Dear Neil:
            I just watched you roundtable about capitalism, "Did We Ask for it?, re the Pittsburgh G20 conference.
            We've been pleading this case for years: Drop the term "capitalism" as it means something entirely different in America than it ever did in Europe, from whence comes almost all our left wing political attitudes.
            Try this. Add one modifier, and one substitution and tell me if you would get the same result from that bunch of screaming ninnies, the Hole in the Soul Gang, running around tearing up things.
            Instead of calling it "capitalism", call it unfettered capitalism. Instead of calling it "capitalism" call it "free markets".
            You will never see those mobs riot against "free markets". Nor will you ever see them riot against "unfettered capitalism", as all they will do is stand scratching their heads, "Huh?"
            Unfettered capitalism always ends up "state-protected" capitalism, while free markets are constitutionally protected capitalism. One favors "big" at the expense of "small" while other favors "small" at the expense of "big". Unfettered capitalism moves toward monopoly while free markets always move alongside competition.
           It was always the great irony of Karl Marx that the system he most hated is also most favored by the ideological system he created, a monopolistic system of production, whether communist or fascist.
           So, when you dedicate an entire show to that term, you are playing a hand dealt by the Left.
VB

Richmond, 26 September, 2009
             
              Many years ago there appeared a book by Thomas Cahill entitled How the Irish Saved Civilization. A compelling argument, but also a reminder of just how long civilization requires to re-emerge after being overrun by barbarism. Approximately a thousand years.
              Today France and Russia stands uniquely poised to do the same thing, save civilization, and of the two, I select Nicholas Sarkozy of France.
              (I can't believe I just wrote that...France.)
              Early in the week President Barack Obama stood before the United Nations and abdicated America's role as leader of the Free World. Indeed, he more or less declared it dead. He denied America's role as defender of the poor, the down trodden, the set-upon...assuming that no one would step forward to replace us. His vision, I am quite certain, is of a world of equals in which he, like Citizen Robespierre, would be just a tad more equal than others. Obama dreams of charade and expects the rest of the world to play along.
             Then, three days later (yesterday) he strode across a stage, with the leaders of France and England in tow, to announce that only now had he discovered that there is gambling in Casablanca, and the world is shocked and outraged. (Leaks as to who knew what and when and was first in knowing about Iran's secret nuclear processing facility to follow.) Then followed the predictable threats of stern sanctions...although by who...the UN?, these three? others? remain undisclosed. The world has seen this before and has no reason to take threats from one and a quarter penises very seriously.
             So now comes some sort of December deadline at which time Iran must open its doors and the United Nations and IAEA can once again parade its own useful idiots through the turnstile to reassure us that they (the United Nations) are doing everything that can possibly be done to protect the peace and insure its doctrine of fairness, which covers every country on the planet...save one. We've been down this path before, also.
            Speaking of that lone pirate nation, whose own unshared intelligence also knew of this nuclear facility, just how long will Israel wait? That's the question everyone is asking. It's clear everyone expects them to do something...first. That's the stage Mr Obama seems to be setting. It's equally clear the United Nations has always wanted Israel to do what it hasn't the political will to do, and that is to end this nuclear nightmare in a flash, rather than through sanctions followed by another corrupt Oil for Food Program. It's a sucker play, for a peremptory Israeli  air strike would allow the UN to breathe a sigh of relief that Iran's nuclear ambition has been set back at least a decade or more, while actually being able to beat Israel up even more for its piratical ways of blowing the place up.
            I am quite sure, in this scenario, there will even be a place for President Obama to do a cameo and take a bow.  

            All that said, imagine a brave new world where one of the "other" major nations decides to take bold unilateral action and take out Iran's nuclear capability. Only France and Russia fill that bill right now...since there are no men at 10 Downing Street at the present time.
            And of the two, only France could do it for the glory (and other existential considerations), without demanding more tangible reimbursements.
            The result? Omigod!. Imagine.
            Israel gets what it wants while being spared one more outrage from the world community. The United Nations gets what it wants in the sense that a non-cowboy nation committed this deed while sparing them the humiliation that normally comes just by showing up for work each day. The Islamo-fascist world gets a long overdue warning...and spanking.
            Even the United States wins in that our talkative retreat-prone president gets a real lesson in real politik...that no vacuum goes unfilled. If the United States wants to abdicate leadership, someone will step in to replace us...and as long as Nicholas Sarkozy is that man....
            Amen. Insha'allah.
Vassar

Richmond, September 25, 2009
             
                  We've all done the math. Even if every Republican had their John Madden "Lineman of the Year" face on...you know, snot bubbles and drool running out of the side of their mouths...even if every Republican said not only "No" but "Hell no"...even if every Republican said about Reid and Pelosi and Obama in front a mic what Joe Wilson blurted out offstage last week, there still wouldn't be enough votes to stop this health care bill in any form.
                  We deal in Agritprop here, where sneaking up and tweaking genuinely dishonest people and their cohorts is part of our trade. But how do you reach inside the heart and soul of a man, a good honest man, who has been trapped by his own vanity?
                  That can only be done close up, face to face, mano y mano.

                  If in fact, as some argue, the Democrat Party has become soulless, and there is no honor there any longer, then nothing I have to say here will matter. But I believe there are many Democrats, even old style Liberals, who have been trapped by their own vanities, the worst being having to admit you have sided with out-and-out criminals and mountebanks, and worse, facsist thugs.
                  Who, in a theatre where illuminated vanity is everything, can ever admit that? Who can say, by word or deed, or vote, that they were hornswoggled, lied to and cheated?
                  Better to ride it out, or go down with the ship, eh? Can you imagine some of the things the "secretly honest" liberals are saying to themselves every morning in the mirror? The little devil on the left shoulder will say, "Well, the country will be better off if I try to work from the inside, within the system"...while the little angel on the right will whisper "Yeah, whatever system it finally turns out to be. Be prepared to hang with them, so get a lawyer."

                 I can't say how many Democrats go through this daily soul-searching, except to say I'm fairly certain Arlen Specter isn't one of them. Or Jack Murtha.
                 All I can say, as Glenn Beck intones daily, pray for them. Pray that just a few, a redeemed few, a "happy few", will actually see and understand the nature of that hole they are drilling into the hull of what had once been the most seaworthy ship ever to float.
                 As for the Republicans, if this bill is passed, we don't need you anymore. Your only responsibility, and only path to redemption will be to place the mark of anathema on every single person who votes for this bill, in both chambers, and to forswear any and all personal and social contact with that person, from the simplest "Good Morning" or "Excuse Me", except as required by law and the rules of the Chamber.
                Either that or get out...and get a lawyer.
VB
                 

                 

Richmond, September 24, 2009

     Once again I remind you. As you  raise the pitch, and call down the thunder...
     As you repel everything they try...
     As you just say "No. No, No"...
     As you push back, and they begin to give, then move back, then retreat...
     As they know you will not quit...
     It will be they who will fire the first shot.
     Watch and wait.
VB

 Portland, Sept 23, 2009
     Leader of the Free World....my sister's black cat's patoot.
     At this writing, there no longer is a Free World...our former role abdicated today so that the United States would join the rest of world's petty potentates and poppinjays, as only it's largest and most powerful member, headed by the posing peacock and popinjay in chief.

     I believe it is time to begin considering the "M" word...
     megalomania.
Bernard Chumm

     At some point our Rebellion may succeed in throwing the scalawags out of Congress, and hopefully we will get to snidely smirk as we watch a few of them marched off to be arraigned. We may even get a repeat in 2012, watching an army of administration insiders limp away with their tails between their legs.
     What then? Have you considered next steps?
      In 1992 we sent a bunch of fresh faces to Washington, then turned and walked away, and very shortly, many of them had become just like "them". So, have you ever considered things you not only have to continue doing until the day you die, but must now also pass on to the next generation?
     Have you all considered these things? There can be no respite, no rest, until the day you die. What you (we) have undertaken will be central to your lives from now on. It is that kind of war...and not just the memory, but the severity and peril must never fade.

     But also consider this. At some point our Rebellion may fail miserably and utterly. I can think of many ways this can happen, so where that fire that now burns white hot in your belly must be banked so as to continue to burn even if we lose, but also must be hidden from view...as millions of Iranians have had to do the past thirty years. Think about it.
     Everyone remembers the Boston Tea Party, but can anyone recall the Boston Massacre? Think Tian-an-men Square. Look it up. The other side has the manpower, the guns, and if they want to do it, can make the law into any sort of weapon they desire, turning what you think now to be a patriotic act into a crime. I have no doubt theat when pressed up against the wall, when they start to lose but still have power over government, they will try some awful stunts.
     So you have to be sure of yourself, for, as I cited Steve McQueen earlier, "You've never played the game until you have played for more than you can afford to lose."
     You can also self-destruct from internal bickering and disputes, as I lined out in Part II. The first tests of that will occur soon, as you will have to decide what political shape the Movement will take. Right now we are an unofficial adjunct of the Republican Party, inasmuch as we are pursuing principles they have espoused for many years...though rarely fought for, also for many years. The GOP has not yet decided whether to reach out and accept paternity for us, little b**stards that we are (and they utter under their breath). Nor have we fully decided we want to accept back into our family that man who drove off to Washington one day, leaving momma on the front porch, barefoot and pregnant, promising to come back, but instead falling in with the bright lights and brothels of the big city. Daddy, we hardly knew ye.
     And then there's all those Sugar Daddy Warbucks who have spent so much money making our little Rebellion possible, with all the stagecraft, sexy websites and fireworks. How beholding are we to them? Or them to us?
     How many of them actually have their sight on the same prize we do?
     That's the politics of it. It seems to never stop...at the same time it seems never to fix...correction, promises to never fix anything.
     In this, Part III and in Part IV I will line out things we have to do no matter what, win, lose or draw in the political arena.

     As I wrote earlier, there are three phases to the Rebellion: the political, the institutional the culture. Top to bottom politics is corrupt, in part because 1) men are corrupt when they get too close to power for too long, but also because of all those little fat, greedy mouths they have to feed in the institutions, who in exchange, keep them in power (and also keep the culture in decline).
     The culture, if you're looking for a definition, is the soul of the people. Just as in everything, there are good souls and there are bad ones. Ours is becoming, in fact, at one generational level, has become almost rotten to the core. We have to fix this. And we have to fix it without tossing out the Constitution with the bath water.
     You can analyze this yourself, or take my word for it, but a rotten culture eventually has to be tied to a leash and led around like a dog, which, while you make this out to be a bad thing, suits the people owning the leash business just fine. A moral culture on the other hand can roam freely. It's that simple. The rottenness found in our culture today was put there on purpose, therefore you can see this relationship between the political, the institutional and the culture.
     Retaking the culture is our end-game, for only then will we be worthy of the faith and privilege the Constitution placed in our hands almost 225 years ago. I'll discuss how that can be done also in Part IV, but you can also see how the Politics is the lynchpin, for without controlling the political landscape we double the time and manpower in reigning in the institutions that are making war on our households and and freedom. Just go to East Europe, and look at the cultural slide after the Communists took over in 1944. They held onto enough to eventually run off the Communists, but after 50 years, most of the original culture, the original strength of the soul of the people had been lost. Twenty years later, free, they are still struggling to regain even a semblance of that moral center that defined them.
    The top three, in my estimation are 1) the power of the bureaucracies, 2) the power of public schools and universities and 3) the power of advertisers.
    The good news is, these are fights you don't have to march on Washington in order to make your case. These are fights that are fought best from the bottom up anyway, and to some extent, these are fights that can start simply by saying "No". Solzhenitsyn wrote about the "wrecking" of the great plans for agriculture reforms in the USSR under Stalin. It was true, what was once the bread basket of Europe in the days of the tsars (not to be confused with czars), had annual crop failures from 1919 until 1992. Stalin blamed counter-revolutionaries, "wreckers". But all it was was the people saying "no". For you see, the one power even the most tyrannized people have is to be able to deny their masters what they want. The Communists wanted total control, but if total control included bumper crops, they couldn't have it.
    Remember this law.
    
    Bureaucracy
    In January, Robert Hightower, one of our partners, wrote a piece on the "Front Office vs the Front Lines". He is our "Bureaucracy-buster".  He described bureaucracies, even in the best of run private companies, as cancers, requiring constant vigilance and treatment. Miss one dose and the cancer spreads.
    From the constitutional standpoint, controlling bureaucracy is an issue of size, and political will. The people can rarely affect bureaucracies directly, but rather must require their elected officials to do this for them...for the first mission, the Prime Directive of Bureaucracies, is to secure their seat at the dinner table. (I'll bet you thought it was getting medical care to to infirm, or medicine to the elderly, or building highways in Vermont. Hah!)
    There are several rules about bureaucracies you should know, and I recommend you visit our other essays and learn them. They figure in, and exacerbate, just about every political ailment known to man, since the third millenia BCE. To the extent "bureaucratism" could be cured, constitutional democracy in the public sector and free market competition in the private, is about as close as you could get. Bureaucracies feed on the Left in public sector just as they do on inefficiency and redundancy in the private, for the Left sees their bureaucracies as the primary jobs sector, "their" job sector.
    But both require extreme vigilance, which in the political sphere we stopped watching years ago, while in the private sector, in the specter of Big Business, has come back to bite us big time....for you see, either way, it is us, taxpayers and consumers who pay for their waste. And if you want to know why mom's can't stay at home instead of work even if they want to, like it used to be on black and white television shows, it's because of that waste, and the high taxes we must pay to support it....and the power advertisers have over our children.
    The main rule you have to understand is that they don't care about you, the taxpayer, the guy who pays their bills, fills their rice bowl. Remind me to write an essay about the evil that is indifference, but it is one of the guiding rules of bureaucracies:  They care about your rice bowl, their place at the trough. They care not one whit about the people who prepare that place for them. In fact, they look down your nose at taxpayers.
     Bureaucracies, in government at every level, and Big Business are filled with redundancies...in other words, two people in two different offices doing essentially the same work, only for a different boss or agency, or according to a different enabling act of the legislature...since the guys who wrote it forgot someone was already doing it. Usually they fill out forms and count stuff, and pass the forms onto the next guy, who double checks the work, then puts his signature on it as well...only, if it's something serious, every one of those signatories have to send the paper back down the ladder for further explanation, which is a sort of CYA, and which may eventually mean the paper will never get to its final destination or will find a circuitous route, so that if anything ever does go wrong, it will be that poor schlub back at the beginning who gets fired. After WWII, when they hung so many Nazis, many of those men who stood on the scaffold and stared Eternity in the face, did so cursing that one signature that sent that one carload of Jews one step closer to the rail yards.
    Bureaucrats are risk averse.
    Once upon a time the way you controlled this was by simply denying your own congressman or other elected representative the right to send these people your money. FDR stopped a lot of that, and indeed, after 1933, not only Washington DC, but every state capital who had to deal with the New Deal, found both depression and bureaucracy to be very profitable. Even today, as I write this, we have lost almost 2.4 million jobs, yet the government is claiming nearly a million jobs saved or gained from the "stimulus". No one to my knowledge is pointing out the simple fact that those 2.4 million lost jobs are all private sector while those saved/gained jobs are public sector.
    See how this game works? Virginia right now is boasting that its unemployment rate is going down, not up.
    Today, federally mandated and funded bureaucratism has crept down to the tiniest city council, where, just fifty years ago, the only federal employee ran the post office.
What to do.
    So today, you have to form a shadow government in your town, your district, your state so as to decide just what services, and at what cost, you believe your little part of this democracy can abide. (The first two people I want to get rid of are those two sheriff's deputies who take my pocket knife away from me every time I enter the courthouse. I've been through a dozen this year.) Most standing politicians will not go along with you, so you have to form your own ticket, and find your own candidate.
    (You will have to do pretty much the same thing with your schools, so get ready for some long hours of work.)
    From these slates of candidates, within eight years, will arise some very important state and national leaders. This is how Sara Palin rose.
    The major point is, no matter how you arrive at the formula, your elected official has to know his/her job depends on reducing the size of government, both in terms of structure and mission, and the size of its budget. Start at 25%, and as my friend Mr Hightower wrote, make sure it is the paperhangers in the front office and not the people in the front lines who feel the pinch.

    The Public Schools
    In theory we defend home schooling, but it has always been a great sadness that we are willing to walk away from what once was the finest public school system in the world. And the reason it was the finest was because of local control. The Left long ago understood the power of state textbook commissions, for instance...while we slept. That garbage your children is taught didn't get there by accident.
    You have to reacquire that power, which even in the best of circumstances, would have been a fight lasting many years. And you have to look beyond the time your own kid is in school. Public schools ain't Little League baseball. It's your country's future.
    I will not tell you here my opinions about dress code, corporal punishment, busing, private automobiles, school uniforms. I will simply say there is much that is being taught in public school that should not be taught at all. There is also much that is being taught the wrong way, with the wrong emphasis. Among these, especially, are American Government and American History. Both need to taught with enthusiasm (which would require the firing of many teachers straightaway) and with a view toward American exceptionalism, and American heroes.
    Kids relate to heroes at about fourth grade. So start then, and build up. If George Washington slept around, let them find that out in college. What they need to know early on is how to discern the difference between a lie, a smear and a fact. They need to see the perosnal virtues of the founders reflected in the virtue of the country as a whole.
    In all cases, what is taught in schools should augment what has already been taught at home..and by "at home" I mean most homes. The entire school system should not be required to stand on it's head because one parent is abusive, an atheist, or offended. The school system should reflect the standards of the community at large, and hopefully our finer elements. So black lipstick just may be out this year in East Kentucky.
    In the 1930s our school systems "forced" certain American values down the throats of kids, from backward Appalachia to immigrant- ridden St Louis to segregated Columbia, Tennessee. Black students in 1955 received demonstrably better public educations than they do now, in any public school, and the question needs to asked "Why?". Segregation was not the answer, so look for the others. Reverse engineer that whole process. In my view, segregation notwithstanding, public schools went from demanding "you can" from its students, to "you can't". That's "leftism", not racism. Instead of teaching those children to hate the white George Washington and Thomas Jefferson, teach them to hate what has been done to them by their government the past forty years...for it indeed has been hateful...and criminal.
    I'm getting into proprietary areas here, for we are involved in counseling, curricula and cultural issues, both from the position of being (back) in political power and from the opposite position should the new national police come crashing through your front door with a battering ram, and we have to take this theme covert.
    Our main point here is, you can't just win in 2010 or 2012 then walk away. You have to know "they" won't quit until one of you is completed defeated, so you can't quit either. Sorry, that's the hand you've been dealt, so you have to play it.
    Or fold.

   Public Universities
   Dittos to what I just said about K-thru-12 public schools, only to add that the high cost, the criminally high cost of public education is a reflection of our health care problem. The reason $29 textbooks cost $125, and have to be revised every three years, killing off the used book market, is the same as that $29 aspirin at the hospital...just substitute "subsidy student loans" for "insurance company".
   Moreover, fully a third of most university academic programs is designed to regenerate itself and grow. Any decent analyst can come up with a 1-, 5- and 10-year forecast for the nation's needs in historians at the university, high school and middle school levels. For super specialized studies, such as the History of Pre-Columbian Sheep Shelter Furnishings in the Ozarks, let Professor Gardiner at SE Missouri State choose his own successor.
    When college programs graduate students at a 2:1-3:1 ratio to available jobs in a particular field we have a problem. And not just because of the disgruntled two thirds who end up at Best Buy, Hooters or answering the phone at Dewey, Scoogem and Howe. Besides, all the Women's Studies grads who chose not to go after their masters degree already have those receptionist jobs in tow.
    The tendency is to expand the university itself to accommodate the overage, and the way they do this is by tapping out the best of the lot and move into graduate programs. Those grads in turn will then go on to newly created position and departments in yet another university, bumping up that state's education budget. see how it works?
    We believe the people should cause the curricula to be revisited, with a view of creating a core curricula, based on what was taught 1900-1960. Yes, that means Western Civilization is back, Samoan Civilization is out. University budget priorities should be directed toward this core, from whence come jobs and the old ideal of the "better man and woman". Colleges and universities can be cut by 25% easily, and the degrees they pass out at the bachelor's level have become so meaningless that truly, a degree is worth little more than a diploma...except that a lot of educational bureaucrats got richer along the way.
    Finally, in every area of academe K-PhD, there is the problem of the "outlaw" teacher, professor, and sometimes even entire department. There are things citizens can do to cast a chilling effect on this conduct. All legal, mind you, but things that will certainly make them think twice about repeat performances. And yes, there is a little reverse engineering of Alinksy's Rules for Radicals, in that's how they spot us and make our lives miserable. But it's also the way the Commies took care of business when they were in charge in  the Eastern Bloc...identify, isolate, prosecute and persecute. They could be clever to the point of being artistic. We know how.
    I've asked Bernie to work up a single article on this subject, the outlaw teacher, to appear soon, but much of what we have to say as to specific tactics, well, we can't say. That's how we make money, since, for a few hundred bucks, instead of hiring Vinnie and Augie with baseball bats, you hire us to bust their shins legally.

    You'll note I've said very little about the unions, at either the high school or university level. But they are your chief adversary. At the local level they will fight back, and fight hard. They will know you by name...so learn theirs. It will get personal. It will get mean.
    The way to beat them is by beating the drums about things that are really above their pay grade. If the people of Iowa decide Women's Studies don't fit into the plans of higher education, it is none of their concern (only we all know that it is). That is a political issue decided by legislators and the people.
    You way you defeat the unions is to beat down "their soldiers in your emply", i.e., the legislators. (This is the one fight Ronald Reagan didn't want to take on in the '80s, and it was because the people were not yet on his side of the issue. Now we are.) If you squeeze or replace the legislators who conive with the unions, you will beat them.
    In twenty five years, if you are successful, there will be many books written as to how you did it...and a grateful nation will read them and learn.

Advertising
    I consider most forms of advertising protected speech, so there's the problem. Advertising works best with children, and they've been doing that since the radio shows in the 30s first began selling cereal to kids.
    What we all know is that advertising that doesn't work stops. Suddenly. Just like bad music. Since few kids actually work...cut grass, deliver papers...everthing kids buy, someone else pays for.
    Don't do that anymore. If you say "No", the advertising stops. Kids will be content to wear 4.99 T-shirts instead of 14.99 ones with a silhouette of a man and a basketball on it. I once asked a kid how much Nike was paying him to advertise their products. He looked at me dumbfounded.
    In any case, that logo cost about $10 on a crummy t-shirt, and the point is they marketed and advertyised that t-shirt to him, but you shelled out the money. If Nike were to remove the logo and simply put their label at the back of the collar, then sell the shirt at say 7.99, and then sell the logo as an iron-on at another $8, see how many kids would pay for the logo. You are the problem....for you are not teaching kids about the basics of economics and marketing, and the humiliation of being made a sucker.
    Advertising and marketing isn't so much about lies as it is in making you want somethign you don't need and often can't afford. It is about being suckered. In the end they know you will be willing to go into debt to get it. At that point advertising is a home invasion with a full seat at the dinner table, right next to car loan and home mortgage.
    You need counseling and therapy. Join a group. Form a group. Teach you kids and practice what you preach. Just as you demand of the schools, create a core budget of necessities, and ask you kids to do the same thing. Make it a routine thing...watch "I Remember Mama" (Irene Dunn). Teach your kids that saving, and building a nest egg, or delaying gratification are good things. Teach them these are things with which we build our House, and by "House" I mean the House of David Schmidlap, not a building.
    Teach them early enough and they will beam with pride, rather cower with embrassment, when they put that dollar back in their pocket,  turning down the offer the biggie-size the fries, instead putting that money in a mason jar at home.
    This is just one thing you can do, but just think of the collateral damage advertisers are doing to your House, because of the lack of a simple "no".

Vassar Bushmills
  
 


   

Portland, 22 Sept 2009

        Most people agree that "death by cynicism" is a type of murder. Bill Ayers, who can't be quoted on any subject without inserting a comment about the "murders" of the Nixon administration in SE Asia, is conspicuously quiet on this about to occur "murder" of American Marines and soldiers in Afghanistan.
        In March, the still-new President Obama  stated he had a solid new policy and strategy in place for Afghanistan, apparently referring to a counter-insurgency plan to be implemented by his new theater commander, Gen Stanley McChrystal.
       That was March, this is now September and Obama says we do not yet have a strategy, and he will consider a troop surge only after the direction and form of that strategy has been determined.
       ????
        In other words, Obama either lied in March, and never really had a strategy or the strategy he had then has failed. Either one is plausible. In fact, both could be true.
        What also has occured in that time frame is that Obama in March had a game plan in which his Health care plan would be law by the August recess, and therefore the Left would (cynically) give him all the rope (and troops) he wanted to finish up Afghanistan in the way he (cynically) promised the American people.
       Now in order to keep those on the Left in tow with a crumbling healthcare plan, Obama must (cynically) place not only the mission, but the lives and endeavors of the troops in Afghanistan on the back burner, possibly with a view toward ultimate surrender, retreat (pulling out), having all those lives lost in vain.
       As far as we are concerned at SICCM, the death of every Marine and soldier since March has been cynical murder.
       So, where's Bill Ayers?
BC

       Before he finally headed for the high country that last time in 2006, one of Moses Sands' greatest laments was the failure of conservatives (who he called "protectors" of the Constitution) to educate religious people (who most everyone calls "social conservatives" without any clear definition of just what that is) about the proper relationship between their faith and the Constitution.
       Of course this subject is about to come up again, as the Republican Party tries to sort out its intellectual, cultural and class differences (all pretty subjective) while standing athwart history in a struggle to defend against a very objective enemy, one whose object is to crush the Constitution to smithereens. Since time immemorial, when petty is easy and life-and-death choices hard, there is a class of people who will always choose petty. (Remind me to write about that sometime.)
       William Buckley stood in constant reminder to us that the intellectual arguments standing behind the "social conservatism" of the unlettered and untutored rubes in the rural south and west are far stronger than those adopted by their so-called betters in the suburbs and cities (especially on abortion), and he was just the person to articulate those arguments on behalf of the hicks.
       But as seen by the other side of the argument, the real debate was one of class, and WFB knew that as well.  So it was far easier for the country club set, especially in the sound byte lingo of the day, to define the social conservative as a Bible-thumping hayseed instead of an erudite Yale man whose family came to these shores when King George was still in knee pants...allowing them to keep the "debate" on their side of the fence stile, and intellectual egg off their face.
       But Moses said (more than once) that there is a streak of tyranny in all religions, and small town Baptists and Mormons, parish Catholics and even Scandinavian Lutherans in Minnesota were no exception.
       All religions, including Christianity, tend toward dictatorial control if given enough rope. For centuries the Catholic Church burned all sorts of people, from atheists to heretics to mere dissenters, all from the position of an almighty power it had no right to claim...and deep in its heart knew so. When resistance finally erupted on a large scale in the 16th Century, the fact that it (the Church) didn't erupt into even deeper paroxysms of violence was because of its own self-examination of those tenets of faith. The Church changed. The Church "surrendered" back again to its faith...leaving temporal power to temporal men whose church the head of which, as Mark Twain noted, always was and always will be Beelzebub.
      This is where we (conservatives) fight our battles.
      Other religions through history had been even less bending, possibly because there was no inner redemptive quality in their faiths. Who can say? Today, there is a keen intellectual argument as to whether such a quality exists within Islam. I believe there is, as did Moses Sands. But others disagree. For years, westerners have been waiting for the rise of an Islamic Martin Luther, or at least an Avicenna or Averroes, which would cause the struggle in Islam to turn inward, toward the soul, toward the more pure intentions of the Q'uran.
      But as it stands today, so far, the forces within Islam who have declared war on America are the unredeemed forces of tyranny, plain and simple.
      In America, embedded in the 10th Amendment are powers that to some of us seem near dictatorial, especially if you find yourself in central Kentucky on a Saturday night and learn that the nearest cold beer is 20 miles away, across the county line. At one time, local blue laws even kept the drug stores closed on Sundays. And while law (and better sense) may have finally allowed them to remain open, there is still that cadre of folks, mostly older, (and their children who never got too far way from the teat) who seethe at the idea that their "right of majority rule" to close any business on the Sabbath, their Sabbath, had been superseded by some federal judge in Montgomery.
      In truth, they probably couldn't get a majority vote on that issue any longer, for most people, including some very fine Christians, have found that store being open on Sunday to be a benefit, and actually causing no spiritual harm either...at least to the non-busybody segment of their Christian community.
      You see, somewhere along the line most American Christians find no profit in ordering by law non-Christians (of all types) to abide by a set of rules Christians could just as easily impose on themselves without benefit of ordinance or constables. As all conservatives know, that role of Busy-Body in Chief always falls to the government eventually, where it resides now.
      Nor is this common sensical, live-and-let-live approach found in all faiths and one must ask why?
      The modern Left reminds us that most every modern government is a government of busy-bodies. Many American Christians loved the 10th Amendment fifty years ago, for it was always seen as their license to order their local culture (majority rules). But like the Muslims they also see that same Bill of Rights to be a license to corrupt when placed in the wrong hands. So, even as a person in Murfreesboro will gnash her teeth that someone in Nashville will claim the right and power to dictate what she should put on their cereal each morning, the fact that she may feel no compunction whatsoever in deciding where someone else ought to be, or ought not be, on Sunday morning, is an issue conservatives need to take up with our religious base.
      For if you think southern Baptists are bad, try opening up an accounting office in Show Low, Arizona, while also practicing the religion of  being a "Gentile".
      People are just funny that way.
 
      As I have often written, my mother was one of those people who believed that the local sheriff should go around every Sunday morning and haul out every man and woman still in bed and cart them off to church, or, if they choose, to some sort of community service...that did not involve labor, being the Sabbath and all.
     Still, she would never have rounded up a bunch of men and women and done it herself.
     My mother wanted the law to do it.
    And by inviting the law to do so, just ask any black American who can remember the old south just fifty years ago, she and her fellow Christians damn near destroyed the 10th Amendment...never knowing that today it, along with a new alliance with black people who find themselves enslaved now because of its absence...may well be their only rescue line.

    The question you on the outside looking in should ask, why is it that Christians, when they were all powerful, only shunned and ostracized, and passed local ordinances that favored their particular religious beliefs? If they were so dictatorial and invasive, why didn't they just barge though Clyde Barr's door when he beat his wife, then drag that drunk out and beat him until he repented? Why didn't they just take Lila Cornet out, who cheated on her husband, and stone her? Even the KKK wore hoods to signify that they were stepping outside the law.
    Imagine the Jewish and Muslim women who have been stoned, or the many Hester Prynne's who would have given worlds to get the cold shoulder, and nothing more, at Walgreens while buying condoms for Bruno. If Christianity were truly the tyrannical evil they say it is, there would never have been any need for a Klu Klux Klan. The local folk, through ordinance, could simply have sent the local sheriff and his deputies to talk to the pagan Asian or Jew who worshiped on Saturday and worked on Sunday, or the ignorant and backward (no doubt Yankee) white person who felt it was perfectly permissible to invite a nigra up on the front porch for lemonade and cookies. Why the need for disguise?
    Because the United States Constitution, from the very beginning, implanted a respect for law that superseded even the most basic religious faith, that's why. There were lines Christians would not cross which other religions will. For a century Muslims have come here and lived in peace, and secretly breated deep sighs of relief that so many of the harsher aspects of shari'a law did not have to be invoked...nor was there any power to order it so. This was how it was until the Wahhabi's began sponsoring mosques and madrassas, and the general rise of militant Islam associated with those teaching.
   As Europe may find out sooner than us, liberty and freedom of choice cannot co-exist with this strand of Islam.
   And there were lines which Christians would not cross that government most certianly will...and which seem to be aimed at the very Christians who first began the practice of passing off to the local sheriff (and child welfare agency and county attorney) the power to do to people what a nice cold shoulder could have done.
    There is an irony here. And like any sin, you really can't find release and redemption until you fully confess it. The small, "parochial" religious communities of America are now under assault...by the state, by the atheistic socialists, and by the class-minded members of their own party...using the tools they first brought into play during Jim Crow and hid under the sweet innocent name of "states rights".
    No one will take their pleas for rescue by the 10th Amendment seriously until they are prostrated at the foot of the sins they committed under it, for no one fully believes they won't just go right back to being petty tyrants in their towns once the pain has been relieved.
    Conservatism has to meet this head on...for the revival of the 10th Amendment is one of the major wedges we can use to get the black family to our side. It is also the one major way to remove populist appeals to a darker nature (read local race-and-religion baiting) as we saw in the 2008 GOP campaign. We are completely in favor of re-introducing God and prayer into the classroom. The recent rap-murders in Farmville Virginia remind us why this is so important. We are in favor of strengthening divorce laws, making it harder to get one, but also for strengthening marriage laws, making it harder to get one of those as well. And personally, I find a certain quaintness and innocence that a country should decide not to allow the sale of alcohol beverages, just as I find it legal (but not so quaint) that a California town can ban the sale of tobacco. (Just stay away from our guns!)
Vassar Bushmills
   
   
   

      For the record, on this new charge of racism.
VB

Portland, 18 September
      OK, I'm only three-quarters serious, because even if Scott Brown were elected for even two years, he'd probably do a Kirsten Gillibrand and become the most liberal back-stabbing Republican Massachusetts has ever seen...and in Ol' Mass, that's saying a lot.
      Still, we recommend he hire Jay Leno or Colin to write his campaign.
      "Hey, it's only for two years. Isn't there anything you'd like to get even with the Kennedy's about?  (drum roll)
      "Besides, imagine what it would be like for the other 49 states actually liking us for two years. (drum roll)
      "For once in fifty years we'd actually outrank Quebec in the "love from our fellow man" category. (drum roll)
      "A priest, a rabbi and a Mexican walk into this bar, see..."

      Personally, I believe there's a lot of wistful Massachucks (or is it Massachite? Massachussetin?) out there who would like a two year respite in the fresh air...just to see what it smelled like.
BC

 Portland, 18 September
     You may not remember Maxine Waters' threat some years ago to put people into the streets in L.A.
     Well, that's coming, and Nancy Pelosi sent the signal yesterday.
     Make no bones about it, the stakes are about to get higher, especially if the public pressure against Obama's health care takeover continues.
     Ms Pelosi's whimpering reminiscence yesterday was no lament, it was a single. And it was putting us all on notice, "It will be on your heads."
     The ugly is just about to get uglier.
BC

   Richmond, 16 September
   First we have to make government's affairs (sic) public once again, then stop it lying about its affairs.
   Why is Joe Wilson's bad manners and not President Obama's lies not the story?

   Bernie Chumm has been working on a manual for some time about publicly debating public liars. This is to be a book for public officials, at least public officials with courage, and the press. It details how, without violating the various congressional codes of conduct, public officials can call out other public officials who lie. It details how media interviewers can trap officials, especially in that radio/phone call interview, when they lie. (And vice versa, just in case you want to lay into Bill Maher someday. The easiest way to get a fellow is when is trying to play "gotcha" with you. All you have to do is have the facts in your hands (that is the side that should always win) and be willing to go to the mat with those facts (that is the reason the factual side seems always to lose).
   Make the lie the story. When a person lies, stop the debate, conversation, whatever, and make the rest of the conversation about that person and the lie. Make them prove their assertion. Since they obviously can't in that venue, promise to schedule a free, open air debate later on...soon...three, four days tops...but get a date certain.
   What you have done (and which politicians and pundits alike hate) is to have the ball publicly thrown back in their court. They hate that...for they can't just walk away. The public...and if you're lucky, some of their constituency...are waiting with bated breath for the rematch, so their congressman can mop up the floor with you. 
   Only he ain't gonna show. He knows you got him.
   Take away the lie and you take away 70% of the Left's ammunition and 30% of their protective armor.
   Are you listening FoxNews?
   Your news division needs to take "the lie" out of the political opinion segment of your broadcasts (Beck, O'Reilly, Gibson, et al) and put it firmly back in the news division...where I believe...the Constitution always intended it to be, for I do believe the Constitution viewed the media as Quality Control in this process.
    Fair and balanced, my sister's black cat's arse. As long as you allow yourself to treat a lie as "politics" rather than a direct assault on the foundations of government, you're on the wrong side of the issue.
    Get it Roger? Get it Shep?
VB

   Portland, Sept 14, 2009
     We've been watching developments with ACORN, as this young couple goes from Baltimore to Washington to Brooklyn with their Hooker & Fleshmonger Camping Show.
     One interesting thing stands out.
     If you're not old enough, in the late 1960s, beginning with Chicago and the Democrat Convention, when the young people confronted the police, they brought all the girls forward, to the front, squared off against the fuzz, the theory being cops won't hit girls. (For the most part they wouldn't.)
     At the time both underground and north-of-the-dirt reportage called this tactic "clever and ingenius."
     I'm beginning to think there may have been more to it.
     After reading Vassar's profile of the genesis of the "liberal" gene, I think he could have spent more time on the "chicken s**t" gene that seems to afflict the Left's menfolk.
     Notice how, at all these ACORN offices, they stick out front, in "customer service", a couple of women, easy-to-hire, easy-to-fire, to run the gauntlet, while Li'l Lord Fauntleroy hangs out in the background?
     At some point that is no longer clever. It is cowardice.
BC

   Portland, Sunday, Sept 13
    I don't want to put words in Joe Wilson's mouth, or express how his colleagues in the Republican Party should behave, either toward him, or in his behalf. But let's be clear. Joe Wilson's loud shout of "Liar" during President Obama's speech top Congress was an act of extraordinary bad manners, and unparliamentary behavior.
    He apologized to the White House forthwith, which was correct in being offered, and correct in being accepted.
    But he apologized for bad manners, not for saying aloud that a man who spoke untruth after untruth for the most part of 48 minutes was indeed lying. The press, even the Obama press, has said as much since, although "misspoke", "disingenuous", etc were the  preferred descriptive terms.
    And they could be right, for indeed, instead of lying, Obama could have simply been misinformed, or been incredibly stupid (the other two alternate theories for stating untruths). And quite frankly, the jury is still out of that broader issue.
    That said, Joe Wilson owes the Democrat Party and the Congressional Black caucus nothing, especially an apology. If they want to issue some statement of condemnation, let them. If any GOP member votes "Aye", fire him...or her.
    I don't think Joe Wilson can be compelled to stand in the well, a la Gerry Studds, but should he desire to anyway, (I'd admire him all the more) I think he should say just what I have written. That Obama lied, and he was only apologizing for bad manners. Moreover, as a parting gesture, I suggest he be scratching his eye while saying this.
    You see, I have a 90 year old friend, who still understands the protocols of good manners when in the company of dishonorable people. But he also possesses this unusually long and angular middle finger. It almost looks like ET's. And he can always find the most appropriate time to reach up and deftly scratch his eye.
    This is a not a barroom you have to back out of, Congressman. Say your piece and walk out like a Jethro Gibbs, and not like a Lindsay Graham. The days of slinking and skulking Republicans are over.
    Well, nearly.
    Bernard Chumm

     A couple of days ago, a caller complained about Bill O'Reilly on Glenn's morning talk radio show. Glenn came to Bill's defense, which was both called-for and good manners. I would have done the same.
     Still, I hope Glenn understands the game, and the very basic difference between himself and Bill O'Reilly.
     In April, we took notice of Bill O'Reilly's discomfort with this new kid on the block at FoxNews, Glenn Beck. We also made note of O'Reilly's "purported" conservatism.
     If the truth were known, Glenn, Bill is seething at your meteoric rise in national popularity (your 5 PM time slot draws 75% of Bill prime time 8 PM time slot) and your national weight and gravitas on the only real issue in America today, and that is the collapse of republican democracy. It was not of your doing, and more of Bill's, but he is now on the periphery of this war, while you are at the center. Trust me, he takes this personally, for you came to Fox as a young Turk, a yapping schnauzer trotting alongside his strutting mastiff. 
     I am not sure you understand how Bill sees this.
     Again, I repeat, we have our own problems with some of your schtick, but believe you have been of immeasurable value to the Rebellion, and have indeed put your life on the line. Just watch your top knot.
     We have written about this often, in part an attempt to shame many so-called conservative's over to the cause of the mass of American's citizens, but sadly, as far as we can see, Bill O'Reilly's "conservatism" in defined entirely by his own self-interest. The government is okay as long as it doesn't threateh his nest. Screw the neighbors. The government is okay unless there's a good stpry line in proving otherwise, thus expanding that nest.
     So watch your topknot. Just as I would, when Bill's right, you'll congratulate him, and be glad that the country could benefitted from his work. Just don't lay any long odds that the "country's benefit" is why he did it.
Vassar Bushmills