Posts Tagged → america
Josh’s Veteran’s Day presentation in Catawissa
Hello. My name is Josh First.
I am a political activist and small business owner from Harrisburg, and a dad and husband.
What an honor it is for me to stand with you today, recognizing our past and present military Veterans.
Thank you for your service!
Thank you to Jared Valeski and the other volunteers for all of your hard work on the field gun dedication, and for the invitation to be here with you today.
If you go to Ironmen Arms here in town, Jared and Tom might sell you a French army gun from World War One. It is in great shape, because it has never been fired and was only dropped once.
Hey, don’t forget the French army knife, either.
We all know what a Swiss Army knife looks like, right?
Lots and lots of tools in it, lots of uses.
You can fix your car with a Swiss Army Knife.
Well, maybe you’ve seen the French Army knife.
It has just two tools: A corkscrew, and a little white flag that flips up.
Hey, we can pick on the French a little bit, because American military veterans have been saving their behinds time after time, right?
Lots of ultimate sacrifice by our boys for the French, and for the other Europeans, to be free.
American military veterans are beacons of freedom and hope, each and every one of you, and the world knows it.
Who does the world call when freedom is on the line?
You. Each one of you.
We are going to talk about one of your fellow military veterans today, a young man named Herb McCarty, who defended the French from being turned into Germans back in World War One.
The question is: Will America be able to produce in the future more patriots like you, more heroes like McCarty?
A big thank you to Steve Campbell of the Catawissa Valley Historical Study Group.
Steve did the historical research on Herb McCarty, a real local American hero, and one of America’s best known combat veterans.
History is critical to civilization’s success, because without understanding history, we are doomed to repeat past mistakes.
Civilization only progresses if people learn from their successes and mistakes.
McCarty was a farm boy born here in Catawissa, in 1893, and like many Americans who loved liberty, he dutifully, almost happily went off to fight the Kaiser’s army in Europe in World War One, which threatened the cradle of Western civilization, that being France and western Europe.
During 1918, the end of World War One and also the year when most Americans fought and died then, McCarty covered a lot of territory over there, notably at the Argonne Forest front, where over 26,000 American patriots died for freedom in a matter of just days.
The Western Front there has been memorialized in many films, because the fighting was especially fierce, the weather was especially cold, the conditions were awful, and many wonderful young men did not come home to their families.
McCarty’s heroism there included leading men in an up-the-middle charge into entrenched German positions, after their captain fell, right into the teeth of thick furious fire, deadly combat, and
–carrying his wounded comrades off the field of battle while under intense fire, and
–being shot multiple times from a strafing German airplane, and
–then blown up by an artillery round, and
–then being merely wounded badly by another shell, and
–then he was left for dead on the zero-degree ground for 46 hours, before he was carried off.
All of this just three days before Germany surrendered and the armistice was signed.
But McCarty’s will to live was powerful, and while recuperating in Europe and during the following four years back home, he underwent just shy of fifty, yes fifty surgeries, 16 of which were done without any anesthesia at all, none, but involved young Herb simply lying there and screaming into a clenched wooden dowel while the surgeons sliced away at his wounds to heal his body for hours at a time.
In just one surgery, four bullets were removed from various parts of his body. Two bullets eventually became attached to his jugular vein with scar tissue, and McCarty took them to his grave.
Shrapnel was constantly being found throughout his body, and removed.
Some wounds just would not heal, and required frequent invasive attention, and that is what eventually killed him, four years after the war ended.
This is why McCarty is known as “America’s Most Wounded Veteran.”
92 years ago, at McCarty’s July 1st, 1922 funeral here in Catawissa, the Reverend Doctor Ulysses Myers said “This army never had a better or a braver man…We give thanks to God for him and feel that now he has been promoted.”
Reverend Lau said “For McCarty to live was God, country, and justice to all, and it was for this cause that he finally gave his life.”
McCarty’s incredible strength of will to survive, his powerful character, his grace and ability to bear such tremendous pain, are representative of Central Pennsylvania’s good people, long ago and still today.
And McCarty was motivated by much bigger ideas than just himself. He wanted everyone to be free.
I was thinking, if Catawissa meant “pure waters” in either Shawnee or Delaware Indian back in the early 1700s, then to its native boys in 1918, it must have meant “pure spirit,” because that is what McCarty represented to the world, pure American spirit.
For his many acts of heroism on the field of battle McCarty was awarded many medals, most notably the American Distinguished Service Cross, the Silver Star, and the Croix d’Guerre (that’s the War Cross in English) by the French government.
You know, it’s amazing the French didn’t make McCarty their prime minister!
Take note that Columbia County also produced other World War One combat heroes, two of whom were also Distinguished Service Cross recipients: a young Mister Monahan, and Michael Chyko, who fought in McCarty’s unit and who was one of his pall bearers.
For those who may be wondering, the Distinguished Service Cross is the second highest military award that can be given to a member of the United States Army, for extreme gallantry and risk of life in actual combat with an armed enemy force.
Only the Medal of Honor outranks it.
You know, if the first European settlers of the Catawissa Valley were English Quakers, opposed to warfare, then I am here today, as a former Quaker myself, to say that in these modern times we still need the Private Herb McCarty’s.
We need them in our own generation.
We need to absorb McCarty’s strong character, his gallantry, his willingness to take the ultimate risk, and apply it here, at home. His quintessential American spirit.
Without that attitude, America fails.
There are some who claim the American spirit is bad, that we are a bad nation. They claim that we are too war-like.
Of course, they say nothing of the people who started wars with us in the first place, so you have to wonder whose side they are really on, and what they are doing here in America…
But we are gathered here today to honor long-dead heroes like Herb McCarty because they still inspire us so many years later, and we want them to inspire future generations, too.
As we are not presently at war abroad, we must ask, To what present purpose are we inspired by heroes like McCarty and their patriotic sacrifice?
More succinctly, what relevance do Herb McCarty’s actions from 1918 through 1922 have for our own actions today, 92 years later, or even as recently as this past Election Day?
We have been hovering about this question and it is time we took a shot at answering it.
Although there is certainly a serious conflict looming ahead of us between Islam and Western civilization, our biggest war right now is at home, here in America, not abroad, and we must recognize that we are fighting on our own home front.
This is a war not of bullets and bombs, but of ballots, hearts, and minds.
To that end, we must draw inspiration from Herb McCarty’s dedication to the American principles he passionately believed in, the American flag, our Constitution, and each of us must become a warrior-in-spirit for our nation on the home front, wielding a pen, a vote, not a sword….yet.
A majority of Americans and certainly most Veterans are awakening to the reality that our own federal government is presently at war with the very citizens who lend the central government its legitimacy.
Using federal agencies like the IRS, ICE, Homeland Security, NSA and others, our individual liberties, our free speech rights, our Second Amendment rights, our rights of assembly and petitioning our government, our privacy rights, our voting rights, our religious rights have all been “transformed” for the past six years in an unprecedented assault on the core of American democracy.
There is today in Washington a man who believes he is a “government of one,” a man who believes that Congress either rubber stamps his policies and his anti-America nominees, or it gets the hell out of his way so he can do whatever he wants.
There is a man in Washington whose tyrannical actions are greater in number, scope, and gravity than those in our Declaration of Independence’s list of grievances against King George in 1776.
No, his behavior is not democratic, and Yes, that man was soundly and absolutely repudiated by the American people last week at the voting booth.
That still feels pretty good, doesn’t it?
The citizens of our Constitutional Republic spoke out against his usurpation of power.
He has been repudiated in historic terms.
But the problem we face in recapturing the America of liberty, equality, and opportunity as it was founded, is that our votes only matter to those who believe in the American system.
We can vote, win at the ballot box, and go home feeling like we succeeded.
But we may still be defeated in the long run, if we forget to recapture our traditional culture and values, the qualities that made us Americans to begin with, the values that motivated Herb McCarty.
We risk becoming slaves to an all-knowing, all-seeing, all-doing central government.
And the problem with that is, The bigger the government, the smaller the citizen.
In America, we are all about the citizen, not the government.
This is the real battle, the real war: To maintain our freedom at home, not on European battlefields.
This is a culture war, a contest either for an America as it was founded, or an America that looks like the old Soviet State, with no liberty, our Constitution rendered meaningless.
Like McCarty’s long battle to stay alive, this is not going to be settled with a single decisive battle.
Rather, it is a long-running war from which there is no retreat and no easy resolution.
It is not just about that one man in Washington.
It is about the anti-America movement that put him in Washington.
Our politically correct opponents’ tentacles have penetrated every fiber of our nation, every major institution, including churches, academia, charitable foundations, the Boy Scouts, the military, the media…you name it.
Sorry. Digression here, I just need to ask a simple question – with all due respect to the professional journalists with us today, may we ask if you are truly an objective, dispassionate arbiter of facts and accuracy, or are you an agenda-driven political activist hiding behind a false mask of fairness, like so many journalists appear to be?
Back to today. Today we face politically correct opponents not on an active combat battlefield like those on which Herb McCarty fought.
Rather, we are battling with ideas, information, and taxpayer-funded giveaways of great wealth.
Our opponents are not necessarily swayed by elections, nor dissuaded by individual electoral defeats.
They view these as merely temporary set-backs, individual lost battles while the bigger war continues behind the scenes, where McCarty’s strength of character and a sense of duty – YOUR strength of character and sense of duty — can be quietly erased from entire generations of Americans through control of groups like the Boy Scouts and educational institutions.
The very next day after an electoral defeat, our opponents return to the same battlefield with wing-nut activist Federal judges whose hatred for a Constitutional America is exceeded only by their pursuit of Socialism and big government micromanagement of We, the Peons.
They have Dumb and Dumber educational programs like Common Core.
Our opponents want to take America, the world’s most vibrant economy, and turn it into another French socialist democracy, at the least.
And that is why France has not fared so well in my presentation.
Because let’s be honest: France stinks. It is a mess in every way.
France hasn’t produced any Herb McCartys in a long time, and if America becomes like France, then we won’t produce many more quintessential American heroes, either.
The result of France’s socialism is that everyone with money and potential is fleeing the country.
Demographically, culturally, France will never be the same as it was 92 years ago.
But that’s where the politically correct Left wants to take us, despite history telling us that experiments in socialism and multiculturalism always fail.
And mind you, the France that Herb McCarty fought for had a military that invented Poudre B, or Powder B, the precursor to modern smokeless gunpowder used by all modern militaries.
That was a different France then.
But now, in France and their allies here in America, advocates of Big Government have spawned the rise of the entrenched, unelected, unaccountable, demanding Big Government bureaucrat.
The bureaucrat and his enormous pension have deeply eroded our individual freedoms.
The bureaucrat is a huge threat to liberty not anticipated by our otherwise brilliant Founding Fathers, who envisioned a limited government, not a big government.
But the bureaucrat outlives all elections. His ever-bigger government makes citizens ever smaller.
He is not balanced by the other branches of government.
We must elect politicians who are brave and strong enough to tackle this tough challenge.
So, if we are to follow in the footsteps of Herb McCarty, and if we are to translate his actions into actions today, and similarly serve our nation personally 92 years later, without necessarily fighting abroad or at home in a military combat unit, and if we are to be inspired to live for America the way Herb did, then here are four specific suggestions for winning the political fight for our traditional liberties and values here at home:
1) Be as politically active as possible. Go door-to-door, make phone calls, etc. for causes and candidates.
Support and work for good political candidates every year, in primaries and general elections.
America runs on political activity like a heart needs blood. Without you, the process is run by people who do not have your interests at heart.
2) Elect only those public servants who will voluntarily term-limit out, who do not seek a career in elected office, and who rely first and foremost on the Federal and State Constitutions for limited government.
Tell candidates that you will only vote for them if they pledge to voluntarily term-limit out.
And for state house and senate seats, elect people who will stick to the Pennsylvania Constitution and take only a salary and mileage as compensation.
That is what Article 2, Section 8 says is allowed, not the laundry list of taxpayer-funded benefits, like a pension, health care, car and per-diem costs.
Elected officials who term limit themselves are more able and willing to take risks and make sacrifices than those career politicians who will sell their soul just to stay in office.
Representative government, politics, should be about service, not self-enrichment.
And if there is a theme today, if Herb McCarty means anything today, it is about taking risks and making sacrifices in the service of our fellow citizens.
3) Bypass the political parties, and donate directly to political candidates and organizations like Gun Owners of America, Firearms Owners Against Crime, the NRA, and others.
Recognize that political parties are self-interested. Individual citizens do not interest them.
The political parties are full of bureaucrats and self-important functionaries who are modeled on government bureaucrats and functionaries.
Political parties were supposed to be vehicles for ideas, but nationally and especially in states like Pennsylvania, they are privately run business enterprises, whose goal is self-perpetuation.
They rarely serve the forgotten taxpayer, citizen, and voter. Rather, they simply re-divide the political spoils between each other every two to four years.
And do not fool yourself that “your” political party is better than the other.
I am a Republican because I am a conservative, traditional American, but believe me, the Republican Party establishment fights activists like me harder than they fight the Democrats.
Why? Because establishment Republicans know how to deal with the liberal Democrats: They each get a slice of the taxpayer pie; sometimes it’s less, sometimes it’s more, but they always get a slice.
Both parties agree on that, even though how big their slice of pie is may change year to year.
But good government activists can’t be bought, we stand on principle, and we want the taxpayers to eat their own pie, not politicians, and not the bureaucrats.
So we pose a greater threat to the bipartisan exploitation of government than if the parties merely temporarily lose to one another.
Our good government movement needs your support. Look for our candidates, like Scott Wagner in York County, who became a state senator on a write-in vote against his own party this year.
And finally, number 4) Reassemble the militias, out of love for our nation, Constitution, and our individual liberties, not out of hate for anyone.
Organized militias with muster rolls meet the “well regulated” clause in the Second Amendment of the Constitution.
Militias formed the basis of our nation, the basis of our military, and they are as American as apple pie, so long as they are focused on protecting communities and the Constitution.
And yes, that can include protecting American citizens from their own federal government, which is not some kooky idea from out of the blue, but in fact was a long discussion among our Founding Fathers and is the basis of the Second Amendment.
Even the French once knew the danger of big government, except they didn’t have the militia.
Instead, they used mobs and the guillotine.
Americans are just a wee bit more civilized than that, right?
It’s like Europe was the imperfect prototype, and America is the finely finished product.
It’s like Europe was the cradle of democracy, and America is the kid that got up out of the cradle and walked away, and grew up into an independent, strong young man.
That’s why young men like Herb McCarty have had to return several times to save the Europeans from themselves, and demonstrate each time how great we Americans are, at great cost.
Americans are exceptional, we have always been exceptional, not because we simply think we are better than everyone else.
It is because we humbly demonstrate our greatness time after time.
We get the toughest jobs done, because we are asked to.
High-falutin’ Europeans pretend they are exceptional by living hedonistic lifestyles and tossing their traditional values out the window.
Let’s not follow Europe’s lead, and let’s not allow young Herb McCarty and the many other vets buried here to have died in vain.
Let us learn from history, and let’s not make mistakes we know can end our civilization.
Last week’s election results were a small step in the right direction, and the real work is just beginning to re-create a traditional American culture.
Please be part of that movement.
In conclusion, thank you very much for having me here with you today, and…
Again, a big Thank You to our military Veterans here: Each and every one of you sacrificed and contributed toward my own personal liberties, like my ability to speak honestly with you here.
I would like to thank our audience for listening so patiently.
In Herb McCarty’s memory, I want to thank God the All-Mighty for having founded America on the Bible, the Hebrew and Christian scriptures, so that law, justice, fortitude, service, mercy, charity, liberty and love forever inspire and bind us together in American brotherhood.
Thank you!
The morning after the morning after
One cannot help but wonder how liberals continue on with their destructive policies after such a thorough rejection by the voters of their icon and patron saint, Barack Hussein Obama.
I mean, my God, if JFK returned from the dead today he’d be a right-wing Republican on every count, on every policy.
JFK would not recognize his Democrat Party.
Where did this leftist madness come from?
I have some answers, but insufficient time to write about them, now. If you are politically interested enough to be reading this, then you are probably literate enough to imagine what any patriot might say.
Two words help us make this succinct: Marx, Utopia.
The psychology behind utopianism walks a fine line between religiously-inspired fervor and a self-destructive insanity that sees no reality in front of its face.
The idea of giving away gifts of free stuff to everyone who is some sort of a victim is psychologically gratifying. There are few bigger thrills than being generous to those in need. You just know it’s the right thing to do.
But government’s coercive theft of taxpayer money and redistributive policies are not charity.
And when those goals become entangled with a political party’s hunger for power, my goodness, the next thing you know a nation’s national security is thrown out the window so that millions of takers can walk in and vote themselves more gifts from the makers.
That is unsustainable insanity, and it will lead to a civil war and the end of our incredible nation.
So now that it is the morning after the morning after, and sane people, however deluded by a quest for power they may be, are wondering aloud about how this political earthquake happened, may I make a small request?
Ask this: What would JFK do?
It is likely that you will come to the conclusion that JFK would have done nothing that Obama has done, nor Harry Reid nor Nancy Pelosi. JFK would not have recognized these deceitful characters as Americans. And you shouldn’t either.
Their destructive, power-mad binge has damaged the Democrat label more than helped it, never mind what it has done to America.
Please come home, my dear Democrat friends. Please return to America, as it was founded, not as the “transformed” utopia you would have it be.
Updated: Take someone to the voting poll today
Today is Election Day. Vote.
Voting is the life blood of any representative form of government, whether it’s a straight democracy or a republican constitutional democracy, everyone has to participate or it fails.
So, irrespective of whatever political party you belong to, or do not belong to, take someone to the polls who hasn’t voted in a long time.
You will be doing America a favor.
Today I will be working a poll for one state house candidate. That will be my contribution to the process.
UPDATE: After working a poll this morning and afternoon, and voting at my own different poll, and hearing from other campaign workers what they’re seeing around the area, voter turnout sounds very high outside of Philadelphia. This is good for conservatives. There’s a chance that Tom Corbett might pull off a Dewey Defeats Truman upset-upset tonight.
Obama’s Ebola gift to the nation
Obama’s administration has actively opened the borders and suppressed efforts to curb illegal aliens.
His administration has released hundreds of violent criminals into American communities, because they were illegal aliens.
His administration has allowed illegal aliens to bring typhus and other dangerous diseases into America, and now his gift to us is Ebola, the kill-you-now disease from Africa.
This list of Obama’s malfeasance reads like the list of indictments of King George in our Declaration of Independence, but it may be worse.
Obama’s War On America is designed to create as many new welfare voters as possible. Legal immigrants are not what he wants, but rather people who have no stake in America, no contributions to America, and no commitment to America, other than what they can get for free from our taxpayers and then demand more.
But many voters are awakening to what this really means. When Ebola arrived from illegal aliens and from foreign travelers who should have never been allowed into America, more and more Americans now recognize that Grievance Politics is dangerous. It’s not just vote dilution. Now it is public health threats on a massive scale, and Obama is purposefully introducing a toxic cocktail of diseases that threatens everyone. He hates America that much.
Let us hope that our collective love for our nation is stronger than his executive-action hate.
Fifty years of designated wilderness
Two weeks ago marked the fiftieth anniversary of the signing of the Wilderness Act.
It applies to federal designation of remote areas, not to states. States can create their own wild areas, and some do. States closest to human populations and land development seem to also be most assertive about setting aside large areas for people and animals to enjoy.
I enjoy wilderness a lot. Hunting, camping, hiking, fishing, and exploring are all activities I do in designated wilderness.
Every year I hunt Upstate New York’s Adirondack Mountains, in a large designated wilderness area. Pitching a tent miles in from the trail head, the only person I see is a hunting partner. Serenity like that is tough to find unless you already live in northern Vermont, Maine, Montana, Idaho, Wyoming or Alaska. It’s a valuable thing, that tranquility.
This summer my young son sat in my lap late at night, watching shooting stars against an already unbelievably starry sky. Loons cried out all around us. A gentle breeze rustled the leaves on the birch trees above us and caused the lake to lap against our rocky shore.
Only by driving a long way north, and then canoeing on a designated wilderness lake, and camping on a designated wilderness island in that lake, were we able to find such peace and quiet. No one else was anywhere around us. We were totally alone, with our camp fires, firewood chores, fishing rods, and deep sleeps in the cold tent.
These are memories likely to make my son smile even as he ages and grapples with responsibilities and challenges of adulthood. We couldn’t do it without wilderness.
Wilderness is a touchstone for a frontier nation like America. Wilderness equals freedom of movement, freedom of action. The same sort of freedoms that instigated insurrection against the British monarchy. American frontiersmen became accustomed to individual liberty unlike anything seen in Western Civilization. They enshrined those liberties in our Constitution.
Sure, there are some frustrations associated with managing wilderness.
Out West, wilderness designation has become a politicized fight over access to valuable minerals under the ground. Access usually involves roads, and roads are the antithesis of a wild experience.
Given the large amount of publicly owned land in the West, I cannot help but wonder if there isn’t some bartering that could go on to resolve these fights. Take multiple use public land and designate it as wilderness, so other areas can responsibly yield their valuable minerals. Plenty of present day public land was once heavily logged, farmed, ranched, and mined, but those scars are long gone.
You can hike all day in a Gold Mine Creek basin and find one tiny miner’s shack from 1902. All other signs have washed away, been covered up by new layers of soil, etc. So there is precedent for taking once-used land and letting it heal to the point where we visitors would swear it is pristine.
Out East, where we have large hardwood forests, occasionally, huge valuable timber falls over in wilderness areas, and the financially hard-pressed locals could surely use the income from retrieving, milling, and selling lumber from those trees. But wilderness rules usually require such behemoths to stay where they lay, symbols of an old forest rarely seen anywhere today. They can be seen as profligate waste, I understand that. I also understand that some now-rare salamanders might only make their homes under these rotting giant logs, and nowhere else.
Seeing the yellow-on-black body of the salamander makes me think of the starry night sky filled with shooting stars. A rare thing of beauty in a world full of bustle, noise, voices, and concrete. For me, I’ll take the salamander.
I brought my guns to school
Back in the 1970s, I brought my deer rifle to school on the bus.
It was locked in my school locker when I arrived at school on the bus. In its case.
No one made a big deal about it.
No one was hurt by my gun.
My biology teacher reloaded my 7mm Mauser shells for me.
I hunted after school with friends, and no one was hurt. We were all safe handlers of our firearms. We all took it seriously.
It now might be a time for Americans to recall a different time, a safer time, a time when Americans could not imagine using basic firearms to hurt one another. A time when deer rifles were as normal as new sneakers, as significant as new clothes. A high powered deer rifle meant that much, and that little.
So many Americans today wonder what happened to our nation. Well, quit treating traditional American values as inferior to the chaos, anarchy, and violence that have replaced them. Let us traditionalists come back. Let your kids demonstrate how responsible they are. Take comfort in the inherent strength of our nation and its traditions. Relax.
We gun owners are safe, responsible, and experienced. We have our own children who we cherish. We will do nothing to hurt our own children.
Guns, used safely, are safe.
Some Westerners still adore Imperialism despite their protestations
If there is one hotbed of kooky political extremism in Western Civilization, it’s England.
As it was in the 1920s and 1930s, England is full of self-proclaimed “peace” activists and anti-imperialism yellers and screamers.
Their weak righteousness brought on World War II, and paved the way for massive treasonous infiltration of English government at all levels.
Many Soviet Russian spies were warmly welcomed by these activists to set up shop and undermine the individual rights and liberties that mark the strongest European democracy.
Anti-British sentiment ran and still runs quite deep in Wales, Ireland, Scotland, the Falklands, and many other far-flung places unassociated with England proper.
Yet where were those activists then, when those nations next to England yearned for their own self-determination? Sure, the activists accused everyone else (America, Israel, the actual anchors of Western freedom and tolerance) of vicious imperialism, but they themselves loved the unfair, artificial, imperialistic, forced notion of a UK. Scotland, Ireland, Wales were independent places with unique languages, cultures, and religions. They were hardly “united” with England by choice.
The Falklands? WTH?!
Why now that Scottish citizens are finally waking up to their own freedom are the British trade unions, left wing activists, and self-appointed bosses of equality silent on Scotland’s chance for true opportunity?
I’m not Scottish, Welsh, nor Irish, I am an American, but I do know that my country fought British imperialism many times, and that Americans greatly benefited from their Constitutional republic’s individual liberties.
It is time for Britons to act in a consistent, civilized way, and set aside their imperial self-interests.
As a former Scottish freedom fighter once said on film, FREEDOM!
9-11 happened 13 years ago; are we any wiser?
America’s toughest enemies attacked us September 11, 2001.
It appears that the subsequent 13 years have been spent trying to cover up who those enemies were, and pretend they are actually peaceful, despite that they remain to this very moment committed to the destruction of America and Western civilization.
No American policy, foreign or domestic, can change the mind of someone who has been raised, nurtured, and trained all his life to want to kill you. The problem is on his side, not on ours.
America’s president says that no religion condones the killing of innocents. Wrong again. This particular totalitarian ideology poses as a religion, and it is all about death and destruction. Submit (‘Islam’), or die. We see it over and over again.
Perhaps why our Apologist In Chief keeps saying “ISIS is not Islam” is that, as the world’s greatest promoter and defender of Islam, he realizes the images of Steve Sotloff and James Foley having their heads sawed off, helpless on their knees, have had a profound impact on the Western psyche. So Obama needs to challenge ISIS now, in a country he lost after America won it, before the cat is fully out of the bag and people see the truth we are facing.
Let’s wise up, recognize our own greatness, and stop beating up on ourselves for things we do not do and did not do. Otherwise, the victims of the 9-11 attacks died in vain, and the huge memorials in Shanksville, New York, and Virginia will not be signifying 9-11, but America’s willful blindness, instead.
See more with her amazing speech: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5MwqVmoXPbc
And if you REALLY want to watch her kick ass, watch her respond powerfully to foolish propaganda: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ry3NzkAOo3s
People ask me why
For some people, politics and political activism are their bread and butter. Politics pays their bills. With the right clients, they can make millions of dollars out of politics as a business model.
For me, politics is about personal liberty, freedom, opportunity and many other inspiring principles behind the founding of America. It is also about the little freedoms we have that emanate from the bigger ideas: The freedom to drive or walk somewhere without having to prove that you belong there, the freedom to choose where to live, the ability to select from a wide assembly of fresh food, to name a few popular ones.
Call it an innate sense of justice and right and wrong, which family and friends have said I’ve had since I was a little kid, or call it a lack of patience, an inability to watch, participate in, listen to, or tolerate BS/fluff/empty slogans/lies/self-interest, whatever it is that motivates me, I am passionate about good government.
Good government has been a passion of mine since I was a teenager, when I first got involved in political campaigns. Back then, I was horrified at the way abortion-on-demand was changing our culture, I was against gun control, and nuclear missiles scared me. Later on, watching police beat non-violent pro-democracy marchers in South Africa motivated me to put my voice behind change there (note that now the monumentally corrupt and un-just African National Congress government there is hardly better than the overtly racist apartheid government it replaced). Age, paying taxes, and work experience have a way of shaping political views for normal people, and I was no exception.
So here I am, living a life that has meaning for me, trying to shape Pennsylvania and American politics in ways I believe are healthy, necessary, and just. The citizens and taxpayers who are supposed to be served well by their government (of the people, by the people, for the people) are not being well served today. This is why I am involved in politics. That is why I will not go away, at least not until things are fixed to my satisfaction.