Know Them According to Their Actions

Glenn Beck held his rally to restore honor and to celebrate the troops who sacrifice so much for us. Google honored that ambition by publishing deceptive maps on its site which directed you to FDR’s monument. Al Sharpton, who apparently did not have a black woman who was falsely accusing another of rape to support, said that Beck was stealing Martin Luther King’s legacy because Beck dared to hold his rally on the same day and at the same location where Dr. King delivered his famous “I have a dream” speech. Others on the left have even attacked Dr. Alveda King, Martin Luther King’s niece, by accusing her of trashing her uncle’s legacy. Want more? How about this as reported by Fox News on their website, “Eleanor Holmes Norton, Washington's delegate to Congress, said she remembers being at King's march on Washington, which she said prompted change and ended segregation in public places.”Glenn Beck's march will change nothing. But you can't blame Glenn Beck for his March-on-Washington envy." When the left spews vitriol in quantity, one can be assured that the people of America have awakened and is aware of their deeds.

I assert that the left has no understanding of Dr. King’s dream and even less understanding of the man himself. Dr. King saw a world where nobody was judged for their outward appearance. In his eyes, we were all equal. Only our actions and our character mattered and I submit that the actions and the lack of character demonstrated by the left gives enough information to render an accurate judgment as to their motives. Yet these craven individuals fear that they will be relegated to the backwaters of history should Dr. King’s dream ever truly be realized. Therefore they pump out millions of gallons of their vitriol, they make snide comments, and they countermarch in order to reassure themselves that they still matter in the grand scheme of things.

Al Sharpton even said that Dr. King favored a huge government that could steamroll over any offender on civil rights issues. Balderdash. I believe that Dr. King knew that government could change nothing. In order for his dream to be realized the heart of man must be changed and only man himself is capable of making that change. Why would Sharpton say this? Because he is dependent upon the system of government and the bigger that it is the greater is his share.

The majority of black Americans do not even know that it was the Democratic Party that earnestly sought to keep them in chains. They are unaware that the Jim Crow laws were enacted by Democrats. The do not know that President Eisenhower tried desperately to get Civil Rights legislation passed, but that a Democrat, Lyndon B. Johnson, blocked it and prevented its passage until he passed it himself seven years later as President. They are even unaware of the rampant racism within the Democrat’s ranks as evidenced by President Clinton’s comment that President Obama should have been serving him coffee or that Senator Byrd was a ranking member of the Ku Klux Klan and still habitually used the word nigger. If his heart had changed, would he still use that word? I don’t think so.

Earl Warren was appointed by a Republican President and his Supreme Court handed down the Brown v. Board of Education ruling that ended the travesty of Plessy v. Ferguson. The right values a man’s heart while the left looks at a man and only values his use to them. This is why Senator Joe Lieberman was cast off as soon as he was no longer of any use and Democrats and they even put him in blackface in order ridicule and diminish him.

These are the same people who say that they support our troops while they undermine their chances for success. They claim to love the freedoms of our nation and to deplore water boarding as torture, but when they have control of both the House and the Senate and one of their own is in the White House they keep such techniques for their own use. They claim that they are honest and ethical, yet they always run afoul of their own rules and the law or seem to have paid far less in taxes than they should owe, if they even bother to file a return at all.

As for the “counter protestors” to Glenn Beck’s event I think that I will quote the bard when he said, “The lady doth protest too much, methinks.”

Remembrance

I have heard it said that forgetfulness is the bane of man and I confess that I share that view. All too often we forget that which we should remember. Our heritage, our hopes and dreams, and most importantly, our freedoms are sometimes relegated to the back corners of our minds and left there neglected as we engage in our day to day activities. While it is true that we must earn a living and take care of our families and communities, we must also insure that such neglected concerns are resurrected so that they may be passed down to our children as we once received stewardship of them. Man is not an island and Western civilization stands upon the hopes, dreams, and knowledge of countless generations that came before. It is our duty as the next link in that long chain to contribute our share lest we risk bequeathing a second Dark Age to our children as the legacy of our failure.

Of course, when I mention the Dark Ages I am speaking of the fall of the Roman Empire and the Age that followed its destruction and consequent loss of man’s knowledge. That Age is commonly known as the Middle Ages today. Had the Moorish scholars and libraries not held some of the classical knowledge of ancient Greece and Rome that knowledge would have been lost forever and the Renaissance would have been stalled for centuries. In our time, we risk losing much more than knowledge. We risk losing our freedoms.

The word freedom means many things to many people, but I use that word in its classical American sense. American freedom allows a man a shot at greatness because he is not hampered by the government, it also allows him to decide for himself what is and is not important in his life, it also includes the freedom from someone telling him how to live his life or what to think, and finally, there is the freedom to speak his mind against a tyrannical government. Freedom is a phenomenon that is unique to the individual and therefore the collective can never truly know it because the collective is merely another form of slavery and that is why socialism is strangling the American dream.

The price of freedom is responsibility and self sacrifice and each citizen who lives in a free society must shoulder that burden, but before the citizen can act on those burdens he must first remember them. All across the globe there are those who would enslave men in order to empower themselves. Not necessarily physical bondage per se, but bondage nevertheless. They would bind a man financially through taxation to beggar him in order to limit his choices and with entitlements to foster dependence upon the state, ideologically to confine his mind and imagination, and with a spirituality that does not lead to salvation and enlightenment, but to the destruction of hope by poisoning the soul. Those of the left who seek this control will do everything in their power to insure that a man can never free himself from that control. This is ultimately the aim of the left whether they know it or not because leftist ideology feeds off of man’s own nature.

Man’s nature will always assert itself and it is our nature that guarantees the outcome of the left’s ideology. This is why the governments that are based on leftist ideology always end in suffering and the ones who suffer the most are the same ones that the left professes to protect and defend. This is because the weak must be permanently bound to the Party in order to front the moral high ground. While the left would say that they do this because they care, the simple truth is that it is done because it is politically expedient to do so in order to draw emotion into their cause. In the grand scheme of leftist ideology, man has no value. Only power has value. This is why the left establishes re-education camps and gulags when they have power concentrated in their hands.

The march of leftist ideology across the world can be seen in Europe, America, Canada, Australia, New Zealand, and in Central and South America and where its ideology has been tied with Islam it is particularly dangerous and virulent. The effects of such a joining are even now unfolding in New York City in the controversy surrounding the proposed Cordoba mosque. Does the Muslim have a constitutional right to build a mosque there? Yes, but the blatant disregard and utter contempt for the feelings of their neighbors reveal their true intentions. On the one hand, they expect others to bend over backwards for them, but spit in the face of their fellow countrymen. They desecrate our national flag, disrespect our traditions and heritage, and they act as the aggrieved party whenever they receive any criticism despite the justification. The reason that the Muslims are so bold is evidenced by the cowardly actions of Mayor Bloomberg and President Obama supporting the building of the mosque in defiance of the will of the American people. They do not do not support the Cordoba mosque because they believe that it is the right thing to do, but because their support is throwing a bone to the Muslims with the expectation that they will get political support back from them in the future regardless of the damage to the psyches of the families of the victims and of the American people. While the left arrogantly believes that they can control Islam, the future will prove them wrong.

In addition to supporting fringe elements of society, they also work tirelessly to collapse the U.S. economy. When the manufacturing czar intends to dismantle the engine of capitalism brick by brick, what do you believe will happen to the economy if he succeeds? As government spending spirals out of control, money is being flooded into the hands of the public each and every day since March of 2008, and the nationalization of commercial banking, industry, and the healthcare system all spell looming trouble for the American people. Worse, we do not even know how bad a shape we are in because the government keeps multiple sets of books and lies incessantly about how much is spent and on what. If that were not enough, the States are also going bankrupt setting the stage for a total implosion.

As an example, California is in deep trouble despite being the third largest economy on the planet. This is because of sanctuary cities, entitlement programs, hostility to business, and leftist policies in general. You see, California has spent itself into oblivion exactly as the Federal government is doing right now. You and I know that the only way to stop the bleeding is to stop spending, but those in government have a different philosophy: spend your way out of poverty. Sounds like an idiotic thing to do, but that is Keynesian economics. If you have never heard of Keynesianism, it is why during the Great Depression of 1929 the world took two years to recover economically by using Adam Smith’s model and America took ten years to recover. However, the economy was more robust than it is now and could stand the damage of Keynesianism and the tinkering of politicians better than can the economy today, although it would likely never recover under that system. The constant policy changes of the government kept investors off balance and they therefore held on to their capital until things settled down. The economy rebounded only because of the transition to a war economy secondary to World War II and not due to the politicians and their constant tampering.

Today we are faced with an unstable economy that has the markets going up and down like a yo-yo and a government that is all over the map scaring the hell out of investors and therefore preventing any sort of recovery. With recent events in the market, the picture grows more ominous and big time investors like Mr. George Soros are bailing out of Wall Street before it comes down like a house of cards. The question is: what does Mr. Soros know that we do not? In short, he knows that leftist policy is bringing our nation to the brink of destruction and that the American dream is dying. The leftist lickspittles in the media would have you believe that Santa Clause is coming to save the day if you vote Democrat, but the reality is that is exactly what brought us to this point in the first place.

We must remember how we arrived at this point in our history. The government sought to benefit itself and not the American people. Our elected representatives only yielded platitudes and boilerplate as we earnestly begged them for answers. At town halls prepared by our representatives, we were laughed at and scorned for our concerns and chided because we did not show proper respect for our betters. Congressmen and Senators ignored the will of the American people and shoved unwanted legislation down our throats in order to grow their own power as a new aristocracy and in so doing they returned us to taxation without representation in our own government. They did this in order to feed their own egos and to accommodate their lust for power. Worse, the man who would be King finds himself as nothing more than an emasculated fop and pawn of communists and unions as our nation suffers. He is a man that apologizes for America at every opportunity overseas while he shows obeisance to dictators and foreign Kings. The American flag did not dip in respect to Adolf Hitler at the 1936 Olympics, but I believe that this man would have done so and called such an obsequious act a mark of civility.

We must remember the unmitigated arrogance of our elected officials who mocked the patriotism and character of citizens who recognized the incompetence and corruption of Washington as our supposed representatives legislated behind closed doors and in secret. We must also remember how these same men and women used our most precious national documents as doormats for their mad quest for personal power at our expense. Where is the separation of church and state when the American government sends an Islamic Imam overseas on our dime in order to secure funds for his mosque or when government supports the building of a mosque of conquest on the site of the deadliest attack on American soil while it steadfastly denies any assistance to a Christian church destroyed in the 9/11 attack in the same area? The government really does believe that we are stupid and we need to remember that as well.

Hardship is likely coming and while America burns President Obama is on vacation, again. The American people are no strangers to suffering and hardship. At Valley Forge, George Washington said "To see men without clothes to cover their nakedness, without blankets to lie upon, without shoes ... without a house or hut to cover them until those could be built, and submitting without a murmur, is a proof of patience and obedience which, in my opinion, can scarcely be paralleled." If you take a look at the picture that accompanies this post, you will see what General Washington was talking about. What could give a man such obstinate courage in the face of privation? I will give you that answer, it is belief.

Belief is the seed from which faith springs. The men at Valley Forge believed in the cause of freedom and in relief from the tyranny of the King. They believed so strongly that they were willing to suffer the bitter cold of winter without shoes or even without clothing. They held that conviction so strongly that they had faith that God would not abandon them in their fight and so they endured all that the elements could throw at them. They endured starvation, frostbite, and the specter of death which stalked them through the winter and on the battlefield. We enjoy the fruits of their belief to this day and we also need to remember that.

In Ancient times, Xerxes wanted to be reminded about the actions of the Athenians in bringing about the freedom of the Ionian Greeks from the Persian Empire and so he had a servant remind him each day at breakfast with the phrase, “Sire, remember the Athenians.” I believe that we need to remind ourselves of the actions of our former servants else we will not repay them when Election Day comes. We should remind ourselves each day of the growing tyranny of our government, the out of control spending, the arrogance of our former servants, and the threat to our very way of life that these people pose. Congressmen and Senators stopped being public servants long ago and we must do something to correct that.

We must remember that it is we, the American people, in whom the values of freedom and the love of a just God are deposited. When you read the preamble to the United States Constitution it says, “We the People of the United States, in Order to form a more perfect Union, establish Justice, insure domestic Tranquility, provide for the common defence, promote the general Welfare, and secure the Blessings of Liberty to ourselves and our Posterity, do ordain and establish this Constitution for the United States of America.” The words “We the people” means us, the American public. It is from us that the power and authority of government is derived by our consent and that consent may be withdrawn at any time because the American people are sovereign as individuals. We loan our sovereignty to the government in order to speak for us collectively overseas and to defend us from our enemies, but when a long train of abuses and usurpations bring about a new tyranny upon this continent, then it is time to act and our first act should be to use the ballot box to express our displeasure with our government and change it while there is still time.

What I am saying is that we must recall our duty to our nation and to ourselves and our children and that we must act decisively to defend freedom and our American values. The ballot box is our weapon against the corruption of Washington D.C. and it can restore our Republic. But I beseech you to remind yourself each and every day what these jackals did and to exercise your liberty to change the government that does not serve you. Otherwise, we will prove to be poor stewards of the freedoms that we now possess.

Live free or die

On Leave ** Updated **

** I have written about my grandfather's life on Reflections of a Night Watchman. If you would like to know more about the man that he was, the story can be had there.

My Grandfather passed away last night and this blog will be on hiatus for two weeks while my family grieves. His death marks the end of an era for me. When he was born, many of the technological advances that we take for granted were not present for him. His grandfather had fought in the Civil War and had been a prisoner of war in Andersonville Prison where he survived until his release at the end of the conflict. Grandpa served in the U.S. Army himself as one of the last, true Cavalry soldiers, and he served the City of Richmond as a Policeman for forty years until he retired as a Police Lieutenant in 1974. He raised me and my brothers after my dad took off when I was five, and was a guide post when we needed direction and advice in our adult lives and he will be sorely missed. Grandpa was two weeks from his 97th birthday.

I will write about his life in more detail, but I will post it on “Reflections of a Night Watchman,” my seldom updated personal reflections blog. This blog will resume on August 30th.

We The People

“When, in the course of human events, it becomes necessary for one people to dissolve the political bands which have connected them with another, and to assume among the powers of the earth, the separate and equal station to which the laws of nature and of nature's God entitle them, a decent respect to the opinions of mankind requires that they should declare the causes which impel them to the separation.

We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable rights, that among these are life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness. That to secure these rights, governments are instituted among men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed. That whenever any form of government becomes destructive to these ends, it is the right of the people to alter or to abolish it, and to institute new government, laying its foundation on such principles and organizing its powers in such form, as to them shall seem most likely to effect their safety and happiness. Prudence, indeed, will dictate that governments long established should not be changed for light and transient causes; and accordingly all experience hath shown that mankind are more disposed to suffer, while evils are sufferable, than to right themselves by abolishing the forms to which they are accustomed. But when a long train of abuses and usurpations, pursuing invariably the same object evinces a design to reduce them under absolute despotism, it is their right, it is their duty, to throw off such government, and to provide new guards for their future security. --Such has been the patient sufferance of these colonies; and such is now the necessity which constrains them to alter their former systems of government.”

You will recognize the above text as the words of the Declaration of Independence. The two paragraphs above make clear these principles:

1. The people are sovereign and must consent to loan their authority to any government

2. That decency and respect must be observed

3. That the rights of man come only from God and therefore cannot be created by man

4. That the individual is more important than the collective masses

5. That equality is the right of all men as individuals and under the law

6. That it is the right of man to free himself from an oppressive and tyrannical government

There is a reason why the founding fathers deposited political power into the hands of the American people. It was because it is only they who can be fully trusted with it. No government can be trusted with raw power because such power tends to concentrate into the hands of a few men and thus are tyrannies and despots born. This is because it is in man’s nature to seek power for himself and to accumulate as much as he can in his lifetime in order to establish dominance over others. If political power is reserved to the people alone, then each citizen acts as a check upon the other and nobody acquires too much power and therefore the balance cannot be threatened.

The people also act as a check upon the government. Most high schools teach about the constitutional checks and balances, but never have I heard of anyone teaching about the people’s check of power on the government outside of the founders. Those who roam the halls of power in Washington do not wish you to learn that you possess that check in order to protect their own accumulation of power. This is why the government no longer listens to you.

Even as citizens protest in anger in the streets of the nation, those in Washington call them Astroturf and jeer and ridicule them for their efforts. The American people have been asleep for so long, that the Federal government no longer has any fear of the citizen at all and that has led to the arrogance and elitism displayed by the mighty in Washington as they wipe their shoes upon the U.S. Constitution as the government seized control of one sixth of the U.S. economy with Obamacare.

Never before in the history of the United States has a citizen been forced to purchase a product because he is alive. The government calls this a tax, I call it tyranny. The people of America were vehemently opposed to this ridiculous idea, but the Federal government rammed it down our throats anyway with a tart rejoinder that the bill had to pass before we, the American people, could learn what was in it. Yet, the President and the Congress had sworn that the process would be open and transparent. What was delivered was opaque and done behind closed doors with the intent of keeping the American people ignorant, but this is not new.

The government keeps multiple sets of books so that they can lie to the American people with a set of doctored papers to back them up and if that does not work, they can always feed a list of numbers to the GAO and get their asses covered that way. With our national debt exceeding 90% of the GDP and Congress still spending massive amounts of money to pay off their friends in education and labor, it is likely that we are digging our way to China. One day however, the bill will come due and the American economy will collapse. Don’t believe that? Then check out why Greece’s economy collapsed and why the European Union is chewing their finger nails. If the economic picture were not so bleak, there is the nationalization of industry and the banks to be concerned about.

Regardless of what lies the Congress and White House tell, the truth is that they are Marxists/socialists/progressives who despise capitalism. In fact, they wish to see the greatest engine for wealth creation taken apart brick by brick in order to make us all poor. That is why there are so many communists and Maoists surrounding the President, as Czars, and in the Congress itself. It is why they nationalized the commercial banks, it is why they nationalized two thirds of the auto industry, and it is why they socialized medicine despite the vehement opposition of the American people.

Don’t think that they have not preserved a means of lining their own pockets though. The Chicago Climate Exchange is the best example of their greed. Why do you think that the Federal government is still pushing Cap and Trade to save the planet when global warming has been exposed as a massive fraud across the globe? Because Cap and Trade will allow them to sell a non-existent product to solve a non-existent problem and you are the guy who has to pay for it. Business will be forced to purchase carbon credits and will pass that cost on to you, the consumer. In fact, your energy costs alone will rise by more than $1,000.00. Then there are the taxes.

Sure the government is printing money morning, noon, and night, but you can’t keep paying your bills with fresh money or you will end up like Zimbabwe. That means that new taxes are on the way to the American citizen and they are going to be huge. One of the ways that Congress will seek to pay for its incompetence is to create the Value Added Tax or VAT. In Europe, the VAT is a happy little tax that dramatically increases the cost of living for the wretched citizens overseas. The Congress and the President hope to bring that here so that they can pay for the newly created welfare state that they have created in addition to your income taxes. Maybe if you are lucky, you can keep 20 cents on every dollar that you earn, if you still have a job that is. Then there is the emasculation the military.

The use of the U.S. military for social experimentation has long been a leftist habit. It began in the 1970’s when we tried to feminize the American military and bleed off its testosterone in an effort to make it a kinder and gentler thing. Today, we give soldiers medals for cowardice, sorry, I mean restraint. The next thing you know, the administration will reward soldiers for dropping their weapons on the field of battle and running away screaming like a little girl. They will probably call that medal the NOW medal. I believe that the job of any military is to kill people and to destroy infrastructure and manufacturing. Unless I am very much mistaken, you cannot do that in a friendly way. By expecting anything else from the military you are sacrificing more blood than is necessary to win. If that means more civilian casualties, then so be it.

I do not blame the government for these ridiculous programs, I blame us. We allowed it to happen and some of us even cheered for it. We the people, have a responsibility to discharge while the soldier does his job overseas. It is our responsibility to insure that we protect and defend the U.S. Constitution from its enemies in the Congress and the White House and we do that by voting the bastards out of office. This is not about any political party. This is not about who gets more power. This is about freedom and what future we will bequeath to our children. Honest men will have differences of opinion, but when the government usurps the authority and sovereignty of the citizen with the intent of consolidating their power, it is time to act decisively.

The rule of the public was meant to be done by the States because the State is closer to the people than is the Federal government. Yet, the Federal government seeks to also usurp the power and authority of the States and this is why 37 State legislatures have introduced legislation asserting their rights under the 10th amendment. The power and size of the Federal government is such now that our very freedoms are threatened. If we do not act now, there is no guarantee that we will still have that prerogative in the future. We must awaken our neighbors, friends, and associates and urge them to stand for freedom come November and to clear the Congress of its corruption. If we do not, then we will richly deserve the government that we live under.

Live free or die

The Republic Is Burning

I do not mean the title of this post to be figurative. The American Republic is truly in danger. Not from any outside force or foe, but from within. The United States of America is poised to head down the same road that took Greece and later, Rome. For centuries, nobody believed that Rome could fall. There were no enemies strong enough to topple her, but social, cultural, and moral rot corrupted the values of Rome and so she fell, not from any external enemy, but from her own apathy and once she was down the wolves were at the corpse tearing it to pieces. Such will be our fate if we do not awaken.

Our Republic was not the first independent government upon this continent. The men who fought the revolution first founded a confederation of the states and chartered it under the Articles of Confederation. They did this because those men did not trust that the government would remain passive in the lives of men so they made that government weak by design. Unfortunately, that design was too weak and the central government was a failure. This was because a fierce independence burned in the hearts of the patriots that founded our nation. They had already fought one war to secure their freedoms and they did not want to fight another for the same reason because they were reckless in creating the new American government.

After a period of years, the people of the United States was forced to conclude that a new government must be created in order to secure the freedoms of later generations, and so the Constitutional Congress was convened to do just that. Two hundred and forty-two years later, the people of the United States are faced with a similar crisis.

Unfortunately, our crisis involves a government that is too strong rather than too weak. That the Federal government has grown too fond of its power is evidenced by its neglect of the American people and the arrogance evinced by the legislators who see themselves as aristocrats and not as servants. This is why elected leaders seek to chide the public for not showing them the courtesy and honor one would expect from a plebian. Thus it is that our government no longer serves our will, but rather its own. This is why the American people are faced with tyranny again so long after the Revolutionary War. But why has the government grown so unruly?

The answer to that question is simply because the American people have grown apathetic and lazy. No longer are most Americans aware of their heritage. No longer do they know the history of their people’s struggle. No longer do they ferociously fight to maintain their independence from oppression, but rather seek it so that they do not have to take care of themselves as free men and women. In short, the American people have fallen down on the job.

Our founders took great pains to insure that the Federal government would be constrained by its charter, the United States Constitution. Each and every elected official in Washington has sworn an oath to protect and defend it, but they care not for the most precious document in America. I have witnessed Congressmen publicly flaunting the highest law of the land and violating their oath of office in the process. Representative Pete Stark even said that he does not give a damn about the Constitution. Nancy Pelosi, the Speaker of the House of Representatives asked a reporter if he were serious when she was questioned about what Constitutional authority she and the legislature was operating on in order to bring about the current healthcare law. If these people do not care about the constraints of the law, then why the hell should we? There can only be one reason why these people would disregard the U.S. Constitution: they no longer care because it is their will that is the law and not the will of the American people. That is the core of the arrogance and contempt that the Washington politician has for you, the citizen of the United States of America.

It was known that one day, a time would come that would test the courage and will of the American people. Such a time came once before in American history and the result was the Civil War. Today, in our time, we are again faced with a turning point in history. Do we allow the Federal government to run amok and enslave the American people or do stand for honor, virtue, and our founding principles? Already the government has forged the chains and fetters of financial slavery to be affixed to our descendents and now they conspire to rob us of our rights as well by dismantling the capitalist system, the very reason for our high standard of living and wealth, and imposing socialism upon us. Thus, the socialists and Marxists will at last have their way as the torch of liberty is doused.

I say that it is time to stand up for what is right. To reassert our will upon the jackals in Congress and to force them to either respect and listen to the will of the American people or be forced out of Washington. This is our nation and it is our government and I will not stand idly by while the dregs of humanity attempt to run my life and rob me of my freedoms while they simultaneously line their pockets with my money. The incompetence of the Washington politicians and the treachery of the news media have damn near enslaved all of us. If you do not know your history or the source of your freedoms, then I urge you to educate yourself.

Stand for what our founding fathers brought forth on this continent. Insure that the American government respects and abides by the people’s will and finally, defend the virtues that gave us freedom from tyranny. Else, prepare yourself for the chains of slavery.

Sic Semper Tyrannis