Remembering 9/11
It is tough to square up the religiously-inspired terror attack on America 17 years ago with our national policies since then.
America went through a ridiculous bout of Political Correctness, instead of rational, logical approaches to minimize the risk of something similar to 9/11 happening again. The PC policies placed American at even greater risk. Our porous borders are a symbol that we are still asleep.
Today, political commentator Jamie Glazov was tossed from Twitter, on 9/11, for posting simple ideas about how to protect America.
FakeBook deleted people’s accounts for simply mentioning 9/11.
PC is alive and well and it will only invite more terror attacks like 9/11 on America if we do not adopt a survival attitude.
God bless America and the brave Americans who put up such a fierce fight on Flight 93, and who showed us all how to deal with this scourge.
John Arway gone away, but not forgotten
Beyond nailing down and putting the finishing touches on some epic large land conservation transactions, my summer and Fall of 2003 were spent politicking and angling for the executive director position at the Pennsylvania Fish & Boat Commission. After ten years, the last ED had recently left as most EDs leave these posts – everyone involved all too happy to not see one another again.
The door was wide open for a fresh newcomer, someone not from within the agency, for the first time in as long as anyone could recall. I knew I had a shot, and so did my supporters. I was excited.
As I met with elected officials and conservation leaders, presenting my own “impressive” credentials and qualifications for the job, and trying to amass my support from people who mattered, a single name kept coming up: John Arway.
Who was this faceless John Arway guy, who so many of the active conservationists mentioned? I had never seen him at a meeting, or at a land dedication ceremony, nor had we testified at the same legislative hearing. But many in-the-know conservationists knew him, or of him, and they were quietly supporting him for the ED job, increasingly so as we got closer to the interview process in December.
Many other ED candidates were emerging, some really impressive, and some less so. My own self-promotion continued up to the beginning of deer season, and then I sat back for the following couple of weeks to see how it would all play out.
I was granted an interview with the PFBC board of commissioners, and in fact I ended up being the very last one interviewed out of six candidates. But as soon as the interview process began the back channel scuttlebutt was that the real contest was already well under way, the board split evenly between wanting Arway, or the agency’s long-time legal counsel, Dennis Guise, as the alternative.
Raging through and beneath the calm surface of the rote, officially procedural, professional interview process, the two main candidates fought each other tooth and nail, each calling up bigger, better, more powerful allies. In the end, it was not a question of qualifications, but of ….well, one of those simple things guys fall back on when measuring up an opponent. “Size.”
So to say. Because both guys were equally competent, just each differently endowed with important skills the agency needed. It was an impossible choice between the two of them.
This battle royale ended the day before I was interviewed, with the board hopelessly deadlocked between the policy weenie Arway, and lawyer Guise. With the two accomplished men set aside, the board was now looking for a “dark horse” candidate without war baggage, who could salvage the situation and bring peace and unity unto the bruised agency’s divided ranks and leadership factions.
In the end, Doug Austen, PhD, was selected over me to run the agency. The chairman and several of my advocates on the board took me aside and explained that Doug had beaten me by 3/100’s of a point, and that the ED decision had come down to that: How many points did the next best candidate have. It was a very close decision, as close as any decision could ever be.
Austen went on to run PFBC for about four years, and as he has a PhD in fisheries biology, he eventually begged off for less political drama and more biology and went on to his next neat job with the US Fish & Widlife Service. Today Doug happily runs the American Fisheries Society, I happily run my own small conservation-driven small business, and boy, did John Arway end up running PFBC.
When Austen left PFBC, Arway was better positioned to take the helm, and immediately take it by storm did he ever. From deep within the agency’s rubber-meets-the-road programs, Arway brought to light and into implementation long simmering policy addressing natural gas fracking, combined sewage overflows from too much rain overrunning sewage plants, trout stocking, non-native invasive plants and fish, the sustainable economics of fishing, and many many more big and important policy questions that had sat dormant for way too long.
Arway’s personal style is easy, smiling, genuine, with a natural affability that helps him slide the medicine in. The medicine being those long-put-off policies that no one had the balls to deal with, and which John knew to be too important to ignore any longer.
Fact is, the Pennsylvania legislature is full of career politicians who refuse to make difficult decisions, for fear of upsetting the voters and possibly losing their artificially cushy jobs. And so Arway made those tough and necessary decisions for them.
The legislature did not like that.
True to form, the careerist politicians wanted to both hinder Arway and second-guess him, without ever providing alternative decisions that would save or protect our state’s incredible natural resources. At the end of all this bad government on full display to we taxpayers who underwrite it, Arway was ironically held up by the dithering careerist politicians as an example of a careerist bureaucrat long past his own use-by date. And so the legislature began to ever increasingly squeeze PFBC, financially, politically.
John Arway fought as only the honestly passionate can fight, with everything he had, without regard for his own personal longevity. Like Neo, the hero in The Matrix movie, John magically dodged every bullet fired at him, every knife stabbed at his back, and every rug pulled out from under his feet. And through it all he maintained that affable personality and firm determination to “do the right thing.”
If you didn’t know John Arway before he became PFBC ED, you knew soon after that he was one of the last of the conservation warriors cut from an old die that has long corroded and may now be broken and long lost. It is tough to imagine that any Pennsylvania resource agency will find and also choose again a tough leader and fearless resource advocate like Arway.
John recently retired from PFBC. Though he had every right to do so, he did not whine, he did not take shots at his enemies or opponents, he did not complain. Rather, ever the real pro, he listed the many natural resource conservation achievements he wished he had time to win and which he hopes the next generation will pick up and carry over the goal line.
The board was loathe to let him go. His many, many supporters are sad to see him step down. If you like to fish or drink clean water, you are sad to see John go. Both Austen and I talk about what might have happened had Arway simply been selected as ED back in 2003 and gotten his conservation agenda under way earlier. I do not always agree with John Arway on policy, but I will always agree that John Arway should be in the policy driver’s seat.
We will miss you, John. Thank you for your service and for being the champion for the voiceless fish and the splashing mountain streams whose language we hear but do not understand.
Who has the national Democrat Party NOT declared war on?
Is there any thing or anyone in America whom the national Democrat Party has not declared war on?
Nationally (not to be construed with what always happens at the local or state level, which is often less radical), the Democrat Party has gone after the First Amendment free speech rights of everyone who does not agree with their politically correct radical base voters.
The Democrat Party has gone after the Second Amendment rights of law-abiding citizens, while opposing prosecutions of actual criminals who illegally use guns.
The Democrat Party has aggressively championed the elimination of the Fourth and Fifth Amendment rights of the US president and everyone around him, which means they will try to strip you, too, of your presumption of innocence and due process rights if you, too, oppose them politically.
The Democrat Party openly sides with people illegally invading America, who break our long established laws on their way over our borders, and who then commit outrageous crimes against and impose tremendous costs on our citizen taxpayers, all the while demanding taxpayer-funded (your money, my money) welfare, universal education and health care. The Democrat Party calls these criminals “victims,” and has abandoned the citizen, the taxpayer, the people who pay for America to run and work every day.
The Democrat Party has declared war on the rule of law by creating “sanctuary cities” that are so obviously contrary to our laws for such obviously necessary reasons. But the Democrat Party wants a huge wave of illegal aliens as new voters to put the Democrat Party into permanent political power. The Democrat Party is even now extending voting rights to illegal aliens, even though they are obviously not entitled to vote for dog catcher or anyone else running for office.
Naturally in all of this Democrat Party warmongering, police officers everywhere are targeted for demonization and vilification at the very least, and usually police officers are targets of violence and deadly ambush justified by totally fake complaints of widespread racist police brutality. Failed NFL Democrat icon activist Colin Kaepernick and his endorser Nike Shoes have done more to damage the standing and safety of police officers and the rule of law they safeguard than any other individual or company. Think long and hard about how this junk impacts your own personal safety before voting for a Democrat in a national election.
If you are enjoying the shared prosperity of a powerfully productive economy, record low unemployment (especially among Blacks), and an American president pushing back against the unfair trade war waged against America over the past fifty years, then do not count on the Democrat Party to join you. I cannot tell you how many Democrats I know personally, beyond those prominent elected Democrat officials saying things in public, who are wringing their hands over how good the economy is, how well it is doing, how much more money American taxpayers are putting in their pockets. When I point out that the economy is doing GREAT!, they respond that either it is not nearly as good as I think, or that it will come to end any minute now, or that it is the result of the previous administration’s policies. The Democrat Party would rather see the American economy destroyed and poor-mouthed into failure than to give credit to the current president.
The Democrat Party is literally making war against the American economy.
The Democrat Party is openly, brazenly, laying siege to America, coming at us from dozens of directions, trying to destroy and tear our nation down from the top and at the foundation.
The last time the Democrat Party did this, they controlled the South and started “the war between the states” in 1861.
These many disgraceful actions make the Democrat Party a seditious criminal enterprise that is illegally and openly at war with the American people, your laws, and our form of government.
Is it time to outlaw the outlaw Democrat Party?
A culture of protest, a culture of animosity
If you desire to see the raw underbelly of an overly tolerant democracy, then watch or listen to today’s US Senate hearings on Judge Kavanaugh.
Kavanaugh is a smart, friendly, humble, kind of nerdy, bookish federal judge who had the audacity to be nominated to the US Supreme Court.
Why audacity? Because he is not super liberal. Because he does not walk in lock-step with the media arm of the Democrat Party. Because he has a judicial philosophy that is directly connected to how America was founded. He does not run around making legal judgments that are contrary to the US Constitution.
All this makes him audacious in the eyes of people who would use the US Supreme Court to achieve de facto legislative results they cannot get in the US Congress. Kavanaugh is audacious in some people’s eyes because he dares to fill a vacant seat on the Court, and play a constructive role in administering US law and jurisprudence.
To me, it looks like the most boring job in the world. Though at one time, in the heat of my youth, I aspired to be a constitutional scholar and actually studied a lot of constitutional law at Penn State and in graduate school (Vanderbilt) in preparation for it. My uncle has argued twice in front of the US Supreme Court, and on his second trip I was honored to help draft an Amicus brief and sit in the audience while the justices grilled both sides.
But now, look at how even Kavanaugh, The Most Boring Man In The World, is attacked and dragged through the mud by opponents of a lawful society. A shameless howling mob greeted him and the entire world today in one of the world’s most hallowed democratic chambers, the US Senate. To watch and listen to Kavanaugh’s opponents today in The People’s chamber, you would not know that we live in the most civilized nation.
From the 1960s to present, a culture of protest has developed to the point where the ends justify the means. That is, if someone opposes a political issue or a political person, they can go batshit crazy in front of everyone and put on the most foolish antics, with the craziest accusations, and the most violent and destructive behavior, because they are simply protesting.
And because they are protesting, they must be correct, is how they think. And if people oppose them, or have a majority in a legislative chamber or on a court, then every possible brick must be thrown in order to stop them…is how they think.
Where protest has its healthy roots in the First Amendment’s guarantee of peaceable assembly and petitioning the government, today’s protests are anything but constitutional. They are violent and hate filled, lawless and vile, cruel and destructive of people and property.
A very real culture of animosity has resulted out of the 1960s, and it is a bad thing, a toxic thing, corrosive and uncivilized. Its practitioners do not wish to live and let live; they desire control above all, and the use of angry mobs and threats to intimidate their opponents into acquiescence.
In the 1930s and 1940s, Hungary fell the same way. Slowly but surely the Communists there used a combination of violent mobs and corrupted police and courts to eliminate their political opponents. The Hungarian Communists used democratic processes and institutions to achieve non-democratic, tyrannical ends. Hungary went from one of Europe’s great nations to completely oppressed under the Communist boot. Only through uprising and great sacrifice were the Hungarian people freed once again, long after many horrible repressive crimes had been committed.
That same thing is now happening today with the national Democrat Party, whose hatred for the common person, the working person, the taxpayer and citizen, America’s “normal” and boring people, like Judge Kavanaugh, is so overwhelming that it can no longer be controlled.
If you love America, if you enjoy your simple pleasures and the basic freedoms we have here, then tell your US senators you support Kavanaugh, and do not vote for Democrats. The national Democrats do not have your interests at heart. Democrats care much more for illegal aliens (purported “victims”) who murder and rape our children than they care for you or me, taxpaying citizens who have worked hard to build this nation.
A good, decent man, a Justice Kavanaugh will restore some semblance of lawful and constitutional behavior to America, and the howling mob opposes that. Don’t let them win. They are not “protestors,” they are angry, lawless destroyers who pretend they are under the protection of the First Amendment.
How to render bear fat into usable grease
We take a break today from our more usual political commentary and slide easily over into rural culture. Specifically, how to render your luscious bear fat into a usable grease.
Why, you ask?
Because at one time, bear grease was considered a very close substitute for whale oil, which was such a cool product that literally every kind of food, medicine, and flame was made from it. As whales are rightly protected, and bears are bursting at the seams everywhere across America, making a bit o’ bear grease is a neat way to reach back in time.
Many people will use their bear grease for baking, and I have heard and read it is delicious for that purpose, provided it is rendered down carefully. My purpose was and is much more utilitarian: bear grease is going to be a new leather preservative and a lubricant for the patched round balls in my flintlock rifle. I am going to experiment with this unique grease as it was primarily used until the 1880s, when bears were in short supply from unsustainable market hunting, and more modern substitutes, mostly synthetic oils but also including whale oil, were more widely available.
Here are some photos of the simple process I did, using about five pounds of fresh and then immediately frozen fat from a young male bear.
The fat started out as mostly well trimmed, with only slight slices of meat on it. I left those on to see how those slices and the grease would turn out, and if the meat would impart a smell\flavor\aroma to the grease. What I have read is that any meat left on the fat will leave a meaty aroma and flavor to the grease after rendering. Based on the sniffing results of my snoot’s sharp capabilities, I think that is true. That is, meat left on the bear fat will definitely infuse a meaty smell into the grease.
If you intend to cook with the bear grease, then whether or not the meat is absolutely all removed is a question of what you intend to cook in the grease. If it is vegetables and other meats you will be frying in it, then my opinion is the aroma of the bear meat is pleasing and it will not ruin your cooking. If, however, you wish to bake pastries, pie crusts, and breads with your bear grease, then all of the meat ought to be removed. That means every scrap, shaving, and hint of meat should be sliced off the fat.
The fat should be clean, free of debris, leaves, twigs, pine needles, etc. Wash it well. You do not need to dry the fat when you go to render it, as a little water will only help you. It will not be a problem. Cut it with a knife into small chunks. The smaller the better. Some people process their bear fat in a meat grinder, breaking it down into a gooey mess that has no bonds linking the globules. Which makes the fat break down much faster. I think if I had ground up the bear fat, then it would have rendered out in the boiling water in a couple hours.
At first I steamed/ boiled the fat chunks in a second metal bowl immersed in a boiling cauldron over a propane burner. My goal was to be gentle, go slow, and not burn or even cook the fat. For cooks, burned or fried bear fat will definitely impart a certain taste or flavor to the grease. Depending upon your cooking goals, that “cooked” flavor might not be a bad thing. It is a savory smell, and will not go well with pies or sweet pastries.
After six hours on the water, the bear fat had barely begun to melt. So I turned up the heat. The higher the heat under the water, the faster the fat melted. But it was still taking way, way too long. So with about a third of the fat rendered, it was removed from the water and put directly on the lowest flame possible. A little water was added to keep the fat from immediately scalding. Some people put in a lot of water and render the fat on top of it, skimming it off. I did not try that, and it may work better than what I did. It would also be messier.
Direct flame under the pot definitely caused the fat to begin to cook down much faster, and it also began to fry a bit as time went on. The chunks and bits of bear fat began to turn a golden brown. For those interested in rural cuisine, these are called chittlins, much like various types of fried animal fats from Down South. And not just hog skins. Be a bit more creative in your imagining.
Think Larks’ tongues, Wrens’ livers, Chaffinch brains, Jaguars’ earlobes, Wolf nipple chips, Dromedary pretzels, Tuscany fried bats, Otters’ noses, Ocelot spleens, and a host of other fancy Roman cuisine listed in The Life of Brian.
Comparatively speaking, bear chittlins are right up there in that “unusual and fancy” category.
For me, the goal was to maximize the amount of bear grease rendered from the fat, and to minimize the cooking smell or odor imparted to it from the rendering process. This meant reaching a balancing or tipping point where the fat chunks were clearly cooking down substantially, but not completely. Because at completely rendered, the fat is really hot and it is cooking itself. As I wanted to avoid the grease having any kind of food smell, this meant I prematurely ended the whole process, before all the fat was completely cooked down, or even close, to avoid scorching the fat and making the grease smelly.
As you can see from the photo, about 36 ounces of bear grease was obtained from the several pounds of bear fat. Not a bad conversion ratio.
The first photo below shows double boiling; you can see some of the grease appearing. The second photo shows the grease after six hours. Clearly not much progress, even with higher heat. The last photo is after the pot was put directly on a very low flame, with a small amount of water added. Even after this care, the pot had some fat cooked (not burned) onto the bottom. This did give a faint food smell to it. The last photo shows the grease in a refrigerated wide mouth glass pickle jar. It is easy to access in the big jar.
You are damn right I still support President Trump
Despite a howling mob’s best effort to obfuscate, harangue, punish, slow down and hamstring the president of the United States, I still strongly support him.
What broken third-world country do we live in where otherwise normal everyday Americans boast about being in “the resistance” against their own president?! Are they running a guerilla civil war against the country?
Can you imagine if these were conservative militia members saying this about a president in the other political party? The uproar that would follow!
This shameful notion that liberal activists as well as average Democrats have about “resisting” a legally elected president of their own nation is incredibly harmful to our nation. All the foolish talk about our electoral system being compromised by “Russia” hurts the integrity of our electoral system, because it undermines people’s trust in it.
And yet none of these liberals wants voter ID, none want the local voter rolls to be purged and verified. Oh no no no, that would remove too many fake voters from the rolls!
One of the reasons I support President Trump is that, by and large, I agree with his choices and policies. Certainly not all of them, but definitely the preponderance. There are some policies and actions I think his administration could do better, like in the environmental and resource conservation fields. More nuance, more refined distinctions, more sophisticated analysis. But like with any other elected official, you learn to take the good with the bad, and with this particular elected official I believe we have much more good than bad. This president is running a net Positive. America is booming!
Another reason I support President Trump is that he is standing strong amid a withering personal crusade against him, his children, his grandchildren, his wife, his in-laws, his friends, his business associates, his business partners, his employees, his friends, his neighbors, and everyone else who has any sort of association with him. It is meant to punish him and everyone he cares about. Just for him being him.
This ridiculous attack is way outside the normal scope of American politics. It is unprecedented. It is unfair. It is evil and disgusting. If it were Obama, or Clinton getting this same treatment, you couldn’t get away with it for ten seconds.
For me and I think a lot of Americans like me, this very personal and destructive assault on President Trump is an attack on basic American decency and on our system of government. No one in public service should be subjected to this. Certainly that is what some people argued about president Bill Clinton, when he was caught having sex with women in the White House and then lying to cover it up.
People who win elections should get to carry on with their work. That is the way our system works. Is supposed to work.
That the media have been corrupted into this crusade only cements my view that this treatment of our American President is simply unjustified and wrong, enabled by the corruption of the First Amendment.
That Hollywood actors feel free to use the most vulgar language against the person who was elected to represent our country means that they, the Hollywood people, are that low vulgar quality. It does not mean anything about the person they are aiming at. Hollywood and its actors are really in the smelly gutter. Makes you wonder why you went to see their stupid movies in the past. Why should we enable such infantile jerks?
All of this mistreatment has only hardened my resolve for President Trump to stay in office and succeed.
So when people ask me “Josh, do you still support President Trump?,” I say “You are damned right I support President Trump!”
To Hell and back.
The McCain in my soup
What seems like a hundred years ago, in the summer of 2000 I served as a volunteer at the Republican National Convention in Philadelphia.
Staying with my old Philly friends Mark and Bill in their back bedroom, I was able to easily access the convention center by foot.
Being a burly lad, I was put on “security,” which involved wearing a special yellow or red shirt, standing at certain choke points and doorways in the convention center, checking credentials before allowing people to pass to some next destination, and answering questions about the location of bathrooms.
Most of my security role was done at the entrance to the main stage, where speakers and media activists (“reporters”) entered and exited. From this doorway, the speakers walked out onto the stage to speak from the main podium, and the media things sauntered, pranced, sashayed their ways to nearby desks set up to look at the podium and speaker.
Cameras were set up to capture both the speaker and the media commenters looking at the speaker. Sitting en banc like a panel of judges, the media personalities were represented as a real-time source of expert analysis and useful commentary. Of course, that is exactly the role the mainstream media plays at a Republican convention: Judge, jury, and executioner, heavy-duty criticism. At Democrat conventions the same media people are giddy cheerleaders.
Why anyone thinks that these celebrity personalities add anything useful or valuable to the experience is beyond reckoning, except that the mainstream media have done a very good job of arranging their own roles at these conventions. The political parties do not necessarily need them there. The Republicans would do well to not have them at their conventions.
Anyhow, three distinct memories of that 2000 Philadelphia convention stand out in my head, all of them from my unique VIP security role at the entrance on to the main stage.
The first memory was NPR activist Cokie Roberts. Like all the other VIPs at that stage entrance, my job was to walk from the stage entrance and get her at the far end of the tunnel where a temporary FBI office was located in a small room. Police officers and FBI agents populated this end of the tunnel, providing heavy protection for the VIPs. From there I would then accompany her back down the tunnel to the stage entrance. Once there, the protocol was to look around and make sure everything was clear, no unpermitted people around, and then point the VIP toward their destination: the main podium, or, with Cokie Roberts, the press desk ahead and slightly off to the left.
Sharing the same physical space as Cokie Roberts is unpleasant. Her smug self-importance sucks up all the energy in the immediate vicinity. Cokie was like a saucy queen, and the air was full of expectation. I felt diminished in her presence. Yet I stayed close to her, walked her to the doorway, pointed her to the media desk, and there she sat, lips pursed, looking feline, watching her prey through slitted eyes.
OK, that is one memory.
The second memory is of that same exact location and security role. I walked Bob Dole down the tunnel to the stage entrance, looked around, and sent him out to the podium. I had never been in Dole’s immediate space before, but true to form he was clutching a pen in his damaged hand. Dole took a bit extra direction, and I had to step out onto the stage apron and take him by the elbow so that he was fully oriented toward the podium.
Dole spoke, and began walking back toward the doorway. I took a step forward and extended my hand to help him feel comfortable, and out of the corner of my right eye I saw a strange looking man slowly and very carefully edging his way toward us. I have no idea how this guy previously evaded my view, or how he even got there, given how well secured the back stage was. I am a keen hunter and my eyes miss almost nothing around me.
And yet here was this white haired but not terribly older man suddenly materializing out of nowhere and now bearing down on a frail Bob Dole. Dole was now a couple steps into the tunnel and heading back up toward the FBI office, where he would get an armed police escort to his next stop.
Like out of a movie, the white haired guy’s arm shot out toward Dole and the guy was suddenly hurtling through the air in a complete and very athletic dive towards Dole that did not match his somewhat older appearance.
Well, the old wrestler automatically took over in me, and just as the guy’s hand was about to grab Dole’s arm, literally just a few inches away, I was all over the guy. He was strong, but I was stronger, and within a couple seconds I body slammed him flat onto the concrete floor, his outstretched arm locked painfully sideways by my left arm, my legs intertwined with his and his struggling body splayed out and largely immobilized in a classic wrestling move.
The FBI guys came flying down the hallway and covered me in what is now called a dog pile. I was immediately suffocated beneath a steaming pile of heavy bodies smelling of dry cleaned suits and shoe polish. Whatever people may think about FBI agents today as a result of the corruption by Comey, McCabe, and Stzrok, those agents were super physical and aggressive. I loved it and hated it all at the same time. Loved it because the bad guy was stopped dead, hated it because I could not breathe, and then again happy to know the weird son-of-a-bitch underneath me was being turned into a pretzel by all the hands reaching around me. Within about twenty seconds I was pulled off by three FBI guys, while a uniformed cop and two other agents were cuffing the weirdo hand and foot.
The white-haired weirdo guy was trussed like a hog and quickly carried up to the FBI office. I, too, was hustled up there, pushed from behind as a wall of guys swarmed the tunnel and then pushed the weirdo and I into the little FBI room.
Once in the room, the guy was cuffed to a chair and the questions started flying. Within a minute or so he was identified as a Polish national who had a long history of stalking Bob Dole and trying to assault him, all around the world. The guy was an obsessive kook and already known to law enforcement.
I was asked my version of events, congratulated on stopping the weird guy, with one of the big Irish cops giving me a big smile and saying how much he enjoyed watching me slam the guy down so hard. A couple of the FBI agents said they didn’t know anything was amiss until they heard the guy’s body smack the concrete so hard.
During the melee just a couple feet away, Dole had shrunk back against the tunnel wall, still clutching his pen, looking scared (why not) and two agents took him by the arms and hustled him back up the tunnel. That was the last I saw of Bob Dole.
From the little FBI room, I was accompanied back down to my spot at the stage entrance, patted on the back, and instructed to stay vigilant. Hey, I was never so important before or again!
The third and last distinct memory I have of that convention also involved the VIP entrance, because it was from there that I got to watch Senator John McCain deliver an emotional speech about wanting the presidential nomination so badly, and yet being denied it.
McCain delivered an interesting and very personal speech. He had just been through hell, with the Bush team pulling a lot of dirty tricks to eventually stop McCain’s momentum late in that hard-fought primary race.
From my view at the edge of the stage, I could see in McCain’s adam’s apple a huge lump had appeared while he spoke. I actually watched it grow. I had never before seen such an enormous lump in someone’s adam’s apple. This moment was obviously much more emotional for McCain than I would have expected from such a battle-hardened candidate, and I doubt that the many TV cameras there captured it.
What that huge lump in his throat brought home to me was how heavily and personally invested McCain was in his pursuit of the presidency. As opposed to Senator Bob Dole, who had torpedoed the 1996 Republican challenge to Bill Clinton by insisting that it was “his turn” to run, despite his lack of emotion, lack of energy, lack of passion.
John McCain is now dead, and with him goes a large part of strange era in Republican politics.
Like a lot of American conservatives, I retain mixed feelings about McCain. He was good and bad. He was both patriot and sell-out, warrior against and enabler of our domestic enemies, and so on. I had supported him in 2000 and 2008, but in recent times I had really disliked the guy for his policy sell-outs. He was the fly in my policy soup.
But when I think back to that huge emotional lump in his throat at the 2000 Republican Convention, I think of a man passionate about America and his cause to protect and improve it. Whatever his reasons for taking such strangely contrarian, incongruent positions in the past couple years, McCain remains in my mind as a once-principled all-American who at one time had my strong support.
Rest in piece, Warrior McCain.
Mafia Mueller’s Illegal Inquisition
Newly made Mafia “don” Robert Mueller continues his Grand Inquisition into innocent Americans in his quest to deflect attention from his own crimes.
Robert Mueller has zero credibility, zero integrity. He belongs in jail.
Mueller is documented to have used his official positions to steer enormous Lockheed-Martin contracts to his friends (James Comey) and himself.
A raft of FBI agent whistleblowers are poised to testify against Mueller. One of their chief complaints is that as FBI chief, he threatened to actually arrest FBI agents who objected to his self-enrichment behavior.
Mueller is one of the biggest criminals in America. And his role as an appointed special prosecutor was made by one of his fellow criminals.
His entire Inquisition is designed to deflect attention from his crimes and the criminal enterprise of his enablers, like the Clintons.
His prosecution of Manafort was political, not legal. The warrant enabling Mueller to investigate people is based on some fake Russia collusion thing, and has nothing to do with any other crimes people may have committed. The US Constitution is clear, as is case law, that a person cannot be convicted with illegal evidence. The government cannot breaak the law to enforce the law; that is official lawlessness. And yet that is all Mueller has against Manafort.
Making predictions is risky, but I am confident that Manafort’s legal appeal will be successful, and he will go free. For the simple reason that the evidence arrayed against him for crimes unrelated to Russia collusion was illegally obtained.
The same stands for Flynn, and Cohen and a bunch of other people who were coerced by arch Mafia criminal Robert Mueller into confessing to things they did not do. So that Mueller can move forward with his political persecution.
The historic Grand Inquisition was famous for torturing people into making false confessions. There is no real difference between what Mueller is doing and what the Inquisitors did to their victims five hundred years ago.
One would like to think that humans have evolved past such naked power grabs, but the Mueller witch hunt disproves that. Greed, ambition, and a lust for power and control over other humans has always driven people to do terrible things, and we are witnessing this happen right before our eyes right now.
Folks, if you like you democracy, then you will have to fight for your democracy. And do not make the mistake of pooh-poohing this, you are indeed in a fight. You did not pick this fight, you do not want this fight, you would rather be peaceful and not fight. But if you do not fight (vote, march, protest, write letters to the editor, post news reports on social media, attend political rallies, and go door-to-door for good candidates), then everything you take for granted is up in the air, up for grabs. Your good economy, your cheap food, your freedoms, your free speech. Everything is in play.
And behind it all is Mafia don Robert Mueller and his friends. If you want America to be run by criminals like Robert Mueller, then sit back, grill hotdogs, drink beer, go to your job, go out to dinner and watch movies, and pretend that you can’t make a difference.