We've predicted some interesting battles inside the Democrat Party over how this new reality of controlling all three wings of the government will play out. (Yes, I'm including the Court. Sorry.) We predict Obama to emerge victorious in most if not all of those battles with Congress...and the screaming mimi's of the law schools and blogosphere. Mr Bushmills even predicted a lot of members of the old race-business monopoly will come away disillusioned, or even shut out.
      Of course we could be wrong. Maybe the Calvera-the-Bandit wing of the party will emerge victorious. But we doubt it.
      Either way, without one single conservative having to lift a finger, the bodies will start to pile up as soon as the spring thaw.

      Two things to look for: 1) As we've pointed out, look for Obama to try to do several things that are appealing to conservatives, e.g., in education, even jobs creation. Maybe even culturally, such as too much T&A in Hollywood. Cigarettes will be back in and hot smoking sex out? We think Obama wins here inasmuch as he knows what his agenda's all about (if our theory about him is correct). He knows there is a big, big difference between the things you do to get into power and the things you do once in power. Hot-tub socialists like Pelosi and Reid don't.
      These "appealing" actions by Obama will separate serious conservatives with shallow-as-a-warm-pool-of-p**s conservatives, since, as reported in Nov-Dec, we listed all sorts of things conservatives and hard-core socialists agree on, only for very, very different reasons.
      About these things, if you wise, just sit back and hone your skills of observation and analysis. We haven't any vote anyway.

      With that in mind, and what I wrote in early January about leaving Obama, the Word alone for awhile, we think the herd should start being thinned as to the people who are most likely to be caught with their pants down most quickly and in all the most embarrassing of places. That's right, the media. The fawning and sychophantic media.
       When Obama won in November I told St George Frederick to go help in other projects, and let GreatAmericanzeroes.com rest.
We never wanted it to be a national venue for liars in the first place. We want to hang local politicians and local media, especially those who from their words, especially in the past 2-3 weeks, will have braided some very nice rope with which to hang themselves. Local columnists. Local television hosts. Give us some names.
       It's time we started taking names. It's time we started thinning the herd....where they least expect it.
Bernard Chumm
       
    
 

  Seems I needed to revise the title as a few light-standing conseravtives saw the title, assumed the rest, and when straight to the salutation.
  I always assumed that was a pathology of the Left, but it seems its generational.

    Looking back over our posts since mid-2008, we've had a common theme here at the Sands Institute...that of preserving the Constitution of the United States and the right of the common man and woman to pursue life, liberty and happiness as they see fit, with a view to building, owning  and perpetuating their House.
      Sadly, words and oaths don't seem to mean much these days, but no more it seems than the Constitution itself, which both parties seem to ignore or circumvent at will. As they seem to do so with the approval of nearly if not over half of the people of the United States, you can understand the magnitude of  the task at hand.
      And it won't be enough to simply grab power and jerk the teat out of the mouth of the free-riders. Besides, President Obama may do that jerking for us...only for other political reasons. (We have to educate ourselves as to what those other reasons might be, and be watchful.)
      We have to win back the culture. We have to begin the long process of reacquainting ourselves with the Constitutional blueprint, and to re-inject its values into our culture in the same manner self-love, vanity, and appetite-appeasement were injected to replace it.
      This has always been part one of the Constitutional assumptions, that it would remain in good health so long as a majority of people dedicated a reasonable amount of their time (the tithe) to building their House and preserving it by educating their children as to its secrets. This is still a keystone to liberty. You can't get there without it.
      This is the first part of the solution, and while it will take years, the path is really clear and fairly simple. All it takes is work and dedication.
      The second part of the Constitutional assumptions involves the rise, or maybe better worded, the re-awakening, of the Protectors of the Constitution, who need to define with more clarity just what is and what is not a constitutional conservative, and then build real plans to once again shake hands with the common man and women in order to bring about both cultural and political revival in America.

      Recently Rush Limbaugh said he didn't have time to worry about "the Movement" as he was too busy trying to rescue the country. In my view, the movement and the country are now both irretrievably joined. They are inseparable. You can't fix one without the other. You can't attack one without wounding the other.
     All it is for us to do is to collectively, in one voice, define with more precision just what it is about America we want to save, and just what it really means to be a constitutional conservative.
     With that in mind we at the Sands Institute for the Constitution and the Common Man hereby call for a National Convention of conservatives to be held within 18 months, open to all who want to participate. From that week-long Convention will arise 1) a drafting committee to set into stone an enduring set of principles of conservatism, as found in the Constitution, (something like Martin Luther's 95 Theses) and 2) political and cultural platforms for focused action. Political action groups will be started from any community of any size that wants to establish one. Conservatism can no longer afford to be a conglomeration of one-issue movements.
      From that Convention and resulting platforms may flow a new political party, but not necessarily, or even desirably. That remains to be seen. At the barest minimum the Convention will set forth a new set of standards which will be submitted to all people seeking public office, to either accept or reject as a foundation for their public service. This seal of approval, this imprimatur, will serve as a contract requiring an unbending allegiance to the same Constitution each members takes an oath to protect and defend anyway. Remain faithful to it and continue to receive our support. Dishonor those vows and unlike 2006 and 2008, losing candidates will no longer need to look for scape-goats. They will know exactly why they lost.
  
Vassar Bushmills
     
   
     

     I wish William Buckley were here to discuss this with me. He once wrote during the Reagan Administration, when Congress was running one of its show trials against the CIA that he would have no problem lying under oath if it meant saving the lives of agents in the field. I assumed he figured God would let him off on that one. I also assumed, like Jack Bauer, he was also willing to pay for the crime down here...if caught.
     I missed George Bush's farewell address yesterday but did watch his last press conference and final interview. All in all, he said he was proud of his decisions. His biggest regret was not being forceful enough in pursuing immigration reform.
     I was sorry to hear him say that.

     The title is a question, only a question. But it is a moral question, with no clear answer.
     And it's a question that only George W Bush could answer. Any assumption on my part (or yours) as to what truly was in his heart and mind, especially as to the full and deep meaning of the oath he swore on January 20th, 2001 and 2005 would be wrong to assume.
   But if you want to play along, and substitute what is in your own heart, and impute that to GW, feel free to do so. I have.
   In answer to my title question, I would not have resigned.
   But neither would I have turned the other cheek.

   The President's Oath of Office:
   "I do solemnly swear (or affirm) that I will faithfully execute the office of President of the United States, and will to the best of my ability, preserve, protect and defend the Constitution of the United States."

   That's simple enough, and when you think of the truly unholy men who have placed their hand on the Bible and taken that oath, you can understand why so many view those words cyncially, as just a vain repetition. In fact, I don't think any Democrat since Harry Truman would ever consider what I am about to discuss...or even be allowed to consider the nature of this simple oath without fear of party backlash.
   But I believe George W Bush did.
   I believe George W Bush takes his oaths very seriously. But maybe I am naive.

    My wife and I have a running debate over Bush's conduct vis a vis the Leftists inside the Democrat Party. He simply has refused to engage them toe to toe. In a spirit of bi-partisanship, mind you. Worked in Texas. Wouldn't be seemly, either. Demeans the office.
    I have been more than just a little harsh about this charitable sense of comity, and the timidity of his party in countering the rising anger, the rising dishonesty, even criminality, among the Left. They clearly are and always have been overt threats to the Constitution of the United States.
    Rush Limbaugh says it's just not in Bush's nature to engage in political brawling. Excuse me? This ain't touch football.
    When George W Bush entered office in 2001 the Constitution was the one thing no one seemed to worry about. It was fine, and leftism was in general retreat, thanks to Bill Clinton and Rush Limbaugh, as much as anyone alse. Today, actually in less than one hundred hours, it will officially be taken off life-support, Bush having already signed the do-not-resuscitate form.
    On this site I have referenced more than once John M'Cain's purported honor, and Bush's religious convictions as "vanities", and defined them thus when it had become clear that those deeply felt personal beliefs paved the way for harm to be done to the people of the United States and the Constitution. They were either vanities, or frauds. (In M'Cain's case, maybe both.)
    Finding ourselves today firmly in the grasp of a socialist-style government that has always viewed the Constitution as an impediment is no accident, and it is no mere hiccup.
    So, just what was Bush thinking?
    My wife says she believes GW wished to follow Scriptures to "turn the other cheek", as laid out in Matthew 5:38-42. I suspect there are other applicable scriptures as well, for we are also told to love our enemies, and forgive them. I found a nice series of essays by James Arlandson at The American Thinker on the subject dating back to 2005-2006. But they do nothing to tell us what George W Bush actually believed, and when he believed it.
    My counter-argument to my wife centers on two acts by Christ that certainly seem to contradict the tone He seems to be trying to establish in Matthew. First was his angry "storming" of the Temple when he saw it being defiled by money-lenders and such.  (John 2: 13-25). He even used a whip.
    Second, and more important to me is found at Luke 4: 5-8, where Jesus told Satan to "...Get thee behind Me"...spitting in Satan's eye, as it were. No turn-the-other cheek, there, either.
    And clearly, there was no cheek-turning to terrorists after 9-11.

    Now, I'm not here, as Arlandson attempted, to "legally" parse the language of the Scriptures. Bush clearly DID NOT turn the other cheek on behalf of his the nation,when it was attacked on 9-11. But America, not the Constitution, was attacked that day.
    So, why has he turned the other cheek when the US Constitution, to its very core, has been assaulted with a repetition as steady as machine gun fire for eight years?
    Is there something he didn't see? Understand? Realize? Did he really believe the Leftists were just good ol' boy Americans with a different point of view?
    I have lost more than one friend since 2003 defending the fact that George W Bush is not stupid. He clearly isn't stupid. But is he that naive? That shallow?

    (Now many of you who have given this some thought as you go along with my discussion may want to question how much Bush's immigration position is contrary to the Constitution. I won't argue that here, since again, I don''t know his heart.  I will only concede that regardless of what is in his heart, the people who would actually carry it out will (as we will soon see), by design or by simple execution, will destroy the sovereignty of the United States, placing the Constitution in graver jeopardy, as just one of many cards to be laid on the table when Canada and Mexico finally sit down to discuss "issues of mutual interest" some day in the future. Does this fall into the "naive" category, too.)

    Were it me, I would have recognized early on the conflict between my own pacific personal Christian beliefs and my oath to defend the Constitution. Being in the middle of a war I couldn't let go of, but with a Veep who would carry it out as forcefully as I would, the day after being sworn in in 2005, I would have gone to my closet and had a good talk with God.
    I would have had to decide which came first, my oath to the Constitution or my personal convictions, (or promises to Laura). I could lay aside my personal convictions and defend with vigor the Constitution against those enemies, while at the same time doing battle with the external terror enemies of our country, who (Shazzam!) had made common cause with same the Leftist in my own back yard. Like Buckley, I would figure God would let me off lightly on the "turn the other cheek" rap.
    But if I could not bring myself to do this...with many it's a matter pf personal style as conviction...I would have handed the ball off to Dick Cheney, with the full knowledge that Dick would do what in good conscience I could not...spit in Harry Reid's eye.
    Maybe George Bush never even saw this moral dilemma this way. Maybe he never came to that crossroads. I can't say.
    But he should have. Then it would be us, instead of him, who wouldn't have any regrets in 2009.
Vassar Bushmills
   
  
   

  
  

  

  

   We've been sharing thoughts on what should be on the iPod, computer mp3 on that august day.
   Bushmills in Virginia will have Mozart's Requiem on constant rotation. Me, recalling a great non-battle, being surrounded then surrender, many years ago, Bruckner's 6th seems appropriate.
   No sense crying over losing a battle we never really fought, eh?
BC

    Like alcoholism, there are both legal and cultural definitions of "torture". The cultural definition is the older and more ingrained in popular understandings, but also the least understood, since it reflects a worldview that lawyers, politicians and polemicists would just as soon ignore. With alcoholism, there's even a good reason for this, since, as you can imagine, a southern Baptist community may find one of its members who takes a daily nip to be an alcoholic, while in Boston the Southies may consider that same fellow a tea-totaller. Legally, the Constitution took care of these regional contradictions with the Tenth Amendment, and left the cultural distinctions alone.
    The first problem with "torture" is it belongs to federal jurisdiction, although I'd wager a state trooper engaging in it would still have to answer to his state courts first. The second problem is that under federal law, there are ever-changing goal-posts, often with a view to steering the more time-tested cultural understandings in a different direction. (Depending on the issue, the record of this is at best mixed, compare Brown v Board of Education with Roe v Wade.)
     The United Nations Convention Against Torture (1984) appears to be the final "first" word on the subject, and is the law of the land in the United States (under USC 18, Part I, Chap 113C, Sec 2043). I say "first" word since each ratifying nation appears to claim its own jurisdiction as to just what "severe pain or suffering, whether physical or mental" means. This is typical "lawyer bail-out language" to appease disparate nationalities and their sense of sovereignty. You can see how China might define "torture" entirely different from how US federal courts might define it...taking us straight back to the Baptists vs Boston on the comparative sins of a daily swig of Jamesons.
    How the UN treaty language was designed says much about the stupidity of the argument about what is and is not torture under US law. What conduct falls within the "pain, suffering, physical and mental" criteria is a big issue, but specific conduct, such as water-boarding, can only be proscribed on a case-by-case...and nation-by-nation basis. It can't be inferred, then applied retroactively, which so many lawyers would like to do. Even The Hague is looking down the barrel of a political rather than legal issue, for as much as it may wish to drag Bush, Cheney and Rumsfeld before its bar, it can't without having to say nakedly why Clinton and Hu, just to name two, aren't also there. If you had been  following the impeachment-on-war-crimes travails of G W Bush in 2006-2007, you can see how insane the sideshow has become, as many (most?) law faculties have claimed their own private jurisdictions in defining torture, without the help of ordinary legal process, such as the courts. That's how Abu Ghraib became a showplace for "American torture", when in fact it was cruel and stupid abuse (also a criminal offense) falling well short of the more offensive crime of torture.

     So much for preface. How does American culture sees all this torture stuff? Thanks to Jack Bauer we've seen, and been able to decide that there is a cultural component, even context, to deciding this issue which, I am certain, the women of the law faculties (my apologies to real women, I say this as a Mohawk might use it against an Algonquin) both don't understand, or agree with.
     Jack Bauer's torture, in the early years of "24", would qualify as torture under any legal definition, at least where he actually inflicted harm. I won't argue that. He even said last week in a new episode he was ready to pay for those crimes, as a way to showcase the issue. But he often only threatened it, and there the crime becomes more problematic, at least in the eyes of culture. In one case, he made an Arab think he had harmed his family (an illusion) when he in fact hadn't. The deception worked, and there was a furthering of the story, and what Aristotle would have said, "...a Good End was had by all." Lawyers may make hay with this sort of conduct, but the people ain't buying it. They approve.
    Illegal? Hell, yes. Approved by the American people anyway? Hell yes. Why? Jack Bauer provided a cultural real-time context for approving genuine torture that made the pretend-wannabe-torture of water-boarding all the more sensible, especially since it caused the tough-guy mastermind behind 9-11 to cry like a baby, sing like a bird, and rat out everyone he could recall having to do with past, present and future plans to harm America...thus saving hundreds if not thousands of lives. And they only scared him.
    Get it? They scared him. America gets it, even if the law-gals back at Cal-Berkeley don't. And that's probably the rub.
    For what's important now, today (so get ready) is that like rendition, a Clinton/CIA "crime of pragmatism" (I disapprove of this practice generally) that became an albatross around Bush's neck, all these imagined high crimes of torture will disappear very soon once that the tools and rules for their use are back in the hands of other people, er, socialists, with altogether different purposes. They will disappear from Page One for the same reason torture in China...against Falun Gong...will never be a cause celebre in the US.

    This means it's time to inquire a little deeper into that cultural component of torture, set against the back drop of this eternal struggle between men who would free and men who would rather they not.
    Moses Sands loved the old Texas Rangers, which he saw as the model for democratic law enforcement in the developing world. I don't know if he every read Larry McMurtry's Lonesome Dove or saw the television series, but I had, so when he mentioned them in his piece on democracy in Iraq (his finest sermon) back in Ought Four, I understood what he was talking about.
     He asked if I'd ever considered the difference between the uneducated, tough, even mean men who went out into the wilderness and the men they tracked down and captured? Depending on whether they were heading out to the Staked Plains or heading back to Austin, or the availability of water or provisions, they often as not would just hang those bandits on the spot, with no trial, no due process. Just a "May God have mercy on you soul...Amen", and slap the pony.
     "What made these barbaric men different from the low-down scum they was hanging?", Moses asked.
     Then he answered himself. For one, at the end of the day, they could hang up their guns. The bad guys wouldn't. And two, they would hang their guns up because they were invested in something the bad buys weren't, something good, something bigger, and something that would outlive them. (Moses always believed in the ability of the inarticulate to show the nobility of their souls in other ways. He looked for it.)
     I recalled the hanging of Jake Spoon in Lonesome Dove and knew immediately what he was talking about. That scene was powerful, not so much because of the terrible weight carried by Gus and Woodrow for having to hang their old pard, but in Jake's understanding that he had crossed a line which he could never retreat from. At least in this lifetime. It was a poignant testament to even the harshest of understandings of the differences between right and wrong.

     Like Tom Sawyer's affectionate name for Jim in Huckleberry Finn, I fully expect to see films and books to be withdrawn from library shelves in the next few years that portray such barbaric lawlessness as honorable and noble...or worse, justified. In fact, the committees are already getting organized. Look for it.
     What won't disappear will be the threats or inflicting of "severe pain or suffering, whether physical or mental" to get information, and get it right away, when needed. All that will change will be the political or cultural end being pursued. That's the cultural component.
     All that will have changed will be the justifiers...
     ...who will not hang up their guns at the end of the day.
Vassar Bushmills
    
   
   
   

   Just three weeks ago, 23 Dec, I posited the question that how Barack Obama would define the new National Security Force, would be based on whether he wanted to succeed himself after 2016. I was wrong, for I stated that we should start looking at proposed Constitutional amendments to change the 22nd, by 2011.
   It's already started! Jose Serrano, D-NY, has already introduced H.J.R.5 to begin the process. Wow!
   Forget about having heard it here first. We called it for a specific reason, the Praetorian Guard & All-Night Wrecker Service.
   Worry about that.
Bernard Chumm

        "All that is necessary for the triumph of evil is that good men do nothing."-Edmund Burke

         As promised, I will attempt here to explain a position we state from time to time on posts. It is not so much an ancillary to Burke's dictum as a precursor. "When Good stands and confronts Evil, Evil retreats. It must."
         Every time I bring this up, someone counters with either a Russian mafia or jihadist example,where, once engaged, they fight until only one is left standing.
         True enough, but in fact, the handlers, the underlying struggle, the movers of such men, indeed do change and indeed do retreat from the way they had been doing a thing if confronted by a certain amount and a certain kind of resistance. They retreat, lick their wounds, and begin designing Plan B.
         We may be seeing this in Gaza right now. The Israelis are entirely in control of determining the outcome. They and they alone can cause Hamas to retreat. Hamas cannot cause them to retreat. (Arguably they can even defeat Hamas in Gaza, but only in Gaza. Like the other jihadists, the Israelis know Hamas is but an appendage of a larger enemy, and Gaza only one scene in a three-act play.) Usually the Israelis pull up short, to assuage international pressure, and may do so again. But this may soon no longer be the case. If the Israelis see the bond with Amerika loosening, they will be more willing to play their last hole card.
         And they will win...and that particular struggle with Evil will have ended.

         Christians, indeed, many religions, believe that there is a constant struggle between Good and Evil. In fact, some see it as a controlling force in the universe. They see this struggle as eternal, and Christians believe, in the End, there is a final victory. 
         We have stated our axiom, above, as it refers to the struggle between the forces of Constitution and the liberty of men and the forces of elitism and state power. This struggle, too, is built on an eternal struggle, as Man has always struggled to be free, only being powerless, and until the 18th Century, more or less illiterate, he was unable to articulate his need to be free, much less put into action plans to attain it. That changed in July, 1776. With me, that is an article of faith.
         Moses Sands like to use George Soros as the personification of this desire by elites to win and control other men's lives, although for the life of me, I fail to see what Soros gains by the light of liberty being extinguished in Amerika. Perhaps it is because he gains nothing materially, and it only fills a hole in his soul with Good's defeat, that he is the perfect candidate as an icon of our characterization of Evil. People like Reid, Kerry, the whole Congress are only ravenous hyenas. The Marxists are only self-deluded children, jackals-in-waiting. What they seek they can hold in their hand, touch, taste, feel. Pure Evil wants to defeat Good simply because it is there. Evil wants only to watch another thing die...and among the modern Left, there are millions with this hole in the soul.  So, I think it is fitting that Soros is our bogerman poster boy for Evil.
         I think Moses was right.

         But in my analysis of Good versus Evil I don't really require a religious or theological grounding. That was the point of my conversation last week with Mr .....
         This same struggle has been suggested in the biological sciences, by animal behavioralists. It is especially relevant in studies on aggression and territoriality. Nikko Tinbergen and Konrad Lorenz were both staunch evolutionists, and both very un-religious so my use of the words "Good and Evil" would be anathema to them. So I won't use them biologically. You can make your connection anyway.
         What they observed among many animals in the wild that when two animals (of different species, or even same species but not of the same troop) meet on neutral ground, the larger stronger animal will attack and usually wins. Assuming he's a carnivore, this is where the kill is often made.
         But if the smaller, weaker animal escapes and head back to it's own territory, its defense strength increases. Once it passes its own scent post, entering its own territory it turns and defends with twice the ferocity of open ground. Likewise the aggressor weakens once he passes that scent post. What ethologists can't say with any particularity, is what triggers this turnaround. Although they believe the "scent of territory" sets things off, what came first? The heightened defense display by the smaller animal? Or the sense that he was on forbidden territory by the larger aggressor?
         I'm not an animal behavioralist, but the notion of territory has always been of interest to me, because, in my view, man has not overcome many of his baser instincts, namely to defend territory, and moreover, to recoil (at least a little) from attacking the territory of others.
         I like to refer to that "sinking feeling" in the pit of one's stomach when he crosses that invisible scent-post, when he realizes he's going to have twice the fight on his hands than he thought he might, as "ethological guilt", with apologies again to Lorenz who would never use the word "guilt".
         But I'm looking for an anthropomorphic term to explain a reality, and the reality is that good men (Aristotle's and Aquinas' Good) almost by definition, don't go around attacking or killing people and taking their property and land. Evil men do. My apologies again to Lorenz, but this is why Man stands astride the natural world and a sentient world of his own, or an Invisible Hand's, making.
         Still, my position stands...when Evil in the visage of George Soros, vor v zakone, or Hezb'allah confronts Good...and Good stands, shows its teeth and fights, Evil weakens, and eventually retreats. It has to.
         To be sure, as I'm reminded daily by the hate mail, there are others who see their positions as Good. Jihadists do. So do the Terror-Symps, who see America as peculiarly evil. If you happen to be one of those who see Good in this fashion, at least we both understand the stakes.
          Laisser les bons rouller!
Vassar Bushmills
        
        

    It was revealed in 2008 that the FDR programs during the Great Depression prolonged it by several years. Had the Dem's kept their paws off the engine, the depression would have been over by '35.
    Now the same is being said about the Obama plan for recovery-through-stimulus. What could be fixed through natural market forces by 2010 will be many years more under the Obama Plan.. He has already said things will be much worse.
    Has anyone considered, maybe that's the Plan?

    I'm simply echoing what better minds than mine have said on the economic aspects of the Great Depression. It's impossible to determine from the literature from the period that the FDR administration intentionally prolonged the Depression in order to allow its programs to take seed, but it can't be argued that it turned out that way. The government benefited. In fact, it's impossible to say how much longer it would have lasted had the Japanese not had another idea in mind for the American economy in 1941.
   A bureaucratic generation lasts from 15-20 years, but it only takes about seven years for it become laid in stone. If a bureaucracy can't fix the problem it was created to fix within seven years, it's there until hell freezes over. And we all know, the first mission of an embryonic bureaucracy is to subordinate its original mission behind it's self-perpetuation.
    But of the Depression, I doubt there was anything "criminal" in either the causes, or the fixes that arose, unless you want to consider the planting of socialist seeds into fertile soil to be criminal. But making sure that soil remained receptive to the seeds well beyond its natural cycle? That is another matter.

    The current economic crisis, however, according to Bushmills & Chumm, has the smell of criminality, and that complicates this recovery fraud a little, as it had created, as they argue, two factions inside the ruling party seeking different outcomes. Real socialists want to stretch this downturn out at least five years, more like eight, depending on who Obama selects as his successor. The socialist wing of the party, unlike FDR, has good economic history as what the outcome of these policies will be, so there must be a hidden agenda. But like the party criminal wing in bringing about the banking crisis, even this Recovery plan can get out of hand.
    My focus here is on the cementing of yet another bureaucratic foundation which by 2018 will be impossible to dislodge by ordinary political process. Unlike FDR, this time it will be on purpose.
Robert Hightower

    I'm the only person writing on this blog that will be using his real name. I'm the "legal" founder of the Sands Institute, it's "bureaucracy expert", and also manage a fee-based consultancy in Virginia. I first met Mr Bushmills in Macedonia during the NATO war and helped get his first Moses Sands piece (on Democracy in Iraq) published on the internet in 2004.
    From time to time I'll be posting here on issues pertaining to the bureaucracy.

    One of the failings of tax revolts by citizens is to allow the state (or local government) too much leeway in carrying out their demands. The famous Proposition 13, Jarvis Amendment, an amendment to the California state Constitution, was a perfect example. It capped property taxes at 1%, thus reducing taxes by 57%. Did that stop government?
    Not only did it not stop government, but government punished the people. How? By reducing essential services. Cops, schools, that sort of thing. And wherever government cut, a co-conspiring press was there to magnify the pain ten-fold, making sure everyone felt guilty about their selfish exercise of freedom. Remember that snow-mobile operator in Yellowstone when Newt Gingrich (actually Clinton) shut down the government in 1995?
    In the end, the Jarvis Amendment failed, even though the heart of its tax line-in-the-sand remains. The bureaucracy simply found ways around it. But it failed most as an attempt by the citizens to re-establish public control over the political class emanating out of Sacramento, of which the taxing branch is but one. There was no real follow-through. The people thoight they'd won so just walked away. There's a real lesson in foresight, wisdom and commitment there.
    It also alerted the courts. It would be 2000 before the US Supreme Court would uphold Jarvis. The people in states where initiatives are allowed (we'd like to see Initiative and Recall in every state) continue to draft new ones on all sorts of subjects, from gay marriage to taxes, both pro and con, but courts are more amenable to stepping in and over-turning the people's wishes, with a view to protecting not just the political class, but also the courts' own roles as final arbiters...not the people. (There has been a "legal movement" in this direction for many years now.) The legislatures and the courts may be at loggerheads as to who is supreme, but both agree, it is of paramount importance to keep the People out of the mix. They are the object, not the soul, of government.

     It's axiomatic that you don't hire the fox to provide a better security system for your chicken house. Still, that's what we do both in government and large corporations. As with Jarvis, the board of directors tells the CEO he has to reduce costs by 15%. He in turn calls in his divisional managers, who in turn call in department managers, to 1) come up with a plan, then 2) execute it, once it has been decided what will be cut. (Senior managers always love to set lower managers at each others' throats. I've never understood this.) In the arm-twisting and blood-letting that ensues, each manager seeks to protect his territory by magnifying the importance of every scrap of paper that comes offof one of his desk, but also by going all the way down to the lowest production worker and telling him his job's in jeopardy; loss of car, home, health benefits, etc. (Government bureaucrats are much more mean-spirited at this scare-game than private business...in part because they are more able to bring down the ax on front line essential services, so are more indifferent to the suffering they cause.)
     Senior managers are not unaware of these games. They aren't stupid. They know where the waste lies...in the front office. But that is also where they work everyday. Workers are somewhere else in the building, or at a different location. You don't have to see their faces or feel their pain when they get laid off. Senior bosses have close personal relationships with office staff, from secretaries to accountants, all support personnel, while they (these days) don't even know the names of the people who actually make the product, from machinists to engineers to assembly workers. A kind of front line class distinction also comes into play, since college degrees and prestigious universities trickle down as rank does. In today's world an MBA or degree in marketing outweighs a degree in engineering by a mile...and maybe therein lies the problem. Front line supervisors bear the brunt of the pain, for they are most often called on to give out the pink slips. They tend to be 50-50 in their sympathies, which has given rise to the term "Kisses up and kicks down" and vice versa. The former attitude is definitely the better career path in this generation of corporate managers these days. Vassar Bushmills touched on this when he wrote how the corporate culture had changed since the 1970's.
     Government is much, much worse.   
     In government we know that from 55%-70% of taxpayer dollars go to administrative costs, and not to the end-users, beneficiaries, or ultimate mission of a division. The money goes to bureaucrats, a high percentage of which are either redundant or just plain useless. 
     For example, Virginia is constitutionally required to balance its budget and in a few days the general assembly meets for the 2009 Winter session. The governor (Tim Kaine, soon to be head of the DNC) has been laying ground work for raising new highway revenues since late summer, even though it was recently revealed that over 50% of his highway budget goes to paper-pushers. We've been complaining at least that long, but even local talk radio seems to miss the connection. Interestingly, and here a key, the governor nor his adminsitration is willing to provide a great deal of transparency about how tax monies have been spent in the past, or will be in the future. This is the job of state watchdog groups, not just to watch, but dissmeninate.

     We favor (encourage) grass roots involvement in matters of taxes and how they are spent. Even the smallest locality spends millions of dollars, usually from revenues (federal grants, state matching funds, etc) that came from outside the area. My father told me years ago that there is a narcotic effect when a man who has never seen a check for more than a thousand dollars is suddenely hired, or elected, to spend millions. To some this is unimagined power. To others, this is a scary unreality.
     Most citizens who feel we need to get a handle on local publi spending, get together and nominate a candidate who, if he/she wins, as like as not will suddenly change stripes. There simply is something about "sitting up there", on local cable television, that is also narcotic. There is something that is also near irresistable, and that is to become a member of the inner circle of local governent. A big fish on a little pond. When a new council man or member of the county board is elected, he/she comes in as a "newbie", and outsider, and can, if the others deem it so, to remain that way, if he doesn't go along. The pull to be accepted is almost irresistible.
     My suggestions: Grass roots groups that select candidates to sit on the local government must provide a never-ending support group, a shadow government, so as to provide moral and legislative support for that person once in office. Don't turn and walk away, as they did in Califiornia. You cannot know the pressures they're up against...not unlike the seductions your local congressman gets when he goes off to Washington. There's money, too.
     As to taxes, especially, always analyze the bureaucratic flow through. Many state and local services are unnecessary. Do no be afraid to end them, as well as the jobs they protect. Never be afraid to let a bureaucrat go, for in the larger scheme of things, that will either save two front line jobs, or, reduce the taxpayers' burdens.
     Every bureaucrat should have to go to work everyday thinking they could lose their job that day. Once they realize that the power to fire comes from the people, they will get the message.
      Do those things and before you know it, you'll be ready for the big leagues, public schools.
Robert Hightower
President
Technology Transfers
  

   

   

  

    With the Illinois Supreme Court decision today that Illinois law does not require the Secretary of State's signature (Why did he say it did? Or is anyone asking?), the Blago Saga officially became two stories, not one. We expect more starbursts as Blagojevich, for the moment victorious if not exonerated, follows his destiny, while Roland Burris hires a food taster to accompany him to the Senate cafeteria.
Watch for the comet's tail of Rom Emanual, and as we wrote earlier, that Tony Rezko fellow has a role still to play.
    Maybe Obama is indeed the messiah. Already he's multiplied a rotting fish. We're waiting on the bread.
    Benard Chumm

    About Dem reaction to Obama's economic policy statement (Jan 08), we wuz right. We stated two months ago that in all likelihood Obama and the Reid-Pelosi Axis in Congress will not be on the same page for very long. Marxists and bank robbers rarely are.
    It's just a fissure now, like the glaze on an old porcelain teapot that has been washed in hot water too many times. Watch it. Over time the fissure will become a crack.
    Conventional wisdom states that however it is settled (we think Obama wins, no matter how space-captain'y his economic plan may seem), it will be settled behind closed doors. No spilt blood in public.

    But that may not be the case. After all, it's GOP conservatives and moderates Obama must try to assuage (read: diversion) with his economic prestidigitation. He knows that much of Dem anxiety about his economic stimulus plan is that it does not provide adequate cover for their own misconduct (read: criminality) in bringing about this economic turnaround. He can afford to be indifferent to those concerns, especially since they don't take him and his agenda where he wants it to go. Unlike congressional Dem's, Obama no longer has to blame George W Bush. He can turn on a few of them, if he wants.
    Conservatives would love to see at least five, maybe more, congressional Democrats indicted and go to jail over the banking meltdown. Throw in Franklin Raines for good measure. We all have sugar-plum dreams of Barney Frank playing Drop-the-Soap at Lewisburg medium security prison. Obama knows he can send many more to the rack, but all he has to do is select the right number that will send the right message to those left behind, then sic Justice on them.
    If Obama even causes one indictment he will become the darling of the GOP Right and the center, and that will divert attention from his true agenda. It will be five years, and into a second term, before the GOP finally looks up under its skirt to find out he'd stolen the Liberty Bell....leaving only the bell ropes.
    A point we harp on and will continue to harp on; conservatives and Marxists share many precepts, such as nose-to-the-grindstone education, and one-strike-and-you're-out law and order. Different education, different laws, and different reasons, to be sure, but we believe the GOP can be relied upon to see this point last.
  Bernard Chumm
   
   

   I had an interesting phone call last night which I want to share, for it went to an issue we've written about before. Last night the words came a little easier. A man called, who, I'm sure you all would know if I told you his name. It was in response to a solicitation St George had sent to raise money for The Sands Institute. StG had sent a link to a recent post here on Townhall, plus a link to our website. It was a real pleasure that he would call personally (must be a Lutheran) as usually a secretary or aide answers those kinds of letters. And he had done his own research, for he was a little miffed about a Moses Sands piece we posted here last year, The Failure of the Constitution's Protectors.
   He wanted to know why, if I thought major conservatives were laying down on the job, should he send me any money?
   I used up all my cell phone minutes telling him, but for once (unlike with Moses) I got to do all the talking.

   I need to set this piece up, as you already know we've spent page after page here telling you what ordinary people can do understand what's happening out there, and what we can do at the grass roots to begin taking back government.
   But I've also commented, as well, about the failure of the wealthier, more recognized and powerful conservatives, for not "plowing the road" for all of us down here in the trenches. Remember that line from "Independence Day"? It just came to me last night, but it's no different than that "handshake" Moses Sands said the people at the top of the hill had to reach around and offer to those at the bottom.
   
    I offered two examples, seemingly unrelated. I linked Sarah Palin and public education. As you know Sarah got her start in a local PTA.
    I said in all likelihood Sarah has reached the zenith of her national political career, in the sense that she will be unable to get public office with a broader voter base than she already has in Alaska. This is analysis, not a wish, so don't get me wrong. My own wish is that we had fifty governors that had all started out as presidents of a local PTA. But the hard truth is, there has been no road "plowed" in most states for a person like Sarah to rise much beyond county commissioner. My own county is more populated than all of Alaska. And we have in Virginia the same sorry band of lawyers and other hand-squeezers being picked by their respective parties, as they do in Florida, California and Colorado.
   There is no road "plowed" for a Sarah Palin of Virginia to rise at all, nor is there a road plowed even for her kind to be matriculated in the necessary aspects of the Constitution and human liberty to be able to argue down one of those lawyers in debate. The cards are simply stacked against it. The System favors another road, already paved...but with several toll booths, which people like Sarah can't afford. Sarah is unique in that she is a quick study, self-educated in all those things necessary to rise to leadership in the conservative movement, plus natural skills and instincts. But the bad guys will be laying in wait for her. That sort of ambush wouldn't work if there were a hundred, or thousand Sarahs. But most of all, Sarah rose from a state of only 700,000.
   I think my interlocutor saw where I was going, and I finished by saying that plowing those roads requires lots and lots of planning.
   "Compare what conservative's have done and what George Soros and a few others have accomplished on the Left. They have literally hundreds of plans out there, some of which have failed, some of which still lie dormant but stand at the ready, some still in the incubation phase (such as future plans to interdict any popular rise of Sarah Palin), and others, such as the Secretary of State Project, started in 2006, living testament of remarkable successes. I don't know when the SoS Project was conceived, or designed, but it didn't show up until 2006...with a view to 2008. Just reverse engineer such a project to understand the assets, both in people and dollars, to make such a plan work.
   "Do we have any plans like these...or are Ann Coulter best sellers and Rush Limbaugh talk radio supposed to serve as an adequate substitute?"
   He responded, "I don't think we have that kind of money."
   "Well actually all of you probably do, but it isn't really necessary. That's the point. Unlike the early days of Marxism, the war between Left and Right is now being carried out between competing camps of The Rich, one trying to enslave the common man and woman, the other trying to protect them. Only now, it's back to liberation. The Founders had this all figured out. They saw it coming. The poor proletarian Marxist is at worst a sham, at best a hiccup, between the real struggle that has gone on for centuries, the desire of some rich and power men to build empires on the backs of serfs.
   "This newest brood of Leftists doesn't have to be totalitarian. Mere socialists will do. Still, the prospects they represent now, and which lay just over our horizon in America are far worse than the "tyranny" the Founders feared under King George, when they pledged their lives, fortunes and honor. So where are those pledges?
   "The Founders always expected the good rich to protect us and the Constitution, from the bad rich. In times of tyranny ordinary people have no where to go. All they can go is hunker down and wait it out, or wait on a new leader top come rescue them. But when things gets hot, the rich on either side can always just move on...to Costa Rica or someplace.
   "The bottom line is that you, and other conservatives don't have to try to match Soros dollar for dollar, for you have something he doesn't have.  Maybe pennies against the dollar, but still, unless you go to Costa Rica, you really don't have much to lose anyway, do you? If you take the pledge.
    "We have the Ace hole card. There is an immutable law (we believe this here at the Institute) that Evil and Good are not and never can be equal. When Good meets Evil head on, it wins...every time. And the reason Good wins is that Evil instinctively knows it must retreat."
    (Some of you may want to challenge this. Mr ... did, and I explained, at some length, which I'll set out in a separate essay in a couple of days. I hope I won him over. But this is not a faith-based assessment, as he assumed and some of you may believe, although faith does help. Many natural biologists believe this as well.)
    Moving to Public Education, making my second point, I noted that he and many others have been carping for years about the left-wing indoctrination of public schools, to name just one sin. What should we do about it? Are there any plans on the table? Take one school, any one school...how about the worst of the lot, the University of California at Berkeley? Do you have a plan to take it back?
    Take it back? No.
    Do you know anyone who does? David Horowitz? Heritage? Anyone? I'm out of the loop here. Anyone? I know they study the hell out things like that. But does anyone have a plan?
    My point is that Bill Ayers, and many others have always had plans to take those schools away from the people in the first place. Plans. Not studies to be published. Plans. Not opinions to be shared with politicians. Plans. Those plans have been in the process of being carried out for forty years, under the noses of  politicians on both sides of the aisles.
    They had plans and we don't. The Left has reached well beyond our comprehension when it comes to planning. It's like MacArthur noticing Germany's tanks in the 193Os, while he was still General-in-charge of horse cavalry.
    I don't care how far-fetched the plans are, there has to be some plans, constantly being designed, changed, and when possible, laid into action. You love the military, I know. You know they have a contingency plan for just about everything, don't you? You know, I'm sure, that they have a plan, for instance, if the situation is especially dire, and there is no other option, to completely denude Waziristan of every living thing. We already both know the military can do it. But is there a plan. You betcha. I'd hate to see it come to that, but it sure would end a whole passel of problems, wouldn't it? Only it would also raise new ones in its place.
   My point is, no matter the unthinkability, they still have that plan, and still keep it current....just against that day. They have to.
   That's what I mean by Planning.
   And we don't have it.
   They do.

    I don't know if we'll get any money.

Vassar Bushmills

    On Dec 16th we visited the general issue of the need for a speedy political conviction of Rod Blagojevich, as the criminal case looked slim. On the 31st we updated the story, stating the political case was falling apart as well. We could find no legal bar to Burris being certified by the Illinois Sec of State and sworn in by the Senate. Seems there's legal Supreme Court precedence.
    So guess what? The AP announced today Harry Reid's going to come off his high horse, eat a little crow and probably allow the swearing-in to go forward. (My words, not theirs.)
     Two questions:
     1: If I can smell this case out with thirty years of unused legal training, surely, with some high-powered lawyers on staff, why couldn't the GOP as far back as December 16th?
     2: Sure, Harry Reid's got a little egg on his face, but why not scrambled...along with the imprint of a Revere Ware skillet across his nose? All that would have been required would have been for Mitch McConnell to stride, amble or mosey up to a microphone and state the legally obvious; Harry Reid is over-reaching his power by stating that he or his party could refuse to seat a legally appointed member. He might even have used words like "imperious" or "high-falootin'" or anything in between.
     (About naming the shrinking violet the official GOP flower, we've talked about this before.)

      I don't think this is the end of it, as Reid may allow Burris to be seated, then seek the magical 2/3rds vote to quickly send him packing back to Chi-town.
      We'd like to see the GOP come out now, and come out hard, with a "Hell, no" then promise the mark of Cain on any Republican's head that votes with Reid. Trust me, if the GOP holds the line, many Dem's will come over.
       Or, is this really all just about "The Club"?
       If so, they all need to go. ALL OF THEM!
VB


      

    Fran Leibowitz (among others) said that love is a mental illness. So you can only imagine what sort of pathologies self-love can sink to.
    Hold that thought, and think about the seemingly unrelated notion of "class"; high class, low class, middle class, upper class, working class, de classe, low-born, high-born. Even "caste", belongs in this list since it really is no different from how many people of the upper classes see themselves versus others, as a birthright rather than a mark of merit or personal achievement.
    If a red clay dirt farmer in east Tennessee would rather listen to Mozart than Earl Scruggs, is he of a higher class, or, as some might say, only aping the tastes of his betters? Or are only his tastes for music of a higher class? Maybe he still wipes his nose on his shirt sleeve.
    I've always considered honesty to be a "high class" attribute, so where does that place the political class vis a vis that Tennessee farmer? Who's higher than who?
  
    This self-perception has a lot to do with how class is perceived in America. Earlier in 2008 I wrote a long piece, "Frank Capra Was Right, It's All About Class" which provides good background as to where I'm going here.
    America is a middle class society. Period. I was talking with an old Boston Irish couple, old lefties in fact, and they saw class entirely through the lens of income; money in the bank. I told them that Bill Gates is middle class, and they were appalled. I said, "He still eats hamburgers. You know of any place you can get a thousand dollar hamburger? He started his business in a garage."
    Is Ozzie Osborne upper class? How about Mick Jagger? P-Diddie Combs? Mark Teixiera? They all have plenty of money.
    Western civilization is supposed to have been passed on through the arts and letters of Europe, as the highest expressions of civilization. (I agree...to a point.) Not bank accounts.
    There's not an English schoolboy, no matter how deep his Cockney, who doesn't recognize Mozart's "Eine Kleine Nachtmusik".  In America the only way you'd recognize it would be it had been used to plug a feminine hygiene spray.
    But the French, by the 12th Century, had already decided that no matter how well you refined your tastes in wine, music, arts, architecture, if you didn't have a bloodline to go along with it, you were only bourgeois. Remember Simon the Jew in Ivanhoe? He had to sneak in the back door just so he could loan the  Prince John money! So you can imagine what that line of thinking "thinks" about Bill Gates. They all wish they had his money, but it will take generations for him to establish a bloodline that is worthy of club membership by European standards. Hell, the Merovingians (you know, Pepin the Short, Clovis and that bunch) still look upon the Carolingians (Charlemagne) as a bunch of upstarts.
    What does America have to counter that kind of lineage? The Van Rensselears of New York?...who arose from a Dutch tradesman and storekeeper a mere 350 years ago, just two generations ahead of the farmers Rockefeller and Roosevelt. And Irish gutter trash like the Kerrys and Kennedys would be another century and a half getting started with their royal lines. You can just imagine the peat bogs and potato patches they emerged from.
    How's about we track the Wallace Beery clan, or the Barrymores? (Alas, bum-stabbers like Elton John and pillow biters like Rosie O'Donnell, their royal line begins and ends with themselves. No pun intended.)
    The point is, by any measure, money or a taste for fine arts, scratch an American "upper class" member and I'll show you a storekeeper or farmer. In truth, scratch a Merovingian and I'll show you a man who bathed once a year, and ate pork off an open spit with a butcher's knife...just don't tell the French.
   
     Even though the Constitution is generally against it, many Americans want to create royal bloodlines, and believe it or not, that has always been at the core of Left versus Right political fight in the country. ALL leftist thinking in America is class and elitist based, and sadly, (due I believe to the rise of the Pop Culture) many so-called conservatives have signed on to the leftist view.
     So, just how "base" is this elitist thinking, really?
     It's a natural enough desire to want to be able to wear the appurtenances of class, especially for the children of storekeepers. But what they use as frames of reference are not so much the arts and higher civilization of Europe, as the imagery, which Americans mostly get from film.
     If you like great period "costume" films, you know, the ones filmed on location in 19th Century Paris, London, Vienna, or the English countryside, the heroes and heroines almost always are of the upper classes. Or move among them.
     Where does America fit into these films? Pick any scene on London streets, the hero and heroine walking along, he looking like Johnny Walker (black label) and she like Emma Thompson. The Americans? They are all those people in the background, in drab, tattered work clothes, carrying packages or bales, or selling flowers. As the French would say, America is the backdrop to real class.
     Some people say that Karl Marx discovered the working classes, but in fact Dickens was years ahead of him...and far more
sympathetic. And Jane Austen was ahead of Dickens. Marx hated capitalists much more than he liked the proletariat (indeed, he didn't care one whit for them), and Dickens felt more sympathy than outrage at the condescension of the gentry class. Neither wanted to abolish class...exactly. Dickens wanted to expand the obligations of noblesse oblige, into a kinder, gentler aristocracy, while Marx simply wanted to replace one ruling class with another. In the end, his view won, only using the imagery of Dickens to get there. England, indeed Europe, is much more Marxist than it is Dickensian. They rather like the idea of a base society in their midst.
     But until the 19th Century almost no one noticed the lower classes...at all. ALL ART was dedicated to the people with money, and who could pay, and that frames how we perceive culture and class today. Makes sense.
     No one among the poor ever wrote...most didn't know how...so no one knew, or really wanted to know, what their hopes and dreams were. No cared about their underlying virtues.
     But wait, the people who first came to America and populated it were not of this sort. Oh, they were genuine tabula rosae, when it comes to the fine arts of class in Europe. Yet they were middle class. If you learn anything about the European precursors to the Pilgrims and Virginia colonists, know that they came from a new middle class stock of England, not the dregs of society.
     But after them, in wave after wave, came the very detritus of Europe's sewers; criminals, vagabonds, failed farmers, poor of every ilk. Most of those "losers" who Europe encouraged to leave their shores for uncertain futures and near certain poverty, are the shoulders we all now stand on today. (FYI)
     Look back to say 1940, and Greer Garson and Laurence Olivier in "Pride and Prejudice". Jane Austen wrote that novel ladened with class overtones, yet never once descended to the lower or even lower middle classes to make her case. Her story was all about upper class pretensions versus gentry class aspirations. It was a perfect costume play, with nary an American (as Europe saw us) in the film. The domestic help were scarcely in the film.
     Now, imagine a waitress in Broken Bow, Oklahoma paying her 25 cents to see that film. She looks around town and sees one big house, owned by the family that owns the one grainary, a bunch of small stores, one paved tree-lined street of nicer houses, the rest little more than huts built in willy-nilly fashion along dirt streets. This is 1940 mind you, not 1880.
     She sees "Pride and Prejudice" and thinks "That's for me", and "That" surely ain't here in Broken Bow.
     Well, where is "That"? Could be Omaha, Wichita, St Louis, and some went there, seeking "That". But most trails led west to California, and on the first Greyhound that came through after she'd saved her $4.32, she was on it.
     In another five years, she's could be back in Broken Bow, broke, or still waiting tables, only in Pomona, or possibly just taking her last paycheck from a defense plant. Maybe she met a Marine at the Stage Door Canteen. Maybe he died on Iwo Jima. Or, maybe he's back and they have a little nest and a kid in Ventura. And maybe, just maybe, that one in one-hundred thousand shot, she's got a job at Warner Brothers as a line dancer behind Carmen Miranda, with fruit salad on her head.
     All we know is that in 99.9% of the cases, "That" turned out to be an illusion, and our common-sense American girl who fell in love with the imagery of class, never having really known its under-lying priggish substance, eventually settled into whatever life threw her way. Some came away sad, some embittered, but most only wiser for the journey. A few, the whores, became reformed, married lawyers and went on to found the feminist movement in America. But this is America, so most ended up happy anyway, as life in general always looked upward for ordinary Americans in those days.

     Well, that film was re-released in 2005. Different cast, of course, but the siren's song continues. Or does it?   
     We now have a political class that embraces completely the European political view of class, only, it still embraces just that shallow cultural imagery of class....as a costume, something that is just out there, waiting to grasped, but only to be grasped by the precious few.
     Moses Sands said many years ago that this is the French view of class, that most of the people have to live in some level of degraded life, so as to make those who are above it seem more illuminated and self-important. "It makes absolutely no sense to be of a superior class if you have no one to lord it over." Sadly, Peggy Noonan seems to have joined that chorus.
     These are the bitter clingers, for they cling to a view in which they always are in the foreground of whatever costume play is being enacted on the national stage, while all the rest of us are in the background, lifting that bale and towing that barge.
     This is self-love, and it is what drives the politics of the Left.
Vassar Bushmills
     
     
     
  

     Obama the Person will be revealed soon enough.
     We've caught him in a couple of lies, actually one lie and one stupidity, the lie of the CYA variety, regarding Emanual and Blagojevich. Unlike many of you, to date, we've not hung around his neck the lies of his staff, especially during the campaign, even the "I approve of this message" lies.
     We're holding our powder for a reason, and suggest you do so as well.

     Before the election there were two opposite views of Obama the man, in terms of the depth of his mind and soul. One is that he is just an empty suit, truly the perfect "magic negro" who can wipe away all (liberal) white fear about being caught in a rest room stall or back alley with him. A black Gatsby, in tux and martini, ankles crossed, laid back against the wall, watching all the wannabes trying to pick up girls at the dance, knowing his will be waiting in the Cord when he wants her; a smooth talking shill, a dancing marionette, dressed, dangled and choreographed by as yet unknown and unseen handlers.
     The other early view, based on his writings as well as video interviews with small distribution (Thanks, mainstream media, for keeping this stuff away from the public...for your sake I hope this guy turns out to be Stalin, and you're the first to be cattle-carred off to the Gulag), of deep, but disturbing views on the Constitution and the entire American view of liberty. A genuine Marxist zealot, with a bone to pick. Coupled with several murky relationships inside the radical Muslim world, this view is entirely opposite from the first view, with really no way to square them. Only time will tell.
      You can understand our hesitancy, then.
      Now, post election, with the Blagojevich affair, a third image emerges, of Obama as just another anointed five-fingered Barry from the Chicago crime families sent off to Washington to pillage the treasury for his clients, instead of the pillaging Reid, Pelosi, Schumer, the CBC, et al have been doing for their clients.
      The ham-fisted way in which Obama has handled the Blago Affair...it's almost as if he wants the entire Illinois Democrat Party and the Senate majority leader crucified on the altar of public opinion...makes us wonder if this isn't in fact just going to be Clinton Redux.  
      OK, the New Clinton Minstrels.

       So, a word of advice, sort of. Just a day or so after the election, Rush Limbaugh (who still has the fire in his belly) took a position we agree with completely, announcing that he would make no personal attacks on Obama. We agree for the same pragmatic reasons Mr Limbaugh laid out. Most importantly, they do no good. They are like water off a duck's back. After all, considering the names the rank-and-file of Leftdom had called Bush for 8 years, they expect the same, in kind. It will be a badge of honor for them to be painted with the same kindergarten watercolors by their counterparts on the Right.
      It was our hope there wouldn't be any counterparts on the Right. But.....
      (For those of you who may be confused, we make the distinction between members of the general public, even people like Limbaugh and official members of say, the GOP. We would like to see name-calling raised to high art among that crowd. We would like to see envelopes pushed. That causes people to sit up take notice. But when I do it, or a scat-caller named Gunny, also on TownHall, it's just ho-hum. It sets conservatism back,)
      As you know, we're ambivalent about well-chosen curse words and names.  But scat talk is most often used in lieu of a cogent thought, where it is also least effective. You know what I mean, "Obama is a c**k s**king sumbitch. Why? Well, just because he is, that's why. And how do I know this? I know it down deep in my gut, that's how!"
      Whew, I'm convinced, where do I go to sign up with the "Don't Tread on Me" League? Unfurl the banners. I'm in. Seriously, how many times have you read that sort of tripe on left-wing blogs about Bush, Cheney, Karl Rove?
      We're a little too understaffed here to go after conservatives-posing-as-bawl babies, and have already picked fights with a host of conservatives for exactly the opposite reason, an unwllingness to pick fights with Lefties. We conservatives own them on substance (facts), philosophy, and quite frankly intelligence. Why blow it by taking leave of your senses and throwing an old fashioned Scarlett O'Hara foot stomping teat fit?
      And we're absolutely arse-holes about facts. I cannot abide to see any person purporting to be conservative misspeak, whether out of ignorance, stupidity, laziness, or just plain lying. When you see one, PLEASE, give him/her a little test just to make sure he isn't really a plant from the enemy camp. ...wenn ies wir eine stormtruppen waddlen...quaken...es ist eine fascistche. You get my drift?
       Fergodsakes, don't be like them. I'm not a Marine, but was Army and I do know you can never win a fight when angry. The idea is to make the other side angry. See where I'm headed, Sarge? Good research can be absolutely destroyed by ad hominum screeds.
       (If you are one who just has to get that venom out, I suggest Glumbert.com videos. That site is no-holds-barred with the language, and usually in real-time. Find a guy named Canuck, who has a bunch of tagalongs. And have at it. Or you can go to the Indianapolis Colts Cry-Hotline.)
  
       For us, Obama is still just a word, not a person right now. Until shown otherwise, by his actions after January 21st, we plan to take Obama at his word, namely that he is on the dark side of the moon when it comes the Constitution and human liberty. We are very wary. But enough with the name-calling based on what you know he is, or what you know he will do, for right now, you don't know Richard....even if it turns out later you're right.
Bernard Chumm