“Having been a guinea pig in the feminization of the American military plan for a very short time decades ago, I’ll share with you how this goes. The political factions within the Pentagon will begin tinkering with new ways to make it appear that women can do these heavy-lifting, grueling combat tasks by eliminating as many of the tasks from the physical standards as necessary to get women into these positions. The physical standards for men will lower and all sorts of concessions will be made to soften the ride for women to succeed in these jobs. They’ll desperately seek a few über herculean gruntettes to become the face of the new Amazon band of sisters for the full court press, to “prove” women are just as strong as men.”
“Marine Corps Commandant Gen. James Amos wants training officials to “continue to gather data and ensure that female Marines are provided with the best opportunity to succeed,” Capt. Maureen Krebs, a Marine spokeswoman, said Thursday.”
The Marine Corps embarked on a careful evaluation of female performance in combat skills this past year and their report submitted to the Secretary of the Navy rained on the parade of the feminist hoopla over the two female US Army officers who recently completed the US Army Ranger School . The Marine Corps report is available online and the highlights lead to huge questions about not only throwing open the doors to all combat jobs to women, but in my mind, it raises the question of whether slack was cut to the two female Army officers to get some females through the US Ranger School for political propaganda purposes. President Obama showed up for their graduation, which further suggests a political agenda at play and raises the specter that once again military brass might have compromised the truth to support Obama administration narratives.
Yes, there I said it, I am skeptical about whether some standards were lowered to accommodate women during this highly publicized and politicized US Army Ranger School effort to sell opening all combat jobs to women. I wonder about upper body strength skills, in particular. Having observed this sleight of hand in standards many times over the years, the Army brass often plays to the feminists within the Pentagon pushing female integration. No one ever admits to the standards being lowered, because for male leaders in the military to speak up is career suicide. In May, 2015 all 5 of the remaining females in the Army Ranger training had dropped out. They were then given a third chance to retry and graduated in August 2015. The feminists will argue their completion of the course vindicates opening all combat jobs to women.
The press cheered for the two female Army officers, but then along comes this report from the Marine Corps careful study and here are the key highlights:
Combat Effectiveness
Overall: All-male squads, teams and crews demonstrated higher performance levels on 69% of tasks evaluated (93 of 134) as compared to gender-integrated squads, teams and crews. Gender-integrated teams performed better than their all-male counterparts on (2) events.
All-male squads, regardless of infantry MOS, were faster than the gender-integrated squads in each tactical movement. The differences were more pronounced in infantry crew-served weapons specialties that carried the assault load plus the additional weight of crew-served weapons and ammunition.
Lethality:
All-male 0311 (rifleman) infantry squads had better accuracy compared to gender-integrated squads. There was a notable difference between genders for every individual weapons system (i.e. M4, M27, and M203) within the 0311 squads, except for the probability of hit & near miss with the M4.
Male provisional infantry (those with no formal 03xx school training) had higher hit percentages than the 0311 (school trained) females: M4: 44% vs 28%, M27: 38% vs 25%, M16A4w/M203: 26% vs 15%.
All-male infantry crew-served weapons teams engaged targets quicker and registered more hits on target as compared to gender-integrated infantry crew-served weapons teams, with the exception of M2 accuracy.
All-male squads, teams and crews and gender-integrated squads, teams, and crews had a noticeable difference in their performance of the basic combat tasks of negotiating obstacles and evacuating casualties. For example, when negotiating the wall obstacle, male Marines threw their packs to the top of the wall, whereas female Marines required regular assistance in getting their packs to the top. During casualty evacuation assessments, there were notable differences in execution times between all-male and gender-integrated groups, except in the case where teams conducted a casualty evacuation as a one-Marine fireman’s carry of another (in which case it was most often a male Marine who “evacuated” the casualty).
Health and Welfare of Marines
In addition to performance, evidence of higher injury rates for females when compared to males performing the same tactical tasks was noted. The well documented comparative disadvantage in upper and lower-body strength resulted in higher fatigue levels of most women, which contributed to greater incidents of overuse injuries such as stress fractures. Research from various U.S. and allied military studies reveal that the two primary factors associated with success in the task of movement under load are 1) lean body mass and 2) absolute VO2 Max. Findings from the physiological assessment of GCEITF males and females conducted by the University of Pittsburgh’s
Neuromuscular Research Laboratory include:
Body composition: Males averaged 178 lbs, with 20% body fat: females averaged 142 lbs, with 24% body fat
Anaerobic Power: Females possessed 15% less power than males; the female top 25th percentile overlaps with the bottom 25th percentile for males
Anaerobic Capacity: Females possessed 15% less capacity; the female top 10th percentile overlaps with the bottom 50th percentile of males
Aerobic Capacity (VO2Max): Females had 10% lower capacity; the female top 10th percentile overlaps with bottom 50th percentile of males
Within the research at the Infantry Training Battalion, females undergoing that entry-level training were injured at more than six-times the rate of their male counterparts
27% of female injuries were attributed to the task of movement under load, compared to 13% for their male counterparts, carrying a similar load.
During the GCEITF assessment, musculoskeletal injury rates were 40.5% for females, compared to 18.8% for males
Of the 21 time-loss injuries incurred by female Marines, 19 were lower extremity injuries and 16 occurred during a movement under load task
The Army produced the required female poster gruntettes needed for propaganda, as I predicted, but the Marine Corps produced a careful study on combat performance. Sadly, all soldiers will suffer if we play along with the feminist Amazon mythology. The truth is females are biologically weaker than males and here’s the blunt truth, to quote this Marine Corps report:
“A military unit at maximum combat effectiveness is a military unit least likely to suffer casualties. Winning in war is often only a matter of inches, and unnecessary distraction or any dilution of the combat effectiveness puts the mission and lives in jeopardy. Risking the lives of a military unit in combat to provide career opportunities or accommodate the personal desires or interests of an individual, or group of individuals, is more than bad military judgment. It is morally wrong.”
The following information is from the blog, Refugee Resettlement Watch, run by Ann Corcoran, a homemaker on her rural farm, who began investigating the US government’s refugee policy since 2007. Corcoran reports:
“Federal refugee resettlement contractors on board—have upped the number to 100,000 Syrians”
Within her article are lots of links and she includes the list of non-governmental contractors whom the federal government pays big bucks to handle the relocation of refugees in America. Please note that most are religious charities:
The refugee crisis engulfing Europe may seem like a “not our problem” issue here in America, but the Obama administration has not closed the door firmly on resettling more refugees from the Mid-East here. At http://www.msn.com there’s a short news article which states:
“WASHINGTON — The Obama administration is opening the door to the possibility of allowing more Syrian refugees into the United States, marking a subtle but significant change in the White House’s thinking about how best to respond to the mounting humanitarian crisis.
“The administration is actively considering a range of approaches to be more responsive to the global refugee crisis, including with regard to refugee resettlement,” said Peter Boogaard, a spokesman for the National Security Council, said Monday.”
Here’s a link to a USA Today news video, stating that the White House must decide on next year’s quota of Syrian refugees the US will take in by October 1st and also states many Democrat Senators are urging President Obama to drastically increase the number of Syrian refugees.
Although, the refugee crisis at the moment is not a US problem, these murmurs in the news serve as warning bells and it seems likely another massive White House effort at writing a narrative and selling it to the American people will launch soon. I wrote a piece yesterday on things to keep in mind:
The photo of a little Syrian Kurdish boy, Aylan Kurdi, who washed up on shore in Turkey, when the boat his family was in overturned, has become the face of the Mid-East refugee crisis. The world now faces another of those media-inspired propaganda blitzes to force action. Americans need to tread with extreme caution and learn from last year’s Central American “refugee” illusion.
Last summer Americans fell prey to deft propaganda about some, as heretofore unknown, Central American crisis fueling the large influx of illegal immigrants, many children, from that region. The story took flight and suddenly the media produced stories about a gang crisis in Honduras, as the impetus of this influx. Even the New York Times splashed, “Fleeing Gangs, Children Head to U.S. Border.” Reporters rushed to Central America and reported on the terrible gang violence and drug cartels wreaking havoc.
A Huffington Post piece, by Matt Garcia, spells out the semantical magic wand waved to poof these illegal immigrants into protected “refugees fleeing violence”. Garcia writes:
“The upsurge of 240,000 migrants in recent months, 52,000 of them unaccompanied minors, has unleashed the same arguments we’ve witnessed in the endless debates about immigration. But once we consider the twin questions of “why is this happening?” and “how should we respond?” it becomes clear that the current crisis is more of a humanitarian one than it is another chapter in our immigration debates.
The fact that many migrants have come from one of three countries–Honduras, El Salvador, and Guatemala–suggest that something is wrong there. Although critics of these refugees hate to admit it, the crisis exposes a legacy of flawed American policies in the region: from the CIA-inspired coup d’état in Guatemala (1956), to bribes of Honduran officials to suppress export taxes on bananas by U.S. agricultural conglomerate United Fruit (in the late 1960s and through the mid-1970s), to the US-financed Contra Wars in Nicaragua that consumed its neighbors, and the CIA involvement in Guatemala’s civil war (the 1980s).”
Eureka, it’s all our fault, in this roundabout reasoning, which permeates the political Left in America. If you, being a daily news reader, like me, wondered how this terrible crisis in Central America passed unbeknownst to you, well, it’s because the media, leftist activists and the Obama administration manufactured this crisis to foster another of their “narratives” to sway American public opinion.
Many ironies, like Rahm Emanuel offering to take in refugee children fleeing Central American gang violence to his lovely gang violence plagued Chicago or Nancy Pelosi pontificating that these illegal immigrant children should be treated like refugee Jesus, provided dark humor elements to this surreal crisis, as I tried to figure out, “what in the heck is going on here?” Then, conservatives from Glenn Beck to George Will jumped on board the “save the poor refugee children” bandwagon and after that the story faded from the headlines and this Central American crisis, likewise disappeared too.
The key to understanding the situation lies in understanding how the Refugee Resettlement Program, run by the U.S. State, Health and Human Services and Homeland Security Departments operates. Ann Corcoran, a homemaker working on her farm in rural Maryland, has researched and tracked this program since 2007 and created a website, Refugee Resettlement Watch, to provide information, which our own government tries to shield from scrutiny. Within this Refugee Resettlement Program, many Christian charities rake in big bucks from the federal government to assist in care and relocation of “refugees.”
A conspiratorial mind might believe that the Obama administration calculatingly encouraged this influx of illegal immigration and used a manufactured crisis to give them protected status, all for partisan political purposes, like bolstering Dem voting demographics in key areas around the country. With this current Mid-East refugee crisis, the stakes rise much higher than partisan politics, where mistakes could jeopardize our national security.
Before America begins taking in an influx of refugees from war-torn Syria, Iraq, Libya and other people reaping the harvest of that other leftist propaganda, the not-so-glorious Arab Spring, we must demand a thorough airing and housecleaning of the Refugee Resettlement Program and the implementation of a careful vetting process. State and local governments should be informed by the federal government before refugees are relocated in their communities and outreach programs, geared at integrating refugees in communities should be implemented. Most of all the American people deserve truthfulness and transparency about the refugees brought into America. Within Pelosi’s “refugee Jesus downtrodden” from Central America were many violent gang members. Within hordes of Mid-East “refugees” the American taxpayer could be paying for travel and relocation of Islamic State terrorists.
Our national security should come before feel-good gestures. Perhaps, President Obama and his fellow, hand-wringing leaders in Europe might want to rethink their collective failure to deal with the Syrian crisis, the power vacuum they left in Iraq and crafting an Iranian deal, which lifts the sanctions and assures a path to the biggest state-sponsor of terrorism becoming a nuclear power.
Here’s a short post, which was a comment by Minta Marie Morze, that deserves more prominent visibility:
The most important and implacable truth about maintaining civilization and raising gentlemen and ladies is that it has to be taught—it has to be a heritage that is specifically and individually passed on generation to generation, and specifically and openly valued.
The stories, the “narratives”, the legends and myths, the movies and TV series and quotations and historical references people know and understand, all have to envelop the citizen of a civilization with magic and wonder, with ethics and manners, with decency and heroes that demonstrate the shared values.
In The Lord of the Rings, Frodo, one of the key heroes, gets to a certain point in the daunting journey of salvation and he says he just can’t go on with his mission, it’s too difficult, he’s faced too many dangers and the future looks like it will be even worse. His buddy is the lowly Sam, traveling with “Mr. Frodo” to fetch and carry and guard. At yet another moment in the adventure, they have barely escaped death and face even more peril, Frodo barely can speak:
Frodo: I can’t do this, Sam.
Sam: I know. It’s all wrong. By rights we shouldn’t even be here. But we are. It’s like in the great stories, Mr. Frodo. The ones that really mattered. Full of darkness and danger, they were. And sometimes you didn’t want to know the end. Because how could the end be happy? How could the world go back to the way it was when so much bad had happened? But in the end, it’s only a passing thing, this shadow. Even darkness must pass. A new day will come. And when the sun shines it will shine out the clearer. Those were the stories that stayed with you. That meant something, even if you were too small to understand why. But I think, Mr. Frodo, I do understand. I know now. Folk in those stories had lots of chances of turning back, only they didn’t. They kept going. Because they were holding on to something.
Frodo: What are we holding onto, Sam?
Sam: That there’s some good in this world, Mr. Frodo… and it’s worth fighting for.
It’s High Noon and Die Hard and Gunsmoke and the Longest Day and the man at the end of the movie saying to the children, “Stand up. Your father’s going by” and even George C. Scott turning around at the end of the film and going back into the hospital—but you all know them, don’t you, so many titles, so many characters, so many moments that thrill you no matter how many times you’ve seen them, so many moments when you feel the strength and the passion of Truth and Honor and the Hero . . . .
It’s Todd Beamer saying, “Let’s roll!”
You raise your children to be ladies and gentlemen, to honor the Good, to recognize and acknowledge the Hero and the Heroic, to know how “to fill the unforgiving minute with 60 seconds worth of distance run”—because there is thunder and magnificence in Sam’s “there’s some good in the world, and it’s worth fighting for.”
For a completely different take on the Donald Trump vs Megyn Kelly dust up, G. Murphy Donovan penned an amazingly blunt assessment of “tampon politics”, “Rosie, Megyn, Carly and Hillary”, at New English Review. Being a very sparse TV viewer or tabloid reader, I learned the details of the long-running Trump vs Rosie feud and was presented a New York perspective too. GMD writes:
“You are more likely to encounter misandry, not misogyny, on the daytime chat circuit. Indeed, the daylight airwaves and audience are dominated by shallow girls and girly men. Real men and women are usually busy at real jobs between nine and five.
Maybe somebody needs to explain the “New York way” to Megyn too. If a bully gives you a fat lip in Queens, you respond with a bloody nose. And if you behave like a “pig” in the Bronx, no one treats you like a lady. And if you are loud and rude in Manhattan, you might get a network chat show, but you are not a victim. There are enough real victims in NYC like the now iconic Kitty Genovese, without squandering compassion on misandrist misanthropes.”
GMD wins bonus points just for using the word “misanthropes”, as he lays out the truth about the girl power club in America, yet I still disagree with him on Trump. The man who brags about writing, “The Art of the Deal”, should have been able to deftly disarm Kelly and her stink bomb question, much like Reagan often did, with calm aplomb and humor. Instead, Trump reacted in anger, then ran to CNN to whine about being treated unfairly on FOX, like a wussy. Later, he retaliated on Twitter, like a petulant 12-year-old boy. None of Trump’s responses though speaks to the hypocrisy of the feminists’ reaction, from Carly to Hillary, who closed ranks in feigned outrage nor answers why Kelly threw that stink bomb question in the first place. Very likely GMD called it correctly:
“Having it both ways is a time-honored American double standard, a kind of behavioral Title IX for politics. Hat tip to Orwell!”
“I always thought it was so very American, when we were back in the days when Americans were known to be brash and bold. But I want to point out something while I’m thinking about Shane and the Virginian—both of them had impeccable manners. It was actually pointed out in the books, not by saying it, of course, but by having someone notice it and be shown thinking about it. It was a part of each man. Polite, filled with decorum toward actions and other people. Decent. Even knowing which fork to use—I loved it. Because the books set out the best of all worlds.”
– Minta Marie Morze
My friend, Minta, serves not only as a trusted friend, she’s also part cheerleader and part muse to keep me writing. When she sent me her critique on my blog post the other day, where I had mentioned the 1902 novel, “The Virginian”, my thoughts turned to dissecting what it is about Donald Trump that bothers me the most. The answer has nothing to do with Trump’s political views or flip-flops. What bothers me is not just the brashness nor the bragging, it’s about his ungentlemanly behavior. His supporters cheer that he isn’t bowing down to PC, but here’s the truth, he isn’t offering an example of behavior that is any better. Going on Twitter and bashing Megyn Kelly as a ‘bimbo” doesn’t come across as “presidential”, but it also shouldn’t be acceptable behavior for any man. Yes, I mentioned the Kelly/Howard Stern interview in a previous blog post and I find her behavior questionable too. This all leads to the much larger topic of this post: “Where have all the gentlemen gone?”
It seems that almost daily we are assaulted by more left-wing social-engineering insanity, accepting every sort of sexual disorder and deviancy as just a lifestyle choice, the expansion of imaginary gender categories too freakish and numerous to keep track of, and on to the angry racial animus tearing at the very seams of American society. At the center of this turbulent storm swirls a core of rage and violence. We have a lot of angry people in America, especially young men. Across the seas lies another culture that has promised death to America, and the one thing they have in common with America is they have a lot of angry people too, especially men. So, here we go as I ponder the history of gentlemen. In a 2013 blog post, I delved into, “Why America needs gentlemen…. and ladies too”, but decided it’s time to revisit this topic.
In a 2013 column, Mark Steyn wrote about the groups of young black men engaged in knock-out crimes attacking innocent white passers-by. He wrote:
“As things stand, if white youths target a black guy it’s a hate crime, but vice versa is merely common assault. I doubt this would make very much difference. “No justification of virtue will enable a man to be virtuous,” wrote Lewis — and, likewise, no law can prevent a thug punching an old lady to the ground if the thug is minded to. “A society’s first line of defense is not the law but customs, traditions, and moral values,” wrote Professor Walter Williams a few years ago. “They include important thou-shalt-nots such as shalt not murder, shalt not steal, shalt not lie and cheat, but they also include all those courtesies one might call ladylike and gentlemanly conduct. Policemen and laws can never replace these restraints on personal conduct.””
The Islamic State nutjobs (more out-of-control young men) claim to be building a new Caliphate, as they crucify, behead, and topple every vestige of civilization, both modern and ancient. These barbarians apparently read about as much history as the New Black Panthers, the thugs rioting in Baltimore, Dylan Roof and all these other violent young men. Since 9/11 I’ve heard Charles Martel hailed for stopping the spread of Islam in Europe at the Battle of Tours in 732 AD. He stopped the Moors, who had conquered Spain, but it wasn’t until the late 1400s when the Moors were driven out of Spain. What followed was the Spanish Inquistion, where the Muslims and Jews were driven out of Spain and heretics (those who were not Christians) were rounded up, judged, then sentenced to extremely brutal punishments.
Most Americans, due to our lamentable education system, have no clue that the Moors(Muslims) in Spain had built an advanced civilization that far surpassed the rest of Europe at that time. I came across a passage in the 1943 book, “The Discovery of Freedom”, by Rose Wilder Lane, describing where the European code of chivalry originated. It came from the Muslim world. The Moors brought that code to Spain and during the Crusades, Lane notes the knights observed it in the Saracens’ world during their travels to the Holy Land. “Saracen” is an archaic term for Arabs/Muslims during the Crusades. Lane writes:
But the returning Crusaders brought back to Europe the first idea of a gentleman that Europeans had ever had. Until they invaded the Saracens’ civilization, they had never known that a strong man need not be brutal. The Saracens were splendid fighters when they fought, but they were not cruel; they did not torture their prisoners, they did not kill the wounded. In their own country, they did not persecute the Christians. They were brave men, but they were gentle. They were honorable; they told the truth, they kept their word. This ideal of a gentleman especially impressed the English. It is still producing perhaps the finest class of human beings on earth today, the men and women of the British ruling class. It is an ideal that permeates all of American life. This is what surprises so many people in many parts of the world, when they see and meet the common American soldiers and sailors.
Lane, Rose Wilder (2012-05-02). The Discovery of Freedom (LFB) (Kindle Locations 2118-2125). Laissez Faire Books. Kindle Edition.
“But Cordova was not merely the abode of culture,of learning and arts, of industry and commerce; it was the home where chivalry received its first nourishment.
Chivalry is innate in the Arab character, but its rules and principles, the punctilious code of honour, the knightly polish, the courtliness, all of which were so assiduously cultivated afterwards in the kingdom of Granada, came into prominence under an-Nasir and his son. “It was at this period that the chivalrous ideas commenced to develop themselves, joined to an ex- alted sense of honour and respect for the feeble sex.”1 Another competent writer states that chivalry with all its institutions, such as came later into existence among the Christian nations of the West, flourished among the Saracens in the time of an-Nasir, Hakam, and al—Mansur.2 Here came foreign knights under guarantee of peace and protection to break lance with Saracen cavaliers.”
Now, back to Minta’s astute observation that started off this post, well, here’s a passage from, “The Virginian”, where the Eastern visitor describes his first encounter with the Western cowboy, who happens to be the Virginian:
“As we went, I read my host’s letter–a brief hospitable message. He was very sorry not to meet me himself. He had been getting ready to drive over, when the surveyor appeared and detained him. Therefore in his stead he was sending a trustworthy man to town, who would look after me and drive me over. They were looking forward to my visit with much pleasure. This was all.
Yes, I was dazed. How did they count distance in this country? You spoke in a neighborly fashion about driving over to town, and it meant–I did not know yet how many days. And what would be meant by the term “dropping in,” I wondered. And how many miles would be considered really far? I abstained from further questioning the “trustworthy man.” My questions had not fared excessively well. He did not propose making me dance, to be sure: that would scarcely be trustworthy. But neither did he propose to have me familiar with him. Why was this? What had I done to elicit that veiled and skilful sarcasm about oddities coming in on every train? Having been sent to look after me, he would do so, would even carry my valise; but I could not be jocular with him. This handsome, ungrammatical son of the soil had set between us the bar of his cold and perfect civility. No polished person could have done it better. What was the matter? I looked at him, and suddenly it came to me. If he had tried familiarity with me the first two minutes of our acquaintance, I should have resented it; by what right, then, had I tried it with him? It smacked of patronizing: on this occasion he had come off the better gentleman of the two. Here in flesh and blood was a truth which I had long believed in words, but never met before. The creature we call a GENTLEMAN lies deep in the hearts of thousands that are born without chance to master the outward graces of the type.”
Throughout America, gentlemen still exist, although they are definitely an endangered species. The US military used to be a bastion of fine gentlemen, but the Obama transformation marked them for extinction, under the guise of progress, where sexual orientation and progressive nostrums neuter gentlemen and turn them into parsing, mincing PC cheerleaders. The ones who want to wear the skirts are being given top attention before being separated from the military, as it seems the Secretary of Defense spends more time working to make sure transgenders can serve openly than he does trying to make sure we defeat ISIS.
There are still glimmers of hope, like the young American men, who charged ahead unarmed to deal with an Islamist terrorist on a French train recently. so let’s hope across America, some Moms and Dads are still teaching their sons to be gentlemen, because they are sorely needed!
“My son,” said the Norman Baron, “I am dying, and you will be heir
To all the broad acres in England that William gave me for my share
When we conquered the Saxon at Hastings, and a nice little handful it is.
But before you go over to rule it I want you to understand this:
“The Saxon is not like us Normans. His manners are not so polite.
But he never means anything serious till he talks about justice and right.
When he stands like an ox in the furrow with his sullen set eyes on your own,
And grumbles, ‘This isn’t fair dealing,’ my son, leave the Saxon alone.”
—RUDYARD KIPLING, 1911
Hannan, Daniel (2013-11-19). Inventing Freedom: How the English-Speaking Peoples Made the Modern World (p. 91). HarperCollins. Kindle Edition.
Coming from a blue-collar background, I do understand the rise of populist icons, like Sarah Palin and Donald Trump, among working class Americans, who aren’t going to assiduously study issues, read history or pay any attention to renowned pundits like George Will, with his use of words most of these people have never even heard, let alone know their meaning. These are the people I grew up around and as one of my sons, as a precocious12 year-old informed me, many years ago while on a visit to the backwoods of PA, “Mom, your family is kind of like Northern rednecks.” There you have your explanation for the rise of Donald Trump and Sarah Palin before him.
In my many years online, I have been banned two times from posting comments on two blogs, The American Thinker and The Last Refuge Blog, one years ago and one just recently. After my experiences posting on the Excite message boards way back during the Clinton impeachment, these days I don’t venture to other sites very often to post comments, preferring to stay here at my own backwoods blog, to ramble to my heart’s content. The past few days, I spent some time at National Review posting under my long-time user name, mhere (my little inside joke on the Russian word for peace) and at The American Thinker under the name, susanholly. I was observing the comments from the devoted Trump supporters and thinking about the Trump supporters’ views.
This Trump phenomenon hearkened back to the Sarah Palin flirtation with a 2012 run for President and that is where I got banned from The American Thinker, for commenting on Sarah Palin wallowing (and making big money) in the reality TV trash culture, while bashing the decline in American culture. I hadn’t written any cuss words or called any other posters names, just expressed my opinion, that she is a populist, self-promoter more than she is a staunch conservative standard-bearer.
Often Palin lands on the right side of conservative issues, but she can’t offer more than trite slogans and appeals to emotion to support her views. Her supporters adore her and any venue where she ends up looking stupid, gets turned on the reporter asking the question, like Katie Couric asking Palin what newspapers and periodicals she reads to stay informed, in that famous interview before the 2008 election. Palin couldn’t even list any and to this day she insists that was a gotcha question, when in fact it’s a fair and very pertinent question. Instead of learning from that failure, Palin doubled down on her attacks against the “lamestream” media and her supporters do the same. Charles Krauthammer fell prey to vicious attacks from Palin supporters for his comments in a Dec 2010 appearance on Bill O’Reilly (at minute 2:50), for suggesting that Palin should have spent the past two years acquiring policy expertise. Krauthammer committed the ultimate sacrilege for insisting the Couric interview questions during the 2008 election were not gotcha questions :
Daniel Hannan, in his book, Inventing Freedom: How the English-Speaking Peoples Made the Modern World explains this gap between the elites and ordinary people perfectly:
On July 3, 1940, Admiral Sir James Somerville issued the saddest order of his career. France had been occupied by the Nazis and was required under the armistice terms to transfer its Mediterranean fleet to German command. The British couldn’t allow such a development: Italy had entered the war on Hitler’s side, and control of the Mediterranean was at stake.
Winston Churchill ordered a larger British force to confront the French fleet off the Algerian naval base of Oran. The French admiral, Marcel-Bruno Gensoul, was given three options: to take his ships to British waters and carry on the struggle; to remove them from the theater of operations and keep them in the West Indies for the duration of the war; or to scuttle them.
All three options were turned down and, as the sultry day wore on, a final ultimatum was issued and rejected. At last, Admiral Somerville ordered his ships to shell the French fleet, the only occasion the British and French navies have exchanged hostile fire since Trafalgar. For ten minutes, great geysers of water shot into the sky, soon joined by black smoke from the battleship Bretagne, which was badly hit. No fewer than 1,297 Frenchmen were killed and 351 injured, by far the worst naval losses suffered by France during the war. There were no British casualties.
Somerville was sickened by what he later called “the most unnatural and painful decision” of his life. He passed a grim and silent evening in the mess, where many of his officers had tears in their eyes. But he couldn’t help noticing that, on the lower decks, a very different attitude prevailed, most sailors cheerfully declaring that they “never ’ad no use for them French bastards.”
It was an extreme illustration of an age-old social divide. The English (and later British) upper classes tended to be Francophone and Francophile. Yet theirs was a minority tendency, one that opened them down the centuries to accusations of being effete and unpatriotic.
That class division can be traced right back to the Norman Conquest, which placed England under a French-speaking aristocracy. It was to be more than three centuries before English again became the language of Parliament, the law courts, the monarchy, and the episcopacy. Certain parliamentary procedures are still, a millennium after the Conquest, conducted in Norman-French. The Queen’s approval of legislative bills, for example, is announced with the phrase “La Reine le veult.”
The native English, disinherited and resentful, projected their resentment onto French-speakers in general. The popular stereotype of the Frenchman closely resembled the radicals’ stereotype of the aristocrat: mincing, epicene, sly.
Even today, most Britons suspect (with good reason) that their elites are more Europhile in general, and more Francophile in particular, than the country at large. By “Europhile,” they don’t simply mean readier to accept EU jurisdiction, though that belief is demonstrably accurate. “Europhile” has wider connotations: of snobbery, of contempt for majority opinion, of the smugness of a remote political caste.
The extraordinary thing is that we can find no period in the past nine hundred years when such a sense was absent. The linkage between French manners and upper-class decadence has been made in England (then Britain, then the Anglosphere as a whole) by every generation.
Hannan, Daniel (2013-11-19). Inventing Freedom: How the English-Speaking Peoples Made the Modern World (pp. 92-93). HarperCollins. Kindle Edition.
In the day, weren’t Old Hickory and the Jacksonians “mad as hell?” Jacksonian Democracy was fueled by a righteous indignation — as is today’s liberty rebellion.
When we consider the struggle for freedom (and it’s been ongoing since the Revolution), we need to consider how past movements are amalgamated, synthesized. Today’s liberty rebellion resembles the Jacksonian but has many fathers. Expressions for liberty change, somewhat, to fit the times, but the core principles remain. Liberty is still man’s natural state. Humanity’s direction (as epitomized in the American experience) struggles toward achieving this birthright. It’s nearly instinct.
Though the focus is on Trump, some conservatives — and more Republicans — are unsettled by the liberty rebellion. It’s too Jacksonian in profile for whiggish conservatives — it’s raw, coarse, and full of the frontier; it discounts government more than they’d care. They are the George Wills of the world.
By the 1820s, these tensions fed into a many-sided crisis of political faith. To the frustration of both self-made men and plebeians, certain eighteenth-century elitist republican assumptions remained strong, especially in the seaboard states, mandating that government be left to a natural aristocracy of virtuous, propertied gentlemen. Simultaneously, some of the looming shapes of nineteenth-century capitalism—chartered corporations, commercial banks, and other private institutions—presaged the consolidation of a new kind of moneyed aristocracy. And increasingly after the War of 1812, government policy seemed to combine the worst of both old and new, favoring the kinds of centralized, broad constructionist, top-down forms of economic development that many thought would aid men of established means while deepening inequalities among whites. Numerous events during and after the misnamed Era of Good Feelings—among them the neo-Federalist rulings of John Marshall’s Supreme Court, the devastating effects of the panic of 1819, the launching of John Quincy Adams’s and Henry Clay’s American System—confirmed a growing impression that power was steadily flowing into the hands of a small, self-confident minority.
Daniel Hannan and J. Robert Smith clearly lay out this common man vs the moneyed elite sentiment, which transcends centuries in American society as surely as in British society. At the turn of the 20th century novelist Owen Wister, dedicated his popular novel, “The Virginian”, to his close friend, President Theodore Roosevelt. “The Virginian” introduced America to the iconic cowboy, bold, brave, unfettered by Eastern elite snobbery. This is one of my favorite American novels and I often cite a quote from it too: “When a man ain’t got no ideas of his own, he’d ought to be kind of o’ careful who he borrows ’em from.” Wister perfectly describes the class gap between the self-made Western cowboy as he prepares to go East to meet the family of his new bride, a New England schoolmarm from a blue-blood family:
“Why, I have been noticing. I used to despise an Eastern man because his clothes were not Western. I was very young then, or maybe not so very young, as very–as what you saw I was when you first came to Bear Creek. A Western man is a good thing. And he generally knows that. But he has a heap to learn. And he generally don’t know that. So I took to watching the Judge’s Eastern visitors. There was that Mr. Ogden especially, from New Yawk–the gentleman that was there the time when I had to sit up all night with the missionary, yu’ know. His clothes pleased me best of all. Fit him so well, and nothing flash. I got my ideas, and when I knew I was going to marry you, I sent my measure East–and I and the tailor are old enemies now.”
Bennington probably was disappointed. To see get out of the train merely a tall man with a usual straw hat, and Scotch homespun suit of a rather better cut than most in Bennington–this was dull. And his conversation–when he indulged in any–seemed fit to come inside the house.
Mrs. Flynt took her revenge by sowing broadcast her thankfulness that poor Sam Bannett had been Molly’s rejected suitor. He had done so much better for himself. Sam had married a rich Miss Van Scootzer, of the second families of Troy; and with their combined riches this happy couple still inhabit the most expensive residence in Hoosic Falls.
But most of Bennington soon began to say that Molly s cow-boy could be invited anywhere and hold his own. The time came when they ceased to speak of him as a cow-boy, and declared that she had shown remarkable sense. But this was not quite yet.
Donald Trump, part and parcel, a creature of that wealthy, elite class that his supporters loathe, has managed to transcend his personal history and take on an outsider personna, carefully-crafted to tap into this populist sentiment of his supporters, many who like Palin, rail against the Washington elites, big-money interests, mainstream media and most especially those they deem RINOs. I was called a pinkie wagger a couple times yesterday while commenting, for holding a different view of Trump. Most of these people will not be swayed by smart punditry, as Kevin D. Williamson and Jonah Goldberg are finding out, nor will they bother with George Will or Charles Krauthammer, because what is happening is they are closing ranks and it is very much a class struggle. The more information you provide to show Trump flip-flopped or discredit his vague policy ideas, the more they will hunker down, fuming about “pinkie-waggers” and elitists. In fact, here’s Sarah Palin’s interview, commiserating still over those unfair media gotcha questions, with Trump. He, being asked what his favorite Bible verse is, fits her definition of a gotcha question… Truly, he said his favorite book after the Bible was his own book, “The Art of the Deal”, so asking him what his favorite Bible verse was an attempt at a gotcha question???. You can watch the entire Palin interview of Trump, replete with their mutual adoration society, but very slim on policy or insights on anything more than how they understand how ordinary people feel: Video here.
Partisan political ideology aside, America remains torn apart by factions and this Trump phenomenon must be forcefully exposed as just that – a populist movement centered on a personality more than firm American founding principles. They may rally under “freedom and liberty” slogans, but there is no firm principled core to the Trump campaign, because his campaign centers on emotion and ginning up a mob tactics. In every other breath he spouts his polls numbers as vindication that he is right. Poll numbers don’t make you right. He should hone his arguments in well-thought out, clear sentences.
America needs to hold all of its presidential candidates’ feet to the fire. Expecting intelligent, well-reasoned arguments and explanations for their policies and ideas, should be the standard we demand. We need leaders who read extensively, who will study issues carefully and at the heart, being President is the highest political office in the land, so demanding a president who has mastered government policy issues is a must. Expecting that all of our elected officials, both in Congress and the President possess an in-depth understanding of The Constitution, a breadth of knowledge on US history and a strong foundation on foreign policy issues should be our minimum expectation.
Education is free in America! Accept no excuses! I possess no college degree, but I devoted my life to reading as much as I can in my spare time. I have signed out books from Army post libraries, public libraries, purchased many books and even borrowed books from friends. The ability to access information and learn is limitless in our internet age. Assuredly, there are gaps in my education, as my blog will surely affirm, but if someone points out something they think I need to read or points out an issue where what I have written is totally misguided or ill-informed, I don’t get angry. I get reading and try to learn more. We must all start demanding excellence, not only from our leaders, but from ourselves as well. America should be admired for it’s educated citizens, not considered as the home of ignorant, loudmouth, vulgar slobs!
Trump is a smart man, who has been fabulously successful. He can afford the best speech coaches, writers and political advisers. Showing up for a debate unprepared is not to be cheered, it’s a show of arrogance and self-conceit. Ronald Reagan wrote his speeches out on index cards. A poster yesterday told me I was supposed to infer what Trump was saying in his ramblings . Absolutely, dead wrong!!! The President represents all of us to the entire world and he/she must be a person with clear ideas, excellent public-speaking ability and our American message must reverberate, clear, concise and leave no doubts! Perhaps, Trump will devote the energy to study policy and perfect presenting his vision for America, and prove that he is the best candidate to represent all of us. And that’s the key, the President of the United States is not just the President of his partisan followers; he is the President of ALL Americans.
To put America on the right track, every American should read President George Washington’s Farewell Address and understand that railing about partisan political views is fine, but to “make America great again” we need to unite as one nation, bond by common values, and that remains the challenge none of the Presidential candidates has spoken to. Factions will destroy our Republic and President Washington warned that it is the “duty of a wise people to discourage and restrain it.”
Here’s a quick lesson on judging moral character. Yesterday, Hillary Clinton came out and repeated the same lies and parsing as previously, while admitting her private server wasn’t a good idea in retrospect. She cloaked this as “taking full responsibility”, which amounts to another huge LIE. Not admitting that classified information was passed on her private server, possibly both sent and received, shirks ALL responsibility. It’s at best a clumsy attempt to deflect, because she will now come out and repeat, “I already took full responsibility”, in hopes of burying this email server scandal. Her shills in the media will dutifully repeat, “But, she’s taken full responsibility for her private server.” Taking responsibility requires owning up to ALL the repercussions of her private server – admitting that classified information was passed on her server and she did not stop it. That’s called being an honorable leader, you take full responsibility for the bad decisions you made by telling the truth and facing the consequences. She’s doing everything in her power to bury the truth and avoid any consequences, moving 180 degrees from taking full responsibility
Donald Trump continues to lead in the GOP field and if you didn’t know that, just listen to one of his speeches, where he will remind you of that in every other breath. He uses his poll numbers as vindication that he is right, but the truth is when it gets down to details – he’s vague, vacillates and frankly hasn’t offered much in the way of concrete proposals that have any real plan behind them. He will build a Great Wall of Trump, but do we even need a “Great Wall” or do we need modern enhanced border security, faster interdiction of illegals trying to enter the US, enhanced e-verify, an end to sanctuary cities and a revamped program to keep track of visa-holders? He has offered no idea of how his mass deportation plan would work or how he would decide how the “good ones” would be determined and be allowed back in, which is nothing more than a tricky and costly word play that is really amnesty. Why not just deport the bad ones and save us the money of mass deportation of the “good ones”, if he’s going to have expedited reentry? It does not make any sense.
Beyond illegal immigration, Trump’s plan to defeat ISIS ranks as ludicrous – he’s going to circle them and take their oil. One can only wonder which of his friends he’ll appoint to oversee the Defense Department, because believe me, he knows the “best” people for everything, as he brags. He’s for affirmative action and universal health care, he’s for taking care of women (whatever that means) and the rest of his platform may unfold as he rambles along, but rest assured the disjointed, angry tirades against anyone who treats him “unfairly” or disagrees with him, should clue people in to his character, but his “fans” love him and sadly many have begun emulating him. I have watched in amazement as the comment sections on conservative pundits who disagree with Trump have become angry, name-calling, like you’d expect at a WWF match.
Polls don’t make Donald Trump’s policy ideas (vague as they are) right, all they indicate is the conservative base and some of his celebrity fan base have gravitated to his illegal immigration-anti-Washington spiel and his campaign slogan, “make America great again”.
Last week I bought one of Trump’s books, as I mentioned before, and I read it. Assuredly, Trump offered many interesting insights into, as the book’s title stated, “TRUMP: How to Get Rich”. The pride he takes in his children comes across and he offers some worthwhile advice on investing and negotiating, but trying to get to the character of who exactly is Donald Trump, well, he’s a man who has chapters in his book like “Be Strategically Dramatic”, “Sometimes You Still Have To Screw Them”, and “Sometimes You Have To Hold a Grudge”, replete with examples from his life and his guiding principles. Here are some quotes (page 138):
“When somebody hurts you, just go after them as viciously and as violently as you can. Like it says in the Bible, an eye for an eye.”
Be paranoid. I know this observation doesn’t make any of us sound very good, but let’s face the fact that it’s possible that even your best friend wants to steal your spouse and your money.”
The chapter on holding a grudge is even more interesting, because Trump relates how for years he had donated huge amounts of money to NY governor, Mario Cuomo and when he called Cuomo to ask for a favor from Cuomo’s son, Andrew, who was running the Department of Housing and Urban Development. Mario Cuomo refused to do the favor (which Trump doesn’t explain in detail other than to say it was an appropriate favor involving attention to a detail). Trump blew up and for any who are confused with Trump’s vendetta against Megyn Kelly on Twitter, calling her a bimbo last night or his refusing to entertain a question by Jorge Ramos from Univision this evening, well, this chapter on holding a grudge (page 142) explains it. Trump called in a political favor believing it was owed to him, because he donated a lot of money to Mario Cuomo (crony capitalism is what most people call this greasing of palms). Here is how Trump describes the phone call:
“I did the only thing that felt right to me. I began screaming. “You son of a bitch! For years I’ve helped you and never asked for a thing, and when I finally need something, and a totally proper thing at that, you aren’t there for me. You’re no good. You’re one of the most disloyal people I’ve known and as far as I’m concerned, you can go to hell.”
My screaming was so loud that two or three people came in from adjoining offices and asked who I was screaming at. I told them it was Mario Cuomo., a total stiff, a lousy governor, and a disloyal former friend. Now whenever I see Mario at dinner, I refuse to acknowledge him, talk to him, or even look at him.”
When you hear Trump whining about being treated unfairly, here’s what I believe he means: If you agree with him, fawn over him and puff up his ego, that’s treating him fairly. If you disagree or criticize him, I believe, he will wage an all out campaign to destroy you. So, I keep wondering how his character will play in the long, arduous rough and tumble of presidential politics, where being ripped apart by opposition research, pundits and reporters only escalates as the campaign wears on. We’ve got plenty of rounds to go, so it’s certainly not going to be boring.
libertybelle diaries 
The most important and implacable truth about maintaining civilization and raising gentlemen and ladies is that it has to be taught—it has to be a heritage that is specifically and individually passed on generation to generation, and specifically and openly valued.
The stories, the “narratives”, the legends and myths, the movies and TV series and quotations and historical references people know and understand, all have to envelop the citizen of a civilization with magic and wonder, with ethics and manners, with decency and heroes that demonstrate the shared values.
In The Lord of the Rings, Frodo, one of the key heroes, gets to a certain point in the daunting journey of salvation and he says he just can’t go on with his mission, it’s too difficult, he’s faced too many dangers and the future looks like it will be even worse. His buddy is the lowly Sam, traveling with “Mr. Frodo” to fetch and carry and guard. At yet another moment in the adventure, they have barely escaped death and face even more peril, Frodo barely can speak:
[From http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0167261/quotes
Frodo: I can’t do this, Sam.
Sam: I know. It’s all wrong. By rights we shouldn’t even be here. But we are. It’s like in the great stories, Mr. Frodo. The ones that really mattered. Full of darkness and danger, they were. And sometimes you didn’t want to know the end. Because how could the end be happy? How could the world go back to the way it was when so much bad had happened? But in the end, it’s only a passing thing, this shadow. Even darkness must pass. A new day will come. And when the sun shines it will shine out the clearer. Those were the stories that stayed with you. That meant something, even if you were too small to understand why. But I think, Mr. Frodo, I do understand. I know now. Folk in those stories had lots of chances of turning back, only they didn’t. They kept going. Because they were holding on to something.
Frodo: What are we holding onto, Sam?
Sam: That there’s some good in this world, Mr. Frodo… and it’s worth fighting for.
It’s High Noon and Die Hard and Gunsmoke and the Longest Day and the man at the end of the movie saying to the children, “Stand up. Your father’s going by” and even George C. Scott turning around at the end of the film and going back into the hospital—but you all know them, don’t you, so many titles, so many characters, so many moments that thrill you no matter how many times you’ve seen them, so many moments when you feel the strength and the passion of Truth and Honor and the Hero . . . .
It’s Todd Beamer saying, “Let’s roll!”
You raise your children to be ladies and gentlemen, to honor the Good, to recognize and acknowledge the Hero and the Heroic, to know how “to fill the unforgiving minute with 60 seconds worth of distance run”—because there is thunder and magnificence in Sam’s “there’s some good in the world, and it’s worth fighting for.”