AP Headline: "No Charges Against CIA Officials for Waterboarding"
       How magnanimous.
       Yes, it's true, in Chicago you can indict a ham sandwich, but this one, even Tammany Hall couldn't convict.
       What Pres Obama really said is that Government-as-Bully, (remember Travel Gate?) will not bankrupt some CIA officials having to defend themselves in acts that weren't crimes in the first place. The power of the government to convict is limited, but the power to bankrupt is absolute. Such "pardons" should be considered as tax refunds, part of the stimulus plan.
       In our research on the Bush-Lied People Died story and the subsequent impeachment charges brought against GW by city councils around the country, we cited the pathologies that underlie the ability by so many on the Left (especially in law schools) to create crimes in their minds which do not exist in reality, then retroactively indict public officials, to be especially troubling.
      Now Mssr Obama is now granting pardons for some of those non-existent crimes, which moves one step beyond troubling.
      But see how the insanity works, once in power? Mad dogs.
      Forget that they are living in an parallel universe. They're trying to make us live there too. Such is tyranny, when calling off the dogs equates to Christian charity.
St George

    The recent Napolitano/Homeland Security Report identifies conservatives as right-wing extremists and potential threats to the peace and security of the United States.
    Spare me the shock, outrage or anger. (The anguish may come later anyway.) The proper response is to take a deep breath, step back, clean your glasses (if you have them) and take a second look at the things that drive and impel the Other Side. The Enemy has just come into greater focus.
     We have been writing about this for a long time. There is a logic to what the Left wants to achieve, and have wanted to achieve since the beginning of their movement...and that logic has become more and more clear as the fog from the dimensions and intentions of this Administration are beginning to lift.
     To them this has always been a fight to the death.
     Yes, I said death. True, in their own minds, this "death" I speak of represents the death of our will, our resistance, not actual human lives, but if push comes to shove, that too, for they are of the mind that we would shoot first anyway, so can easily justify preemption. That's how those minds work.
     And the target is what the Left considers to be the real enemy, Conservatives and Conservatism. Ever wonder why Al Qaeda and Islamo-fascism by-passed Europe to America, calling us the Great Satan, even as we, not Europe, are the last God-fearing state in the West, and while pretty bawdy by some standards, still, mere naifs compared to the sex and filth industry in Europe? For one, Al Qaeda believes Europe already to be moribund, having rolled over years ago. All that is left is for them and Russia to divide the spoils. (We're not convinced it will work out that way, but the signs are all there.) But most of all, they see America, specifically American freedom, as the greatest threat to their view of the world and ambitions.
      It is no different with the Left's view of Conservatism. They must break our will. They all see us as evil personified, even as we seem them pretty much the same. Only, and here's the rub, they seem more willing to press their point. There can be no live-and-let-live as long as one conservative openly resists. And by resist, I mean yearn for freedom...you know, out loud. They really don't care what you yearn for silently, but will probably set up the re-education camps just to be safe.
   
      This new Homeland report (there will be others, in all likelihood, with an increasing sense of urgency) is not just a promotional nip at the heels of the Tea Party movement, but designed more to suppress what they know will happen if the Tea Parties prove successful...you know, more and more websites, bumper stickers, t-shirts, caps, and 527 ads...and more adherants. A rally song could be just around the corner. Just like the Missouri State Police report, they want to stop the snowball before it's rolled to the top of the hill, and the way they do that is scare the hell out of the hands that might be pushing it up.
      "If you do this, we will paint a bulls-eye on your back." Forget a simple violation of the 1st Amendment, this is pure Nazi thuggery...but also a thuggery that has a proven track record. They know it works because they believe that we are less committed than they are. They believe, with intimidation, they can simple peel us off, a few here, a few there, who are not willing to have our names held up to public ridicule, our jobs put at risk (easier than you might think) or to be associated with those real snot-eyed inbreds who lurk in the fringes of all political movements.
       Now, this is not an Ooops!, as the Missouri report purported to be, but neither is it Napolitano's handiwork. Nothing in her past (that we've found so far) shows any inclination toward this sort of gutter profiling and targeting. Like so many before her, Janet Reno comes to mind, and so many in this Administration, men and women with titles in empty offices; this is an administration of sinecures.
       So we now know something else. Add that your information bank. No one is in charge who appears to be in charge.
       All the more reason to stiffen the spine.

       Oh, so where's the GOP? Can't say. We're working hard to find a few who might be inclined to turn things around inside their party, but most are still in seclusion. Cowardice? Or stupidity? They are supposed to be smart, but in an office cubicle sort of way, so they may not actually be able to connect the dots and draw out the logic of the equation they see before them. But, then again, maybe they do, and like true betas, seeing the "committedness" of the Other Side, have simply decided they just don't want any bulls eyes painted on their new suits. Maybe discretion, and accepting a permanent Bob Michel sinecure in Congress, is the better part of valor.
       We just wrote about the sadness of so many businessmen who find themselves having to go the way of the new masters. They may have to only to survive, and we are sure many will "wreck". But men and women who purport to be protectorss and defenders of the Constitution?

       It is indeed a fight to the death...either our will or their will succumbs. We already knows who wins if we stand firm.
       Never forget Steve McQueen's words: "You have never played the game until you have played for more than you can afford to lose."
VB

    Hold this scene in your mind: Revisit Schindler's List in your mind. In one of the earliest scenes, just after all the Jews of Cracow had been pulled from their homes and taken into the ghetto, it showed some of the younger men in synagogue still working little competitions against one another trying to get Nazi business. I asked myself then why Spielberg would insert that scene, as it was not very complimentary of their understanding as to the pickle they were in.
    Maybe that was his point....here was a business culture that had been the object of name-calling for generations, rising to a crescendo quickly after the German invasion in 1939, then this round-up into the ghetto in 1941. Still, they never saw what would come next.

    I'll come back to this.
    Since the November election there has been a lot of speculation as to just what this new "socialist" phenomenon really is. Is it socialism, or communism, or fascism?
    If you consider the individual players, from Obama, Bill Ayers, Pelosi, Barney, you might say all three, but in the end, a system is defined by what it does, not what it says it is doing.
    In truth, while all three are socialist in nature, and each have textbook definitions, none probably work in describing what is going on now in America, as all three terms carry popular baggage that has little to do with those textbook definitions. Communism is not what Marx designed, but has come to mean "Marxist-Leninist" as practiced in the USSR and later, Iron Curtain Europe, where there was little in the way of an industrial base, and a business class that purveyed to a very small, wealthy part of the society, almost all royal licensees. The middle class didn't exist. Under those conditions it was easy (well, sort of) just to tear it all down and build over the ashes, as Lenin, Stalin and the east European thugs tried to do.
    Because of Lenin, in general, "socialism" was what Marx's theories were called in Europe (although there were others), and they were quickly adopted, and adapted to the special circumstances according to each particular country (all but France having a royal line at the head) and to the tastes of the political academics in their respective universities, each with their own ideas as how to best devolve from a royal system to a workers' paradise. But the idea of state ownership of the means of production, which Marx's communism called for, and Lenin got, was never in the European tea leaves. No one could find a practical way of getting from here-to-that place without the sort of radical violent revolution Lenin carried off, and the Russians, well, they just weren't European. Enough said.
    So, from the 1870s until around 1945, in all of Europe except the three fascist states, socialism was an ideology without a state, a plan without an apparatus to execute it...but with a growing political parties supported by the working class. They were a factor to be reckoned with. By the 1930s, throughout Europe, they competed with the Communists but were not on friendly terms...much of that animosity born on the backs of Marxist purity, particularly atheism.
    Then came the Nazis. The socialists were so easily and completely stomped by the Nazis in Germany that the name itself lost much of its allure, so, after WWII, the Communists rose, replacing traditional socialists in the workplace, while the political socialists turned into democratic-socialists and the academic socialists returned to their cloistered towers, happy, I assume to have at least a little of the pie, as Europe moved Left in the late 40's-early 50's.
    The point I'm leading to is that the Europeans didn't use a master plan to design their socialist democracies after the war. In the economic and business sphere (I'm not considering the social sphere here) what they all ended up being were little more than neutered, kinder, gentler versions of the relationship structured between the German Third Reich and their private sector; an industrial and manufacturing sector that got all its marching orders from the national government, and a narrow band of middle class businesses that lived or died at the caprice of the state.
     But see, we can never call that aspect of European socialism "fascist", as it is obviously a word that simply cannot be used to describe anything institutional in Europe. They had to call it something else. Still, in most of the European social democracies. But "facts is facts". They are closer to German fascism in terms of how private business and private property are managed and allocated by the state than any other model.
    What is confusing is that this fascist design itself, where the ownership of business and substantial property is "licensed" and guided by the state, creating a wealthy class that is more or less "allowed" by the state, was also similar in nature to the kinds of "licenses" passed out by royals...you know, when you buy a hat on Bond Street, or a tea at Fortnum and Masons, and it bears a special seal that says "By Appointment to Her Majesty's Government", etc.
      The Euros adopted this form of political connection to the "private sector" out of pragmatism, as it was unthinkable that they would adopt a more strident Marxist model. Picking between the royals and the fascists, since the royals dealt only with a small group of private purveyors, Hitler and his crowd get all the kudos for having designed the first large scale working model of this state-to-private-sector model...and also having the good sense, being barbarians themselves, to hire on a bunch of guys with a "von" in front of their names, e.g, von Schacht, von Ribbentrop, to wine and dine, and sip tea with all the ranking members of the industrial, legal, and scientific classes. They pulled it off in a class of people they probably couldn't get jobs delivering milk to. William L Shirer wrote that getting the Krupps to come on board was the coup de grace. The Nazi takeover was complete.
     What this proves is what Moses Sands always said, "Sky determines" and the kind of socialism that politicians will adopt is based on circumstances on the ground. Europe has made their bed, which, no matter what they call it, is fascist in nature in the terms of how they "allow" private ownership of property and business...and those bureaucratic systems, all originally designed for homogeneous societies and built under the a nuclear umbrella paid for by American taxpayers, will suddenly come to a quickening end now that those two exigencies have changed...and the bureaucratic cancer metastasized.
    
    But the United States is a case of first instance. Never has any form of socialism taken over a fully functioning free market economy and republic. Just as when we were formed in 1789, we're now the first to throw out the baby with the bath water...so now we get to find out the answer to that searing question of the ages...does the baby survive?
    No one yet knows how our sky will determine what shape this new American socialism will take, but common sense says it is not in the cards to simply burn it all down, as Lenin did, and start from the ashes and rubble...although President Obama does speak an awful lot about building "new foundations" which is governmentese for almost the same thing. Once again, pragmatism will apply...only whose? Marx's? Hitler's? Pelosi's? Obama's? Soros?
   You see, the cinder block in Karl Marx's Chipper Vac was always American small business. The rise of our small business sector alongside the industrial revolution in the late 19th Century was the single most important economic event (there are others) to disprove Marx. So we think this is the real front line of the new socialism. It cannot be destroyed a la Lenin unless they just decide to go ahead and put all those displaced jobs into concentration camps, which is logistically impossible. So the only other option is to co-opt small business, i.e., setting up what appear to be "free market" competitions, say among twenty businesses in a single business line, thus shaking them down, er, out, to say three. Only after the other seventeen have been gobbled up, will the surviving three come to find out there are new terms and conditions that go with this new position they have acquired.
   Now take your mind back to that synagogue in Cracow in 1942 where young men were trying to ace out their friends in getting some of that German hard currency.
   In November I wrote on a sombre note here about the prospects for small business, based on this theme of what I saw as too great a willingness to sleep with the enemy. I even dumped my tux. Well I tried it again last week, only this time, in tweeds.
   A friend of mine and I surveyed the room, all business men we knew and asked each other, if given the choice of keeping their business but only at the sufferance of the government, or losing it because they refused to kiss up and adapt to the new socialist models, which would they choose? We worked the roomed for almost two hours, asking a variety of questions that might give us a signal.
   It was not encouraging.
   Although it's too late to cry about it now, it was clear that the Constitution's protectors, such as they are anymore, had failed to reinforce the "spiritual" foundations of these men's understandings about the links that run directly from the Bill of Rights to their wallets. What's worse, most of them strutted about the room thinking themselves protectors of the first order, creating the sort of situation, where, even if there were offered help, it would never be accepted.
   Most of these men are about to be hooked by those same wallets...by joining the competition, never seeing how, once they do, the final barb is set.
   The Great Shaking Out has already begun in small business, only few know the invisible hands holding the sifter. They will be gobbled up, a few left to swim in a fishbowl, the others spit out.
    Try as I might, I can't get angry, because it was never small business' job to fight back once the state was dead set against them...anymore then I can get angry at the citizens in Germany for making the wrong turn, then, once finding out they'd made it, finding they were also unable to reverse course. The facsists now, juts like the facsists then, know to block all exits.

   There was one small glimmer of encouraging news. Many of these men spoke of their wives' new involvement in political affairs. Their wives, not them, would be at the Tea Party.
   Call me old fashioned, but women, especially wives, have a great deal of power over their husbands behind closed doors. I'm reminded of what a black professor told me in the 1970s...Segregation in the South started to die the first time a mother in Mississippi saw her son on television, all decked out in his Kingston Trio madras shirt, standing behind a rope line, screeching curses at James Meredith trying to get into school. At that point that quiet, patient God-fearing little Baptist mother got up, closed the kitchern door so the rest of the children couldn't hear, and had a serious talk with that hooded husband of hers. It probably began something like this..."I'm not going to have the first child in this family's history go to college only to show up on television burning some poor nigra in effigy..."
   It could happen. Be watchful.
VB
   

    We saw this coming and have been advising local party officials (who continue to seem clueless), so hope the organizers of these Tea Party events are more aware. The other side will be sending along plants whose mission it will be to attract media attention by yelling profanities, racist (stereotyping) comments, or any incendiary words, trying to indicate there is a skin-head mentality actually driving these protests. Never under-estimate the willingness of a continuing dumbed-down public to buy the spin, or the ability of the Left and the media to spin it. The Nazis were masters at this in the 1930s and the Communists were no slouches either, so pick your poison.
    These are not push mobs, but rather troops called out for a specific event in a specific place, with specific assignments they receive from (usually) internet handlers.  The Left has millions of soldiers, and tens of thousands of these able to carry out more specific assignments. In the Left's army these would be corporals, not rank-and-file mob-to-the-barricade grunts.
    Here, their purpose isn't to pick fights, as you may see at a gay parade in Boston on March 17th, nor is it to blend in while gathering intell. It is to try to portray the most absurd fringe of this movement as being really it's center, with racist catcalls, anything that will call attention to themselves...and the media...so as to create a photo op for the news at 6 and 11, and a lasting impression for all those swing-citizens at home who sat this protest out, but might consider the next one if taxes get any higher, and the bill-paying tougher.
    If you were paying attention, they did a lot of practice drills during the M'Cain-Palin campaign, especially when Gov Palin was on the stump. Remember that reporter, David Singleton, from Scranton who wrote that he'd heard the "kill"word yelled during a rally, while everyone around him said no such comment was made? He lied.
    This will be a team effort and they have their bases covered...well, almost.

    The conventional wisdom is that these goon squads should just be ignored. Just act like the good citizens you are and they will eventually go away. 
    We think otherwise, since the major impact these protests are designed to have is that the next and the next will be even larger, and these groups from California to Maine will eventually join hands. We know from experience that the Left has all the tools, and the will to use them, to cause rain on every single one of these parades, to turn them into a one-day event, from which everyone strolls home with a happy memory, an anger at least temporarily assuaged (sort of like going home after church on Sunday), complete with a T-shirt or cap. (Note, we're seeing 29.95 Tea Party hats and T-shirts being sold. If you want to grow the movement with advertising, try giving them away, at at least get them down to cost...about $2-$3. Damn!)
     These Leftie plants go to these events believing that the Right has it's own snot-eyed inbred wing, who will be there, and all they have to do in fall into type. They also know no one's going to kick their behinds if they act up. They may try to pick a fight, but we doubt it. Wrong venue. They are props for a photo news story to be told by someone else. They know their parts...and they are the perfect actors. for most of these are not true believers, just plain gullible stupid...of the never-changing sort. They were handpicked because they will be totally oblivious to the quality of people they will be surrounded by. (For some sense of just how stupid they are, imagine plants sent out by Nero to walk among the throngs of Christian in the dens below the Coliseum, before they are dragged upstairs to be devoured by lions. While they pray and console one another about the coming tribulation, all the plants "hear" are whispers of conspiracy and then duly report these "facts" back to the Throne Room.) This is a total credulity and total detachment from the real, sensory world. The Left did not get these children to this point of suspended animation overnight, but that is another tale for another time. That they are there, and they are real is what is important now.
    Their designated purpose is to turn a political victory by the anti-tax Tea Party movement into not just a defeat but a political victory for the Left, if the opportunity arises. They are better at this than we are, or at least have proven themselves so far. (So far we have been unable to convince anyone in the GOP that if they don't learn how to fight this kind of dirty...oh well.) If they can take the starch out of the Tea Party movement and reduce it to the public image of an unruly mob, fewer people will show up next time...and next.
    Can this be turned around? We think so.
    First, ID everyone you can at every event. Share intell. (This will require hand-picked spotters and taggers, with cameras and immediate communications.) After spotting the person "tag" them with photos, follow them at the end of the event, home if possible. Get a license plate, even an address. 7 will get you 10 they'll be on FaceBook, MySpace, YouTube or their own website, advertising their true agenda. Their vanity is an enduring weakness...and least at this level of mobbery. (Here you have to be creative, and a little covert, er, sneaky, as we've suggested to others, e.g, when that person wakes up the next day he/she may find ten people with placards at their front door, doing the same things they did to AIG employees, or church members in California who gave money to the anti-gay marriage movement. Payback.) Once ID'd you will have several options as to how to play your cards, depending on whether you have one good reporter or local talk show host who will broadcast your findings.
    We continue to work on this at the organizational level, but it ain't rocket science. Your mission is to turn the story back to your advantage. Moreover, you can, over time, compile an evidence and photo file that can be used in future political campaigns, to prove to ordinary people that this sort of jack-booted thuggery has always marked the behavior of the Left. (Most people now won't believe it...even old Acorn members from the 80s I know.) Your first job is to get the evidence. The next is to "chill" whatever thoughts they have of trying it again in the same way.
    Good hunting.
VB
   
    

    Like the headline?
    VB told me that Moses Sands once said, "Most athiests ain't."
    Inasmuch as atheism is an intellectual pursuit, with, as its "good end", to attain something lofty and positive, (even I think humanism is a positive idea) rather then simply put down something it views as negative (religion), most self-professing atheists we've seen and read simply are too stupid, simple and mean spirited and narrow (anti-Christian versus anti-religion) to be true atheists. Only a few show any intellectual depth whatsoever.
    Most, rather than not believing in God, just don't like Him. After all, He sets the rules, and doesn't pass out attaboys for poor performance, as they often got in school. It's even been said He punishes it...some times. Nobody likes judgment.
    Excuse me. There is one, will be one, and that is what the debate is all about. One cannot will...or wish...it away. As VB once wrote, "One of of us is right, and one of us is wrong, but only one of us can afford to be wrong."
    According to "new" athiesm lingo, is I am wrong then I have not been an arse-hole for nothing...for all they are proving to be are "arse-holes"...for nothing, indeed.
Bernard Chumm

    In all likelihood, yes...unless...
    ...the Tea Parties all fly in on the wings of a larger theme.

    For the longest time now, we have been trying, through some rather long sermons, er, essays, re-establish the spiritual roots of Liberty and the Constitution, as the Founders saw it, and which, until around the Wilson era, most Americans were taught to see it...as a kind of secular religion...a transcendental secular religion. When you stand back a ways and look at it, as a giant landscape, set against the history of tyranny and serfdom through the ages, America does take on a religious aspect. It just does.
    I use the word "transcendental" in this sense: when a person accepts the Christian faith (among others), what some sects call "getting saved" or "being born again" or "seeing the Light", it is as if that religion had just been born  for the very first time, because, it indeed had in that individual. This is why such religions can procreate themselves one person at a time and persist through millenia, for each day there are being born this truth anew, with each convert. (This is also why, despite some texts that seem to the contrary, we find a deep "goodness" in Islam as well....for men do not accept and bequeath Evil as readily, or in the same spiritual way, as they do Good. One does not get "saved" for, or "see the light" of Evil. That comes from a different direction altogether.    
    The underlying, or if you will, spiritual underpinnings of the constitutional ideas, i.e, dignity of man, the free pursuit of life, liberty and property are no different. This is why generation after generation of foreigners have come here and, in time, discarded all the hateful baggage of the places they left.
    But they had to be taught....in part by example, and in part in various types of classrooms.
    Unlike the corner Baptist church, where the biggest trick was getting people to visit in the first place, it was always easy to get people to come to the American "church"...so easy, in fact, saved Americans we gave up on the sermon and the teaching the lessons as to this place is special, and why they were here, what they could do here they can't do anyplace else, and what new insights they should take home so they could pass the Good News of America and liberty onto their children and their childrens' children. Because we quit teaching gratitude all around, it has been easy for the Congress, just to name one institution, to displace the nobility and sacrifice of others to provide and protect these people's access to better jobs, homes and futures. Today, for millions, life is good, only no one knows why. No one is taught why. There is no thanksgiving....save to the re-distributors of wealth.
   
    If we can restore this one thing...the spiritual connection of our liberties...our schools have long since abandoned it...intentionally I might add...then the Tea Parties and other events will all have legs and mean something bigger.
    For you see, Marx also preached a kind of secular religion, only one of hatred, jealousy and envy for the achievements of any sort that did not arise from its own hallowed halls of the intellect. And today, he holds the upper hand.
VB

     Republican Party leaders have been acting as if they just got some bailout money and are all trembling in their offices waiting to be called to testify in front of the dweaded Fwank Committee for having given themselves a bonus.
     Who knew that the solution to all the GOP's problems would come down to a single word?

     When William Shakespeare put into King Hal's mouth "...when gentlemen in England now a-bed...will hold their manhoods cheap..." he was bouncing his punch line off a verity, a widely accepted truth, just as Thomas Jefferson was when he wrote "...we hold these truths to be self-evident..." The operative understanding, of course, was that gentlemen do not hold their manhoods cheap.
      That no longer seems to be the case, for gentlemen (especially) in America scarcely think about their manhood at all these days. Maybe that's the problem.
      I can't say what day it was in 1968 that mothers began un-teaching manhood...while fathers simply turned away...but it was sometime that year. Maybe it was the war. Or Bobby Kennedy. Maybe it was Hal 9000. Who knows? But suddenly, becoming a man in the classic sense of the word became, well, declasse. Mothers, for the most part, didn't just decide to amend the rites of passage a boy had to go through to become a man, they downright repealed them.
      So it figures that a lot has changed since 1968. Johnny no longer comes home with a bloody nose because someone called him a "bas***d", in part because, in all likelihood, he is. In 2007's bumper baby crop, 40% were, which deprives the term of any sting whatsoever. And the same for "son of a b**ch". Forget any bruised knuckles over defending mother's virtue...unless Dad's still lives at home, which by the time Johnny is 10 or 12, is less and less likely. Today, nearly 50% of all kids under 30 were raised in their formative years by mother alone....so Mom has "known" other men.
      Besides, if Johnny came home with a bloody nose it would be in a squad car, toting an arrest warrant for assault.
     Yeppers, times have changed.
      And so has the idea of manhood. In the over-50 crowd, (and why I even bother to write this) it still exists in memories of a time when a boy would stake out a piece of ground with a pike upon which was hung a banner, with ribbons attached for, let's see, Mother, Truth, Honor, Dignity, Self-Respect, maybe even Betsy Lou. In his own mind, every kid, no matter how humble, had that spot, that sacred piece of ground, which he would not yield...lest he be known as a coward. In those times we were taught these "little" things by the men in our lives, and told if we defended them we were "growing up like men" which we knew to be just next to nobility, which was itself just next to sainthood. And since mothers in those days were the keepers of the religious flame of the House, attached to our banner were all kinds of ribbons we got from her; Reverence, Kindness and a general fear of all those transgressions laid out in the Ten Commandments. Some of those ribbons on our banner sewn by Mom we didn't dare yield out of a specific fear of disappointing or embarrassing her, and a general fear of going to Hell.
     We carried the knowledge that as we got older, we would attach even higher-sounding ribbons to that banner, so we carried it around like breast armor. Everyone I knew had one. It was a hidden shield you knew not to invade or you'd have a fight on your hands....and sure enough just as sure as we'd all had to defend our own shield once or twice, most of us grabbed the shirt of another kid once or twice  just to make sure the lessons we were taught was true. They were.
      That's the way the world once worked, and it was a good way. Sadly, I think the under-50 crowd missed most of  that. For you see, they ran smack dab into 1968.
      Oh, manhood is still out there, only it is almost invisible among those of today's "gentler condition", which in Shakespeare's day carried an altogether different understanding than it does now. For one, "gentleman" of classical times did not mean "without a standard", lest we forget the origin of the word. Indeed, to be a gentleman was much sought-after because of that higher standard it represented. But all men, all but the lowest sort at least, carried some sort of banner, and we all knew and respected one another because of it.
      Today, manhood has been demoted, classed down, sort of like broken old boxers who can't get a fight. Instead of a sitting in a noble perch, it has been used to define the sort of kids who go around extorting other kids' lunch money, rather then a kid's refusal to give it up...without a fight. It has come to mean aggression, not defenders of the peace who stand their ground shielding the innocent. So it's only natural that it has come to mean what the lesser folk do, such as what farm boys learn when they join the Marines...you know, C-students...and not what better raised, "gentler" boys already know...you know, A-students and law school material. To "man up" is what a fellow must do when he gets a girl pregnant, then gets a dull job, but hangs with it, and her, for forty years. Pretty dreary, huh? In short, since the late '60s, manhood has become that coat of varnish brushed on a coarse, unrefined rube your mother would never let you hang out with...after 1968.
      As has been said about my generation, the "best and the brightest", when the Vietnam War came along, for the most part the best went one way, the brightest the other.
     
      There has always been an American rub to this Elizabethan theme of manhood and gentlemen, for here in America it was allowed that ordinarily-educated men could form their own business, then turn their small companies into very successful ones (because of a natural talent college-training could never really create, only magnify), where they could build that big house on the hill, own two SUV's, a Dodge truck, buy a bass boat and send the daughter off to Julliard...or maybe just the Midwest Music Academy in Lawrence. Still they are things neither Shakespeare nor Queen Bess ever imagined for free farmers.
     Still others built those companies into giants, then handpicked the men who would make them even more successful, thus bringing an even more heroic meaning to the term "man", for it took real men to build those companies. Henry Ford was such a builder. Jack Welch, in a direct line from Edison, was such a hand-picked successor. Can you ever imagine, in any nightmare, Lee Iacocca being frog-marched into a hearing in front of Barney Frank, then leaving with boot polish on his lips?     
      The corporate world has been watching since the late 70s and early 80s, when these children of '68 began to eschew the dirty hands of engineering and the hard mental exercise of medicine and science, and instead choose the fast tracks of law, administrative management, and in the corporate world especially, finance and marketing, seeking position and rewards that did not require any particular knowledge in the product being produced, and godferbid, long hours on the shop room floor. They skulked around in dark corners in the front office muttering under their breath about those dinosaur "manufacturers" (always used as an epithet) who had actually built the company, waiting for them to die or retire so they could pass over the mantle of management onto this new generation...and all knowledge of leadership into the dustbin of memory. By the early 90's, in big business, this was a fait accompli, the builders-of-companies' time nearing an end...except out here in the hustings, where all those left behind to suffer the rites of passage were still drilling for, and finding gold.
      Still, by 2000, in Washington, New York, Los Angeles, the state capitals, there were few if any surviving "gentlemen" would could still build a highway or a bridge while tying a four-in-hand knot with one hand and squishing a U S senator under his thumb with the other. Their scent was gone from America's boardrooms...and its legislatures.
      Since the 1990s most corporations have belonged to the finance and brand managers. Their thesis: You can train a monkey to build or assemble the damned things...and a zoo keeper to keep the monkeys in line. Just manage the cash flow and debt, make the books show a profit, and keep the brand alive. In hindsight it was a train wreck everyone saw coming years ago...when beta males began running corporate America and the alphas were encouraged to go open a auto repair shop or join the Marines...in a cultural process that began around fourth grade. Ritallin has probably helped almost as much as fatherless homes.
      And what about the brand? Brand does to a corporation what apparently the GOP has done to the Constitution. Just look what they did to Ben Franklin, signing the national philosopher to a multi-year contract doing public relations, while forever barring him from the board room where he would annoyingly remind everyone from time to time why they were supposed to be there. You can't carry a banner for 150 years without having a house philosopher, a keeper of the flame. The Constitution is one of those banners, and its language always assumed it would have its standard-bearers, both in and out of government.
      So when a brand sinks, it usually goes down with all hands.
 
      I know, this was supposed to about the Republican Party, and in two thousand words I have prattled on about cultural rites of passage. But in doing so I not only have defined the current GOP, but the entire Washington political structure, and the about-to-be-fascistly-co-opted corporate world in the United States.
      Of course, it would slander the idea of manhood if I said only rednecks who own an all-night wrecker service are men. The concept has evolved. For one, there are as many women nowadays who exhibit the traits of noble manhood. Margaret Thatcher comes to mind, who was every bit the man Ronald Reagan was, and who certainly bears no resemblance to either of Cinderella's ugly half sisters, Hillary and Nancy. Lady Liberty, left breast safely back in her blouse, will re-emerge once again to lead much of this counter-revolution, once again carrying that banner.
      America universalized the "gentle class" which the Brits just never could get around to doing, at the same time undoing the collar Karl Marx tried to hang around "capitalists". The Shakespearean idea of manhood was that a gentlemen hoisted a nobler banner than say a common farmer. Only he said nothing unkind about the latter, only that he was more coarse ("...be he ne'er so vile, gentler will his condition be..."). True enough. But this is not the same as a fellow who is a "smart sunavabitch" (Skilling, Fastow), or fast talker, smooth operator, clever manipulator (Bill Clinton, almost the entire United States Congress and American Bar Association). These tell me nothing of the banners they hold...and in the end we are defined by our banners.
      What's been missing from these profiles of manhood, as they have been redefined based on class since the 1960s, and which mothers missed altogether in re-directing their little Johnny's, is that everyone involved know otherwise. It's as if they wanted to create an alternative universe for themselves and everyone would just turn the other way. Even if the GOP will do that alas, Russia and China will not, so why not man up now?
       Trust me, betas know when they are in the presence of alphas, which explains why they are generally barred from Congressional hearings. What Mom in 1968 may have forgotten to plan for was that certain natural laws always come into play when alphas and betas meet. I hate using any phrase that may be the least bit suggestive when mentioning Barney Frank, but the operative natural law is best expressed when, as in a parade and Old Glory marches by, all other flags just naturally are dipped (droop) honoring the higher banner. Did I imply "limply"? I've been in Officer's clubs where desk-bound colonels would drink and boast...until a captain wearing a CIB (Combat Infantryman's Badge) will belly up for a beer...and a kind of referential quiet descended on the place. Talk will continue, but loud boasting about how that colonel stood chin-to-chin with an insubordinate GS-3 file clerk seems to fade into insignificance. No one ever called the likes of Iacocca or Welch, or even Ronald Reagan a "smart sunavabitch" as way to define them...unless to diminish them, which is just what the fast talking, smooth operating, clever manipulator will try to do. Try to imagine Congressperson Frank berating Jethro Gibbs, then Gibbs slowly rises, straightens his jacket, then walks slowly toward the congressperson, jaw rigid, gaze fixed forward. Frank yells, then orders the marshals forward, but everyone is frozen. Frank talks even more quickly, at first threatening, then cajoling, not noticing that he is very close to hitting high C with his protests. He shuffles, about to get up and run. He may even pee in his pants before Gibbs finally stops, right in front of him, then reaches down to the floor and picks up a dime, and handing it to the Fair Barney, saying "I thought you might have dropped this, Congressman", then returns to his chair.
     This is why alphas aren't asked to visit Congress.

      You can make your own list of what ribbons once belonged on the banner of the Republican Party. I visited their site and they still have a platform of principles, but somehow I think they confuse the difference between "policies" (low taxes, fiscal responsbility) which only sit atop the philosophical principles (according to the Constitution, it's the people's money, not the government's, goddamit!). Somewhere in the past the GOP had strong, unbreakable ones, (read George William Curtis', a GOP founder's, orations) all dangling under that of the Constitution's ribbon...at least until Ben Franklin, or maybe Curtis, was banned from the boardroom. I'll only include a few of those things that went with the ideal of manhood taught to me, pre-'68; Integrity, Honor, Resolve, Unflinching devotion to certain ideals, (these were all personal attributes, mind you) as well as America's good name and virtue (just like Mom's before), the Constitution, the Bill of Rights, The Rule of Law, the Liberty of Man...and a whole host of things that go a way beyond being able to change the spark plugs on a '72 Monza without a hoist.
      In a word, manhood meant first, having a banner, and then, steadfastly representing and defending it. That was the common culture's "brand" that the Founders attempted to put into words both in 1776 and 1787. Most of my life that was also the brand of the Republican Party, especially as defined by Ronald Reagan, Barry Goldwater, William Buckley...and my father, to name a few.
      Once you understand the origin and nature of that brand, you can easily see why some people have always wanted to kill it. And you can also see why some people in society were always so willing to oblige. Take my own mother for instance. The first time I crossed the line and ran smack into another person's banner, and his right cross, he laid my nose across my ear. I had lied and unknown to me he had an intolerance for lying. Worse, he was in the position to be judge, jury and hangman...all inside five seconds. There wasn't even time for one of those Bill Clinton rebuttals, and I decided right then and there, at age 12, I would not even try to be a liar like that "fast talking sonuvabitch" growing up in Arkansas. In five seconds, and not a word uttered, Mick Hensley hung Honesty and Humility on my banner, where it remains today.
      But had I told my mother where I got that bloody, broken nose that day, Mick would have been in reform school within a month. And I would have come away with nothing to sew onto my banner...except a large "B", for whiny, snitch Beta.
      How manhood and the banners it supports were eased out of politics I can't say. But I suspect it was generational. 1968. Law schools helped, where once upon a time, so many members of their classes of  '39-'43, instead of asking leading questions died leading infantry platoons. So much for gratitude.
      The GOP has lost its brand because it very clearly has no banner any longer, at least nothing men would rally around. When the brand and not the banner become the "reason for the season" this is what happens. As a brandless beta, the GOP simply cannot project to any reasonable segment of the population that they are better at anything than the other, more experienced and dirtier-dealing betas already in power. In the rough and tumble world of cat-scratching and back stabbing, the GOP will always be inexperienced pikers, standing in the shadow of masters. Trying to become "better" than they are is not a quest any real man would ever consider.

      And so, as it began in Europe in the 1870s, the revenge of the betas has finally found a permanent nest in America. Marx, in his deepest soul, was always about getting even...but not on behalf of the worker, as he protested, but rather because those who could, did, and those who could not only wrote about the unfairness of it all. He appealed to that very same class of academic layabouts who believed it was all so very unfair that they should not receive the acclaim...and the compensation...and the power of those who were clearly their intellectual lessers (but who did seem to work oh, so very much harder). The envious and bitter will always have armies to lead, and their own facsimile of a banner to wave.
      We will never see any alpha intentionally marched before Congress, for Congress doesn't want any surprises...or embarrassing stains on their trouser legs. No American citizen will be invited to speak, or be questioned who is already carrying a true standard. The scent is too pervasive, and C-SPAN cameras never lie. The only chance of seeing alphas in the halls of government is if, and when, the GOP grows a pair. Then the scent  alone will drive the other side batty. It will be palpable.
     
        Time is moving quickly. But even at this late stage of life the banners of the Constitution and manhood can still be taught, in part because inside us all (even Democrat's) is the desire to stand up an be counted, defending and fighting under a banner of purity and honor.
        So, to the GOP: Out here in the world, ordinary citizens are always looking for those little things that can signal to others you have that banner even when the place and time won't allow you to be overly noisy or profane about it. Only the GOP can carry the banners of integrity and honor back into the halls of Congress...and when you do, all other banners will dip in honor. It's that simple.
        It's your dead silence that probably annoys us most. But, just mentioning the Constitution is one signal we want to see, especially as it is now being used to identify with the snot-eyed inbred militia types (been watching "24"?). Another is mentioning the "shoulders we all stand on", the gratitude principle, which, in my time was one of the first ribbons to be sewn onto our banner...by my father.
       I understand your reticence to come out before a microphone and rant "like a Democrat" (we've written about this a lot on this site), but still, you need to be a little more provocative than you are now. The entire Obama economic recovery plan is based on ingratitude, worse, a glorification of it...representing a generation that is ungrateful for the sacrifices of the last 230 years...and a willingness to gut the very document that guarantees man's freedom everywhere, all for the sake of a political gain that simply cannot endure more than what, 40-50 years, before it all comes tumbling down. Forget ordinary politics, this is an End-of-Civilization type of politics being offered up by the Democrats. Is it your thinking after all the "unintended consequences" that brought us to this brink that suddenly they would step back and see what they are doing, and where they are going, and once they see the "Bridge is Out" sign they will stop...or even slow down?
      They can't stop. That is the beauty of self-destruction. Ask any drug addict.
      You don't have to take out 527 ads to pitch your case. Just mention the Constitution and Gratitude and try to come up with some other "manhood" themes every time you find a mic. Start smelling, start speading scent. They are sure to strike a chord with us out here.
      Man up.
      But first you have to get a banner, for right now the GOP brand is no more.
     Vassar Bushmills
     
 

     If you are a poll watcher, and allow them to alter your mood (as they are intended to do) you should take some comfort (?) in the fact that the majority...correction, vast majority...of Obama voters in November were as ignorant of any facts relating to the election, the candidates or election issues, as your average sea otter.
     Serious minds are still trying to make some sense of the famous and somewhat embarrassing Zogby poll conducted just after the election, showing that what Libertarians most fear about our most recent form of government, which gave far too much power to the C-students of the country (in their minds' eyes), instead is now in the hands of millions of D- know-nothings...and worse, those know-nothings are all aligned with the Democrats.
     We're not waiting for the Republicans to grasp this rather tasty fact. Without teeth they can barely chew their own gums, let alone a Tastee-Freeze soft-serve like this. We've moved on to the really dispiriting bottom line of the Zogby poll, especially if you're a news analyst driven by polls or in the polling business; namely the polls aren't worth squat, and pre-election tags such as registered Democrats, Republicans, Independents, or "registered voters", "likely voters" simply have no real meaning, when a solid two-thirds of the majority 55% of the votes cast in the last election (app 37% of all voters) couldn't find their arse with their hats.
     Pre-election polling nomencalture is designed to convince us those being polled are engaged and aware, and take this voting stuff seriously...uh, do I get my 7-11 coupon now, or after I vote? Probably the one question Zogby didn't ask that would've completed the profile of the typical Obama voter was whether they thought O'Bama was a black Irish leprechuan.
     And by typical, I mean over half. Barely 50% got half the questions right. 2% got them all correct, so against any ordinary A-B-C-D grading system for average citizenship, the profile would have been shaped more like a snail than a bell. A 70 (C-) would have been a great score among Democrats. (We always sorta knew that, though, didn't we?)
    
     Just keep this in your head as a calculator for evaluating future polls, which will, for the sake of continued business (how many pols have been published since November?), ignore the simple fact that 37% of those queried about any issue other than Jolie's mysterious new tat on her ankle, haven't a clue. As a test, we suggest pollsters either first ask a simple question, Who is the president of the United States?, or better, ask the same question two different ways; e.g., 1) what's your opinion of President Obama's performance in office, and 2) what's your opinion of the president's performance in office? This early in his term, I guarntee at least a 15 point swing.
     No matter. Whatever numbers you see reported favoring Democrat issues, just multiply that number by 62% (.62) and you have the real figure.
     As a citizen wanting to grab hold of any edge, that should encourage you just a little...while, as a citizen who worries about the growing distance between citizens and their Constitution, that should cause you to just sit down and cry.
     Finally, the hard part is figuring out what to do about all those stupid, uninformed voters out there.
     Sadly, the socialists already have a plan.
Bernard Chumm
    

 

       I'm not a fan of Bill O'Reilly fan, who fancies himself a conservative and putative "Protector" of the Constitution. Glenn Beck has inadvertently proved he is neither simply by being a foil to O'Reilly's own attempts to position himself between Fox left-wing and right-wing  bomb throwers.
       I rarely watch even snippets of O'Reilly, but being on the road and caught in a two hour vortex between a dinner and meeting, I watched the last half of his show on Friday, when he interviewed Geraldo Rivera and Glenn Beck in succession.
       Rivera, if you don't already know, is Fox News' bad boy, the one guy most agree doesn't belong there except to entirely wash the "fair" out of Fox's "balanced". The problem is, like O'Reilly, Rivera is trained in law, and therefore can be right about legal issues even when he doesn't know why.
       Friday's issue was the indictment of Blago, son of Drago, former governor of Illinois, in a case we stated a long time ago as having several holes in it. Rivera agrees with us. In Chicago, you can not only indict, but convict, a ham sandwich. But this is a tough tough case to convict, and even more difficult to win on appeal. We like Blago's chances.
       But O'Reilly doesn't like Blago, so end of story. He's guilty. This is not the first time O'Reilly has packed his legal training and sense of objective fairness away in his wallet and hung the guilty bas***d before the trial even started.

       Then came Glenn Beck, who's Fox News' new kid on the block, having taken over John Gibson's old 5 o'clock slot and in very short order turned it into a big hit even up against some of the biggest prime time news shows.
       Beck's schtick, as you already know if you listen to his morning talk radio show, is an apocalyptic vision of the end of the era of the liberty of Man, which began here, in America, sometime around 1776.
       You already know our view of Beck, especially his style of delivery and his end game vision. We're not fans. But we usually can't fault his analysis, and in this case, it's that America is leaning fascist. That was to have been the theme of his Friday show which was canceled due to the Binghamton shootings. (It was rescheduled for this next Friday.)
       As a promo for next week's airing, but also as a way of positioning himself, O'Reilly prevued the fascist theme with Beck, while also pooh-poohing it. What I found most interesting is how he tried to shoot Beck's arguments down...as well as exposing possible reasons why.

      For background, remember the Founders knew that most people engage in politics with their own self-interests center-stage. This is why they came up with the balance and check system, which would keep the more overt self-interests in check (until Roe and gay marriage came along). This is also why they made the process so messy, so as to insure the self-interests of parties are exposed early and often...so as to protect the interests of the least men and women, whose interest are most often neglected in the legislative process.
      This is also the reason the Founders assumed there would always be a small army of "protectors" (about whom we've written plenty} who would transcend self-interests and defend the interests of the constitutional purposes, the common weal and the liberty of Man...and other stuff like that.
      Why I bring this up is that O'Reilly pooh-poohed Beck's belief in a coming fasco-socialism is because it had not yet cost him a single freedom. In fact, he mentioned that when the Clinton administration targeted him for tax audits, he sent his lawyer over to threaten them with a lawsuit if they continued...forgetting this is a thing you or I can't do...or that the cost of his legal fees alone is a kind of theft of a person's property and money by government (part of the government-as-bully policies arising from the bureaucratic estate of the 70's), and also something ordinary people can't afford. To the rest of us, when the government comes a'calling...with a writ, a lawyer, a regulator or a squad car...we concede and pay up.
      Still, in the five or so  minutes with Beck, Bill O'Reilly couched his entire fear or dislike of socialism based on what it might do to him.
      Glenn actually countered well, up-dating the tired old "one world government" theme to the more current "trans-national" movement, which over the years has been finding favor in the "sovereign individual" crowd among many wealthy people. It is real, not a conspiracy.
      Chesterton once wrote that the rich don't really need "democracy", and these trends prove it...rich people seeking government structures that will provide them succor. But what you get when the rich marry government is indeed, a kind of fascism. Glenn Beck is right, although he would be wrong to try to put an exact face on it just yet.
      Still, this fight should be fought, and Beck is fighting it, and Bill O'Reilly, if not in the camp of the self-interested, is still on the sidelines.
      As we see it now, Bill O'Reilly is trying to position himself between Rivera on the wacky Left by defining Glenn Beck as being on the wacky Right, out of his "other" self interest, vanity. I think he feels a little threatened by Beck's sudden success at Fox, so needs to keep him in a positioned in a lesser role.
      O'Reilly has shown his true hand here. He is a not a Protector.
      So watch your topknot, Mr Beck.
Vassar Bushmills
 

         Mike Krzyzewski is an old West Pointer, played for Bobby Knight, a real class act and great American. So I yelled "yeah" when he took President Obama  to task for his NCAA picks, leaving Duke out of the mix. But inside me there was this silent "uuhh-ohh". It isn't funny to fool with Mother Nature...or Her Son.
         Villanova 77, Duke 54.
         Insha'Obama    (It is Obama's will, Arabic)
Blakely

   We're on record here as not having a lot for Glenn Beck. I've asked St George to even turn him off in the morning hours.
   I won't go over the bill of particulars, but we felt, for one, Glenn was urging the rest of us to dig deep inside ourselves and learn to cope with the arrival of socialism. Hmmm.
   But with his 9/12 Project he's fighting back, and has a plan executed and is in the process to culminate on September 12 of this year, a full year in advance of the 2010 elections, and plenty of time to frame local and district platforms. If he maintains the tempo, he has a very good thing (for the country) going here.
   First, we asked for a banner and "9/12" is a damned fine one. The Commies had some great "September" flag art on that theme from the 50s-60s, which we may offer as contribution. Second, we asked for a set of irrefutable "we-can-all-agree-on" principles, and while his are a little Boy Scoutish (we like the Scout Law, but as a banner cause?), they are in the ball park. We were thinking of things more lofty, about Liberty, and for God sakes, Gratitude, the shoulders we all stand on. If anything has driven the pop culture and the Left, it is a spiteful lack of gratitude for the thing "given to them. Third, and this is the best, he's opened the airways to his audience to actually come up with, and eventually vote on a platform.
    This is a good plan, and deserves your support. Go to Glennbeck.com and sign up.
VB
 

    A weight coach I know has had a good time, since the early days of the '08 campaign, to insist, when people would call Obama "black" that No, he is just as white as he is black, so it is just as correct to call him one as the other.
    Try as we might, we can't escape Obama's color, especially since "mulatto" and "half-breed" are no longer acceptable terms. An old fellow I know, from the days when color mattered more than it does now, mentioned that to me the other day, as if to you say that everything he disliked about Obama was because of his color.
    I laughed, and said, "You know, you may be right, but not like you mean it to be. Everything about Obama I've seen so far, that I don't like, I associate wih his white side."
    "Really?"
    "Sure. Think about it. How many black men do you know, or ever even heard of, when they came into a little money, didn't spread it around among family? Black street punks-turned-rappers-turned-millionaires still don't forget their brothers and sisters. Obama's black side is African, not Alabaman so the goal of sharing is even higher for him. Akeem Olajuwan is from Nigeria and he has showered his wealth on family both here and in Nigeria. Dikembe Matumbo is from Congo and he has showered his wealth not only on his family, but also also adopted kids and brought them here. Obama has brothers in Kenya still living on dirt floors. Has never sent them a dollar. He had an aunt living in Boston, illegal and homeless. Never gave her a penny...even after she was outed.
    "Now you tell me, is it the African side, or white side that has made him such a chincy cheapskate?"
    He laughed. "Yep, you got me there."

    (I just used both the "c" words to describe this pusillanimous stinginess, but there is also an "n" word, which, I guess, we shouldn't use here lest Town Hall shut us down. Still.....)
Bernard Chumm

   Not that long ago, even after he had left political office, I said Newt Gingrich was the brightest mind on the right (excluding Charles Krauthammer). We need a Franklin in our midst, as VB said yesterday, and two years ago I would have said Newt was him.
   Today Newt Gingrich has become the Timothy Geithner of the Republican Party, a Techie with no discernible grip of the job he says he knows so much about.
   BC

     I was recently asked by a local GOP officer (who agrees with me!!) to look in on a debate going on inside the state party about the possible removal of the state chairman. He'd only been in less than a year, so surely they weren't laying November at his feet. (But I note that since Pres Obama has raised the bar of executive management so high, possibly undoing in a year or less what Americans have worked so hard to achieve, and fought and died to achieve, the past two hundred plus years, and mankind has prayed for the past two thousand, maybe we need to rethink that whole "executive honeymoon" thing anyway. There's a war on.)
     But I don't think the GOP gets it. Indeed, I look at everything in the context of the collapse of the Constitution, and maybe it is me who is wrong to view things this way. But just as I was contemplating that nearly half the GOP House members voted for an illegal tax on the AIG bonus recipients (what do you want to bet it never sees a court room?), I was struck by the content of this debate among some very well-heeled members of the Virginia GOP...ostensibly over the direction of the Party. The arguments, such as they were, centered around personalities (which always lead back to personal vanities and a sense of "class") and regionalism, even county-ism, which in Virginia is just this side of tribalism, as with Saddam's tribe in Tikrit, or Daniel Moi Arap's tribe in Kenya. Virginia has long been separated, culturally, economically and linguistically by the rural south and the urban/suburban northern neck around Washington (and my area around Richmond). "Thay don't git along."
     Class, pure and simple, and it does seem to repeat what Peggy Noonan so aptly said, the first time she lifted her skirt for Barack Obama, "It's not what you say, but how you say it." As we have written here before, it is easy, once you decide you can no longer stomach having to rub shoulders with the redder-necked Americans, the next best thing is to find a way to manage..er, lead them...from a distance.
     In this debate I picked up the tell-tale odor of what I wrote awhile back that many modern "conservatives" of this new era, much like the old liberals-turned-leftists from the 60s, define themselves less by what they are for and more by what they are against...and there is a coarse culture out there that weaves a common thread all the way back to the founding they are definitely against.

     In several pages of "debate" I could find very little mention of the Constitution, or the principles upon which the Party was founded, or which are derived from the Constitution itself. Just caterwauling. There is no real flag, no banner, and while it sickens me to say that the Left now has a banner and our side does not, and are actually more driven, better trained, and just plain smarter, the fact remains: you cannot even begin to start a fight with a guy carrying a banner when you ain't got one.
     Then I recall the original convention that drafted the Declaration, and the real players who made it all happen. Standing out, of course, was the tireless "keeping the eye on the prize" work of John Adams (we could use more of him, too) but always, over in the corner was the national philosopher, who always reminded everyone of that prize. South Carolina never had a position that they didn't have to first bounce off  the sounding board of the conscience of mankind, Ben Franklin, over in the corner, half asleep, half the time.
     Seems to me, it takes two. You can't have a John Adams running around griping palms, whispering, squeezing arms, keeping that prize firmly in everyone's focus, if you don't first have a Keeper of the Prize.
     That one person, in the national councils, or the local or regional councils, I cannot find. The GOP has lost a full quarter of its members, and spiritually over half. It's true, old GOP voters have no other place to go, but you can recall (I hope) how well M'Cain did with that strategy.
    
VB
   

     We mentioned not more than a couple of days ago that the GOP needs to seize the Constitution as icon, banner as well as catch-word.
     But it seems the Bad Guys are a step ahead, or at least, leaning ahead in not only snatching that word, but stigmatizing it.
 
      If you don't already know, Missouri (and there will be plenty of others, very soon) is sending advisories to their state and local police to be on the lookout for bumper stickers, etc, which among other things, mention the Constitution....as a key to possible militia activity, but really code for anti-government activity. Now that Bush is out, anti-government sentiment is now a bad thing, so it seems.
      Look beyond the cry of "profiling" from some quarters. That's not the real purpose of these notices. After all, it is not, and probably never will be against the law to carry those kinds of slogans on your car, t-shirt, or any other visible location.
     The real purpose is to frighten you into not carrying those signs in the first place.
     This sort of tactic has never really been tried on a large scale in the US. The KKK used it in local towns, for just by a whisper of a notion that a person was "soft on black" his life in the community could be over.
     But the communists and socialists of Europe never had to use such a device, except among Christian wearing crosses, or attending mass in eastern Europe. Only the Nazis of the early '30s used such a tactic on a broad...and official...scale. And it worked. A person didn't dare carry the opinions of his heart on his car, his sleeve or his lapel.
     The Other Side is not yet ready to come out against the Constitution....in the open. They must first frighten anyone who is for it into being afraid to say so. That works just as well.
     We repeat our request that the GOP to grab the Constitution and beat its drum every time a microphone is present. If King Christian could wear the Star of David on his breast, surely the gallant GOP can wear the Constitution on its sleeve.
St George