Category → Government Of the People…
Why this election is important
This election is a public referendum on the way America is run.
Right now we have the US Attorney General personally intervening in the FBI investigation of Hillary Clinton. Loretta Lynch is personally using her official position in the Obama Administration to block criminal accountability for an American citizen.
Is this the Rule of Law? Is America now being run like a Third World country?
President Richard Nixon went down in flames for crimes much less significant than what Hillary Clinton appears to have committed. Why is Hillary Clinton not being held to the same standard as Nixon?
Both Obama and Clinton use the levers of administrative power to pursue policies they cannot obtain through Congress, per the US Constitution. A weak Republican establishment is more worried about its own political career, and will not confront these unconstitutional abuses of power.
A compliant press that shares the agenda of Obama and Clinton shields both of them from scrutiny and honest news reporting, and viciously attacks people who do try to raise legitimate concerns. The mainstream press is now an attack dog for one political party. Most “news” professionals no longer even pretend to be objective.
Sure, there are two flawed presidential candidates. But one of them has serious criminal issues, while the other just bugs people with his big mouth. The flaws are not comparable or equal. Voters who easily disregard Hillary’s criminality maintain a mindset they will never tolerate with other Americans. They simply want a certain set of policy outcomes enshrined in Federal law or executive actions, regardless of the cost.
This is why this election is so important.
Do Americans want to be run by a strong president, who simply does whatever he or she wants to do, and Congress is more of an advisory body? That is how Rome was run by the Caesars, and the political swings were so wild whenever an administration changed that bodies littered the streets each time. Is this where you want America to go?
Do you really believe that 50% of the American electorate will stand back and let their country fall apart and the rule of law suspended? Civil wars have been fought over less.
Trump is not an ideal candidate, but he is not a criminal, and nowhere near as flawed or as dangerous as Hillary Clinton. Voting for Clinton rewards her criminality. Voting for Trump is voting for a stable America where the rule of law remains. You cannot go wrong with that.
Wikileaks says “next week Hillary gets arrested”
Despite a wall designed by the mainstream media to blackout and blockade the actual news surrounding Hillary Clinton, and talk up obviously contrived, fake issues about Trump, Wikileaks is beginning to leak past, under, around, and through all of the underhanded attempts to elect an unqualified crook by keeping the American electorate ignorant of Hillary’s many serious crimes.
Go to Wikileaks and see the emails yourself.
These emails are damning.
Hillary Clinton is a walking criminal enterprise like nothing the world has seen before. Influence peddling, theft of private charitable donations to the sham Clinton Foundation, misuse of public funds, misuse of public information (people right now are going to jail for far less important offenses), and even worse.
Wikileaks says that next week’s email dump will result in Hillary Clinton’s arrest.
Property Taxes: Vote them OUT
A version of this opinion-editorial was submitted to the Patriot News editorial editor, John Micek. He usually prints my opinion pieces, but it also takes a lot of hemming and hawing. UPDATE: The Patriot News did run this op-ed on 11/2/16. Thank you, John Micek.
Property Taxes Must End
In graduate school, our economics professors gave us hypothetical tax and income scenarios to solve. Our homework was to critique various tax and revenue structures, and find the optimum public fund distributions, based on subjective values. These learning exercises were designed to give us the ability to present decision makers with a range of policy options best suited to a particular culture or economic perspective. A lot of my peers there were international students headed home to basically run their countries.
My take on property tax is that it spreads the burden around to those least likely to directly benefit from it, those least likely to see an indirect benefit from it, and those least likely to afford it. It penalizes working people the most. Politically it is treated like an off-the-books cash cow, pushing an increasingly unmanageable burden on our most vulnerable citizens. School property taxes are the worst and most unfair form of tax possible. A thousand years ago in Europe they were considered fair, because the taxing authorities no longer had to search and pillage individual farms while looking for “extra” grain and meat hidden among the farmer’s possessions. Land taxes were then tied to the particular land’s productive capabilities. Thin soils on rocky terrain in cold climates with short growing seasons were “penny lands,” because they annually produced only pennies worth of food and fiber beyond basic subsistence levels. “Ouncelands” farms on rich soils in warmer climates produced enough “extra” food to be annually valued in ounces of silver. And so on.
Today even this basic leveling philosophy is long gone from our property tax arrangements, as is the agricultural world that started property taxes altogether. Now it’s a free for all, with school property taxes disconnected from serving students, and directed to gold plating the various administrative and pension arrangements concocted by politically powerful unions, or building unneeded, expensive monuments to the failed educational profession in the form of elementary and high school “campuses” on productive farmland. Thus, the poorest cities with the lowest real estate values have the highest school taxes. This is bad policy, bad government, bad taxation, and it must end. We citizens deserve much better from our government.
Here in Pennsylvania’s 15th senate district, one candidate (the incumbent) has voted several times against repealing, changing, eliminating, or even reforming school property taxes. Then again, he has received tens of thousands of dollars from government school unions.
The other candidate has pledged to support Act 76, the property tax elimination bill that would keep Grandma from getting ejected from her home of fifty years because she can’t pay $23.76 in back taxes to a school district that only knows how to spend, spend, spend, and to which she has not sent a kid since 1963.
If you live here in the 15th senate district, next week you should vote for the candidate who says he supports Act 76. That person is John DiSanto.
Josh First is a businessman living in Harrisburg City.
Does “dialogue” work?
The words “bipartisanship” and “dialogue” are emphasized as being part and parcel of America’s success, political, financial, cultural.
But have you had, or tried to have, a political dialogue recently? If yes, was it successful?
I have been struck between the eyes by what seems odd, to me, about the dialogues and conversations I have had recently, in person and online.
Americans saying they intend to vote for Hillary Clinton are completely unmoved by her crimes, her private actions, her bullying of her husband’s many rape and sexual harassment victims. There really is nothing Hillary Clinton can do that her supporters won’t overlook.
And there really is nothing that her opponent, Donald Trump, can do that is acceptable to them.
I find this odd, strange, illogical, because objectively weighing out one candidate versus the other leads to a pretty obvious conclusion: Both candidates are flawed, but one is desperately flawed, far more flawed than the other. Why a middle-income, law-abiding American will vote for someone so deeply flawed and unqualified is mysterious to me.
It appears that reason, logic, facts, quantifiable substance are all utterly of no consequence to about fifty percent of the voters.
They are utterly unmoved by the Wikileaks revelations, that one particular political party has a core culture of stealing votes, rigging elections, engaging in the worst sort of voter fraud that undermines the entire premise of representative government. Wikileaks has revealed a group of people in love with power and control, at any cost to the nation, to innocent people, to anyone in their way.
“I hope Hillary did kill Vince Foster. That is totally badass” writes a top, paid, political party functionary whose name is frequently in the news.
This person was revealing this sentiment in a private email that was not supposed to end up in the public view, but public it now is, and so is that person’s mindset. This mindset is quite literally insane, and yet none of Hillary’s supporters seem phased at all by it. It is all OK, apparently, among Hillary’s supporters.
And so on, in like mind, in like words, among the people closest to Hillary Clinton’s lust for power.
The list of crimes against Donald Trump and his supporters grows longer every day, as more and more Wikileaks evidence is revealed.
George Soros and his favored political party paid people to go to Trump rallies and wreak violence, to punch and hurt innocent people, to cause destruction, to stir things up, so that their allies in the establishment press could then accuse the Trump supporters of the misdeeds.
And yet none of this bothers any of the people I have dialogued with in recent weeks and days. They simply do not care, and they are simply going to vote for Hillary Clinton, period, because.
America is premised on dialogue, on reason, on voters making educated decisions that are in the best interest of the polity, which we all share. When so many voters are presented with damning evidence that their candidate is pure evil, and fatally flawed, and they still support that person, then they have abandoned the very foundation of what makes America work.
And this is what is most problematic about Hillary Clinton’s support: It means that end of democracy, the end of our Republic, because Clinton is ready to employ the same illegal, unconstitutional actions that Obama has gotten away with. And once she is president and acting that way, America is headed for a constitutional crisis. Her actions as candidate say everything about her as president.
Every human civilization comes to an end at some point. America is not too big to fail. It is only as strong as the voters who run it. If America presently has fifty percent of its voters lusting after domination over their fellow citizens, and well-reasoned dialogue with them is unpersuasive, then our nation is headed for serious problems.
I hope America dodges this bullet, and gets back on track.
p.s. someone accused me of being a Republican, and therefore naturally supporting Donald Trump. First, Trump is no Republican. Second, I cannot stand the commie Republican Party and I am only a registered Republican because I live in a state with closed primaries and I must hang my hat somewhere; I would be most satisfied as a registered Independent. Third, Trump is running against a political establishment controlled by BOTH political parties. He is an outsider who has no allegiance to any party, but only to the American People, which I and many others find refreshing, even if he is a blathering big mouth. Dialogue provides the means by which we come to well-reasoned conclusions. But not one Hillary Clinton supporter I have met seems interested in a dialogue. Rather, they seem to have utopian dreams of control, domination, and “correct” behavior we all must follow once they are in power. No thanks.
Do you really want this double standard?
Why Are Double Standards Bad?
A double standard is where a stringent expectation is applied to one person, and a different, much looser expectation is held for someone else.
The problem with double standards is they are hypocritical.
Where there is hypocrisy, especially in what is supposed to be representative government, there are frustrated, even angry people on the other side. All of the social contracts that underpin representative government break down in a double standard environment.
In this presidential race there are all kinds of double standards at play.
Exactly 6,378.7 women have now suddenly come forward to accuse Donald Trump of unwanted sexual advances and “groping.”
Where all these aggrieved women were over the past thirty years remains a huge mystery. Suddenly, weeks before the election, they all emerge from the shadows. They cite facts that are physically impossible, socially improbable.
That many of them are known political activists is not surprising.
The mainstream media, which is now openly an arm of just one political party, and which has abandoned actual news reporting, has granted these women instantaneous credibility and constant access to cameras and sympathetic talking heads.
On the other hand, Bill Clinton is a known rapist and sexual harasser, and his wife, Hillary Clinton, has been his enabler over decades. Hillary has made it her mission to destroy the lives and reputations of each of the many accusers who have dared reveal their painful experiences with Bill.
Working carefully with Hillary has been the mainstream press, which is in news blackout mode now. The very real female victims of Hillary and Bill Clinton are actually ignored.
And the WikiLeaks data dump? Emails demonstrating just how incredibly corrupt, criminal, and evil Hillary is…these are not news to the CBS-NBC-ABC-NPR-NYT-WAPO-PBS political activists posing as fair minded arbiters of fact and accuracy. America’s news organizations are literally ignoring actual facts, hugely important facts, that undermine the political candidate they have chosen.
And they are trumpeting obviously false accusations made against Trump. It is an obvious diversion from the WikiLeaks data dump so damaging to Clinton.
What is happening is an avalanche loss of credibility, even as the mainstream media attempts to define only itself as bona fide news organizations, and to exclude citizen reporters and others who actually report news. The citizen reporters’ fault is they are reporting actual facts that the politicized media refuse to acknowledge, because those facts undermine the mainstream media’s political agenda.
How are citizens supposed to make sense of this double standard? Aside from using a double standard to advance an agenda by duping the citizenry, the beneficiaries of double standards signal a more important truth: They do not stand by the Rule of Law.
The Rule of Law is a core principle, probably THE core principle, of representative government.
The Rule of Law means that big or small, rich or poor, every citizen is treated equally under the law. No one is too big, or too important, to go to jail.
Well, that is until Hillary Clinton walked free, away from a criminal enterprise shades of which are sending others to jail right now.
And so Hillary is showing that she wants to lead America, and she will use every trick to be able to do that, and once she is in power, she will suspend the Rule of Law any way she can, to advance her political agenda.
Dear liberal friends, are you really willing and able to sacrifice America for the temporary advancement of your political agenda? Do you not realize this is a precursor for tyranny and totalitarianism? Do you not look at recent European history and see parallels with where we are today? What if you were the ones facing the lying media? Would you be OK with where things are now in this race? After all, only the fake mainstream media are breathing life into Hillary’s campaign. If conservatives controlled the media, you would be enraged. Please tell me you are not this shallow.
I do not understand how my liberal friends so gleefully embrace Hillary Clinton. I am not gleefully embracing Trump. Rather, I am simply recognizing that he is the far lesser evil of the two of them. Hell, he is not evil, he is a buffoon. He does not share my own agenda, other than maintaining the Rule of Law.
Hillary means the end of the rule of law, and the beginning of life by a double standard. There is no democracy or republic or representative government anywhere that can survive that.
Judging this race “Chemotherapy for the GOP”
If being pompously festooned with plastic credentials from an unaccountable ivory tower for decades is not enough, decrepit political writer George Will has thrown another rotten tomato at candidate Donald Trump.
After repeatedly insulting Trump, Will calls this race “chemotherapy for the GOP.”
Indeed, toxicity abounds in this race, and it is true that America is given two poor choices for president: One an evil and corrupt disgrace, the other a hip-shooting buffoon who does not appear to have had many serious moments for contemplation in his life. Both of these candidates are flawed, without doubt. I will take the lesser of the two flaws and hope he is satisfied with one term as president.
The other flaw, Hillary Clinton, ends the American Republic as we were founded in 1787.
George Will and his weak-kneed fellow travelers, scurrying about wondering if their cozy ship is sinking, have poured gasoline on the toxic chemicals running through this political race.
By not holding Hillary Clinton to the same standard as they hold Donald Trump, George Will et al fall happily into an old Leftist Saul Alinsky trap.
Alinsky, another f*in’ commie you-know-what, was a true source of toxicity, and a master at using Americans’ best traits against them. One of his tricky traps is demanding that conservatives\patriots\ noble-minded Americans hold themselves to their own rules, while constantly applying zero rules to the Left, from which Hillary Clinton has slithered.
It is always a no-win situation for the traditionalists\GOP\Americans.
Will is demanding that Trump be not only better than Hillary, but far, far better.
The problem with that is it is an impossibility. And it is a juvenile expectation. And not only that, Trump cannot sink nearly as low as Hillary on her best day.
Yet here is Will, with the rotten tomatoes for Trump. He actually spends an entire calumny column devoted to Trump only, without extolling Hillary’s decades of sheer evil and 100% lies.
Trump is “anti-woman”? Compared to rape-enabler, sexual harassment victim-blamer Hillary?
They are not even close! Hillary is by far worse for women than Trump, who sounds like an 18-year-old in the high school football locker room. She is a shameless, ruthless political whore who has sold America’s national security for thirty pieces of silver, and she would sell her grandma, too, if she were still alive. We are all less safe today as a result of her role in the Obama administration.
Imagine how wrecked America will be with her as president.
Indeed, chemotherapy is coursing through America’s veins right now. I grant George Will that one accuracy. But he is creating it. With RINOs like George Will, it appears Hillary could win and the treatment will then kill the patient. The patient being We The People, of whom at least half are supporting Trump.
Congratulations, George Will et al. Way to go. Your fake, frilly judgment makes you feel superior to your fellow citizens, and you are supporting the far inferior candidate, an avowed enemy of The People. You have made that clear.
I love you, America
Writing negative headlines and about negative subjects burns out a person. Tough to outswim the drowning pool of negative politics, negative culture wars, negative attacks on individual liberties.
We naturally want to be positive, to enjoy some humor, to laugh, to be human, natural, not consumed with unhappiness and unease.
Tough luck, as our civilization wallows in materialism and the fantasy that the bank account is always full. Fact: Our national bank account in every way is empty, and the overdrafts are eating us up. Result: Unhappy people, anxious people, worried and fretful people. All they built and contributed towards is being pulled under in the drowning pool.
The fact that a black president is leaving office with a legacy of racist riots he has stoked is really sad. How can we get excited about politics and culture when every day we see this man, Hussein Obama, so full of love for himself, and yet so full of acid hate for America? He hates my love. He hates what I love.
See, I love America. When I see our flag waving passion wells up in my chest and my throat, because it fills me with pride. When I see people so consumed with hate for all I love, well, it leaves me unhappy.
And yes, I categorically reject that most racist of all racist assertions: I am happy because of my “white” privilege. My skin tone has nothing to do with my thinking. The only people who think it does are racists.
Have you seen the video of the Black Lives Matter racists swarming a college library, assaulting Caucasian kids and attacking them for being racist, because they are “white”? That right there is the very definition of racism. Pretty much only one place this can all end, and it isn’t good. Racism is just bad stuff. When the racists themselves accuse others of racism, then it is doubtful that the love can flow. The hate is, well, it is the old racialist hate that is tough to stamp out.
Where the heck is “Let the Love Shine“ from Aquarius, with those big Afros? What happened to Cat Stevens‘ Peace Train?
True, I am add libbing here, taking some liberties with the words and metaphors, but if you are reading this, you know why. That 1970s sense of universal love being just around the corner was pretty strong then.
Loving people know this, and they know better, but they seem to stand by and say little, if anything, while the drowning pool picks up momentum.
I love America. I love my fellow citizens, with all their various skin tones and viewpoints. Genuinely, I love them, because their optimism and hope for a good future is the righteous inspiration America always ignites.
Hopefully, one prays, the old Biblical passages about hate turning to love will come true, soon. America is a wonderful nation, pretty close to a perfect nation, certainly the best nation of all that ever were or ever will be. It is worth holding together. I hate hate; I hate racism.
I love you, America. Good luck, honey.
How nice are you?
Out of curiosity, ask yourself: How nice am I?
Then answer it this way: No matter what media and university people are telling you, the fact is that in this political combat, Nice People Finish Last.
On the one hand, we are told that anyone who is not politically correct and partisan Left is a racist, and an extremist.
The people daily planting this message are themselves politically and culturally extreme, by traditional standards. You know, the traditional standards that founded the very civilization they enjoy so much, but which they have turned against. The people carrying this message have an agenda, to shut down all opposition, whether by shouting it down or making it illegal.
On the other hand, we have a bunch of generally comfortable, nice, thoughtful, considerate Americans, educated at liberal colleges. They voted for Obama, thinking doing so would prove once and for all that they are not “racist.” They work hard, pay their taxes, dutifully invest in college for their children, and follow the flawed but prevalent 1960s maxim “let your kids find their way and discover who they are.” Their kids do not find their way, but are usually led astray by leftist professors and activists.
The material comfort we middle income Americans enjoy is putting us to sleep. And when we are confronted with accusations that we are racist, or mean spirited, or sexist, or whatever, we naturally cringe, and do what we can to prove that we are not as accused.
And thus are the Nice People manipulated and bullied into handing over what little power they have left. Giving to those who will never relinquish it.
This election is not about Republican versus Democrat, or about liberal versus conservative.
It is about the American voter waking the hell up and realizing now, at the last second, that the Left has been on a ruthless warpath for fascist control for decades, and the “right” has been cowed into protecting only its material comforts, at the cost of the Republic. The cost of our liberties. Your liberties. Our Constitutional rights.
When American professors are permitted to openly state that debate is not welcome in their classroom, you had better take notice.
When the American media openly allows itself to proudly act as an arm of one political party, for one highly corrupt political candidate, you had better take notice.
When racist extremists are marching through your kids’ college campus, accusing “white” kids of being “racist” because of the color of their skin, you had better take notice.
When racist extremists are marching through public streets, destroying everything around them and assassinating police officers, and then elected political officials give them legal cover, you had better take notice.
When our highly armed US Navy vessels are dodging tiny boats threatening them in international waters, instead of incinerating them, you had better wake up.
When our military service men are captured by a hostile nation (Iran), and ransomed for over a billion American dollars — your tax money, instead of being returned unharmed under threat of American retaliation, you had better wake up.
Hello there, Mister and Missus Middle America….your nation as you knew it is coming to an end. Everything has changed under your feet. You think that because there is food in the fridge and gas in the car that all is fine. That is materialism putting you to sleep.
If you do not vote in a stop-gap candidate like Donald Trump, then your civilization is over. By the time you realize it is gone, it will be too late. Many of you will later accept being cowed into submission by Hillary and her political descendants, but many of us will not. What happens after that is the kind of conflict that has always happened in every human society preceding us when irreconcilable forces clash. No sane person wants that, and your vote this election can either postpone it, or create the conditions necessary to turn the tide altogether.
Want to be really nice? Help get America back on track, or at least keep it from jumping the tracks. Vote for Donald Trump.
Are We at Culloden, 1746, or Towcaster, 61? Where are We in History?
Are We at Culloden, 1746, or Towcaster, 61? Where are We in History?
At Culloden, the Scots hastily lost to the British and their Scottish Lowlander allies. A poorly planned battle from the very beginning, French officers advising the Highlanders stated that the Highlanders would lose quickly, which they did. In the following years, Britain went on to overrun Scotland, terrorizing the disarmed natives with rapine, murder and mass theft. No rule of law, but rule by the sword in 1746.
1688 years earlier, Briton Boudica had rallied some 200,000 men and women to her anti-Roman cause. After utterly destroying several Roman colonial cities, Boudica allowed her outgunned adversaries to pick an advantageous battleground at Towcaster. There, using the terrain to their advantage, only 10,000 Roman legionnaires mechanically sliced their way through the poorly organized mob. Britain became fully Roman thereafter. No rule of law, but rule by the sword, as Roman soldiers completely dominated disarmed Britons and took whatever they wanted.
In a more civilized form of combat, in 1948 Dewey defeated Truman for the presidency. Except that he didn’t. Media allies had talked up Dewey so much that the election was marketed as a foregone conclusion, leading to the famously inaccurate headline “Dewey Defeats Truman.” The voters had other ideas and rejected the elites in that election. Truman was an Everyman, a truly humble American, and a real patriot. Dewey wasn’t a bad guy, and in fact by today’s standards few principles separated the two men. But the media had gone overboard to predict a winner, and the American voters didn’t like it.
Today, one wonders where we are in history, because history does repeat itself.
Human passion for control and domination of others being what it is, eventually there will be a clash of mutually exclusive wills, like at Towcaster and Culloden, here in America. We saw it at our formation in 1776, and again in 1861. This time the country has far less resilience to destruction and upset. Our finely tuned, supremely comfortable lives are a finely tangled mess of fishing line. Lines leading off in so many different directions that we can barely keep up with them, let alone untangle them. This is a knot that only a deep cut can separate. It’s not physically hard to make that cut; it is only hard to make that destructive decision, because the mayhem that follows is hard to fathom.
On the one hand Hillary Clinton and her trillionaire allies are poised to make America a subsidiary of global corporations, who like their taxpayers subdued and submissive, thank you. FaceBook, Twitter, and most of the media are leading the charge for Hillary, covering up her evil intentions and ill health. Liberty will be gone so fast that liberal Julian Assange of WikiLeaks has accused the pro-Hillary media of “erecting a demon.”
On the other hand is a ragtag army of citizens. No pitchforks and torches here, yet, but millions of American citizens are getting anxious and worried that they might end up in battle against their fellow Americans, for liberty.
How will this electoral battle go? Will it be a Culloden, a Towcaster, or a 1948 Dewey-Defeats-Truman?
I am betting on the Everyman in every one of us, white and black, brown and yellow, red and pink, to bring our nation back from the brink of the cliff, to affirm our individual liberties as being supreme.
Who, Me? No, You!
America has been in the grip of moral relativism since the 1960s, and nowhere is this corrosive belief system more evident than among Politicians-Gone-Wild who get caught.
Pennsylvania’s Attorney General Kathleen Kane was just found guilty on all counts, including perjury, and her answer (she has been consistent on this from the beginning of her investigation) is something like “it is not my fault, I am the victim, everyone is out to get me, it’s not fair, and everyone does bad things so my bad actions are no worse than anyone else’s so I am therefore not guilty.”
This “Everybody does it, so I am not guilty” mindset has now filtered down from guilty politicians to nearly everyone in America. Seems to be almost a lifestyle, where people take whatever they want or think they can get away with, and then cry foul when they are caught and held accountable in even small ways.
Basic examples found daily in the news include shoplifters who then destructively run amok in the store they are caught in, decrying their “unfair” treatment by causing thousands of dollars in damage to prove their aggrieved status.
The most egregious example of this is the Black Lives Matter movement, where mostly hardened crooks are elevated to innocent hero status in the effort to attack civilization and the citizens who undergird it, our wonderful police officers.
More common is the trespassing for firewood theft and recreation that I frequently experience on properties we own or manage.
One guy had his teenaged children riding their ATVs on our property, and when I finally begged him to make them stop, his response was “I can’t control them.” Never mind that he had put up so many No Trespassing signs on our common boundary, and quite a few were way over that boundary deep into our land, that you could not look through the woods without seeing a sea of yellow marring the scenic beauty. In other words, he zealously guards against anyone trespassing on his land, but he casually lets his people trespass on our land, and makes no real effort to stop it.
Recently I received a brutal call from an angry local man I do not know, who really chewed me out, calling me every bad name imaginable. He ended his tirade with “A lot of people out here in the valley hate you.”
Despite efforts to have a lucid conversation with the man and inject actual facts to rebut his wild accusations, he denounced me one more time and then hung up the phone. Sitting there contemplating this strange call, I began recounting the run-ins we have had with his trespassing and thieving neighbors. Indeed, a great many of his neighbors had attempted to steal some of our land, or were serial trespassers after recreation and deer, or were thieves stealing commercial quantities of firewood and mountain stone.
Yes, we have had run-ins with people around him, and when I investigated with one of the confessed trespassers, he informed me that the caller was one of the people we had inadvertently netted in our anti-trespassing efforts.
Ah hah! went my brain. Here we have a man who has been trespassing on our land for years, stealing from us firewood and mountain stone for business purposes, and he is mad as hell that his free gravy train has come to an end.
And in fact, this guy was not alone in his angry denunciation of his imaginary oppressor.
One of the other trespassing locals we caught stealing red-handed two and a half years ago was so mad, he began denouncing me to anyone he met. I guess this is a customary defense mechanism, where guilty people try to pre-empt any negative information about themselves, but it is remarkably brazen nonetheless. We declined to press charges against him, because he probably would have lost his job as a result. And his partner in crime, a local attorney, could have lost his law license.
None of our largesse was appreciated or rewarded by these criminals. In fact, they took it as a sign of weakness and lack of resolve, and they went on the offensive, personally maligning the person who they blamed for their misfortune. That being “caught.” No taking responsibility, no admitting guilt, no owning up to doing something wrong, but instead blaming others for their moral failures.
One of the things I dislike about one of the presidential candidates is that she has zero morals, no ethics, no moral compass. She refuses to take responsibility for her many failed policies and legal failures as a senior American official.
One of the things I like about her opponent is that he stands for basic decency, defined by weak 2016 standards, mind you, not the 1940s Norman Rockwell ways by which we used to run this country, and which I grew up with and miss very, very much.
Americans must elect political leaders who set a basic standard for good behavior, who represent a return to basic good values, and who help us get away from corrosive moral relativism, a culture eating away the foundations of human relationships.