A major reassessment is needed. We really do need to free our minds from conventional wisdom. All of us have been underneath a massive weight of propaganda our whole lives and much of what we think is true is false – even those of us who have done the most to break free are still largely working on the assumptions that there was some logic and decency behind the actions controlling our society this past century or more.
Trump sparked massive Establishment outrage when he placed his name on the Kennedy Center. They acted like someone had urinated on the Washington Monument. The fact that the Kennedy Center had decayed and was a mere slush fund for the Left didn’t matter…Trump was the person violating all decency by putting his name on it! But even in the debate back and forth on it – I think it is enormously funny – everyone was missing the part about whether or not there should be a Kennedy Center.
JFK was very much a Greatest Generation/Boomer phenomena. That is, it was all an act – the appearance of excellence masking a sordid and rather incompetent reality. But now the Greatest Generation is almost all gone and the Boomers are aging out. I was born in late 1964 so I’m the very tail end of the Boomers…and I’m sixty one. The Boomers who really set the tone were born fifteen and twenty years before I was…and they are pushing or over eighty. That is, there aren’t a lot of people left who care to defend that time period. Once upon a time, “where were you when you heard Kennedy was shot?” was a meaningful social benchmark…I wasn’t even a gleam in Dad’s eye at the time. You’d have to be at least 72 to have an even partially connected memory of it. To have it be really meaningful, you’d have to be eighty or more. And now we can look back and wonder just why so much angst was invested in the event?
Sure, it was a shock and, yes, significant questions persist to this day about just how it happened and why. But as for the man, himself, there isn’t much to say. A mediocre junior officer in the Navy during WWII massaged into a very media-driven political career where the showmanship far outstripped the statesmanship. My Dad was a Democrat in 1960 but he voted Nixon that year on grounds that JFK was a lightweight (though Dad had reservations about Nixon as well). That towards the end we have indicators that JFK was waking up to the fact that he was a mere facade is neither here nor there – before he could do anything to buck that reality, he was dead (and might be why he died)…and the actual legacy is not too great. Impelling us on to the Moon shot was significant but almost all the work was done after he died. Other than that, we have the Bay of Pigs fiasco, the totally blown Cuban Missile Crisis, backing down on the Berlin Wall and our increasing involvement in Vietnam as what Kennedy left us. However you slice it, this isn’t the stuff of Eternal Flames. Or Kennedy Centers.
I’ve long thought about writing a booked called Unserious Men – it would be about all the leaders of the West since prior to WWI who have simply run us up on the rocks over and over again…and who are for the most part highly honored to this day. But just taking it from the American perspective, I rate our successful Presidents since the Civil War as these:
Grant, Cleveland, McKinley, Coolidge, Reagan and Trump.
That’s it. The rest ran from incompetent to malevolent (and often both). A series of people who worked the system to climb the greased pole and wind up in the office of the most powerful man in the world. Not people who thought seriously about what was best or what theory should govern action…just work it. Fake it till you make it. Get the brass ring no matter what. They weren’t alone, of course: for each one who made it there are a dozen who twisted and turned mightily trying to climb that pole but failed in the end. On the other hand, the men I rate as successes did have a theory and wanted to see it implemented…and their political efforts weren’t directed towards getting themselves into office, but their ideas into reality. Huge difference.
One might say that we owe some respect to those who managed to get into office. I say, no. The office is a place of respect…but if a disreputable man enters it, then it is besmirched and it can only be cleaned by casting out the dirt. That is, saying what the occupant was. Defining our terms. Not letting our sense of politeness or nostalgia allow things to slide. When Trump put up those insulting placards on Biden and Obama’s pictures, that was a necessary purgative. Sure, it was also Trump’s sense of humor…but Biden and Obama are not the good guys. In office they were cruel, greedy, spiteful and incompetent. They poisoned American politics…perhaps beyond cure (though we still hope for a cure). And for no other reason than narcissism…they both of them thought they were the greatest men alive. But to be bi-partisan here, I also have great disdain for W these days…the man took the loyalty of the GOP base and simply turned his back on it. We stood up and fought for the guy for eight years. Trusted him. Invested in him. Thought he was at least trying to do the right thing. And since he left office he’s had plenty of nice things to say about the Clintons and Obamas, but when the Clintons and Obamas call us racist Nazi traitors…dead silence. That also poisons American politics…it is a grave act of omission. It is consent to having Obama poison us. And once you’re part of the conspiracy in any form, you’re totally in the conspiracy…even if you didn’t mean to be.
And it is all over the place. You take a look at the massive corruption Walz has presided over in Minnesota and you know that it wasn’t just him – it was everyone who worked with him. They all knew. And then you realize that this type of corruption has been going on for decades…so that means when the GOP had total control of the government in, say, 2005, it was going on and nobody did anything about it. Which means the GOP knew and was in on it as well. I recall that when one of Peter the Great’s ministers was caught stealing he sentence the man to be knouted (beaten with a thick leather truncheon) and it was common soldiers who did the beating…after a time, Peter ordered it to stop but the soldiers, drenched in sweat and breathing hard from their effort (they had gone at it with a will), said, “just a bit more, Little Father: he stole the bread out of our mouths!”. That is the sort of attitude we have to start taking towards these people…that money wasn’t just a figure on a balance sheet…it was your grandmother’s in home care that was denied, it’s that decaying bridge at risk of collapse, its your brown-out for lack of up-to-date power lines, it is the wounded veteran waiting ten years to get benefits, it is the peeling paint in your local school…it is your sustenance that was stolen, kicked back and remitted to Somalia and Mexico.
The condition our country is in isn’t an accident. It was deliberate. It was brought here by people who think they’re better than everyone else and this gives them a license to steal and to not care about how many people who die in the process. They need to be beaten within an inch of their lives…not given a statue. And until we start treating them as they deserve, we really can’t break the chains they’ve bound us with.
Blogs For Victory 
One of the things about modern life that bothers me the most is the non-stop efforts of those who would make a living by defrauding other people, and that number just seems to keep rising. I would estimate I get a couple hundred emails a day, about half of which go directly to my spam folder. It’s rare that I open any of those emails, and I only read 10% of the ones that make it into my inbox. The rest are either trying to sell me something, misinform me or defraud me. As you say: disgraceful.
I’ve reached a mental and emotional tipping point when it comes to fraudsters. One day, after dealing with the same kinds of stuff you talk about, I realized that if one of those identity theft guys walked into my office I would be perfectly happy just shooting him and stepping over him to go get a trash bag and a mop.
I don’t mind legitimate sales efforts, annoying as they can be, but the efforts to defraud or steal go way beyond my tolerance level. I use Outlook for my email and I can supposedly report these efforts, but I think the “REPORT” link on Outlook just sends everything into the round file. Outlook does do a decent job of filtering out junk mail—-every now and then I look at my Junk Mail folder and see a lot of stuff piled up in there, often a dozen or so of the same thing that came in one after another in a cascade of repetition.
I have my credit cards set to text me for every transaction, and I usually get a notice by the time I am in the parking lot. My bank notifies me of every transaction. Now that cell phones don’t show the origin of the caller I do answer most calls because the area code is meaningless, especially here in Florida where so many of us have area codes from “up north”, but I can usually tell right away if it’s a solicitation call and just say “I don’t talk to phone solicitors” and hang up.
That didn’t work with car warranty callers, so I finally got really happy to hear from them, because I had been thinking I needed a warranty. “How many miles are on your vehicle?” “246,000 miles and I really need a warranty”. That seemed to get me off the master list. Saying no, hanging up, all kept me on the list but being undesirable seemed to do the trick.
I finally got rid of my land line two or three years ago because 90% of the calls were solicitations or scams. It didn’t take long for those folks to get my cell phone number, and the calls began to mount, up to 15-20 a day. My ring tone is the Navy Hymn, and is quite loud, so the unwanted calls got to be really annoying. I did a little research and discovered that you can set an iPhone to not ring when the caller is not in your contact list. The call still appears in the recent call list, and occasionally I get someone calling that I want to talk to but is not in my contact list, but they almost always leave a voice mail.
I got rid of my land line, too—-I only had it because it was part of a cable TV/internet package—but I still use the number when one of those annoying demands to “register” pops up when I want to buy something online. I only used it to find my cell phone.
In Toronto, three Muslim men were recently arrested (that alone is worth a headline!) for trying to kidnap women, mostly Jewish women, to make them sex slaves. Islam is primitive and savage and intent on taking over Western civilization.
I suggest that every naturalized Muslim be required to publicly restate rejection of his or her original citizenship and swear, unequivocally, to allegiance to the United States and our rule of law. Would many/most lie? Of course. But violation would or at least should bring about immediate revocation of citizenship and deportation.
Starting with Ilhan and Tlaib.
“We, the Palestinian people,” said Abu Ayada, “obey and submit to the orders of Allah. And we know that the war that the Jews are leading against us is for no reason.” He meant that there was no political or economic reason for it, for he continued: “People who think that this is a war against the resistance and its missiles are deluding themselves,” which means that all those pro-Hamas agitators on college and university campuses nationwide are deluding themselves, but of course, we knew that already.
“This is a war,” Abu Ayada declared, “between Islam and disbelief, between Islam and Judaism, between the distorted faith and the true Qur’an, the true belief. I say to the people: we are confronting the Jews. This is a religious and ideological war. Anyone who wants to get out of this war and watch from the sidelines will be dealt with by Allah. We are pleased with the decrees of Allah.”
So much for the claims of pro-Hamas Americans who claim that the poor oppressed “Palestinians” are just fighting for survival, against a vicious genocidal foe.
“Fatah’s exhortation to jihad also includes this: “Fight them, and Allah will punish them by your hands, and he will lay them low and give you victory over them, and he will heal the hearts of people who are believers.” That also is from the Qur’an (9:14) and expresses one of the biggest differences between Judaism and Christianity on the one hand and Islam on the other.
While both the Jewish (Deuteronomy 32:35) and Christian (Romans 12:19) traditions say that vengeance for wrongdoing is up to God, and not for any individual to pursue, the Qur’an tells Muslims that they are to be the executors of the wrath of Allah: he will punish errant human beings by the hands of the followers of Muhammad.
This is how the jihadis who kill Israeli civilians wholesale can do so while believing they are doing nothing less than carrying out the will of the one and only God. They believe those whom they killed to be enemies of Allah and the Muslims, and consequently to have deserved everything they got, and more.”
We need to remember that in the eyes of Islam all of us who are not Muslims are also “infidels” and therefore on the list of those to be eliminated in the name of Allah.
BTW, this is a parallel to the Left’s strategy of claiming that anyone not on the Left is an enemy, “justifying” nonstop personal attacks, slanders, libels and incitements to violence.
Richard the Lionheart and Saladin fought each other for years – and in the end, after a compromise peace was agreed to, Richard said he’d be back in five years to try again. Saladin, for his part, replied that if he had to lose his lands, he’d rather lose them to Richard than to any man alive. Muslim and Christian warriors, convinced of the justice of their cause…and, in the end, friends. Because it is only those who believe in something who can really fight or make peace. Who can be fully human.
The defining mark of the 21st century in the West is unbelief. Even most of those who go to Church every Sunday don’t believe. And we are confronted with people who do believe – and we’re losing the fight overall because the believer will always defeat the unbeliever. Christians could take the fight to Islam and, likely, work out a reasonable peace…cowardly atheist Westerners can only continue half fighting and three quarters surrendering.
Not really much of an exaggeration:
Help me out here—-is this a “bombshell” situation, or just “the walls closing in”? We already know it must be a threat to democracy, but does it rise to the level of being an “existential” threat?
(Gomer Pyle voice:) Surprise, surprise. //sarc
The only question I have is, why is she not in Leavenworth?
Well, she’s black and Somalian so she is safe when it comes to Minnesota “law” so it will take a federal offense to get something going. I don’t know what federal laws she has broken other than immigration fraud. She may end up just being deported, with a few million dollars tucked away in some offshore account.