that stuff around, trying every way in the world to make the bowl get smaller, like I'm sure millions of kids have done with their broccoli or oatmeal ever since the Great Depression. Finally, I finished it, and Ma and Pa Biletnikov strode out the door as if they'd just given me a life-saving transfusion.

For anyone who hasn't read Dickens, there's a lesson here: On the first day at the orphanage, you do not pile up your plate with Ma Sweeney's gruel until 1) you know whether she can cook, and 2) you know whether you can leave the table without finishing it.

I have not been excited about a political person since Ronald Reagan, and really not until mid-way through his first term. My view then, and still is, unless I actually can see them walk on (constitutional) water, the fact that they say they can, or say they will, means nothing to me. And the same goes when some third party tells me they can.

I like Sarah Palin. I really like her. But all she means right now is words to me. I don't get excited about people until I see what they can do. I only get excited about things, ideas, and of those, only a few, such as the Constitution, Liberty, the dignity of man. I am older, and have been around and seen a lot, so I can put a context to those notions that maybe some people cannot. You can't spend time among people who have a recent memory of slavery, and not feel changed. So I'm either wiser, or just more finicky.

When Sarah Plain's words are attached to one of those political objectives that I am excited about, then I can get excited about her...but only just a little more. The proof, the only proof, will be when she can actually walk the constitutional walk.

So forgive me if I don't join in the cacophony of praise for Sarah or Scott Brown or Doug Hoffman or whoever comes down the pike next week. In the past year the only people I have seen worthy of praise have been a few lonely solitary voices in the Congress, people like DeMint and Coburn, and the very hard work of some people on the internet, among them, right here on RedState...all of whom are already walking the constitutional walk...and have made things happen

I've only been here three months, so am still just a visiting friend. But I am quite taken with the sense of community and family that exists here. It is genuinely cordial, friendly, but also intelligent and collegial, and several cuts above a simple mutual admiration society one finds elsewhere. I like this place, and so far, everyone I've encountered in it.

So, I hope not to give offense, but please take heed my words above: you who wish to canonized Sarah, or who wish to set up roadside chapels in the name of Scott Brown; there is nothing so uncomfortable as to have to gag and swallow your own lard in the company of family.

This CBS Report of a luxury early winter tour to Copenhagen by members of Congress speaks for itself.

But it wasn't that many years ago that the state flew coach.

At an officer's call in 1973, in a major Far Eastern Command, an Army major stood up and complained to the commanding general about the disparity in his pay in the Army with his counterparts in the private sector....roughly 70%, I recall.

The general's answer was brief, pointed, and indelibly etched in my mind..."That's because we're the armed services, Major. You might want to refresh you memory as to the meaning of that term."

Indeed, that was a common beef in those day, (I'd been in state government before entering the military), and heard the same from state attorneys, highway engineers, etc. With the rise of so many specialized technical proficiencies in the Army, the contagion had spread, men and women always comparing that their pay was below the civilian world. Grousing was rampant...except among the combat branches.

Oh, it was true, the disparity. During that same tour, our legal team got involved in labor negotiations between a US supplier and local trade unions. As captains we were knocking down a whopping $16-$17K a year, while the attorneys the supplier brought in from the West Coast were getting about$100 an hour. Much gnashing of teeth. A senior captain I knew, the deputy Staff Judge Advocate on a small southwestern post, finally made the major's list (meaning he was guaranteed to go on to retirement), but sweated for at least two weeks whether he should accept the promotion, or resign and enter private practice, where he would make much more, using the same calculation I used above. This was his crossroads...big duck, little pond, great benefits?, or little duck, big pond, but much bigger bucks?

He chose "service".

After we'd only been working together for a short time, Moses Sands urged me not to do any work with the government. He had and had regretted it. (I wish I'd listened to him.) In our conversation the notion of "service" came up, and he only said, "Public service ain't."

Moses was right. The contortions my profession went through in the military about pay (and we weren't even that necessary to the military mission) reflected a general mood that there should be parity without even stopping to consider the "service" element.

Now no one ever accused preachers of following their calling for the money (though some have). They generally give their lives, and often live off the charity of others, all in service to God and others. And school teachers, often the brunt of the old "those who can, do, those who can't, teach" taunt, more often as not knew they were giving up better paying jobs in order to do a secular version of God's work, teaching young children. (I'm not sure that axiom applies higher up the academy.)

That was then. By contrast, in a story we're trying to develop with local media here, it's been revealed that county school superintendents in Virginia can negotiate perqs, benefits, and retirement packages that nearly equal those in Congress. At the university it is the same. LIfetime free dry cleaning?

It seems the disparity between senior school staff and management with front line teachers today is as great as most large corporations, only the school systems have to go to greater lengths to disguise the perqs...since they can't get AIG-like bonuses, or stock options. Just don't blink too long before noticing who will be sitting in the sky boxes at FedEx Field before long.

Today, across the board, from lawyers to postal delivery, excepting military, police, firefighters, etc, the best job in town is working for government. In law, GS-11 thru GS-13 grades, salaries run from $55,000 to $101,000 per year, with annual pay increases that only Congress gets, super retirement benefits after only 20 years, health benefits NOT subject to Obamacare, paid leave at almost twice the civilian level, and cradle-to-grave No-Fire protection from a Civil Service and unions who only want a small portion of your paycheck to insure the public spigot stays open. Once in, you're in for life. Just don't screw up, at least until you're vested for retirement, at which time, those last 2 years, you can play golf, hang out in bars, while management and the union spend thousands more of the tax payers' dollars trying to fire your sorry behind.

It's true, lawyers in the private sector can make a lot more, but only a fraction of them. Most would give their sister's first born to get that no-cut, easy desk job at USDA, where attorneys almost out-number farmers now. And even if they get into six-figures on the private side, there's still that klutz C-student who dropped out to design graphics and ride his stupid skateboard, who just bought John Travolta's old Lear jet, rubbing your nose it in. Government work is "sanctuary", where no one knows your name outside a fifty foot perimeter, and you can really get down to getting that handicap below 10.

Tenure in public schools work generally the same way, only at a lower rate. If they aren't any good, or as is increasingly the case, illegally political, "Mmm, Mmm, Mmm", all you can do is re-assign them to be Caddy master at the local country club at $38,500 a year, but you can't fire them.

Even running for and being elected to public office, at all levels, at one time, carried an element of "service" as it was commonly defined, for the simple reason, at the pay scale of the day, that was all they could find to hook onto as a justification for the sacrifices they'd made.

Service was always part of the pay plan. This is obviously no longer the case.

We often talk about re-setting the public table here at RedState. If we are to do that, the state has to learn to fly coach again. There's no getting around it. And drive their own car to work. Even car-pool. No more more limos to carry a single Congresswoman one block from her office to the Capitol Building. No more million dollar junkets to Kopnhaavn. No more free dry-cleaning.

The Japanese have a word I have always liked, because of it's simplicity. "Wa" means harmony, peace tranquility, balance.

With all due respect to every teacher who did enter the trade based on "service", and served well, and Art in Alaska, and all the rest who served in government with the idea of actually fulfilling the mission of the agency (and without whom the system would have collapsed totally by now), in a free economy there is a harmony between the private sector and the state class. That harmony, that "wa" is found in the word "service", and that service justifies, in fact demands, a lower pay differential...

...for a free economy simply cannot stand (not to mention the republic for which it stands) if those who have the power to vote their own pay scales, can do so at will.

Forget for a moment that bureaucracy naturally leans Left because the Left cannot accomplish a thing without it (a much deeper symbiosis than that actually), it's a simple matter of dollars. The EU is in part a creation of the national bureaucracies of the individual members since they had already broken the bank of their own treasuries, nearing collapse and possibly public hanging by their citizens. The scuttling of their old currencies was a start all over again, which in my view, will also be moribund within 20 years.

America has no place to go...except that one-world currency conspiracy theorists have been going on about for some time, and which now is at least thinkable.

Everyone knows we have to roll back government, but we have to consider the magnitude of what that means...reducing the actual workforce by at least 20% (which in turn will reduce interface-employees at state and local levels by around 10%, talk about trickle down)...and those who remain will need to see their pay scales reduced also by about 20%. (My own view has been that with those savings, at both the federal, state and local levels, some of those monies can actually be given back to front line workers...cops, soldiers, competent teachers, placing them in a better position vis a vis their own management structures. It's the bureaucrats, the paper-hangers, who need to be cut and not essential service providers, as the bureaucrats always threaten.)

You can name it, what 10%, 20%, doesn't matter to me, what has to be restored is the fundamental sense as to why one goes into public service in the first place...and pay, easy job, great benefits and no-fire protections, cannot among them. We ask, even demand this of our elected officials, so we must also of our civil servants.

Now, if you feel a personal sense of protectiveness, for your own career and others you know, let me try to put this into a larger context. We also know that our harmony, the harmony of liberty and free markets and competition, is others' disharmony, and has been from the beginning. The Japanese notion of "wa' really didn't infer a precision, BMW VTEC engine, with every part working in mechanical precision with one another. Neither did it infer a system where 20%-30% of the parts were in total harmony while the other 70% were in misery and pain. In fact, it really never foresaw the chaos of the free market, and free choices made there as being especially harmonious, either.

"Wa" is an internal system of harmonious equilibrium, to be sought and found by the individual. In the West, most people find this in God. The Eastern idea was that the external world was always in combat; opposing forces, Yin and Yang, Good and Evil, male and female, even statism and democracy. All we know is that in our western sensibilities, any kind of slavery or subjugation denies "wa" entirely. So there is only the alternative that only free men can pursue "wa" and find it.

We are bureaucracy-busters by profession, but even our chief B-B, RPH agrees that probably 70%-80% of what government does actually needs to be done, and probably even by government. But not at the cost that is now required, and not with the large quantities of personnel. Most of all, government, the public sector, even as Obama is trying to expand it, and offering student loan forgiveness if graduates will only turn their careers toward government!!!! "service", needs to no longer be a place where every deadbeat with a sheepskin or fast-talking schemer can run to find safe harbor. It is this that has given us the pool from which Lady Nan, Barney Frank, Schumer, Bill Clinton, the other Clinton, and yes, OB1, were plucked.

By putting the service back into "service", those types avoid law school altogether, and go straight into sales. Nancy would probably be renting mopeds in Orange County.

The arrogance factor. We're recommending that in the coming year people hit hard on the easy-to-see arrogance and down-the-nose disdain shown by the political class and bureaucratic class (in sum, the entire political class, damned near top to bottom). This too is a sign of the power shift among the classes. The anti-Martha Coakley vote was as much about Massachusetts' recent history of diminished service in necessary government areas in order to sate some union sectors that had very little to do with governance there, as it was Scott Brown's smile. In other words, there are more people teaching underwater basket weaving and dispute resolution at U Mass but fewer cops, or for that matter, fewer teachers actually teaching 6 year old's to read...which in the days when the state flew coach, was still a relatively simple, and inexpensive task. It was at least as much of these things as it was the Scott Brown's story, his genuineness, and his pick-up truck, that carried the Massachusetts electorate, as Bernie Chumm rightly reported that fateful weekend.

As a theme, this is a political winner that will resonate stronger, and longer, than the old class warfare rhetoric the Left has been using for years, in part because its acrid taste is still fresh on the tongues of ordinary voters.

But in order to be a real winner, it also has become an economic reality. The state class, as a body, has to pared back; salaries, benefits, and population. They have to be put back into coach, and if I had my way, it would Greyhound, not United.

Co Posted on RedState.com

Two pertinent diaries this past week on RedState amplify this question, which, no doubt is nagging in the back of many people's minds. When does it turn ugly, and what do we do when it does?

One is Beaglescout's Great Lie of Partisan Tolerance which is an important piece of research (at least to me) in that it connects the dots on Marxist theory from the 60's to current Leftish thinking in the US, and what we call "deconstructive thinking", which at its most base level, allows someone, usually a college kid who has read more than two books without pictures, to be able to tell himself that day is night and dark is light...in other words, shape the world into to any form that he/she wishes. Many trolls who visit here are of this narcissistic mindset, having shaped their own separate reality.

While Bernie Chumm (and I, to a lesser degree) believe these younger skulls filled with mush can be "gotten to" by certain kinds of argument, it's clear the dyed-in-wool lefties can't. For good or ill, Beaglescout has established here a rule we need to take heed of; those people, in the end, will not sit down and parlay...at least in good faith. In fact, the pathological pose Obama gave to House Republicans on Friday only amplifies this growing sense, and fear, that self-delusion has finally reached the highest levels of academic accreditation. (So thank your lucky stars that Thomas Sowell, and Beaglescout, et al are on your side.) There are none so committed as those who are committed to their own vanities. Which begs the obvious question, in the end, what will we do with them?...before they do it to us?

The second diary is Finrod's exposition on the threats made against Hillbuzz for having done, as the esteemed Maxine Waters says, a "three-sixty", by apologizing to George Bush for their prior cries of high crimes against him, and then, calling out OB1 for current ones. More to the point, Finrod tells us 1) Hillbuzz had been outed, i.e., actual name(s) revealed, and 2) they've received threats of violence.

My question...and it is a question...in light of what Beaglescout tells us about the mindset, how serious is that threat? And if to Hillbuzz, how about members here? Or Tea Partiers, who are even more naked? Glenn Beck has a security detail. So does Limbaugh. How soon before EE has to get one, as well? Is this a latent threat? A present threat?

I have a couple of observations. On a scale of 1 to 10, I'd say the current threat level is X, for you see, even venturing that openly, here, is dangerous. If I said 9, then I would be playing to the false bravado that indeed does infect the vast majority of these sonnenkinder-who-make-anonymous-threats, feeding their egos. But if I said 2 I'd be pooh-poohing what may only be a handful of people who are deep in this movement but have both the willingness and capability to carry out a more serious mission....just to prove me wrong. So I say to you, fill in the blank, then keep that number to yourself.

What we do know is that similar threats have abounded since 2000, especially on the internet, but also via telephone, as when names, addresses are "accidentally" released by the media (remember that poor girl who called Arlen Specter out at the Town Hall meeting in the summer?...or of course, poor Joe the Plumber, for whom I am still waiting for the Ohio Secretary of State to be frog-marched over to the courthouse?). But one rarely sees reports of an actual incident, a rock through the window, a pentagram burning in the front yard, blue hoods instead of white, and certainly no bodies strewn around. This tells me that verbal threats alone are probably not much of a threat at all, probably for one of two reasons; the threats were only intended to be nothing more than words, or, no one has yet to give the "Go Order".

So, teatty your cards. Seriously, as it may not always be this way.

People like Beck and Limbaugh have had enough experience with this that they have people who can separate "real" threats from posturing. We don't. I really doubt that anyone is stalking Glenn Beck with a zip-lock pool cue case, but if it got around that he sneaked out of Radio City every night at the same time and walked through two blocks of alleys to sneak a smoke, he is stupidly making himself an easy target of opportunity. So, yes, then the roof tops would be lined with marksmen. It's sort of like if you just decide to take a drive through certain neighborhoods of Miami...at 2 AM...just to see what it's like at that time of the morning. What hungry lion could pass up an easy meal like that?

Verbal threats are intended to frighten and worry and cause changes in one's ordinary life that in fact may make them sit down and reconsider some of their public positions. (In the Vietnam days, SDS and others called parents of GI's, usually in small towns, to tell them their sons were murderers. Or had been killed. In a sense, that tactic worked, and Barack Obama has made common cause with some of the people who dreamt those "legal" acts of terror up.) Also there aren't just threats of harm or physical violence, but threats of exposure. In the old days, gays were especially susceptible to this, but today, just a real name revealed (since most of us use aka's...I searched all the Mississippi phone directories for Beaglescout, not a single hit, in New York City alone there are 6,432 K Solomon's...go figure...and only one Penguin, a J, I assume Juan, living north of the 60th parallel, in Tierra del Fuego.) can change your habits. In fact, many bureaucrats in government desperately want to keep their neighbors in they dark about exactly what they do, especially if they work at IRS or are local tax assessors named Zacchias. I have long been a fan of exposure.

The Left has proved time and again, you can terrorize a person without breaking any law, once they know what frightens that person. The Nazis also proved it is not the tactic, so much as the end behind the tactic that is wrong. These tactics are tools, so like guns, they don't scare or terrorize people, only people scare or terrorize people.

We all run the risk every day of the "lone gunman"-target of opportunity theory, as Obama once called (wrongly) Abdulmutallab, the Knicker Bomber, only usually it is a drunk at three o'clock in the afternoon, in his SUV, instead. The greater risk to us is the drunk.

But there is that heavier-than-air, pregnant "Go order". We know they're there. (They really are.) Still, we know in our hearts, even with what Beaglescout has told us, we have to wait to throw the second punch. John Wayne always did. But what we also have to know now is the Sean Connery Corollary to the John Wayne Rule, so often written here on RedState, that when they put one of yours in the hospital, you put one of theirs in the morgue. The veritas of that axiom is becoming more apparent with every every week.

But when it comes it will not come from those chattering children who make anonymous email threats or phone calls. They are paranoid and believe in right-wing death squads anyway, so it's easy for them to believe we already know who they are (part of the chest-thumping in the mirror)...so if there ever is an outbreak, most will hunker down. As for myself, that is one delusion I don't intend to spend a lot of time trying to talk them out of...I want them to think I know where they live.

We've spoken of this before, and will again, but the heat will rise very soon, this year for sure. In the end it is not for us to spend too much time trying to decide whether it is childish self-love, deep megalomania, or a deep bitter vengeful anger that has Barack Obama on this (I am now convinced, after Wednesday's State of the Union and Friday's showcase to House GOP members) path toward self-destruction. I must first take all necessary steps to insure that he does not take me, or even more importantly, the things I love and hold most dear down in flames with him. The book hasn't been written, but Adolph Hitler destroyed many noble things in Germany is just 12 short years. Stalin literally destroyed the fixed beacons of morality in Russia within 30 years, the fallout of which we have yet to see. So yes, Obama & Co can destroy many things in a very short period of time.

For we all know behind Obama are men with cunning and guile, who may or may not be on the same page as he is, but who clearly do not have self-destruction in mind for themselves. Follow the money. Follow the power. So, even as it will seem to come from a single direction, we have to consider fighting a two or three-front war...while still holding onto out decency. Right now I don't consider any single member of the Enemy to be Obama's ally, yet must also consider them all to be...except Bill and Hil of course. They're cavalry all right, only no one knows whose rescue they'll come to. Or they may just be Comancheros.

Again, this is only a question for now. I expect it to be a little more difficult for Tea Partiers come spring and summer, in part because they've proven what they can do (Massachusetts) and also in part because the GOP hasn't reached out to embrace them, leaving them naked on one flank (Remember your history, GOP, you know what happens when the b***rd child suddenly is proven to be the rightful heir to the manor, and all lands appurtenant thereto...man in the iron mask and all that?). Last year we had a guy in a wheelchair beaten up. A finger bitten off. It will probably get worse.