Get your own Free Home PageRep. Sonny Bono, who died in a skiing accident, once told a good story about how he got into politics. He owned a restaurant, and a city bureaucrat was giving him fits about a sign.
After Bono had jumped through all the hoops, the bureaucrat still wouldn't approve the sign and told Bono, ``There's nothing you can do about it.''
Bono replied, ``Oh, yes, there is. I can get elected mayor and fire you.''
And he did.
More Americans ought to follow his example. Many seem to have forgotten that the government belongs to them and that elected officials and bureaucrats are their servants, not their masters. Many Americans seem not to realize that any law can be repealed, any bureaucracy abolished. They seem unaware that Congress can impeach federal judges, limit the jurisdiction of federal courts and, if it chooses, reduce the number of Supreme Court justices to three.
The status quo is not set in concrete. Americans just have to remember that the point of the American Revolution was that sovereignty and rights reside with the people, not with the government. The Declaration of Independence is the philosophical statement of the revolution. Its basic premise is that the only legitimate purpose of government is to protect the God-given rights of the people and that we can, and have the duty to, alter or abolish any government that becomes abusive of those rights.
Alas, Americans have this great power, but too many are just too busy to use it. They have left government to office-seekers, those people who, in the words of P.J. O'Rourke, achieve fame and power without merit. The truth of his observation is in the resumes of most officeholders. A large number of them are devoid of any achievement other than winning a popularity contest.
Some Americans seem to think that government doesn't matter as long as they have a job and a television and can make their credit-card payments. Of course it's bad government that allows the credit-card companies to charge rates that would be called usury if a gangster charged them. It's bad government that has cost millions of Americans their jobs by encouraging corporations to move jobs to cheap-labor countries. It is bad government that has inflated the currency, burdening you and your posterity with a $5 trillion debt. It's bad government that sells your foreign policy to the highest bidder, putting Americans in jeopardy. It's bad government that takes nearly 40 percent of your income and delivers far fewer services in return than most European governments.
It's only a slight exaggeration to say that bad government has given the American people socialism but without the benefits of socialism. We get the high taxes, the restrictions on our liberties, the elephantine bureaucracies but virtually no economic security. An American who loses his job is in far more economic peril than a European who loses his job.
Economic risks would be acceptable if we, in fact, had a free economy and a free society, but we have neither. A Basque friend once remarked it was easier to start a business under Spanish dictator Francisco Franco than in America. Under the guise of political correctness, free speech is more in danger than ever before.
But all of these bad things are happening to us by default. There is no army or secret police forcing bad government on us. We are doing it to ourselves. Too many Americans have grown timid.
Sure, if you question affirmative action, someone will call you a racist. If you question foreign aid to Israel, the Israeli lobby will call you anti-Semitic. If you stand up for Christian morality, someone will call you a bigot. That's how those enjoying the privileges of the status quo avoid legitimate debate. As the song says, though, if you ain't brave, you ain't gonna stay free.
Robert E. Lee was born on Jan. 19, 1807, and died on Oct. 12, 1870. In between, he lived a life that won universal admiration and remains today as good a role model as any mortal could want.
Lee went to West Point, where he was second in his class overall and first in artillery and tactics. He would later serve as superintendent of the military academy as well as on the Western frontier and in the Mexican War, in which he first gained hero status.
Of course, most people know of Lee as commander of the Army of Northern Virginia in the War Between the States or, as we Southerners call it, the War of Northern Aggression. As brilliant as he was on the field of battle, where he always fought with fewer men and less resources, his true greatness was as a man, not as a soldier.
When asked after the war whom he thought was the greatest soldier on either side, Lee replied without hesitation, ``A fellow I've never met -- Nathan Bedford Forrest.'' Forrest indeed was a phenomenon -- a man with no formal education or military experience who turned out to be a natural military genius on the level of such men as Frederick the Great. Forrest, a fearless and fierce man, could summon demonic fury. Though a Confederate general, he killed 31 people personally and had 29 horses shot out from under him. Forrest was admired by his men -- but Lee was loved.
Pete Longstreet, one of Lee's generals, said of him, ``His soldiers respected him as a military leader but they loved him as a man.'' After the awful slaughter at Gettysburg, the survivors of Pickett's charge begged Lee to let them try again. Few men have ever inspired such devotion and affection.
After the war, some bedraggled and half-starved Confederates came to Lee's home, where he patiently awaited his fate. These men had found a valley with a narrow entrance, and they wanted Lee and his family to come live there. They would, they said, defend him to the death before they would allow the Yankees to arrest him.
A day or so later, a Yankee sergeant, a big Irishman, appeared at the door with a basket of food. He had served with Lee on the Western frontier and heard that he might be hungry. He wasn't, and Lee's sons, as they had been instructed, declined all offers of assistance. But the sergeant persisted and Lee, hearing the commotion, came to the door. He said he would accept the gift if the sergeant would let him donate it to the men in the hospital.
The Irishman grabbed Lee in a bear-hug and, with tears streaming down his rough face, said, ``Oh, God love you, Colonel Bobby. I was on the other side (of the Atlantic) but if I could have gotten back, I'd been with you still.''
What was it about Lee that caused this phenomenon? He was a true Christian for one thing. Supremely competent, organized and brave, Lee was also humble and simple. He never boasted of victory and never blamed anyone else for his defeats. He never in public said an unkind word about anyone, North or South. He shared the hardships of his men during the war and the hardships of defeat afterward.
Alexander Stephens, the Confederate vice president, said that he met Lee at the beginning of the war and later after his string of military triumphs. ``He was exactly the same man -- humble and almost child-like in his simplicity,'' Stephens said.
Lee, who had become world-famous, was showered with offers of high-paying jobs. He was even offered a free estate in England. But unlike a lot of modern generals, Lee did not think it right to profit on the suffering and valor of his men. He accepted the job of president of the then nearly bankrupt Washington College (now Washington and Lee University) for $1,500 a year. He refused all offers to make public speeches.
Lee actually was what most of us wish we could be.
Post-modern imperialists are having a hard time dreaming up enough bogymen to justify their transnational fleecing and otherwise meddling in the internal affairs of other countries.
They seem to be trying out germ warfare now. Several articles have appeared recently in uppity publications about the horrors of biological weapons. And, of course, the assertion -- without evidence -- that Saddam Hussein is making biological-warfare weapons is the current excuse for maintaining the embargo -- better known as keeping Iraqi oil off the market in any great quanities.
We all grow germs. In fact, we cannot avoid them. I was just reminded of that when a late-night hunger pang prompted me to eat a cup of yogurt that I belatedly discovered had been hiding in the refrigerator a year past its expiration date. Powerful stuff, 2-year-old yogurt.
Nevertheless, you should take a realistic view of risks. Terrorists of all political persuasions on the average kill 200 or 300 folks, sometimes fewer, globally most years. On average, about 90,000 Americans do themselves in each year in accidents.
Perfectly all-natural, organically grown viruses, bacteria and microscopic parasites likewise kill several million people each year globally without any political agenda at all. They kill them by just doing what comes natural -- finding a warm place to live and reproducing. It's impossible that terrorism will ever come within seeing distance of Mother Nature's record of natural mayhem.
Your chances of dying while having fun are much, much greater than being sent west by a terrorist. In fact, your chances of winning a lottery are greater than your chances of being the target of a terrorist. It is, as risks go, negligible.
How many U.S. congressmen, for example, have been killed by terrorists in this century? None. How many by trees? At least one (Sonny Bono). If you are fond of worrying, worry about your bathtub, automobile and stepladder -- those things are real weapons of mass destruction.
If you insist on worrying only about foreign threats, may I recommend the vast stores of nuclear, chemical and biological weapons in China and Russia? The future course of Russia -- especially given the proclivity for blundering by the Clinton administration -- is unknowable. The Chinese government, we know, doesn't like us and considers us its most likely No. 1 enemy.
Nearly all of the writing in the Chinese military publications is about how to defeat the United States in a future war. And just 90 miles away is that criminal psychopath, Fidel Castro, who harbors an intense and irrational hatred of the United States.
Worrying, of course, is a useless thing to do. Better than worrying would be to pressure our own government to eliminate the injustices that cause terrorism. That's the only way to prevent it. Injustices and bad diplomacy that condones and even commits injustices are generally the cause of war and terrorism. Terrorism is a form of war by people too poor to afford an army.
Another way to prevent war is to maintain a strong defense force and if you insist on finding something to worry about, I would suggest worrying about what the Clinton administration is doing to our national defense. Weakening it, to put it succinctly, is what the Clintonites are doing.
Better yet, take a cue from our 19th century ancestors who recognized that if you fear God, you need not fear anything or anybody else.
As Christians would say, do your duty and leave the outcome to God. As Buddhists say, do your best but don't worry about the outcome.
And don't be conned by scare-mongers with hidden agendas.
The anti-death-penalty crowd has seized on the pending execution of a 38-year-old white woman in Texas to repeat their fallacious arguments against justice.
Karla Faye Tucker, 38, killed two people with a pickax. She boasted at the time she had an orgasm each time that the ax landed. Now, she says, she has been born again, and this has prompted some preachers, Pat Robertson included, to seek clemency for her.
If Tucker has found Jesus, then she should welcome the opportunity to meet him face to face. Her relationship with God has nothing to do with her relationship with the state of Texas. God will do as he pleases with her; in the meantime, the state of Texas should kill her and send her on her way to heaven or hell.
The only way a society can demonstrate its respect for life is to take the life of those who murder the innocent. To say that if you murder the innocent, the taxpayers will let you sit on your butt, read books, file appeals, watch television and, sooner or later, despite political promises, be paroled is to spit into the face of the victims and their loved ones.
Only one punishment is appropriate for murder -- death. It should be administered promptly. Nor should any time or money be wasted trying to make it painless. It would be appropriate, but messy, to kill the murderer the same way the murderer killed his or her victims, but I'll settle for hanging, a firing squad, gas chamber or electric chair. Preferably in public.
Lethal injection is just a sop to the squeamish and, for all we know, is as painful as any of the others. The point is that we should not be concerned about the comfort of the condemned.
I despise opponents of the death penalty. When I think of all the sweet, innocent people who suffer extreme pain and die every day in this country, then the outpouring of sympathy for cold-blooded killers enrages me.
Where is your sympathy for the good, the kind and the innocent? This fixation on murderers is a sickness, a putrefaction of the soul. It's the equivalent of someone spending all day mooning and cooing over a hand full of human feces. Sick and abnormal.
I also despise death-penalty foes because they are anti-democratic. Having lost their argument in the democratic process, they resort to propaganda and throwing monkey wrenches into the court system.
Then, to add hypocrisy to their contemptible behavior, they have the gall to say the death penalty should be abolished because it's too slow and too expensive. It is, of course, only because of the antics of the death-penalty foes and the irresponsible behavior of some judges who want to substitute their ideological beliefs for the law.
Liberal elitists should be careful. It is a dangerous thing to deny people justice. The term ``death squad'' did not originate with political assassinations. It was first used in a country where a group of police officers, fed up with a broken criminal-justice system, decided to execute the worst of felons released on the public.
Vigilantism is always a result of a failure of the state to perform one of its most basic functions -- providing justice. People who sabotage the criminal justice system and who deny people justice are stabbing the heart of civilized society. And they are playing with fire in a dynamite factory.
People can endure poverty, hardship and grief. But injustice burns the soul like white phosphorus. Injustice has fathered more violence and more revolutions than anything else.
Let us preserve our society by working to make it a just society.
The reason the debate about abortion cannot be resolved is quite simple. It is a moral issue on which compromise is impossible.
To compromise, both parties must agree on the same basic premise. Easy example: If I wish to sell my house and you wish to buy it, we can compromise on the price. If I do not wish to sell my house and you want to buy it, no compromise is possible. The same is true if I wish to sell but you don't wish to buy.
Mutually exclusive propositions cannot be reconciled -- ever. In the case of abortion the two propositions are mutually exclusive. One is that it should not be legal to kill unborn children. The other is that it should be legal to kill unborn children.
As you can see, no middle or common ground exists. To say that it is OK to kill unborn children with a few restrictions is not a compromise. It still says it's OK to kill innocent children, provided you kill them in the womb or, in the case of partial-birth abortions, as they emerge.
It is an awful thing for a state to authorize the killing of innocent children. In 1992, the last year for which I have statistics, 1.5 million children were killed. They had done nothing to deserve death except have the misfortune to have been conceived by two human beings who didn't want them.
American abortionists have killed three times as many American children as the Nazis killed Jews. Abortion is commercialized mass murder.
The toll of abortion goes beyond the innocent lives that are snuffed out in mini death camps, usually under the most squalid conditions. Mothers, except for the psychopaths and genuinely stupid, who have their own children killed pay a terrible price in remorse and often psychological problems. Furthermore, the practice brutalizes society as a whole.
How can any rational person complain about violence on television while condoning lethal violence against the most defenseless members of society? Which do you think sends the message that taking human life is a casual business -- the actual killing of 1.5 million babies in a year or the make-believe killings on the screen?
How can anyone complain about executing a criminal psychopath while condoning the killing of 1.5 million innocent children and not brand himself pathologically hypocritical?
A politician who states that he personally disapproves of abortion but will not try to stop it reveals himself as an immoral opportunist. It is the same as a politician stating that he personally disapproves of rape but will not take steps to make it illegal. It is the duty of a legislator to inject morality into legislation.
As for the U.S. Supreme Court, it requires serious constitutional surgery. Who but a moral and mental midget would say that the right of privacy, nowhere mentioned in the Constitution, authorizes one to commit infanticide? If the right of privacy authorizes one to kill children, why does it not authorize one to kill others? Since when did the United States ever take the position that murder is a private affair, not to be interfered with by the government?
It is generally accepted by people of all political persuasions that a government that commits or authorizes the mass murder of innocent people is an evil government. No one can purport to be good while doing evil. And the doublespeak trick of calling evil good and good evil will never keep you out of a well-deserved hot place.
Therefore, one has no choice but to conclude that the U.S. government is currently evil.
That seems radical, but is killing innocent people not evil, and does the U.S. government not legalize the mass killing of innocent people? Even Americans who have turned irresponsibility and evasion of reality into high art will have difficulty evading that conclusion.
The Clinton administration and probably the Republican leadership are going to try to tax you $14.5 billion to bail out the big New York banks.
They will call it ``our share'' of an international relief effort for the Asian economies. That's a bunch of hooey. It will be used to pay off the New York banks that made loans to the Asian tigers, which now resemble sick kittens.
It's the same as the Mexican deal, which also was a bailout of the New York banks. It would be all right if the giant banks shared their profits with taxpayers. They don't. But when they face losses, it's to heck with free enterprise and let's bribe Congress to dump our losses on the backs of single mothers, bricklayers, coal miners and shoe clerks.
To paraphrase Winston Churchill, this is something up with which you should not put.
Fortunately there are a few brave congressmen, or perhaps I should say unbought congressmen, in both parties who oppose this raid on the taxpayers by the obscenely rich.
It is in your self-interest -- about $14.5 billion worth -- to help them and register your opposition to this bad policy. You can tell the Grand Old Party phonies, such as Newt Gingrich, that the free enterprise they say they support means eating your own losses and not resorting to the socialistic scheme of dumping them on the taxpayers. You can tell the Democrats that they had better remember who their constituents are or else they can face the next election, hoping that David Rockefeller lives in their district so he can vote for them.
Now you will be regaled by the president, probably by Gingrich and Trent Lott, ex-cheerleader, defender of female Air Force adulterers and liars, and majority leader of the Senate. You'll get a big load from Madeleine Albright and the Federal Reserve Board and Jim Leach, that funny-looking guy (he always looks like he just swallowed a lemon) who chairs the House of Representatives Banking Committee.
You remember the House Banking Committee, of course, which did nothing to prevent the savings-and-loan collapse and then stuck the taxpayers with nearly half-a-trillion bucks.
All the lapdog newspapers will be howling for the bailout, too.
So what's new about the international bankers and the internationalist politicians raping the American taxpayers while they pile on the cow manure by purporting that it is not a rape but a noble, responsible act opposed only by backward isolationists and ignorant people?
Nothing. It's just time to stop playing their game.
Maybe I'm just an ink-stained version of Don Quixote, but I refuse to believe that the capacity of the American people for indignation is stone-dead. Americans stopped the fast-track rip-off (though we will have to fight that battle again this spring), and they can stop the Asian-New York ripoff if they make their feelings known.
It really is unforgiveable to bail out rich, giant corporations with money taken from the sweat of people who work all their lives and are lucky to end up with a cheap funeral. Politicians who do that deserve to be tarred and feathered, a once-honorable expression of public contempt. I suppose, because of changing times, we would have to Super-Glue and rubber-foam them, but that would work just as well.
And don't feel sorry for New York banks. They will also rape the Asian countries by buying up bankrupt industries for pennies on the dollar. If the international bankers have their way, it will be business as usual -- the taxpayers will be nailed for the cash and the Asian countries for their assets. And the multinational bankers once again will have mugged justice and retired to Fat City.
Are you up for a good political fight?
We all have need of heroes -- people, who by their behavior, inspire us to live closer to our ideals.
I'm sure most of you are as nauseated as I am by spineless, cowardly public officials who dance and dodge all over the issues and never commit themselves to anything.
Well, let me introduce you to a hero. He is Sheriff John J. McDougall of Florida's Lee County. He is what is most dreaded in the decaying world of post-modern America -- an honest man who is not afraid to speak truth to political correctness and the little totalitarians running around these days.
McDougall got a snide letter from an abortionist, stating that he was being frightened by protesters and demanding that the sheriff protect him. Here is the exact text of Sheriff McDougall's reply to the abortionists:
``Acknowledging your certified letter dated Dec. 1, 1997, I have read with great interest the questions set forth in your letter.
``You specifically asked me the question, `If I am a baby killer, I would like to know which baby I have killed? ... and more importantly to question the neglect of your department that is not prosecuting someone for killing a baby. If I have slaughtered a child, the same applies.''
Now you can imagine how the average politician would wiggle, squirm, deny, evade. Here's what my hero said:
``Let me begin by saying loud and clear the only reason you have not been prosecuted for killing babies is because of the United States Supreme Court, which by the way is the same court that once legalized slavery, prevents me from carrying out my duty since they legalized baby killing (abortion). Come on, doctor, let's call it what it is, every living baby you abort, you take away their life and the lives of their children and all future generations.
``You mentioned that as a result of these abortions you and your wife feel threatened by `barbarians' who would protest and question what you do. Tell me, doctor, did those tiny, defenseless babies feel threatened when you ripped them out of their mother's womb? Were they fighting for their lives when you began your slaughter? Did these tiny defenseless babies feel threatened when you dumped their lifeless bodies in the trash behind your abortion (baby killing) clinic?
``The Office of Sheriff, Lee County, Florida, must and will carry out its constitutional duty, to protect and serve every citizen, even a baby killer like yourself. Rest assured, we will also protect the rights of all persons who wish to exercise in a lawful manner their first amendment right of free speech as they protest and confront you for the atrocities you have and are committing against God and Humanity.
``We will also do everything within our power to assist the protesters who wish to protect the misguided mothers who come to your clinic of death. I can only hope and pray that God gives you the wisdom to see what you and your staff are really doing before it's too late. I will pray for you and pray that God gives you the insight and wisdom to stop the horrible life that you have chosen. Sincerely, John J. McDougall, Sheriff.''
Now, don't you love this guy?
This is the kind of public official America needs if it is ever going to get back on the right track. Cowards and dissemblers in public office are the curse and eventual death of self-government.
Notice that Sheriff McDougall pledges to uphold the law strictly, both in regards to the abortionist and to the protesters, but he nevertheless was not afraid to express his own moral disapproval of abortion.
That's what is needed in America: people who are not afraid to express moral disapproval. The whole political correctness movement is designed to silence people with intimidation. Sheriff McDougall has given us an example of what an American official could and ought to be. God bless him.
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