Posted on 07/20/2009 3:38:33 AM PDT by Kaslin
Nobody has to tell me things are going from bad to worse in America. The question that preys on my mind is when it was that we began our descent. Some would say it started when Jimmy Carter turned his back on the Shah of Iran, thus providing an impetus for latter-day Islamic terrorism. Others might say it was the first time Bill Clinton dropped his pants in the Oval Office, while still others might contend it began when the Supreme Court determined that the Pursuit of Happiness was a rationale for 80 million abortions on demand.
For all I know, things might have begun sliding the very first time some slack-jawed teenager struck a pose and struck a chord on an imaginary guitar. There was a time, after all, when most American kids were actually given music lessons and learned how to play an actual instrument, and even saved up their allowance to buy sheet music.
Whenever the slide began, in the months since Obama was crowned, we’ve slid faster and further than I would have dreamed possible. Obama keeps huffing and puffing and the federal government just keeps expanding like a gigantic balloon. It’s only a matter of time until it blows up in all our faces.
Not in my wildest nightmares would I have imagined that an American president would travel to countries we’ve bled and died to defend, and apologize for our arrogance. Neither would I have ever expected that the same man who casually dismissed our special relationship with England would curtsy to a Saudi prince; refer to a blood-thirsty Muslim cleric, the Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, as the Supreme Leader; and butter up a Russian tyrant who cut his eye teeth working for the barbaric KGB.
After all that, I wasn’t the least bit surprised when Obama joined Hugo Chavez and the Castro brothers in demanding that Honduras allow dictator wannabe Manuel Zelaya back in the country to resume his assault on democracy.
Obama’s groupies in and out of the media used to cry “Foul!” during the campaign whenever people would question the character of a man whose intimate circle included a corrupt Chicago lobbyist, an unrepentant terrorist, a racist minister and a spouse who announced that America was a mean country. It seems that in the past several months, his circle has grown in size, but unfortunately not in character.
The president’s good friend, Al Gore, who stands to clean up, thanks to the Cap and Trade bill, has long campaigned for the greening of America. How long will it take people to wake up to the fact that his major concern is the greening of Al Gore? For good measure, the greedy oaf recently compared the battle over global warming to the war against the Nazis. And, to think, some folks thought PETA was over the top when they compared a chicken farm to Auschwitz.
Speaking of Nazis and Auschwitz reminds me that I wish Israel, a haven for many of those who survived the concentration camps, would stop referring to portions of their country as settlements. Israel was attacked by its Arab enemies, fought back and won. Part of what the Israelis won was turf. It’s how just about every country on earth wound up having its present dimensions. Referring to the land as settlements makes it sound like they’re only borrowing it until the rightful owners come by and pick it up. You might as well call California, Texas and Arizona settlements. Well, come to think of it, I guess La Raza does.
As hard as it is to accept, there’s no getting around the fact that Al Franken is a U.S. senator. On the upside, just as people used to say that any boy could grow up to be president, now people can say that any comedian who’s smug, obnoxious and not the least bit funny, can grow up to be a senator. That being the case, I guess it’s not too much of a stretch to imagine that Sen. Franken might one day be joined by the likes of Bill Maher and David Letterman.
It is appropriate, though, that Franken represents Minnesota. Its state bird, after all, is the loon.
Before signing off, I found myself wondering the other day why it is, now that Afghanistan is Obama’s war, I don’t hear the Democrats or their lap dogs in the media referring to it as a quagmire, pointing out that the Taliban didn’t attack us on 9/11, and demanding that President Obama announce his exit strategy?
What you said.
Burt Prelutsky always hits the nail square on the head
Popular election of Senators pretty much ties it all up.
It seems to me to have begun immediately after WWII ended.
The author nails it for all those of us who woke up one day recently and realized that the United States was utterly, completely FUBAR, and sat on the edge of the bed shaking our heads and wondering how on earth it happened.
Yes. Burt wonders when the decline began, I can tell him: 1913. The Income Tax and direct election of senators both in that one disastrous year. It has been downhill since.
The descent begins at age 4or 5, and in some states at age 3.
It starts in kindergarten the moment a child steps foot in a government K-12 school. That act alone teaches a child that the government will use the threat of police force to take from his neighbor to pay for his schooling. It also teaches the child that the government will use police force to threaten him ( the child) and his parents if they do not bend to the government's will.
As the child continues in K-12 schooling not only is he taught that government will take from his neighbor for his needs but that that it is the government's **right**. Add to this Marxist dominated curriculum and teachers trained in Marxist indoctrination camps ( mis-named colleges of education) and here we are!
Since government schools **look** like prisons, and the child's routine resembles that of a prisoner, why are we surprised that after 13 or more years child learns to **be** a prisoner of the state?
Our descent began in the mid-19th to early 20th century when compulsory government K-12 schooling became universal across the land. It's taken 2 to 4 generations to crush the independent American spirit, but now we have what we have. Please remember it wasn't that long ago. My dad was born in 1913, and in that year compulsory government K-12 school still was not universally accepted in all the states.
Government schools were a socialist idea in the mid to late 19th century to turn American children into compliant and passive cogs in the fascist state. They have succeeded admirably.
If we want to turn this around, conservatives must work to shut down every government K-12 school and to open private conservative alternatives for every child in the U.S.
The descent began when as a nation we began to stop thinking of ourselves as "one nation under GOD". When we removed God from the nation,from our schools, from our lives, then godless evil comes in to fill the void. What did we expect?
We were so arrogant to think that America's greatness would continue without He who made us great. All other nations who have abandoned God are feeling the same "emptiness". Look at Great Britain for instance.
The seeds were sown with the appearance of Marx’s Das Kapital and his band of merry revolutionaries in London.
One must remember that Marx always thought communism would take root in developed, industrially and agriculturally, societies first. As it turned out Marxists had to settle for Russia to get the ball rolling. It ultimately failed there, but, heck, it wasn’t supposed to start in a second tier country anyway.
Marxists—aka communists, socialists, leftists, progressives and/or liberals—were vibrantly active in intellectual America from before Lenin’s October Revolution overthrew Czar Nicholas in 1919.
However, the concept of communal wealth was anathama to Western industrialized societies and governments. Therefore, the actual formation of communist (as they came to be called) parties was prohibited in most of these countries.
Stalin’s land grab in Eastern Europe following WWII alarmed all Western governments which generated even more resistance to the communist idea.
Therefore, to ultimately prevail communist leadership—international and American—had to devise a stealth plan to eventually prevail in the West. I suspect that this plan evolved in the late 40s and then matured in the early 50s.
It was actually a rather simple plan in concept, but it required patience and time to achieve fruition.
This plan called for the communists to coopt the US Supreme Court (achieved, but lost. They’re determined to do it again), the media (achieved), the public schools (achieved), religion (achieved), entertainment (achieved), and even business leadership (achieved). It required 50 years or so to get where we are today. But, in hindsight, we all just stood in the middle of the tracks and watched the train coming.
There is a concerted campaign by our communist government to convince Americans that it is really Big Business that is the villain. But the truth is, today Big Business leadership is a tool of the Communist (Demrat) Party in America today.
The challenge for constitutionally traditional Americans is to figure out how to undo the damage. For me, education must be attacked first. Communist “educators” must be denied the opportunity to dumb down and propagandize our children from day care through university. Without taking that on and winning, everything else is a waste of time. The commies will just continue corrupting generations of American kids with their communist ideology.
The descent began on a widespread basis when it was decided that college students would be exempt from the draft during the Vietnam War.
While non-college students were drafted and served in Vietnam in large numbers, college students psychologically rationalized their nonparticipation by taking the position that the fight against communism in Southeast Asia was morally wrong, and thus pretended to claim the moral high ground against those who actually served.
These college students went on to become the journalists, professors, book authors, Congressmen, movie and television producers and other professions which even today have a dominant influence on our culture.
Even after the communist takeover of Southeast Asia and the death, “re-education” and impoverishment of many millions proved they were wrong to support the communists, because of their stranglehold on the organs of American culture, the popular impression even today is that they were right.
Before that, radical leftwing influence in America was important, but it was not mainstream, which it became after the college deferment of the draft was instituted.
“But, in hindsight, we all just stood in the middle of the tracks and watched the train coming.’
As these sonofabitches quoted our own constitution at us.
If we don’t shake of our torpor and stupor in the next few months we’re going to wind up in a place of chaos. That’s what it is down to in terms of time in my view. Our here and now is a ‘moment’ in History.
I’m afraid, TalBlack, too many Americans have had it too good for too long. Intoxicated by their colossal ignorence of their own and world history, intoxicated by their never having to take on real responsibility, intoxicated by their never having been “tested”, intoxicated by their belief that individually they are the center of the universe and intoxicated by their belief that have a right to another person’s money, etc. etc. they stumble along from one unhappy state to another trying to find utopia. And that, of course, is the enticing lure of the communists and their propaganda.
Meanwhile, we have all stood by while the left has systematically gutted the Constitution, American families and religious traditions. At the same time the left has suppressed the American trait of self reliance. In its place they have created the dependence mentallity. In short, all the things that made America the premminent world power it became in less than 200 years the commies have turned into negatives.
Americans, like drug addicts, will have to hit the proverbial “bottom” before they rouse themselves. I’ve no idea how or when the tide will turn. But history tells me it will. Totalitarian governments always fail. Our own totalitarian communist government will fail, too.
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