Fighting a Virus

Won't someone rid me of this nettlesome cold? With apologies to Thomas Becket, the publisher of this blog is down with an illness today and may not be able to devote much energy to this forum. In any event, if I do not comment on what is noteworthy today, I will when my health permits. To my sorrowful friends, dread not, and to my gleeful enemies, I am not in line for Last Rites just yet.

Willpower Versus Firepower

The most powerful nation to exist, the only nation to put a man on the moon, finds itself locked in a death struggle with a band of fanatics that want to take the world back to the seventh century, and in Iraq, and increasingly even Afghanistan, the atavists are winning. The only reason America can not defeat the Muslim extremists is that we lack the will to win. Our national policy leaders are casualty averse, even when those deaths are on the other side. Let some village in Pakistan show a dead child to the world media, and claim a drone killed the "innocent" and our human rights ninnies pitch a fit. Do they not realize, that unless they are Sunni fundamentalists, the people that the do-gooders are speaking up for would gladly cut their heads off with a dull knife? When the jihadists say they "love death more than the infidel loves life", they are not kidding.

Odds on Hillary

I do not want to see Hillary Clinton elected President of the United States in 2016 (or ever, for that matter), but after the Christie (who I would never vote for either) meltdown, I would say that rotten Rodham is the odds on favorite. She will never be held to account for Benghazi, for her commodity trading scandal, or for helping her philandering husband overcome "bimbo eruptions" from the women he was exploiting sexually. I see no one in the Democrat primary process who could defeat her for the nomination, nor any Republican who would be able to beat Clinton in the general election after the main stream media scrutiny they will receive but Hillary will not. In a sane world, with four Americans massacred on her watch on what should have been a day of maximum preparation and preparedness (it was after all September 11) in Libya, and we were caught with our guard down, that alone would disqualify her. On top of that, that her and Obama's foreign policy has been a disaster with the Arab Spring turning into a bloody Arab Winter and with the Green Revolution America should have supported in Iran being left to wither, the idea that Hillary could rise to the Presidency is preposterous.

Worth a Cent

Have you ever been accosted by lying urban panhandlers using a child as a prop? Leaving a restaurant the other night, I was approached by a bedraggled white vagrant with a filthy child claiming to need "five dollars for a tow truck", which was a transparent falsehood. I would have bought the pair a meal if the adult had been the least bit honest, but I was not about to feed whatever his addiction is. I hope state social services addresses the welfare of the child who would be much better off as a ward of the state than as a tool for someone's attempt to scam passersby out of their earnings. I feel nothing but contempt for the man and am gravely concerned for the child.

A Real Joke

New Jersey Republican Governor Chris Christie has about as much chance now of becoming President of the United States as Billy Graham has of becoming Pope. Even before the bridge lane closure scandal, I was not enamored with the gun-banning, baleen, moderate GOP governor. Of course, real conservative credentials no longer seem to be a selling point among establishment Republicans. The Washington elite were sold on their fellow traveler from the Garden State, but heartland voters were not as taken with Christie who has demonstrated that he is no conservative on social matters, and while not as free a spender as his Democrat predecessor and not a handmaiden to public sector unions, Christie is not really a fiscal conservative either. With a media unforgiving to Republicans and largely already on the Hillary Clinton bandwagon, I do not think the Fort Lee folly will be forgotten.

War on Poverty

Fifty years back, Lyndon Johnson declared "war on poverty". In the decades that have elapsed since then, in spite of twenty "T" trillion dollars spent to defeat domestic economic hardship, poverty has held its own. In fact, if this is considered our longest "war", no one would credibly claim that Johnson's goals, no matter how noble, no matter how expensive to taxpayers, have been met. America met poverty on the battlefield, and poverty won. Dave Boyer confirm's poverty's victory in an article titled: "That's rich: Poverty level under Obama breaks 50-year record" from The Washington Times published on January 7, 2014.

Observing Societal Rot

Reading of multiple "knockout game" attacks across the United States, about a homeless man beaten and having his dog killed by a gang of "teens", hearing of ever greater legalization of marijuana, finding welfare and Food Stamp rolls that have never been higher, and knowing the only path many Americans see to prosperity is through winning a state lottery at a time states are permitting ever easier access to gambling, I am left to ponder whatever became of out "Founding Wisdom"? Where are the values that made us great of thrift and industry? When did dependency overcome freedom? Why have so many embraced the despondency of the dole over the liberty of self-reliance and the work ethic? We are seeing DC as the unrivaled boom town just as history has shown us that Rome continued to thrive as the far-flung Roman Empire was collapsing. I pray that enough of the sinew of Americanism remains that we remain Americans.