Category Archives: Culture Wars

July 20, 2013 · 12:16 am

Power to the people…. pssssst, that’s in the 10th Amendment, Mr. President

Everyone seems to want to add his/her two cents to the Zimmerman verdict, so here are mine for free, long-winded and a bit rambling – just like President Obama’s.  On the most basic level this tragedy occurred because both men distrusted each other’s intentions.  George Zimmerman felt Trayvon Martin was a thug up to no good and called the police to report him and based on Trayvon’s girlfriend’s testimony, Trayvon felt George was a “creepy ass cracker”, who was following him.  The physical altercation occurred because of these misconceptions each man held about the other one.  The fact that this case is being highlighted and played up as a symbol of racism has led to extreme characterizations about both men, where oddly enough the only way to describe it is folks who believe Trayvon was murdered have whitewashed his character and tried to turn him into a choirboy, instead of a young man who liked to fight.  On the other hand George Zimmerman has had his character darkened to be a racist, wanna-be cop, who wantonly murdered Trayvon Martin, instead of a young man trying to keep his neighborhood safe.

A jury decided the facts they heard in court didn’t add up to second-degree murder or manslaughter and since I didn’t watch the entire trial (because I hate sensationalized trials), I accept our jury system and the verdict, regardless whether I think the jury is right.  We are “a government of laws, not of men”, as our 2nd President, John Adams, put it.  For instance, in the OJ Simpson case, I believe, based on various juror statements that some jurors based their decision on jury nullification, where they felt their racial views should be the basis of their decision.  That pained me to hear that, because all cases should be decided on the evidence presented in the courtroom, but I accept our jury system and give wide berth to assuming a jury acted in good faith..  Nothing I have heard about George Zimmerman’s history has led me to believe that he was a raging racist, intent on murdering a black “child”, which seems to be the characterization the shameless race-hustlers in America have decided to run with.  This case is a sad testament to the true state of race relations in America – anger and distrust still simmer below the surface and despite President Obama’s happy talk about uniting America, he’s been a continual source of fostering racial tensions and inserting himself into local legal matters, where he perceives racism.  Distrust, which ignited the confrontation that led to this tragedy, sadly seems likely to be used to fuel a lot more mob mentality reaction, before it’s all said and done.

Facts matter and I’ll toss out a few – racism still exists in America, but often charges of racism come way too easily, which leads to actual racial tensions when false charges of racism get tossed about.  There is no evidence that George Zimmerman was a flaming racist, which is the characterization that has been made here.  President Obama gave a speech today validating this characterization and really just fanning more racial tensions and I marvel at how he takes great pride in his racial identity as a “black man in America”, but he never recognizes his white heritage at all.  He does make incorrect statements pertaining to local incidents where he perceives race played a part and he sure wanted to label rural Pennsylvanians as racist rednecks.  In regards to his own heritage, he threw his white grandmother under the bus and proclaimed her a typical racist white person too.  Among black Americans, black people who hold conservative political views get ostracized by the prominent, loud black liberal establishment and get racially tagged as “Uncle Toms” or ““house negroes” or other vile racist names.  Racism cuts both ways in America and that’s the sad truth.  We have a highly honed sense of equal opportunity and a high level of teaching every American to report and seek legal redress based on racial, ethnic or gender sensitivity – we are the most sue-happy people on earth.  Americans can’t just sit down and talk out little instances of  friction caused by misconceptions about each other or work to build trust.  In America we politicize just about everything.

The statistics on black crime in America show a disproportionate percentage of violence against black people is committed by black males.  Now, those in the business of racial grievance politics try to spin this into racist efforts to arrest and prosecute black men more than white men.  However to highlight the glorification of violence, disrespect for the law, women and yes, even human life, you need look no further than the thriving rap music industry and listen to the vile, hate-filled, violent lyrics.  Here’s one of those home truths again, who you become depends on how you are shaped, trained and molded as a child. The breakdown of American families, where black families have been hit hardest, leads to the rampant violence and most certainly is harming more black children than the tragic death of Trayvon Martin.  The race-hustlers, like Jesse Jackson, Al Sharpton, the NAACP and others latched onto this case to make money and to fuel more racial discord, not promote uniting Americans.  And in typical left-wing political fashion, the cause has morphed from being about “justice for Trayvon” to a full-throated effort to repeal “stand your ground laws” and more gun control efforts.  Sheer political opportunism – that’s what this is.  It’s a tragedy that this young man is dead, but demanding we overthrow the Constitution won’t be “justice for Trayvon” either and I would be willing to bet money that Jesse Jackson and Al Sharpton already plotted which governmental agencies and which people they want to shakedown in order for them to call off their protests and agitating – these two men are extortionists, who peddle in inciting anger and divisiveness.  That’s a fact.

Now, rather than marching, protesting, demanding we overthrow the Constitution and toss out the 5th Amendment: “No person shall be held to answer for a capital, or otherwise infamous crime, unless on a presentment or indictment of a Grand Jury, except in cases arising in the land or naval forces, or in the Militia, when in actual service in time of War or public danger; nor shall any person be subject for the same offence to be twice put in jeopardy of life or limb; nor shall be compelled in any criminal case to be a witness against himself, nor be deprived of life, liberty, or property, without due process of law; nor shall private property be taken for public use, without just compensation.“, maybe what’s needed most is to use this case to educate young people on The Constitution and the long, intellectual legal history that underpins our legal system.  I’ll even go a step further and say, that Trayvon’s girlfriend, Rachel Jeantel, is exhibit A of our desperate need to educate children. She stated that she is “new school people” and if “new school” means you can’t read cursive handwriting and need to have your friend write letters for you, we’re in sad shape. If “new school” means we accept racist claptrap on the intricacies of acceptable racial language and when a racial slur is acceptable, then we have taken great strides backwards in our civil rights march. For talking heads to let this young woman spew this racist nonsense, unchallenged, shows how far we have sunk. Of course, she’s being used and while her handlers did a nice style makeover, listening to this young woman’s racist nonsense saddened me a great deal.

We all form our perceptions based on our own lives, so once again, this is what I learned growing up in a blue-collar, rural village.  My lineage is mostly PA Dutch and growing up, many of my relatives still spoke PA Dutch at home, but everyone learned to speak English in school.  English is the language of success in America – this cuts across all racial, ethnic, social strata.   Speaking proper English matters and placing a high value on quality education matters too.  The travesty of  justice Rachel highlights is the travesty of a multicultural education, where this young woman explains the nuances of applying racial epithets on various groups of people.  A common ground demand that all people deserve to be treated respectfully should be the starting point in educating all American children.  I learned that it’s hard for outsiders to understand speech heavily laced in a PA Dutch accent, but that was one struggle I avoided.  I couldn’t speak without stuttering, so when I finally learned to spit out a few sentences without stuttering, my speech patterns mimicked my speech teacher (who was not PA Dutch).  We never expected other Americans to learn our lingo, but learned we were part of America and needed to fit in.  It’s fine to embrace your own culture or language, but to succeed in America, you must speak English!  Rachel apparently has a part Creole background from what I’ve read, which was highlighted to explain her halting speech.  Okay, fine, I understand coming from a home where another language was present and I sure understand halting speech from years of stuttering, but we live in America and a common language keeps us unified – it’s a strong, building block of one America, not some nefarious intent to steal your culture from you.

Way too many children in America, of all races and ethnicities, live below the poverty line.  As someone who grew up in decidedly less than luxurious circumstances,  I do understand the difficulties of fitting in with people who have had more advantages, but rather than embracing animosity toward those who have more, our common goal has to be to help all American children become successful and to reach for the stars.  Rather than spend so much effort on dressing up Rachel, someone needs to sit her down and teach her about respecting other people and teach her about America – the land of opportunity.

My mother was the hardest working person I have ever met in my life.  She set such high cleanliness standards that when I joined the Army, I was perplexed by so many fellow soldiers opting to sleep on the floor rather than in their bunks.  Once they had their beds made to Army standards, they feared messing it up.  I had no problem making my bed to Army standards in a few minutes, because I had been doing that my entire life (my Mom was a stickler for perfect hospital corners).  I found many of the Army cleanliness standards less rigorous than my mother’s, who actually did use a white glove sometimes to show us where we missed dusting (oh my, don’t’ skip dusting the door frames).  My mother also learned how to do so many things and she emphasized the point that for most things in life – there’s a right way to do it.  Too many Americans wallow in envying what other people have and our culture is obsessed with acquiring stuff.  This emphasis on material wealth decimates many poor Americans, because so much effort is expended on acquiring things or on looking for self-worth in material objects.

We should be teaching our children that character and how you treat others is the gold standard.  My mother took care of everything she had and she never allowed us to whine about what we didn’t have.  She taught us to be thankful for the many blessings that living in America provides and I am still amazed at how my parents always worked hard to make the things they did have last as long as possible, yet they still managed to help others who had less.  There’s always someone worse off than you and so when my father passed away, my mother told me she took my Pop’s new winter coat and gave it to a young man who worked at the gas station, because she noticed he didn’t have a warm coat.  Very few young people pay any attention to the people around them, because most people, young and old alike, spend their lives distracted by electronic gadgets and on material stuff.  If there’s one thing we should glean from this case is that with a little open communication between these two young men, this tragedy could have been averted and we sure need more parents in America like mine – yes, I think my parents set an excellent example and they talked about stuff like responsibility and duty and they sure didn’t want to hear a bunch of boohooing about other people having more.  They would put you to work doing chores and tell you that this is America – you need to work hard and you can do anything.

I’ve noticed in many black homes there’s a copy of the MLK, “I Have A Dream” speech hanging in the living room.  In first grade, one of my white “cracker” sons got selected by his black teacher to play Martin Luther King Jr. in their black history month play (true story).   I heard many grumblings sitting in the audience from black parents and afterwards I mentioned this to the teacher and she told me matter-of-factly, that my son was the best at reading out loud in that class.  This teacher was living by the words within that speech and maybe we all need to move in that direction.  A fancy makeover isn’t going to help Rachel, once these race-baiters who are handling her get done with her.  Someone needs to teach her that all people matter and her silly racial semantics are hate-filled racism baring its ugly head.  I doubt anyone will tell her that though.  I sure wish we could clone my son’s dedicated first grade teacher, who was a DoDDS teacher working in Germany.   She exemplified excellence in teaching.  She spent so much time not only trying to make classroom time count, but she spent many hours putting together a monthly program where she invited the parents and all she asked of us was that we bring some food to eat to fit the occasion.  Growing up in an almost exclusively white community, no one in my school talked about Martin Luther King, Jr. during the civil rights era.  Until my son had to practice that speech, I had never read the entire speech. Instead of looking for causes to divide America, leaders should read this speech and start living it.  And we all need to move in the direction of talking to each other rather than escalating the distrust and racial animosity.  As black activists, from the President on down, march us backwards, dividing America, it’s obvious we’ve got a ways to go before we will get people to “sit down together at a table of brotherhood”.  Watching this sad national spectacle, we sure don’t seem to be any closer to his dream and our long national nightmare of dealing with the racial discord seems a vast, widening chasm of dashed hopes and way too little real change.

I can excuse Rachel for her racist statements, she’s a kid who doesn’t know better, but really the smallness of President Obama’s racial pandering and disingenuous statements about “wringing as much bias out of me”, while moments earlier in this speech he regaled us with the rampant racial profiling he experienced in his very ethnically diverse home state of Hawaii disgust me.  Here’s a quote from him on growing up in Hawaii that he wrote long before this FL situation:  “The opportunity that Hawaii offered—to experience a variety of cultures in a climate of mutual respect—became an integral part of my world view, and a basis for the values that I hold most dear.”  He never lived in the Jim Crow South, but he sure has borrowed that narrative as his own, and it’s about as realistic as his ridiculous statement that,  “Another way of saying that is Trayvon Martin could have been me 35 years ago.”…….. except for the pesky fact that unlike Trayvon, who was into ground and pound fighting,  Barry liked to hang out and get high as a teenager, then he went to college in CA, followed by NY and then he became a community organizer in Chicago and then on to Harvard.  Between the racial pandering at the beginning of this speech and the MLK rhetoric at the end lies the truth in this speech – he wants to expand the federal encroachment into local matters.  Yes, he may be the Constitutional scholar who went to Harvard, but he sure seems intentionally, willfully determined to ignore any of the parts that are inconvenient to his far left political visions – like the 10th Amendment:

“The powers not delegated to the United States by the Constitution, nor prohibited by it to the states, are reserved to the states respectively, or to the people.”

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Filed under Culture Wars, Politics, The Constitution

July 11, 2013 · 12:01 am

Beyond the long arm of the law

When the Edward Snowden scandal broke I wrote a rather mealy-mouthed take on his theft of national secrets he was entrusted to safeguard.  Barack Obama and Edward Snowden might seem very different, but they’re two very similar men when it comes to their core characters.  Barack Obama  played his race for all its worth to end up attending some of America’s most prestigious universities and I have read speculations that he used his Kenyan ancestry to play games to receive consideration as a “foreign” student, akin to Elizabeth Warren dishonestly latching onto her Native American heritage to get special consideration in her teaching career.  He specializes in latching onto people who can advance his political aspirations and he ditches people just as adroitly once they have stopped being useful to him. Snowden appears to have honed his computer skills and used them to advance way beyond what his educational achievements would warrant and he seems to know how to latch onto the right people to advance his objectives too.  Snowden reached a level of political maneuvering way beyond his capabilities and thus we can see his glaring inadequacies in his silly rants about countries that refuse to give him asylum and while his communist handlers puffed up his importance to gain access to the information, they now want him to quietly disappear into the annals of duped American idiots.  Sadly, President Obama doesn’t know much more about the world or foreign policy than Edward Snowden and woe be it for us, he doesn’t realize that America’s adversaries aren’t done using him and playing him for a fool too.    It’s pretty pitiful to watch Putin orchestrate this Snowden situation and milk it for all its worth to make President Obama look like a helpless dupe.  And this is the man America chose to lead – the one who had a staffer thinking it was clever to say the President leads from behind.   I can assure you that no one working for Valdimir Putin would ever have thought to suggest such a milktoast sentiment as “leading from behind”.  I can picture Vladimir Putin,  sitting with his feet propped up, laughing big belly laughs as he reads American political news and reads the conflicted, disjointed, disorganized mess that passes for American foreign policy coming from this White House. This President really thinks it makes America look stronger to get all gung-ho to put women at the front in combat, while he simultaneously talks about slashing our military??? And I would imagine the President blabbering on about “Global Zero” and now the “zero option” for Afghanistan has most of  America’s adversaries laughing at us, thinking, “here he goes again, null, nada, nothing as usual”.

Now, I’ve spent most of my life baking cookies, taking care of kids, doing needlework, and  oh yeah, reading a lot about military history and military strategy, but here is what I would do. I would say hell no to women in infantry units and hell no to cutting our nuclear arsenal too.  I would say hell no to negotiating with the Taliban too.  And I sure would weed out every single one of President Obama’s Islamist sympathizers from our military and we would start naming our enemies and our adversaries, not hiding behind touchy-feely political correctness.  I would talk to other world leaders like adults and point out areas where we might be able to deal and I sure would talk about points of contention.  The worst mistake you can ever make as a parent is the same one a world leader should avoid – don’t make threats you don’t plan to follow through on.  If you tell your child, “Stop that or I will beat your butt!” and then your child continues to do that over and over and over again and all you do is repeat the same threat, well, even small children realize your threats ring pretty hollow.  The same goes for a President blabbering about “red lines” and telling Iran, “stop developing nuclear weapons or I’ll, ummmmmm, I’m not sure what I’ll do, just believe me I will not allow Iran to develop nuclear weapons!”  Pretty pathetic, right?     Here’s the difference between me and President Obama, I don’t say it unless I mean it.  And I do love reading about  military strategy, foreign affairs, military intelligence (both ours and lots of other folks).   Now I never intend to ever run for any political office, so you’re all safe from my strident, assertive American posture in the world, but really I wonder why Americans elect and fawn over so many people with weak characters.  The single most important trait our leaders should posses is a strong, honest character.   Failing that we end up with a government run amok, where respect for the rights of the people that should be of the utmost concern at all times, ends up trampled and discounted, in an ever widening cesspit of corruption.

Here’s where we end up when we bestow grave responsibilities and entrust unworthy people with power that they lack the character to wield fairly or wisely. The widespread corruption within the Obama administration, where privacy rights were violated cavalierly demonstrates that political  concerns matter most to this President, first, last, always.  His one claim to fame on leading – the bin Laden raid,  shows that puffing up Obama’s image mattered most and the egregious grandstanding by top administration officials after the Bin Laden raid led to the blowback attack by Taliban insurgents three months later that left 30 American warriors dead from their helicopter being shot out of the sky (here).  Yes, this President and his present-day CIA director didn’t have the sense to keep their mouths shut after the Bin Laden raid and named Seal Team 6 and wanted to regale the world with a minute by minute account of the raid, releasing way too much sensitive information on Seal Team 6.  In fact, everyone in this administration wanted to blab to the press about the Bin laden raid and I remember being struck by the insanity from the minute the news broke.  The Pentagon should have handled the release of any operational information and ALL questions regarding the raid should have been referred back to the Pentagon, where military professionals could control and make the decisions on what information could be released and what information needed to be safeguarded to protect our special force operators and their methods.   So, when this Snowden scandal hit, I found this administration’s lamentations about national security just a tad disingenuous.

This president isn’t fit to be a commander of any sort, especially not the commander-in-chief of the United States Armed Forces.  This president doesn’t understand any military issues, except the most superficial, divisive issues that  get used by left-wing activists to transform, remold, dismantle our military as the most highly trained fighting force in the world.  He truly thinks some big focus on “gay rights” will create a stronger military???  How about he study some real military issues and maybe read some real military history.  He has no respect for the US military and how people can conveniently forget that this man accused US servicemembers of being terrorists while he was a US senator leaves me baffled.  The truth is he never developed the character traits required of being a good military leader as a teenager getting high with this Choom Gang (ABC story here) or from his mentoring by his dear Uncle Frank Marshall Davis, an avowed communist.  He has immersed himself in far left grievance politics his entire life and has never done a single thing  that required personal sacrifice.  He doesn’t understand national security issues very well either and that is why he operates such a slipshod drone program using John Brennan to decide who lives and who dies as they secretly compile their kill lists and execute even American citizens with no oversight.

From just the things President Obama bragged about in his own autobiography, well, he would not be suitable to receive a security clearance – truly he wouldn’t.  Yet this is the man who is entrusted with enforcing his own “Insider Threat Program” (here), to stop the Edward Snowden types from betraying our country.  We’ve got a man who sees everything through his own personal political advancement.  He does not care about national security or the military  – he cares about his own big ego and everything that he can control, use, abuse, to advance his big ideas or make himself look good, as he and his staff of amoral political hacks charge recklessly ahead with no thought to the moral high ground or doing what’s right for the country.  This lack of character keeps the scandals churning and surely many more will follow.  Edward Snowden most assuredly damaged our national security a great deal, but then again I wonder if the damage is as great as that inflicted by this inept President and his band of  far-left loons, who waiver, waffle, weasel and wimp out of making tough decisions or following through on much of anything.  So, therein lies why I reacted in such a muffled manner, when I should have realized that just because one person is corrupt that doesn’t absolve another person of violating the law to highlight that corruption.  Sadly, neither one will ever be held to account for their actions, unreachable beyond the long arm of the  law.

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Filed under Culture Wars, Foreign Policy, Politics

June 28, 2013 · 7:53 am

Little scraps worth keeping

On facebook the other day I saw one of those prevalent political signs posted by a “friend”, who is really a friend of  a friend of mine, who is a fantastic quilter.  This “friend” I thought was a quilter too, so I friended her. This “friend” appeared quite animated over the Texas abortion bill, leading to quite a flurry of “pro-choice” postings lambasting the “pro-life” stance.   Now, I have posted conservative comments many times online and in fact, back when I first started using the internet I became a frequent poster to the Excite message boards and someday (not today) I hope to elaborate on just how that experience ended up (bad beyond belief).  Today, however, I want to make a few comments or pose a serious concern I have about people jumping on hot button political issues without a moment’s hesitation.  Being a woman, a mother and a grandmother and growing up in the midst of the feminist movement, I feel justified in offering a few thoughts.  This “friend” posts a relentless stream of liberal and far-left lunatic slogans and I did comment on one about stereotyping conservatives and I posted a comment on a pro-abortion banner, but after a little thought, I decided not to engage in a back and forth and removed my comment.  This “friend” doesn’t want to discuss any political issue anyway and I doubt anything I could say would influence her opinions.  She appears to be locked down tight into the talking points political insanity – the us vs. them mindset.

Whenever the liberal left runs into a brick wall, like in the case of abortion, where advances in medicine lay lie to their central argument of viability of the fetus, that formed the pillar of their argument in the 70s and 80s, they repackage their messaging to deflect from the real issue.  The political slogan that caught my attention proclaimed in loud, large red letters: “WANT ABORTION OUTLAWED?  HOW MANY UNWANTED CHILDREN WILL YOU ADOPT?” and it brought to mind this long-abandoned viability argument.  There’s a complete lapse of logic in this argument this banner proclaims that needs to be addressed.  So, let’s start with the obvious main issue.  What exactly is abortion?  If this banner is to believed outlawing abortion produces “unwanted children”, so it’s saying abortion eliminates “unwanted children”.  Back when the push for legalized abortion gained force in America, the abortion argument centered on this very question of aborting “children”.  The pro-abortion faction pushed their cause by centering their argument on the” when does life begin” question and made the case that a baby wasn’t a baby until it was outside the womb and viable, meaning could sustain life on it’s own.  Medical advancement in the intervening decades pushed that ”viability” argument back into the second trimester of pregnancy and to adjust for this, the pro-abortion activists altered their talking points to a “pro-choice” messaging platform.  Now, if a baby born at let’s say 23 weeks of gestation could survive outside the womb, then that is a viable human life, right?  Of course it is, that’s why the pro-abortion crowd switched all their political dogma to a “pro-choice” message filled with endless repetitions of the phrase, “we want abortion to be legal, safe and rare”, to deflect from the central issue of just what is being aborted.  The science makes it clear that there’s no definitive point when they can declare viability and thus the “human life” question is a hot potato abortion proponents decided to sidestep.  Each pregnancy is different and the viability of each baby varies, which makes it risky business to engage in a scientific debate on viability or to try to set a viability timeline.

The abortion activists  conveniently switched gears and changed their focus to declaring legal abortion a “right” and by convincing young women that this is their “right”  to have sex with whomever they want and that the results are something that other taxpayers must pay for, because of course, it’s wrong to infringe on other people’s “rights”.  If I don’t want my tax dollars used to fund ridding America of “unwanted children”, then I am at fault for these “unwanted children existing, not the man and women/or boy and girl, which ever the case may be, who brought this child into the world???  This banner screams for someone to point out an obvious fact.  A pregnancy results from a man and a woman making a choice, in all but a few rare cases of rape.  Okay, in a tiny percentage of cases we can assume that both parties were responsible sexual partners and used birth control to try and prevent an “unwanted child” from happening.  And in another rare scenario couples face the choice of a child being detected with a serious birth defect or the mother’s life is imperiled by the pregnancy.. This leaves us with a glaring statistic that  in 2009 the abortion rate had decreased, but was 227 per 1,000 live births, so that’s almost a quarter of pregnancies ended in abortion (CDC figures here).  That neatly closes the “rare” argument.  And yes, I am “pro-choice” too, that means you have the right to whatever “choices” you make and you are responsible for the results of your choices, not me.  This is how “responsible”  citizenship works – we must be willing to take responsibility for our choices.

The more interesting moral leap that hit me in this banner is how are people who are opposed to abortion responsible for the sexual choices that other people make?  Here’s the absurdity of the whole “it’s my body and it’s my right” mantra – they’ve got a whining poster girl, Sandra Fluke, who attended prestigious universities, to attain a law degree, and is supposedly one of America’s brightest young women on the horizon.  Yet, she bemoans that the government is responsible for providing her contraception.  One should wonder why this smart young woman and her sexual partner(s), as America’s brightest young people (I am assuming she picks smart sexual partners) must turn to the government to subsidize their sexual activity. No, the pro-life folks are responsible for the “unwanted children” born to pro-choice women, which leaves me wondering, just what personal choices are these pro-choice women and their sexual partners responsible for?

This same “friend” had another blaring banner with an idiotic quote from Texas senator, Wendy Davis, proclaiming, “Lawmakers, either get out of the vagina business or go to medical school!”  Well, yes, I would prefer to only have to worry about my own vagina, thank you very much and by the same token I preferred to take care of my own reproductive choices and my husband and I footed the cost of providing for our four children.   When you are demanding other taxpayers foot the bill for your “rights” and then have the audacity to blame other people for the results of your choices, somewhere along the line there’s a huge gap in that reasoning.  This lack of logic permeates our political landscape on both the left and right, but sometimes the total lunacy strikes when you hear a heartfelt speech like the one Chelsea Clinton delivered lamenting the lack of services that Planned Parenthood provides that her great-grandmother didn’t have access to (story here).  Her great-grandmother was “forced” to give birth to Chelsea’s beloved maternal grandmother.  Chelsea misses how her political indoctrination precludes any logical corollary that if her great-grandmother had opted for an abortion, then she wouldn’t exist today.  She should be thankful her great-grandmother chose to bring her beloved grandmother into this world.  It’s rather sad in a way to see so many politically brainwashed young people, who just jump on the virulent partisan political train and never sit and dissect the rhetoric or think about issues broken down into their essence.  All I can say is that I have never known a pregnant woman who talked about her condition as it being a “fetus” and then as the pregnancy progressed to some imprecise “viable” point declared, “oh, it’s a baby now!’  It’s a baby from the moment you find out about it and that’s really why the deceptive language and subterfuge uses such loud, inflammatory rhetoric to get as many women throwing hissyfits as possible.  Who wants to deal with a lot of high-pitched caterwauling by angry women screaming about their vaginas?’  Not me, I like to keep mine private.

My paternal grandmother ended up pregnant by a young man who had two young women pregnant at the same time.  He married the other young woman and my grandmother gave birth to a truly “unwanted child”, my father.  She married and left my father with her parents – my great-grandparents, who raised my Dad.   My grandmother had only daughters with her husband, but she never wanted anything to do with my father or his children.  My grandmother never once spoke to me in my entire life, even when I was in the same room with her.  Many times my great-grandmother would tell my grandmother, “That’s one of Billy’s girls.” and my grandmother wouldn’t say a word.  My great-grandmother insisted on making it a point to make her daughter aware of my existence and she later would say reassuring things that my father,me and my siblings were her grandchildren and as important as all the rest of her grandchildren.   Despite my grandmother’s rejection,  I sure am thankful she gave birth to my Pop and can’t imagine wishing she had opted for an abortion….. how bizarre is that idea really, wishing that you didn’t exist?   Family situations are like the patchwork quilts my great-grandmother taught me to piece together – made up of varied pieces of scraps in lots of patterns and colors, when looked at individually can seem not worth keeping, but when you add them all together – it creates an amazing end product.  I learned from my great-grandmother, who loved my father probably more than she loved all of her nine children, that no matter how ugly or worthless you think a scrap of fabric is, don’t discard it.  Later on, those scraps might be just what’s needed in another quilt to create a beautiful design.  People are like that too – even the ones who start out as unwanted scraps might mean the whole world to other people later on.  In my book, everyone should be a keeper.

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Filed under Culture Wars, Politics

June 22, 2013 · 10:07 am

Sweet land of liberty….. (or land of the gullible?)

Glenn Beck had guests on his show who talked about a new gated community they’re putting together called The Citadel.  Through a careful, highly selective application process they hope to find people united by their belief in patriotism, liberty, pride in American exceptionalism and preparedness.   This community will require everyone to be self-supporting and these organizers, about as efficiently as the central planners in the old USSR, decided to start a firearms manufacturing factory as a means for the first wave of it’s “pioneers” to support themselves.  Guess, they miss the humor in a community touting “liberty” as it’s keystone, building a community with central planners setting up all the rules to become part of the neighborhood, to include what you must believe.

So far, this new community exists only on a webpage and the developers don’t even own the real land to build this oasis of liberty.  Not to worry about this being a ponzi scheme, they assure you this beacon of liberty will be located somewhere in Idaho, where they’ve thus far acquired  land for the weapons factory.  Don’t worry that one of the developers has a criminal record for extortion, which he explained away as his being naive about speaking out.  Not to worry that if you fill out the application (with it’s $33 application fee) and if you  make it through the Skype interview as a worthy new neighbor for the Citadel community, you must begin paying $50 per month to help secure enough money for these developers  to actually buy real property to build this proposed community.

What would living be, where liberty reigns supreme, without the central planners specifying, “All homes will be built of poured concrete for exceptional strength and durability” (even the Three Little Pigs had more freedom).  Rest assured, you will be free to build your home to whatever specifications you choose.  You’ve also got to be part of the community militia and own a firearm to be able to defend the community.  So, you’ll be providing business for the community factory, as well as the work force for it.

I’m going to talk about neighbors and the neighborhood I love best, being part of the United States Army neighborhood.  We, as all Army families do, moved frequently and lived overseas as well as all over the US.  From my very first days around the Army decades ago, one of the most amazing opportunities to me was to actually be able to meet people, up close and personal, from all over the United States. Due to the traveling and also soldiers’ propensity to marry women in far-flung locales, I even met many people from all over the globe.  My husband retired from the Army more than a decade ago and we live in a typical southern town next to a large US Army installation with a population like an international smorgasbord.  Just a few days ago, my primary care doctor, who is Syrian, was talking about the situation in Syria and he pulled out his cell phone to show me pictures of his parents home, where the next-door neighbor’s house had recently been bombed.  His parents are here living with him, so thankfully they are safe.

From a post I wrote in January titled, “Multiculturism My Way”, you can glean that I consider the world “my neighborhood”  too and even growing up in the backwoods of rural PA, I longed to meet people from all over the world.  Luck definitely lit my way in life, because it’s been a privilege to have a retired solider hand me a slip of paper that opened the door to first meeting people all over the globe and then to spend decades as part of the US Army neighborhood, where patriotism shines bright. It’s been an opportunity to meet wonderful neighbors and hopefully to be a good neighbor too.  So, I want to talk about my neighborhood, where all the values this proposed phony Citadel scheme purports to value is part of the very fabric of the US Army community.

Soldiers believe in a strong national defense, almost down to the last man and woman.  Soldiers believe in patriotism too and a cloak of values shields our neighborhood: loyalty, duty, respect, selfless service , honor, integrity, personal courage (Army values here)  As the standard-bearers of General George Washington’s army, we certainly take very seriously the trust invested in us to bear true faith and allegiance to the Constitution of the United States.  Unlike these, hummm, I’m searching for a word that isn’t a cuss word, because ‘jackasses” came to mind.  Here, I’ll settle on calling them deluded people, unlike them, the Army community is strong enough to welcome people from all over the US and the world and still be a place where our values flourish.  In basic training at Fort Dix, NJ, I learned about how a foreigner seeking citizenship, could acquire it by serving in the US Army.  So, we’re strong enough to welcome diverse people into our ranks and still stay true to our values.

I had all kinds of neighbors living in the barracks as a young private and once I married we found wonderful neighbors everywhere we lived – on Army posts, in German villages and in civilian communities in America.  I’ve managed to make friends and learn a heck of a lot by embracing people who are different than me.  I’ve learned to make some darned good egg rolls from an Army wife from Thailand, who came to my home and spent the afternoon showing me.  I’ve acquired recipes galore and much more.  I had an Army wife from Korea (who married a Cuban guy) show me how to make sushi (yes, I know Japanese, right) in her kitchen.  She was trying to learn how to make Cuban dishes.  I learned to prepare many German dishes from numerous German friends.  I had a Cuban neighbor in one neighborhood, who loved to cook and she was constantly bringing food to me and telling me, “here try this, you’ll love it!” and I did.   That Cuban lady was friends with my next-door neighbor who was Puerto-Rican, so I often got a combination of foods to try. When my oldest daughter was in kindergarten, I met a Lebanese neighbor down the street and she asked me to bring my kids down to her house to play with her son, who was my daughter’s classmate. We became friends and I learned about Lebanese food, because this family ran a Lebanese restaurant.  Lebanese food ranks as some of the best food in the world.

In my food from around the world saga, I can’t leave out this wonderful Southern lady, who was married to a retired Special Forces soldier, who lived down the street from me when we lived off-post at Fort Bragg.  This wonderful lady and her husband had adopted two special needs children and this lady struck up a friendship with me, because her little daughter was the same age as my oldest daughter.  This lady taught me about Southern cooking and boy, she loved to cook.  She often would call in the morning and tell me to bring my daughter down to her house and she’d list the lunch menu and many times she’d say, “come early and we can chat and I’ll show you how to cook”….- fill-in-the-blank with a Southern dish.

Now, some of my forays into international cooking do go awry and I provided a good laugh for my youngest daughter’s  friend several years ago when she was in my kitchen watching me roll up burritos.  This neighbor has a Mexican mother and she had this dismayed look on her face and said, “What are you doing!”  She told me how to properly roll up burritos and I am sure her mother got a good laugh out of her story about my pathetic burrito-rolling skills, but hey, this girl loves my potato salad, so we all have our strong suits:-)

I must confess that my favorite cuisine is authentic Chinese.  Unfortunately, I never met a Chinese woman to come teach me how to cook Chinese food.  I do have a friend who is half-Japanese who offered lots of advice on Japanese cooking, but I’ve been winging it on Chinese cooking with cookbooks and experimenting over the years.  When I did volunteer work at the American Red Cross doing Red Cross messages, a lovely Puerto-Rican friend frequently brought in food.  I learned that the Caribbean is sort of an international mishmash of cultures and thus I still use this handwritten recipe from this friend called , “Puertorican Chinese Arroz”, where she helpfully put “rice” in parentheses.

What’s magical about Chinese cuisine, as well as their culture, is how they take what little they have and through a long, long history, as one of the oldest cultures on earth, developed  ways to adjust and thrive, through good times and bad.  Chinese people demonstrate amazing resilience.  Their cooking encapsulates this, how with a few varied cooking techniques or a few spices,  they can take a few simple ingredients and turn it into something unique and flavorful.  The Chinese spirit to adapt and persevere always amazes me.  Of course, they offer Sun Tzu too, which I just love- all that ancient wisdom on military strategy that still resonates today;-)

This is a true story about a neighbor I had one time – a lovely, good neighbor with a very kind heart and the kind of trusting soul – like the type of people who will start sending money to some schemers like these Citadel planners (yes, this liberty-based community is a “scheme” – it exists only on their webpage).  We were living in military quarters in Germany at the time and my neighbor (a lovely German lady) was preparing to move back to the States with her soldier husband.  My neighbor had an extensive David Winter cottage collection, which she decided to sell.  She sold them to a soldier who didn’t have the money up front, so she accepted a stack of postdated checks, which she agreed to deposit each month and he assured her that  he would have money in this checking account to cover them.  I urged her to hold on to her collection until she found a buyer with cash in hand.

That same neighbor was planning to buy some lovely lakefront property in the US, dirt cheap and sight unseen, but she needed  to send money fast before someone else snatched up this almost too good to be true deal.  I forget where she heard about this property, but I begged her to hold on to her money until she got back to the US and could actually walk around this property and see what she was buying.  When I thought her naive trust had reached its limit, she told me about this puppy her dog had.   Her close friend down the street headed back to the States and my neighbor said her friend was going to send money to her to fly that puppy back to the States as soon as they were settled at their next duty station. The friend had said she wanted the puppy, but then had endless excuses why she couldn’t take the puppy with them.  I gently tried to tell my neighbor that if her friend had really wanted that puppy, she would have taken it with them when they left.  Naturally, my neighbor was stuck keeping that puppy.

My neighbor would help anyone and she had a wonderful sense of humor.  She was the type of neighbor I loved having and you know I couldn’t tell you exactly what her politics were, nor did I ever think about her patriotism.  What I did value was that if I needed a helping hand or help in an emergency, I knew she would do whatever she could to help me.  I judged her on her character and she had a sterling character, albeit a bit too trusting of a soul.  It might be better to teach your kids to respect and value people with differing views rather than enclosing your family behind a fortress to shield them from people with different views.

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June 17, 2013 · 8:47 am

The emperor and his metadata robe (Diana West’s perfect metaphor)

Being naive about technology definitely can shield one from the realities of just how disingenuous our government’s explanations about NSA surveillance rank.  A couple days ago, I posted a piece about this topic where I equated this metadata collection to gigantic “junk mail folders”.  A casual conversation yesterday with my son who is a software engineer left me reeling with just how clueless I, along with many other Americans, am.  We heard soothing assurances lulling us into believing that everything’s safe, yes, “hey trust us”, because only metadata is being collected and the actual content of private electronic communications remains safely shielded behind this secure wall.  Turns out that wall, like most that our government is entrusted to secure, offers about as much protection as our southern border defense.    The new surveillance state,  justified by the so-called, post 9/11 reality, exists because it’s so easy to dupe technological dummies like me (and millions of other Americans).  My son explained that it’s easy to mine information from data, but he added the caveat, “it just depends what you’re looking for”.   In an effort to reassure myself that the government wasn’t deliberately lulling us into submission by this “metadata” only explanation, I said, “but it’s complicated and takes a lot of effort to find out the contents that they say are protected, right?”  My son smiled at my gullibility and said that he’s very good at mining data, but his skills are small fries compared to the people who do that for a living.  So, I asked why this administration seems so uninformed, like in Benghazi, where they came up with the narrative of the lame youtube video caused a spontaneous protest, if they have all this amazing technology to decipher information quickly.  My son hinted that might be a human lapse, not a glitch in the technology – sort of telling the boss what he wants to hear or feeding him information that fits his agenda.

This morning I stumbled upon this tidbit of information in a Rick Moran column (here).  In 2008 the Obama administration slipped in some amendments to the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act, called the FISA Amendments Act, which empower the attorney general to access all of your private communications without any prior approval from the FISA court.  The Obama administration wrote enough loopholes into this act to stray far beyond any legislative constraints, leading me to the sad realization that this wall of protection for our private communications exists only as a rhetorical flourish to deflect us from asking more questions.

At this point, the more I read trying to understand the terminology, the more I realize that even the terminology exists in a relativist’s utopia.  Metadata, means data about data, but even that definition according to Wikipedia, is ambiguous (here).  The simplistic analogy that it’s like your phone records, which aren’t considered protected and needing a subpoena to access, seems rather hollow in light of just how much information about your private life can be gleaned from sifting through your metadata.  Since most of us remain clueless about the terms, the government feels secure, knowing that telling us “it’s just metadata” will keep us quiet because, we don’t really want to know how exposed we are.

Diana West, a brilliant political commentator, refers to this symptom in her new book, “American Betrayal; The Secret Assault on Our Nation’s Character (here), as the situation in the children’s story, “The Emperor’s New Clothes” (here), where everyone pretends to see the invisible new clothes, except for a guileless child, who shouts out that the emperor is naked.  Maybe, metadata is just another set of fine invisible clothes the government has donned to keep us in our place,  but hopefully a few brave adults will cry out that they don’t see it .   Her Townhall.com columns can be found (here) and her blog (here).  West lays out the stakes for our country much more eloquently than I could ever hope to in her latest column No Constitution, No Borders, No USA.

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Filed under Culture Wars, Foreign Policy, Politics, The Constitution

June 12, 2013 · 5:23 pm

My mea culpa moment – Sarah Palin got it right

I mentioned in my previous post that I had said some negative things about Sarah Palin in comments at The American Thinker blog a long time ago (before we had a Republican nominee for President the last go around).  In a nutshell there were two things that bother me about Sarah Palin and I’ll get those out of the way before I get to the things I do admire about her, because even though I didn’t think she was ready to be President, she shouldn’t be written off as a national conservative voice.   The first thing that bothered me about Sarah Palin is how when given the opportunity to influence opinion on the national stage with a prominent news analyst position on Fox News, she didn’t offer anything more than repetitive political boilerplate comments.   The many times I watched her, left me wondering why she didn’t do more research and become better informed on issues and when Charles Krauthammer pointed out the obvious, he was pilloried by her ‘fans”.    I felt she wasn’t offering much to the discussions and outside of energy policy, where she really does shine, truthfully, she seemed in need of some intensive reading (particularly on history).  I remembered Lynne Cheney on CNN’s Crossfire in the old days and now there was a remarkable woman – brilliant, well-read on history, and a powerful voice for conservatives.  I kept hoping that Sarah Palin could move beyond the “lamestream media” trite phrases and really excel as a new voice of conservatism.  Her speeches indicated that she does have the ability to be on the national political stage.   The second thing that bothered me was how she was always getting on the cultural warrior soapbox, but she placed her family in the midst of one of the most detrimental cultural phenomenons of our time – that disgusting venture called “‘reality TV”.  My feeling is that a family’s home should be sacrosanct – a refuge from the world at large and a family’s internal workings should be private.  The American family has been undercut by the pervasive pop culture where people jumped on the Phil Donahue and Oprah train and for families to go on national TV to air private family issues in public ranks as one of the worst breaches of trust imaginable.  I was dismayed when she appeared with her “teenage mom” daughter on Oprah and allowed Oprah to question her parenting.  Then she had her entire family on display on a reality TV show, which laid lie to her culture warrior credo.

Well, in the past week, I remembered how the mainstream press lambasted Palin about her remarks about  “death panels” under Obamacare.  And here I’ll take my own dose of strong medicine and here’s my mea culpa moment – Sarah Palin didn’t flinch in that onslaught of criticism over her view on the “death panels” and she was right.   Watching this sad spectacle of Kathleen Sebelius refusing to intervene to save a little girl’s life (CBS report here) and listening to the remarks coming from Sebelius, proved that Palin had it right all along – government bureaucrats are more concerned about upholding their maze of rules and regulations than they are about saving a human life.  The alarming aspect of the case of this little girl in need of a lung transplant in PA was if this is how Sebelius and her band of medical “experts” react to saving  the life of a child, then one can only imagine how cavalierly they will treat the elderly, whose lives they may well choose to check as past the government-approved expiration date for many life-saving procedures.   After seeing how the Department of Health and Human Services handled the case of 10 year-old, Sarah Murnaghan’s desperate need of a lung transplant, it’s time to offer an apology for being so harsh about Sarah Palin (even though my comments never were posted online) and say one of the things I do admire about her is that she never wavered in the face of relentless media attacks on her position and the past week proved she nailed this “death panel” scenario exactly right.  We should all be very scared of the looming Obamacare bureaucracy.

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June 11, 2013 · 10:09 am

Selwyn Duke On Female Breadwinners – worth reading

Unlike Matt Drudge, I always ramble on and on about articles I read, which I feel should be shared – he just posts a catchy headline to grab your attention.  Selwyn Duke writes many biting, hard-hitting conservative pieces, where he just says it like it is.  His latest piece in The American Thinker (from which I was banned from posting comments – really I was for being pushy about my criticisms of Sarah Palin, whom they love at their website – true story, lol) is definitely thought-provoking….or just provoking if you’re a feminist.  The American Thinker offers lots of smart commentary and even though I’m still banned from posting comments, I love their website anyway. (okay, my comments were pretty harsh about Sarah Palin, there I admit it).   Back to the point here, Selwyn tackles the feminist myths about how great it is that so many women are now the primary breadwinners in the family (truly way too many of them are the only breadwinner, but don’t let that fact take the shine off of the march forward for women).  His latest article is titled “Rise in Female Breadwinners Means America Is a Loser.

Feminist-indoctrinated women, of both the political left and right, react just as he states, arguing based on their emotional investment in the girl power upbringing in America.  I know how easy it is to be sucked into that grand delusion, where we applaud every female who gets to be the “first” to blaze the trail into new career fields, while our American children, particularly boys, become social misfits, diagnosed with dubious psychological ailments and drugged at alarmingly young ages rather than promoting steady, consistent parenting to promote a safe, secure home environment where children can flourish – in that patriarchal evil  environ called a traditional family with a mother and a father.    The trajectory for young black males is a national disgrace, where due to the collapse of the traditional family, fatherless homes, and single mothers struggling to raise their kids in a mostly poverty-level environment,  an alarming number of young black males seem destined for a life marked by criminality and spending time behind bars.  The large numbers of young black men who fall through the cracks should alarm everyone – so much wasted potential and wasted lives where the deck seems stacked against these males from birth.

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Filed under Culture Wars, Food for Thought

June 4, 2013 · 11:38 pm

Military leadership 101: Set the standard

Politicizing the military chain of command continued full-throttle with today’s Senate Armed Forces Committee grilling of the Joint Chiefs of Staff over the recent spate of high-profile sexual assault cases.  (Reuters report here).  The most idiotic comment came from Senator Kristen Gillibrand, from New York, who stated, ““Not every commander can distinguish between a slap on the ass and rape.”   The political solution that Gillibrand proposes adds a layer of bureaucracy between commanders and their troops – a special third-party entity to handle sexual harassment and sexual assault issues.  This will further erode trust between soldiers and their chain of command.  This smells like one more effort to turn the military into a politicized social engineering project of the left-wing politicos.  

As a female in the Army decades ago (circa 1980), I was sent to a Pershing missile unit, as I’ve mentioned before.  My battalion had less than 100 women and around 1,ooo men.  The Army back then had a pretty bad drug problem in Europe too, so things were a little rough.  Since this in my blog, I’m going to speak the truth.  I love the Army and I learned so many important lessons that have carried me through life and truly taught me how to face challenges head-on.  The integration of women into the military rates as a mixed bag of results.  One of my sisters completed a very successful career in the Air Force and she never experienced anything remotely what I did when I arrived to my Pershing unit.  Each service grappled with how to integrate women into the ranks amidst a great deal of politicized decision-making , where actual military excellence has always taken a backseat to the feminist-driven objectives.   Many women do excel in the military and certainly our military benefits from having as many of our best and brightest young people serving in uniform, so I’m not against women in the military.  What I’m going to say, is my opinion, based on my own personal experiences and observations – not some poll or what someone else said.  I’m going to speak about the real life problems that persist by integration being about politics, not what’s best for the mission or the soldiers.  It’s the real life proverbial elephant in the middle of the room that no male soldier dare speak about

In an earlier post I sort of tongue-in-cheek referred to my experiences in a battalion with so many men and so few women as the best diversionary tactics training in the world and you know what, it really was!  The minute I arrived at my battery, men started swarming around me and I guess the most accurate description would be, they were talking a lot of shit.  Yes, men talk a lot of shit, that’s a fact.  A young man grabbed my arm and I grabbed him by his shirt and slammed him against the wall and told him, “Don’t touch me!”   The other guys started laughing and talking more shit, but not a single one of them ever touched me again and the one who did grab my arm became a friend.  A female sergeant walked me down the sidewalk, past the next battery and on to the end of the parade field (those German kasernes usually have central parade field with the barracks arranged around the perimeter) .  The men were hanging out of the windows screaming vulgar things at me and the female sergeant told me not to look up and to just keep walking.  We went and retrieved my TA50 (field gear) and then she marched me back to my battery.  I was very scared my first few weeks there.

I have always felt thankful I was assigned to a battery with a good battery commander and an outstanding first sergeant.  My first sergeant (in the Army he’s called Top) was a Special Forces Vietnam vet, who taught me how to be a soldier.  The first time I met him, I was standing in front of his desk and he asked me where I was from and he looked me up and down and said, “Young lady, you don’t belong here!”  He was at a loss with how to deal with women, but he assigned us tasks, just like the men, and one thing I learned very quickly with him was if you worked hard and did what you were supposed to, he made sure to praise your efforts.  After several months there, some commander decided they should have a female M60 gunner to impress the NATO evaluators who observed many of our field training exercises.  Top picked me to be a machine gunner.  And the morning he told me that  I was going to become a machine gunner, this cocky infantry sergeant (Mr Hotshot 82nd paratrooper) said, “Top, girls can’t be machine gunners!”  Top told him, “Sergeant, you’re going to train her!”  So, I became a machine gunner and that sergeant took me to the range and as many times as I said, “I can’t do this” and I told him, “I’m scared of guns!”  He told me, “the mind controls the body, the body does not control the mind!”  Well, I learned.  Top made sure I learned a lot of other stuff when we went to the field too and to this day, I rank him as one of a handful of men whom I respect the most.  That cocky sergeant later became my husband.

Now, what kind of stuff happens when you’ve got so few young women and so many men – lots of drama and the men would make comments about why most of these women were pregnant and the rest were lesbians, totally oblivious to their roles in events.  Here’s another thing that seems to be part of the male mindset – they divide women into categories and treat them accordingly.  I behaved like a lady and was treated respectfully.  Once a few men determined I was a “nice little country girl”,  they insured other men treated me respectfully.  Men do some sort of internal policing from what I observed.  A typical occurrence would be some man would say something vulgar to me and other men would jump in and tell him that he couldn’t talk to me like that.  I quickly had many men “protecting” me and I felt safe almost anywhere on post.   I observed that many young women arrived there and went to the club and got into bad situations quickly, because men perceived them to be sluts.  Men really do divide women into groups.   One friend of mine was a young woman, who arrived at the same time I did, and she got involved in a few abusive relationships with men and after several months, she joined what I referred to as the “lesbian alliance” – it sure seemed more like a safe sex group from my viewpoint than it seemed to be about some heartfelt “sexual orientation”.  I asked this young woman why she decided to become a lesbian and she told me about her bad experiences with men and how this was safe sex and she didn’t have to worry about being beat up.

Army experiences can vary even in the same battalion and the biggest difference is in the quality of your chain of command.  I felt very fortunate to be in a battery with good order and discipline.  The friend mentioned in the previous paragraph ended up in a battery where there seemed to be little order or discipline and we had a couple of batteries like that in our battalion – in fact, I dreaded even walking into those batteries in broad daylight and going to the orderly room for official  business.  I sure wouldn’t have walked in there after duty hours.  I had another female friend who lived in a battery where the standards weren’t like in my battery.  Top had the female soldiers on the first floor with a female CQ at our end of the hallway and there was a male CQ down by the orderly room.  I felt safe in my room.  Now, this female friend, her first sergeant stuck the women on the top floor with only an unlocked door and a female CQ sitting there.  I walked up to her room only one time by myself and after that I always had a male friend with me.  You don’t ever want to get cornered on a stairwell.   My female friend who lived there was barely 5 feet tall and I bet she didn’t even weigh 100 lbs and she had to walk up that stairwell several times a day and sleep knowing only one female soldier was guarding her from a battery of men (many who used drugs and got drunk frequently).  As an aside, most of the females I met were from blue-collar or below backgrounds.  They weren’t the Hillary Clinton “experts” on women’s issues, but their very personal safety was impacted by these feminist harpies, who continue to push their idiotic feminist agenda on the military.

We had an old school battalion commander and since my public affairs job had me in close contact with the command group, I got to know the entire command group well.  My battalion commander took me along with him for many German/American events and he treated his driver and me fantastic.  He spoke fluent German,  could explain German history as well as he could military history and I loved listening to him explain things.  I had a battalion executive officer, who was a whiz at explaining how Pershing missiles actually worked and he could explain our entire nuclear posture in simple terms, where it all made sense.  I liked talking to him too.  My battalion commander nicknamed me, Fraulein Wunderbar, and he hadn’t quite grasped the female soldier thing.  He always stood up when I walked in his office and one time he had some young officers in there and he told them, “you stand up when a lady enters the room!”.  He made one of them give me his seat.  One time I had to travel with him to a Combat Alert Site, where the firing battery had been there a long time.  He had his driver stop at a nearby village and he bought us dinner in a nice German guesthouse.  When we were ready to leave he handed me over to a German lady and he told me that I was staying in this German guesthouse for the night and he would have his driver pick me up in the morning.  I told him I would be fine at the CAS site and he said, “I wouldn’t dream of having you stay there, those men have been out there for 3 months!”  He treated me like he would treat his daughter.  However, the gap in this is each of those firing batteries had a handful or so of female soldiers, so one can only imagine how they fared.  I can say that I never saw any female soldiers who were physically strong enough to be a Pershing missile crewman, but the Army had them.

I learned to handle a machine gun, but was I strong enough, if I had to pick up that machine gun and move quickly with it – hell, no!.  Yet, I could max the female PT test.  Therein lies the main rub with all this integration hoopla – the feminist harpies in political circles want women in every job in the military, yet they possess not a lick of understanding about these jobs or about unit cohesion, or about how we fight or how to win wars.  All they care about is their lame feminist agenda and waxing on about smashing glass ceilings.  There are females in the military like this too – totally centered on being the “first female” this or that – with no regard for the big picture – how their feminist agenda affects the whole team.  No one ever speaks honestly about the problems of women serving in positions where there are two different sets of physical standards for the same job, yet everyone has to pretend there aren’t.  No male commander can mention how pregnancy in actual deployments creates a gap in mission performance, nor can he impose any sensible policies for fear of the feminist harpies who monitor women in the military issues.  (ABC news story of one such attempt)

When we went on field training exercises, I spent many hours being a perimeter guard and I slept in a two-man tent with my machine gun partner, who luckily for me was a young man whom I could trust and who never said a single inappropriate comment to me.   So, when he was sleeping, I was on guard duty and the thing these feminist harpies fail to realize is their idiotic decisions could cause someone’s death in real war.  When we went to the field they used the few infantry soldiers we had to play the opposing force.  One young infantry sergeant would toss a stone near my guard position at night and whisper my name (he always approached from in front of my position).  He would come sit a few minutes and talk, then he’d head back to be the opposing force.  Now, that cocky 82nd sergeant, he’d approach my guard position from behind me, which meant he already had breached our perimeter.  He would often whisper my name in the dark too and then he would come over and he always checked that machine gun first to make sure I had it set up properly, then he asked me if I remembered this and that and after that he would sit a few minutes and talk.  He would then say, “Okay, back to fighting the war.” and he’d head back into the dark.    I always heard the young infantry sergeant long before he tossed a stone, but that 82nd sergeant, well most of the time I didn’t hear him until he whispered my name and by then he was close enough to take me out.  I would sit there in the dark after he left, telling myself, “I jeopardized our mission again!”  And I would try harder, but I thought about if we were at war against the Soviets – any Soviet infantryman could have killed me in a  heartbeat if it came to one on one fighting and I would think about my partner sleeping a few feet away and his life would have been at risk too.  I always knew that no matter how much I trained, the physical advantage was on the man’s side.  Smart armies should want the strongest men to be infantry soldiers – they best fit the mission.

The answer to the sexual assault and rape problems isn’t to get Congress involved or to have more sensitivity training.  The solution is to train better leaders in the ranks – we need to get back to basics and away from all this politicized claptrap and turning the military into a political correctness experiment.  Back to good order and discipline, back to treating soldiers fairly and consistently, back to focusing on setting high standards.  And most of all we need to decide all missions based on what best fits the mission ( in some cases that will mean men perform those missions) !

And here’s the truth about women and men, we need to get back to teaching them to be ladies and gentlemen, especially in the officer ranks.  Teaching respect at every level in the military will set the standard, so that every soldier will have confidence in the chain of command again.

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May 15, 2013 · 2:41 pm

American Propaganda Masters (ignore that man behind the curtain)

The numerous scandals brewing finally woke up a hypnotized mainstream media, but I want to talk about something else.  During the Clinton impeachment drama, their spinmeisters hit the media – print and TV (lacking only to dominate talk-radio) with a relentless wave of media manipulation efforts.  They floated deceptive language and phrases to try and confuse the American public into accepting that lying under oath was no big deal depending if the testimony pertained to personal sexual behavior.  Along with the “it’s just about sex, sex, sex” line, they also used the “vast, right-wing conspiracy” as a diversionary tactic to convince the American people that Bill Clinton was a “victim”.  Rehashing this old scandal  is meant to illuminate a problem in America, that trickles down from the highest reaches of our government.  Americans, by and large, take their personal liberty and the many blessings of living in a free society for granted.

The mass media manipulations (propaganda) will hit full-force as another corrupt administration tries to survive a series of scandals.  The DNC, the Clinton political machine and President Obama with his army of far-left kooks and Chicago-type political operatives will feverishly work to contain these scandals.  The Republican partisans will mobilize to capitalize on these scandals and make as much political hay as possible.  Seeking the  truth will not be the ultimate objective of either side’s efforts.  Political objectives will fuel both sides.  Even during President Reagan’s second-term, Iran-Contra marred his legacy and it pained me to see some of his cabinet testify using slippery language and, in my view, lie.  Both political parties fall prey to lying way too often.

President Clinton’s poll numbers were touted by the Clinton mouthpieces endlessly during the impeachment saga to neutralize and derail the impeachment efforts.  He governed using a finger-to-the-wind approach rather than from firm principled footing.  To this day much of our news, from all political angles, is presented with polling data as the benchmark on issues.  From impeachment to the present-day gay marriage – issues are sold to the American public, not on the merits of the issue, but on polling data.  Once over 50% of the public can be cited as “supporting” that viewpoint, the media accepts that polling data as a reflection of the “will of the people“.  What we’re being duped into believing is that if you can deceive, trick, and use mass media manipulation techniques (propaganda) effectively, then the end polling results are a true representation of the mainstream public’s position.

The merits of issues should be debated and argued, but to accept the end result of mass media manipulation campaigns, rather than demanding straight facts and the truth,  jeopardizes the very foundation of our liberties.  Polls reflect nothing more than the effectiveness of the propaganda efforts in America these days.   It’s reached the point where reporters talk about the administration’s “narrative” without raising an eyebrow or murmuring even a few probing questions.  We should demand the truth and facts, not settle for some slickly packaged “narrative”.  An administration that can utter explanations such as the white girlfriend that President Obama talked about in his autobiography was a “composite” of white girlfriends, with no media alarm bells being sounded, highlights how bereft of principles both this administration and the media are.  We can’t  trust a mainstream media that is so blinded by partisan politics.  And the Frank Luntz type of  finding the “pulse” of America by how people “react” to certain phrases in speeches provides nothing more than data to be utilized by political propagandists.  We need to try to get the American people to THINK about issues, which requires some time spent studying the issues and pondering the merits of both sides of an argument – not gauging superficial “reacting” on a second-by-second basis.

We need some calm, reasonable voices to remind people to put the partisan politics aside and demand to get to the ground truth facts, wherever they fall.  Polling numbers reflect nothing more than the barometer of political polarization efforts being fueled by partisan political operatives.   Polls do not reflect anything vital and we should demand that those in the media stop relying on polls as the determining factor on issues of great public import.  Polls are about how people “FEEL‘”, not about what people “THINK”  and hopefully we can get Americans to react less and think more.  An informed opinion rests on taking the time to gather as many facts as possible, making a free press a vital link in the process.   Maybe if we’re lucky our press will go back to demanding, “the facts” and let the political chips fall where they may.

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May 1, 2013 · 5:39 pm

Christians: The Latest Obama Target

A few weeks ago I posted a piece, Equal Opportunity For Dummies, Courtesy of the US Army.   Now,  just in time comes a lot of reports that the Obama administration has the  Pentagon meeting  with a rabidly anti-Christian kook, Mikey Weinstein, who heads up the Military Religious Freedom Foundation, an organization dedicated to ending Christian proselytizing within the military.   Perhaps, that PA National Guard Equal Opportunity training guide on potential extremists wasn’t just some isolated misguided fluke, but just might be part of a comprehensive Obama administration attempt to dismantle the core values that have served to make our military the finest in the world.  Here’s a short piece by Todd Starnes on a Fox News radio website on this latest attempt at purging our military of all who cling to their guns and traditions.  Don’t fret about the enemies beyond our borders, worry about the dangerous ideologue who holds the Commander In Chief powers and intends to begin the purges of all who resist another of his fundamental transformation efforts.  Gut our forces, demoralize all who cling to traditional military values, install sycophantic political hacks in all leadership positions, embroil our troops in gender issues, muddle mission with PC claptrap, impose stridently Christian intolerant policies, excuse Islamic extremism and destroy our force from within – hey, who said President Obama knows nothing about strategy – he’s got the old-time  big c “Communist”  blueprint memorized.  All that’s lacking is a fomentation of racial discord, which always figures largely in those old Communist goals.  Alas, I am just one of  those PA clingers to the past – this time I’m clinging to my Cold War training and it’s disconcerting that instead of all those endless worries about how to defend against the Soviets, the new worry lies on whether we’re being defeated by willfully ignoring the truth before our very eyes.

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