Rush Appreciation Day

My company has softened its stance on employees listening to radio programs through their computers. Time was when we simply couldn’t. This strict rule was understandable, given the customer service orientation of our company. However, I am not involved in customer service and my phone hardly ever rings; I find e-mail communication much more effective and efficient.

The other day, I discovered I could now listen to Rush Limbaugh in the afternoons, rather than the odious muzak we must endure. This allowance came at most welcome time; truly, it was an act of mercy. As everyone on my aisle, save one, is “impacted” (that is, our last day of work is March 30th), they’ve taken to grousing bitterly about the unfairness of it all.

I refuse to join in the negativity. I understand the company’s decision and I don’t take it personally. Rather than join the pity party, I divide my remaining time between a last-ditch effort convincing the company I’m a writer worthy of my paycheck and preparing for the GREs so I can eventually earn my Master’s degree and a decent paycheck somewhere else, possibly one of the textbook publishers in the area.

I would much rather listen to Rush than my puerile co-workers. Yesterday, I was quite concerned at his monologue. He was saying that he received blogs from two different bloggers, one of whom likened free contraceptives to a free lunch. He couldn’t understand how the writer could be surprised that people want free things. He also took exception to the statement that Conservatives must do a better job of communicating Conservatism.

This, I certainly have written and stand by what I wrote. However, the assertion was not aimed at poor Rush Limbaugh. No one has done more, for a longer period of time, than Rush Limbaugh for the Conservative cause. No pundit has been stauncher or more faithful in propagating Conservative values. If Rush is feel slighted, we should declare a Rush Appreciation Day and let him know how valuable we find his broadcasts, and his newsletter.

Still, it was unfortunate that the caller he took just before he began the topic of the e-mail bloggers illustrated the very point about Conservatism. Say the name “Rush Limbaugh” (or “Glenn Beck” or “Ann Coulter”) and you’re met with derisive laughter and obstinacy.

I suspect it harkens back to the superstition about “hearing voices” in your head and the implication that listening to anyone on the radio is akin to listening to the Woosies, the imaginary voices my grandmother’s friend heard. The trucker who called admitted that he used Rush’s arguments but not his name for fear his small audience would tune him out.

My own mother scoffs at Rush, even though she’s a staunch conservative and was the one who got me listening to Rush, three days after he began broadcasting nationally.

We must do a better job of withstanding the laughter and not letting it intimidate us. We mustn’t let fools patronize us. Not when the debt is $16 trillion. You can laugh at Rush, Glenn and Ann, but it’s hard to laugh at or ignore such a sum. Mom wasn’t convinced by Rush’s voice, but she sure was convinced when she started reading his newsletter. I’d given my nephew a subscription but as he’s away at school, I had his subscription sent to my mother’s house. My brother visits on a daily basis now that he’s divorced, picks up the newsletter and mails it out to The Nephew along with his other mail.

Certainly, we small bloggers understand that people love free stuff. Nevertheless, they must be made, one way or another, to look at the bill, the price we’re paying for all these free things, in terms of freedom as well as taxes. It’s a sad fact that most people not only love free stuff, but tend to completely ignore the price they’re paying for it in the long run.

We must be more assertive in our communications. There’s nothing else and no one else for it but us. Our biggest problem is the Moderates, who plume themselves on their rationality, which consists of barring the door against Conservative reason and welcoming Liberal irresponsibility in for a cup of tea. They don’t want to fight. They don’t want to argue. They don’t want to appear “uncool.” At the very last breath, they would be obliged to take up arms in defense of liberty and that’s much too violent for their aesthete tastes.

Well, as matter of fact, I don’t particularly like guns, either. I cringe whenever I see a dead animal on the road and change the channel whenever I see hunting, be it animal v. animal, or man v. animal, is the topic. Yet I know that this is an unrealistic attitude in a very real world. If events continue apace, I will very soon be obliged to purchase a gun for self-defense.

If Conservatives seem foolishly surprised by this lust for free stuff as opposed to freedom, it’s only because until the Tea Parties, we had no forum of our own. Yes, there was Rush Limbaugh and Bob Grant before him. However, there was no way for we hobbits to speak out and certainly no known way to break down that wall between us and our moderate friends and neighbors.

We are not surprised, but we are appalled at the acceptance of free stuff and if we don’t start speaking up, we’ll all be enveloped in the collective colliseum, bread and circuses. Moderates are eaten up with vanity about their charitable natures and all too susceptible to charges of selfishness by Liberals for their success.

They must understand that far from forging a stronger, kinder nation, they’re fabricating a weak fabric easily unraveled. A chain of weak links will not hold. Every individual link must be forged with its own strength; it cannot be made stronger or supported by another. Even one weak link can cause the whole chain to break. A chain of weak links will simply disintegrate. Each individual must make him or herself stronger. No one’s muscles ever got stronger by someone else pumping them up and down.

We must, it appears, first strengthen those weak-minded links, the Moderates, before we can do anything at all about that other half of the country. Moderates must understand that they are not the other half’s mothers, nor should the government take on that role.

That is our communications task. Rush Limbaugh does a wonderful job in leading the way. Whether you say his name with pride, or judiciously withhold his name, knowing of your audience’s (however small it may be) prejudices, you must get the message across to your fellow Americans:

Freedom is imperiled and it is worth any cost to protect.

Lowering Our Defenses

At a time when it appears America is headed into a world war – the Chinese military build-up, Iran’s nuclear ambitions, its assassinations of Israeli diplomats, and the escalating drug cartel war on our own southern border, the imminent financial collapse of southern Europe, with rioting in the streets of Athens  – Obama is planning to reduce up to 80 percent of our nuclear warheads, along with other defense cuts in his fiscal years 2013 budget proposal.

According to the House Armed Services Committee, the Navy will have to mothball nine cruisers and amphibious ships and remove 16 more vessels slated for new construction.  Six Air Force squadrons will have their wings clipped. The plan also dispenses with some 130 air-mobility planes such as the C-5 and C-130, which do critical logistics work.  The Army will reduce its force by 70,000, to some 490,000 soldiers, closing down eight Brigade Combat Teams. There will be fewer leathernecks, too, with the Marine Corps shrinking some 20,000, to around 180,000.

Meanwhile, the Iranians are nuking up.  Iran announced today that they’re going cut off oil to six countries that have opposed its nuclear program, and that they have installed domestically-made nuclear fuel rods in their Tehran reactor.  Iranian agents are assassinating Israeli diplomatic officials, riding up to their cars on motorcycles, planting magnetic bombs and then speeding away.

After World War I, Great Britain and the United States happily sank their battleships in accord with the Treaty of Versailles, leaving them vulnerable in both the Atlantic and Pacific.  Meanwhile, Germany was developing modern submarines apace, much to the distress of Winston Churchill.

Now it is China who is developing stealth submarines.  One silently popped up in the middle of an American battle group, undetected until she surfaced.  In cybertechnology, long-range missiles, submarines, and nuclear warheads, and of course, personnel, China is outpacing the United States.  Sounding very much like the British Prime Minister’s advisers in the years leading up to World War II, China is striving for parity but has not reached it yet.  Churchill’s advisors gave them the hard, exponential numbers.  But the peace-loving Liberal Party would have none of it.

According to the Wall Street Journal, “During a visit to China [in December 2011], Michele Flournoy, the U.S. Undersecretary of Defense for Policy, told a top general in the People’s Liberation Army that “the U.S. does not seek to contain China” and that “we do not view China as an adversary.”

Still, U.S. military officials are wary and chary, talk of preparations for a war with an enemy who, thanks to diplomacy and political correctness, shall not be named.  Of great concern is a new long-range missile that can strike a U.S. aircraft carrier far out at sea.  Currently, a large aircraft carrier is in the dockyards, the U.S.S. Gerald Ford.  Able to carry a complement of 4,660 crew and a formidable arsenal, the ship is already a target of China’s new long-range missile.

The object is to keep American forces far from China’s shores and sea lanes, and the islands that are in contention, particularly in the South China Sea.  The distance is too far for any manned U.S. fighter or bomber to travel and the Ford is huge, putting over 4,000 personnel at a risk of destruction by a single missile.  Large ships were a mistake both the British and the Germans avoided during World War II.  Britain’s largest ships that had evaded the downsizing were eventually sunk by German subs, one of which slipped into Scapa Flow in the northern Orkney Islands and sank the Royal Oak.

The issue at hand is the same problem that sparked the Pacific campaigns in World Wars I and II, and Vietnam – the oil in the South China Sea.  What’s more, China’s cybertechnological build up has complicated the War in Afghanistan.  Liberals denounce wars for oil, but you don’t hear them complaining about wars over rare minerals, the kind used in computers and electronics, especially when it is the Communist Chinese benefitting by the mining of these minerals in Afghanistan.  Nor do you hear Liberals denouncing China for escalating a war over the oil off the coast of Southeast Asia.  They certainly didn’t mention during the Vietnam War, a fact that would have necessarily informed Americans’ view of that conflict.

Four major American allies lie within the first island chain and China wants to control them before America can build up her bases and defend them.  Obama has agreed to rent bases in Australia, but no closer than that.

Our position in the Middle East is just as bad, and Americans, disgusted with Islamist radicalism, are content to let them kill each other, and leave Europe to its own fate.  America is in retreat, looking very much like the shrinking circle of defense at the Dunkirk beachhead.  Churchill wrote that no war was ever won by evacuation, although it was absolutely necessary in that case, Britain had only enough manpower to defend her own shores; she could give no thought to an offensive war until she had enough armor and enough manpower.  She had to rely on a reluctant America to supply the deficiencies, and the manpower didn’t arrive until 1943.

This administration is forcing America to circle her wagons.  We have the ability to defend freedom.  We have the intelligence to understand that free trade is critical to a free world.  We can also understand that an isolated America will not long endure in a totalitarian world.  We have the manpower, the will power.  What we have lost is the manufacturing power, and what we definitely don’t have presently is the leadership.  A lesser country would have held a special election to get rid of this obvious danger to our nation’s future.

The presidential elections are now 10 months away.  Long enough for the current occupant of the White House to decimate our military, put the final nail in our economy’s coffin, and lock us into a permanent bureaucracy where a parent can be fined or arrested by the School Lunch Police.

Government Knows Best?

When I was young, in the first and second grade, I was a very poor eater.  Being a poor eater shouldn’t really be a problem when you come from a poor family.  We were so poor, my parents couldn’t afford the price of the school’s cafeteria food.  For my brothers, eating a bagged lunch was no problem at all.  Boys will eat anything you put in front of them.

Being poor in spirit as well as in appetite, being in the cafeteria filled with the aroma of hot food was a disincentive to eating my bologna sandwich.  Day after day I would nibble at my sandwich and bring the remains – and notes from the teacher – home.

All the pleas and arguments and rationalizations about our being poor and having to make sacrifices fell on deaf ears.  I grew thinner and thinner until finally my parents enrolled me, to their intense humiliation, in the school lunch program for the poor.

Having found what they believed was a chink in our family armor, my teachers sought to exploit that gap, peppering me with loaded questions about what a bad mother I had.  I knew something was wrong; I knew I was depressed.  Part of it had to do with my classmates, not my family.  As for the rest, I couldn’t put it into words, but I knew very well it wasn’t my parents.

The teachers would ask me leading questions, which I often resisted passionately, defending my poor mother.  “We know your mother mistreats you,” they plied.  “You can tell us.”  To which I would reply, looking at them as if they had three heads, “She does not.  She never hits us.  Neither does my father.  Mom yells a lot, but that’s all.”  Then they would write notes to her, quoting me as saying she was a bad mother, when I hadn’t.  If my mother and I didn’t have problems, we soon did.  Still, I trusted my parents implicitly and had nothing but contempt for my teachers.

When I was older, old enough to be reasoned with, I accepted bagged lunches.  These portable lunches allowed me to find someplace quieter and more pleasant than the cafeteria to eat my lunch, away from my bullying schoolmates.

I was in kindergarten the day our state’s Supreme Court ruled that school prayer was unconstitutional; it was my turn to say the milk and cookies prayer.  When I was very young, my mother taught me know to kneel down and pray every night to God to thank Him for our blessings.  She said I could also pray to Him anytime to ask for help and that He would answer.

Mom was right.  In one particularly dire situation, separated from my parents, I prayed to Jesus for help and help arrived just in time.  And as we were coming back to our 5^th grade classroom from sort of break, I anticipated the resumption of torment.  I put my hands together and prayed for deliverance.  The bully was right in front of me.  He had turned and noticed my folded hands.

“What?” he scoffed.  “Do you think you’re so much better than us?  Do you think you’re an angel?”

I’d learned not to answer him.  I wondered what sort of religious training he’d had, to think that’s why you put your hands together – to give an angelic impression?

‘No,’ I thought.  ‘I’m praying to Jesus to deliver me from you!’

The torment resumed only to be interrupted a short time later by mother, who burst through the classroom door, threatening the teacher with termination and the boy with expulsion.

I thank God daily for my parents, who always knew best, and I pray to Jesus for deliverance from a government that clearly does not.

Divorcing Ourselves from Moral Society

Yesterday, the New Jersey Senate handed gay rights activists an early Valentine by passing a bill to recognize same-sex marriages.  Gov. Chris Christie has vowed to veto the people, suggesting that the matter be put up for public referendum, instead.  Polls suggest that it would fail, something even Democrats acknowledge.

The vote was 24-16, a change from January 2010, when the Senate rejected the bill, 20-14.

According to Fox News, Steven Goldstein, chairman of the gay rights group Garden State Equality crowed, “It doesn’t mean the world is changing; it means the world has already changed.  So wake up and smell the equality.”

Legislatures can pass all the bills in favor of sodomistic marriages that they like; these will not make the marriage of two men or two women right in the eyes of God; and that is what marriage is about.  The government grants the license but God, not Man, sanctions the union.

Conservatives are not completely heartless.  If they don’t condone homosexual acts, they at least recognized the rights of Gay Americans to arrange their own affairs in pursuit of life, liberty and happiness.  Civil unions, no more right in the eyes of God than a marriage, were at least palatable to society in general.  They served the purpose of allowing homosexuals to live as they choose, and the rest of us to mind our own business.  Civil unions meet the equality test in every way except the procreation, something homosexual couples are utterly incapable of doing.

Only two real differences exist between civil unions and marriages for homosexuals:  they cannot force a clergyman to marry them and they cannot adopt children, and in the latter, the civil union laws could probably be amended, if they haven’t already. 

Fox News notes that New Jersey has no law or state constitutional amendment banning gay marriage, neither its court nor lawmakers have allowed gay nuptials.  Seven states and Washington, D.C., allow gay marriage.  In 2006, the New Jersey's Supreme Court ruled that the state had to give the legal protections of marriage to committed homosexual couples, but that it need not call those protections marriage.  Lawmakers then createdg civil unions.

Gay rights advocates say civil unions have not provided true equality. They complain that they set up a separate and inherently unequal classification for gays -- something social conservatives dispute.  Last month, Gov. Christie vowed to veto the legislation.  He said that such a fundamental change should be up to a vote of the people, and he has called for a referendum on the issue.  Democrat leaders responded by saying they will not allow a vote, arguing that a majority of the people should not be entrusted with deciding whether to protect a minority.

Gay-rights supporters believe they can get enough lawmakers on their side to override the veto.  Two-thirds of both chambers of the Legislature would have to vote in favor of the bill happen by the time the current legislative session ends in January 2014.  According to Fox, Sweeney hinted he knows which senators he'll try to persuade but won't name them publicly.

Sen. Raymond Lesniak, a Democrat from Elizabeth, said that if all lawmakers voted their conscience and didn't cave to political pressure, there would be enough Senate votes now to override a veto. And he said that some lawmakers could switch positions, partly because of the influence of gay friends or family. "You never know who's going to come forward -- a daughter, a son, a neighbor of significant meaning of a senator or assemblyperson -- and change a mind," he said.

Two Democrats voted no and two Republicans voted yes in what was otherwise a party-line vote.

“It is my opinion that our republic was established to guarantee liberty to all people,” said Jennifer Beck, a Republican from Red Bank who voted yes.  “It is our role to protect all of the people who live in our state.”

Sen. Gerald Cardinale, a Republican from Demarest, was the only senator to speak against the bill, saying allowing gays to marry goes against nature and history. "This bill simply panders to well-financed pressure groups and is not in the public interest," he said.

If homosexuals were such an acceptable and equal portion of society, they would not need to intimidate their Conservative relations by coming out of the closet to expose their so-called hypocrisy in voting their consciences.  This is how Liberals, or Progressives if you prefer, reward tolerance and mercy.

Not all homosexuals are on board with this type of legislation; they accept their status as minorities in a moral society.  Gay marriage is about more than two of a kind mating.  This about overturning the entire moral structure of our country.  This is about forcing clergyman to perform sacramental rites against their consciences.  The contraception mandate was Round One.  We’ve seen what Obama’s promises are worth, rescinding the conscience clause on Obamacare as soon as it suited him.

No minority should have the right to overturn such an institution as marriage to palliate them to the harm of the greater society. Yet,  thanks to the Civil Rights Act of 1964, as well as  the 14th Amendment, both of which have been judicially interpreted to include homosexuals as a minority, even if the bill is put up for referendum, the gay activists know they can challenge it in court, as California did.

The danger is that marriage will suffer the same fate as the conscience amendment.  Progressive assurances that the clergy will be exempt from religiously sanctioning such unions are as worthless as the previous promises were.

Obama has proven a most “faithless” president.  Time and again, he’s flouted the Constitution, broken promises, gambled away our money, flirted with foreign powers – did you know that Interpol now has jurisdiction to arrest U.S. citizens over American law, and that part of their mandate is to enforce Shariah law? – usurped control over our individual rights, particularly through Obamacare and will eventually seize all private property and hand control of it over to the United Nations through the Agenda 21 mandate.

America should demand a divorce from this president.

Everybody Does It

How ironic that the tragic death of singer Whitney Houston, at the age of 48, should have occurred on the eve of the Grammy Awards.   She joins a heavenly chorus of singers and entertainers who pushed the envelope, attained fame, and also abused drugs and alcohol.  They were everybodies who became somebodies and died ignomoniously - nobodies.

Bix Beiderbecke was a jazz pianist and self-taught cornetist, a contemporary of Louis Armstrong’s, who drank himself to death at the age of 28 in 1931.  Judy Garland died at the age of 47, a year younger than Houston.  Janis Joplin, Marilyn Monroe, Elvis Presley.  More recently, Amy Winehouse.  The cemeteries are full of stars who fell in their prime, as immortalized for their untimely deaths as for their talent.

Yet the fight to legalize drugs, particularly marijuana, goes apace.  The legalization battle is supported by everyone from George Soros to the Cato Institute, and even Brian Sack, on GBTV.  The titters from Sack’s audience as his guest described his illustrious career imbibing in and sanctioning the use of pot was more alarming than the ridiculous performance.  Could this man see himself?  He was the very caricature of why pot should not be legalized and what happens to someone who makes a career of it.

The argument itself is framed as a joke.  It’s totally harmless.  Look at how funny this guy was.  What a dope!  Tee-hee.  What a dopehead!  Tee-hee.  Calm down, relax, be cool; it isn’t hurting anyone.  Millions of people, particularly black people, are being jailed for nothing.

Rapper LL Cool, in commemorating Whitney Houston, made a plea for the legalization of drugs.  If only they’d been legalized, she’d be alive today.  Wait.  What?!  Houston had more than enough access to every drug imaginable.  She was one of those ultra-rich people who, if not above the law, easily find their way around it.  Michael Jackson is Exhibit A.  The problem isn’t that they didn’t have access to drugs; they had all too much access to drugs.

Pot isn’t addictive, experts claim.  But it is an hallucinogenic drug.  It makes you believe things that aren’t true.  It makes you think things are okay when they aren’t.  Pot is also the ultimate collective drug.  Just about every other drug in the known universe must be done individually. If you walk into a club, you can make the decision whether to pick up that glass of whiskey, or inject yourself with heroin or what not.

Smoking pot, however, is a collective act, a “shared” experience.  You have no say in the matter once the thing is lit up, except to leave.  Authorities right now are in quandary because they want to ban cigarette smoking, but allow marijuana smoking.  Cigarette smokers are a mighty unwelcome bunch.  But don’t worry about the pot smoke because once you inhale it, even second-hand, it won’t bother you anymore.  Tee hee.

Pot promulgators boast that their ambition is to get the whole world “high.”  No doubt.  Then we’ll all be of one mind.  No one will ever disagree.  No one will even think to disagree again.  They’ll just laugh it off.  If you don’t think so, just look at what sheep we have become about issues such as gay marriage, nationalized health care, and the ultimate nationalization of every industry in the country.  “Public-Private Partnerships?  Duh, what are they, man?”  “Uh – huh-huh, I dunno.  Let the politicians worry about it.  Here, have another toke.”

Not every pot user is so goofy as that Poster Boy for Pot on Brian Sack’s show.  But practically everyone under the age of 65 – the Baby Boomers - has done it now and while the effects are more subtle, they’re telling.  Standing up for what is right – traditional marriage and family, personal responsibility, hard work, saving your money instead of spending it all – are social faux pas; politically incorrect.  Don’t offend anyone.  Don’t say anything critical of Obama.  After all, he seems like a nice guy (and boss, I’ve heard that from many people, so don’t take it personally).

Pot is all about weakening individual resolve.  Pot may or may not be addictive, but peer pressure is.  Marijuana just helps the peer group along to undermine individual thought and initiative.  That’s why they call it the gateway drug; it was useful to drug dealers in getting their customers hooked on the stronger, more expensive addictive drugs.

The stuff plays on the ego, pretty much the way alcohol does.  “It doesn’t affect me; I can stop anytime I want to.”  Only, you’d have to drink half the bar away to get the same effect taking one whiff of that organic poison has on someone.  Some say it’s similar to the stuff in the American Indians’ peace pipes.  Except that we’re not exactly loin-clothed savages whipped up into a frenzy to scalp each other when the war is already over.

To the Liberals, we are savages, though.  Individualists who love their freedom and would ordinarily balk at the notion of collectivism.  They started passing out the peace pipe back in the Progressive Era back in the early Thirties to win over the young and avenge themselves on the West for the Opium Wars of the 17^th Century that decimated China.  Ask them (especially after they take a puff two) – they’ll be happy to tell you.

The real savages are the drug dealers making a fortune from fools.  They can well afford to buy off politicians and front pro-legalization, and kill anyone who gets in their way.  The ultimate goal is the institutionalization of this miserable drug.

People back in the 18^th Century were perfectly okay with slavery.  They saw nothing wrong with it and rationalized the practice by saying that the blacks were culturally and genetically inferior.  Who would buy such an argument today (other than some extreme, right-wing knuckle draggers)?  They even laughed and tittered about it.  Blackface routines, a scourge today, were extremely popular on the vaudeville circuit in the 19^th Century.

How was that idiot pothead cajoling Sack’s audience different from the Minstrels of the Victorian Era?  Whitney Houston admitted to being a party girl.  In fact, a pre-Grammy Awards party was going on in the hotel where she died, as she died.  She went on from pot to bigger things, just as she went from singing in her New Jersey choir to the Big Time.  Drinking and doing that stuff ruined a marvelous voice.

Most singers like Houston have what is called “Perfect Pitch.”  It means they can tell – and name – one note from another just by hearing it.  The drug and alcohol abuse corrupted that perfect pitch, and in her death, she has become the “Perfect Pitch” for banning drug use and cautioning against alcohol abuse.  No one should be laughing about pot today.