Posts Tagged → security
Are Israelis being tricked into another Roman Occupation?
Disclaimer: We don’t go down any rabbit holes here. This blog is filled with well-argued opinions and occasionally those of people who I believe need to be heard. My opinions are always backed by facts and Founding Principles, and if I can’t find facts to back up my particular opinion, then I fall back on principle (e.g. America is supposed to be a small government run by Constitutionally obedient and publicly responsive public servants). If no Founding Principle is at stake, then I usually don’t take a stand. Today, if you read further, you are joining me on my first ever rabbit hole exploration. But I am doing it out of commitment to truth, and I am asking questions that are the only questions that make sense to me.
Historically, about 2100 years ago, Israel/Judea became increasingly occupied by the expanding Roman Empire, because some Jews invited the Romans in to provide some protection from the invading Parthian Empire and to give some political stability among a divided Jewish populace. The rest is history, as it is said, as over the following decades the Romans increasingly asserted their own form of political control to the point where they ended up in a civil war with the entire Jewish population. The Romans destroyed the Great Temple in Jerusalem, as well as much of Jerusalem itself, enslaved and deported about half of the Jewish population, etc.
In their destructive romp across Judea and historic Israel, the Romans also unwittingly created two new powerful religions that would go on to shape the entire Western world, Rabbinic Judaism and Christianity, but this is a subject for another time. The key here is that the Jews invited in the Romans for their promised political stability, and ended up getting destroyed by them.
Is the same process now repeating itself in modern day Israel? Is America the new Rome about to politically occupy Israel? I ask because the same historic dynamics are playing out.
Consider the following facts:
- Hamas launched a massive and massively barbaric suicide raid on southern Israel that was destined to fail itself and destined to bring huge destruction down on Hamas and Gaza in response. It is self-defeating. Makes no sense.
- Neither Hizbullah nor Syria have opened up additional fronts, though they logically should
- Israeli security along the Gaza border was essentially a Ring Doorbell camera every hundred yards? Really?
- Contrary to Military Operations 101 since organized militaries began operating about five thousand years ago, no sentries, no sentinels, no guards, no watchmen were posted along any of the Israeli outposts along the Gaza border. Not one. As a result, the few IDF soldiers posted there were literally caught asleep in their underwear and gunned down as they scrambled out of their beds.
- Apparently, reportedly, Hamas has spent the past two years practicing their invasion and giddy child murders on a large mockup Israeli village. No one in Israel noticed this? No one in Israel thought this was strange, or a precursor or a warning?
- The Biden Administration just released Six Billion Dollars to Iran, for no good or logical reason, and to America’s serious detriment, which freed up Iran to spend their existing money on things like nuclear weapons aimed at America and arming Hamas and Hizbullah terrorists killing women and children in Israel (and probably coming to America soon through Joe Biden’s wide open southern border).
- Israel’s supposed “security failure” looks and smells and walks like an inside job by the security and military elites, who oppose Prime Minister Netanyahu’s popularism (just as the American elites and their pet security agencies like the CIA, FBI, DHS etc oppose President Donald Trump’s power-to-the-people popularism). Every day this supposed “failure” at Gaza appears more and more like an inside set-up of PM Netanyahu to blame him and turn the voters against him.
- Israel’s “security failure” at Gaza makes no sense on its face nor in hindsight. Israel can and usually does walk and chew gum at the same time. The IDF has always covered all three bases and Home Base simultaneously. Way way too many important parts of the Gaza security system failed all at the same time to be a mere coincidence. There has been no explanation for this failure, and indeed other than a deliberate act of self-sabotage and self sacrifice by Israel’s military and security elites (because of their power struggle with PM Netanyahu), there is no logical explanation.
- None of the senior officials responsible for Israel’s national security or for Gaza’s border have taken responsibility and resigned, as they normally would when committing such a monstrous failure in any other time. Hmmmmm, right?
- The defeat of Netanyahu and the elevation of America in Israel’s domestic politics would essentially place Barack Hussein Obama in charge of Israel’s next government.
- If in fact Hamas was allowed to go into southern Israel by Israel’s professional watchdogs, who are almost all Leftists loyal to the leftist elites, for basic domestic political purposes, it would be in keeping with the American Left’s practice of burning America to the ground in order to get and keep control of America. Examples of such treason in America include the 2020 “Summer of Love” Democrat Party violence, looting, burning, destruction of American cities, the allowed release of covid into the American populace by American health officials (Dr. Mengele Fauci) supposedly guarding us against such viruses, the deliberate destruction of law and order in many Democrat-controlled cities which has resulted in political and societal chaos in these same places, the suspension of electoral laws in 2020 that resulted in massive and brazen vote fraud in the most important swing states like PA, MI, AZ, GA, the continuing fraudulent and even illegal lawfare against President Donald Trump by the administrative state and Democrat politicians. I could go on, but we are on a time budget here. Looks like Israel just experienced her own “Summer of Love“.
So into this situation of Hamas possibly being goaded and sacrificed by Iran into its suicidal homicide attack sails the American navy. Into the Mediterranean Sea now comes a flotilla of American ships meant to buoy Israeli spirits and signal to American Jews that not only can the Democrat Party be occasionally trusted to help Israel, but today to actually save it. Recall that just weeks ago Joe Biden’s illogical payment of Six Billion Dollars to Iran signaled that the Democrat Party hates Israel and Jews and America because it is empowering their worst enemy, a nuclear powered Iran. Lots of “how the hell can any American Jew be a registered Democrat” arguments were resounding across American synagogues.
But now? We are shown that the Democrats actually looove Israel, and the actual savior of a democratic and secure Israel, PM Netanyahu, is cast as the bad guy who failed in Gaza.
Tell me this is not the beginning of the Roman Occupation of Israel Part Two. Nothing else makes sense to me.
And tell me this isn’t just too convenient of a relationship between the Biden Administration, which has spent the past three years destroying America, and a nuclear powered Iran, which was designated by Barack Hussein Obama to be the ultimate destroyer of America.
Americans, are you paying attention?
UPDATE: Yes, I am suggesting that the Biden/Obama Administration is working closely with Iran to remove PM Netanyahu, so Biden/Obama can install a puppet leader who will follow through on the failed Oslo Accords, implement a two-state “solution” and thereby gut and ultimately erase Israel as a sovereign nation, and certainly as a Jewish nation. Iran appears to be temporarily sacrificing Hamas and Gaza to achieve this goal, but they will certainly expect to get revenge on Israel’s Jews at some point in the future.
We actually saw a movie
The other night, the Princess of Patience and I actually went to see a movie. Like the kind of movie that used to entertain, inform, and inspire Americans, instead of the dreck Hollywood has been excreting, lo, these past thirty years or more.
We saw “Oppenheimer,” a Hollywood movie that is based on fact, based on historic events, based on real people who did and said real things. It is not based on the vomitous Woke PC corrosive nonsense that Hollywood has specialized in for decades. We were entertained and informed by this movie, and inspired about the greatness of America. What a treat! This makes four movies we have seen in the past…five years? Or longer?
Oppenheimer is about a man named Robert Oppenheimer, a genius and socially inept physicist who is considered “the father of the atomic bomb.” Aside from all the sciency stuff about the why and how of developing the bomb, the movie also delves deeply into World War II, the ensuing Cold War with communist Russia, and the very real threat that communists living in America posed to a free America itself.
There is no spoiler alert here, because we all know that the atomic race against the Nazi Germans and the communist Russians resulted in The Bomb being dropped on a fascist Japan, thereby signaling America’s ability and willingness to use the Mother Of All Weapons. Genocidal Japan’s well-earned come-uppance in Nagasaki and Hiroshima also demonstrated how easily the entire blue planet we live on could be destroyed in a tit-for-tat use of atomic weapons, thereby ushering in the “Mutually Assured Destruction” doctrine of mutual atomic deterrence that shaped American, European, and Russian foreign policy for fifty years.
This strange conundrum of “I won’t blow up Planet Earth if you don’t blow up Planet Earth” became a strategic stalemate between superpowers, thereby forcing them to fight their battles in low-intensity conflicts around the globe.
I digress. But such is the force and pragmatic usefulness of such a movie as Oppenheimer that it naturally results in discussing all that came before, during, and after the film’s historic time.
The other important thing that this movie focuses on, but does not follow up on, is the communist takeover of the American universities. That really did happen, despite the Hollywood oh-so-sad depictions of meanie anti-communists trying to stop real communists from infiltrating American institutions. Today, sending your dear child to college is not likely to get them a real education, but rather an expensive indoctrination in (failed) cultural and economic Marxism at the hands of the successors to Oppenheimer’s fellow leftists.
Professor Oppenheimer was like not only a lot of his fellow Marxist academic intellectuals at the time, that is, exceedingly generous with other people’s money in order to vaguely “be nice to everyone,” but he was also like the many non-religious European Jews who had landed in America, abandoned their faith, and then embraced various degrees of Marxism in its stead. Some had already made this transition in Europe. This is a whole other subject, but it is very much threaded throughout Oppenheimer because a) so many of his fellow genius physicists and scientists on the Manhattan Project were former European Jews and b) so many of them were various shades of pink to bright red Marxist, and thus intrinsic threats to a free and democratic America.
While these brilliant minds were needed to make The Atomic Bomb from 1942-1945, they subsequently were very real security threats because of their….divided loyalties…or, said another way, their commitment to genocidal international communism rather than to the well being of their wonderful host country, our beautiful America. And Professor Oppenheimer captured this split or dual personality disorder very well. And so the Father of The Atomic Bomb ended up losing his security clearance in a ridiculous, procedurally deficient, dog-and-pony shadow kangaroo court proceeding that nonetheless had at its core the very real need to protect America from its own openness.
I could say more about this particular subject, but I am saving it up for an essay I have been writing for three years. Maybe longer. It is forthcoming here, because when I read yesterday about the ADL’s fascist Jonathan Greenblatt excoriating his political enemies for calling out American leftist fascism for what it is, I know I have to say whatever I can say to stem the tide of genocidal leftism that began in America in the 1920s, gathered steam among Professor Oppenheimer’s fellow academics in the 1940s, and is today utterly destroying America as a free and democratic country.
So…Oppenheimer. If you have not seen it, it is worth the nearly three hour watch and the ten bucks. I give it two thumbs up.
Riverdance 25th Anniversary Show A+
Last night the Princess of Patience and I drove to Reading, PA, to watch the 25th anniversary show of the much celebrated Riverdance show that took western countries by storm 25 years ago. We enjoyed the show very much, especially the tap dancing part, which is the height of dancing talent.
The venue was the historic “Rajah” theater, now the Santander Performing Arts Center, in downtown Reading, Pennsylvania. The theater’s interior is nicely artistic and harkens to an earlier time in American history, when design and materials were stone, stained glass, crafted metalwork, and did not include ubiquitous bright neon and loads of plastic. Parking was abundant, whether on the street or in lots or in nearby parking garages.
Comfortably parking my fat butt in one of the old seats was another matter, and I tried to joke with the tall lady to my right whose elbow kept bumping into my arm. Or maybe my arm kept bumping into her elbow, with the result that each of us watched the show with one arm stretched across our chest to avoid discomfiting the other person. Point being that these are smaller seats and could use a few inches added to either side to comfortably accommodate larger, wider, broader bodied people. If you are pint-sized like the Princess of Patience, then you will be more than just fine. The venue was clean, tidy, well maintained, and had no weird old smells.*
Riverdance is fundamentally about Irish tapdance, or at least it was 25 years ago. Back then people commented that this kind of tap dancing was not really culturally Irish per se, but the fact is that it is its own thing and the people doing it and promoting it are mostly Irish dancing to lots of Irish music. So I call it Irish tap dance, and it is a lot of fun to watch. Beyond the outstanding tap dancing abilities of the individual performers, the audience is also entertained by the choreography and the perfectly executed timing of the performers as a troupe. Add in some Celtic-themed music, with Irish musical instruments like the Uillean pipes and drums, some traditional Irish style clothing, some songs sung in Gaelic, and you have the entire package. Excellent light show and dry ice fog for effect.
My favorite performance was the eight men executing some sort of intensely high energy quasi military exercise, with yelled commands from one to another. It was so perfectly timed and crisply done that the audience roared when they finished. Wow. Impressive!
My least favorite (as there is bound to be in almost every kind of theatrical performance) scenes are the singing. Because of the sound system, I can never tell if this is piped in and mouthed by the performers, or is, in fact, their own world class singing voices. I have my suspicions. The sole acoustical instrument scene was outstanding, but again, like the singing, sometimes it is hard to believe that the world-class fiddling is being done by the leaping nymph in front of me, and that it is not being piped in. No question that the percussion guy is incredibly talented. One request: Someone at some point in the show should wear some woad on his face, like Michael Flatley occasionally did. Show some true Celtic pride.
Probably the most entertaining dance routine was near the end of the show, when the backdrop (digital screen, as is standard now on stages almost everywhere) switched from the Emerald Isle countryside to a Downtown-to-Brooklyn B Train station and Manhattan cityscape, with a Hispanic guy and a black guy each doing their own ethnic styles of tap dance. Then the Irish guys enter in a mock-up of the old West Side Story confrontation, and the two groups have a series of dance-offs against each other using their different styles. And then of course they dance together. Lots of performer humor and mugging for the audience, as well as amazing dance, and the audience enjoyed it a lot.
I counted about thirty dancing performers and six musicians last night, and both the Princess of Patience and I felt like we had experienced a full evening of high talent entertainment. During intermission a bunch of little girls who had come to watch the show did their best Irish tap dance in one of the aisles, to lots of praise and cheering by the audience. And naturally, the entire audience was a sea of shades of green and various family green plaids and the famous Black Watch plaid, including tartan caps, shirts, coats, a kilt and sporran, and more than a few shilleileighs.
Riverdance 25th Anniversary Show is an A+ fun and impressive night out for anyone and any family. You will leave feeling energized and positive. When we first saw Riverdance decades ago, it was a kind of “If you weren’t Irish when you showed up, you will feel Irish when you leave at the end” experience. The updated version is truly a representation of America 2023, with plenty of Ireland’s best along with “culturally updated” themes that are fun.
*A note about the Santander Performing Arts Center: Like almost every other performing arts center I can think of, Santander Performing Arts Center does not allow its patrons to carry any defensive weapons on its premises. This means that patrons must disarm before entering the building, and then we exit into downtown Reading at night unarmed and vulnerable. Downtown Reading, PA, is not a safe place. The streets are dirty, trash is blowing around everywhere, and there are aimless or homeless people walking around, standing around, everywhere. When we entered this venue, we had to go through metal detectors carrying our keys and cell phones with our hands held high as if we were being detained by law enforcement. It is a humiliating experience. When I broached the idea to a security guard at the entrance of having lock boxes available inside the foyer to concealed carry people, he responded “That is an excellent suggestion, but it is never going to happen. With the current management never, it will never happen, I am sorry to say.” Which raises the questions of why these performing arts venues do this, and what responsibility do they have if you are mugged or beaten while approaching their building or after exiting it. Do they really have our safety at heart, if they disarm us and then turn us loose vulnerable on the city streets at night? I do not like being disarmed, especially when I do not see realistic alternatives being provided by the hosting venues.
As if Liberals couldn’t look worse…congrats
Liberals in recent years have staked out strange policy positions totally the opposite of where their political party (Democrat) held even ten or twenty years ago. Many of their policy positions seemed so odd as to be almost eccentric or naively cute, like the ever-evolving global cooling\ global warming\ climate change business, or opposing voter identification requirements, or elevating once-private sexual practices into cult status complete with public displays of religious fealty (like obviously cross dressing in order to be noticed).
Then the party embraced hatred of Jews, policy positions calling for the end of Israel, mass civilian disarmament, socialism and wealth redistribution, post-birth infanticide posing as “abortion,” and an almost giddy and unembarrassed claim on American blacks as de facto slaves forever to the Democrat Party.
As a result, a whole movement (#walkaway) has begun an exit out of the Democrat Party, not because it is no longer the party of JFK, who today would be one of the most outspoken and conservative Republicans in politics. Rather, many Americans are now becoming former Democrats because the party today is not even close to the party of Bill Clinton. Someone who has been a Democrat for thirty, forty, even fifty years cannot possibly recognize the current political party as the one she or he started with. The differences between now and then are night-and-day stark.
So if one wondered if the Democrat Party and its liberal political allies could achieve even greater outlier status, more bizarre policy positions against the basic interests of Americans, even greater distance from where the party was just a year or two ago, well, your curiosity has been answered by the very immediate events surrounding the demise of terrorist mastermind Qasem Soleimani and his sponsor, Iran.
As of this morning, every single Democrat politician is taking the side of Iran and the deceased Soleimani, and criticizing the side of American safety and security. It demonstrates that if President Donald J. Trump does something, anything, the entire Democrat Party immediately has a hysteric meltdown with false outrage and Looney Tunes accusations about it, even if it greatly damages America. They are so opposed to President Trump that they are now openly embracing America’s sworn enemy, Iran, and in their own defense Iranian officials are literally re-stating the exact words spoken by Democrats in America.
America’s enemies take heart from this, because they can use the Democrats to undermine America from the inside, and weaken us.
Former president Barack Hussein Obama bragged that he was “pretty good at killing people,” after he began using American drones to target anti-America terrorists. Including the most revered austere religious leader Al-Awlaki and his 16-year-old born-in-Denver American citizen son, who were having lunch together when Obama’s Hellfire missile made a mess of their food and everything else. Nobody anywhere on the Left criticized this act, nor any others Obama did; certainly not Democrats, and very few Republicans, except a couple concerned about US citizens being deliberately bombed by American bombs.
Americans see this dichotomy. They know that Soleimani was an arch terrorist who had killed hundreds of American soldiers, as well as thousands of American allies, thousands of Iranian demonstrators, and plenty of non-combatants from the Middle East to Africa to South America. Soleimani was not a good human being, Iran’s government is the embodiment of evil, and yet the Democrat Party has openly taken their side.
The Democrat Party has thrown all Americans under the bus and tossed a few Iranian IED bombs in for good measure. It is as if our lives simply do not matter, and criticizing the president, at great cost to American safety and security, is all that does matter.
At some point, normal Americans have to say “This is not my political party any longer. The Democrats no longer represent me or my beliefs.”
And those people who do continue to embrace the Democrat Party, despite the party’s latest act of treason and anti-America lunacy, are making a bold statement that they just do not care what other Americans and the rest of the civilized world think, that they have a greater loyalty to a political party going over a cliff than to the good nation that employs them, protects them, feeds them. This is a big achievement, because Liberals have been slowly drifting away from an American identity for years, and in just one week Liberals have gone into warp speed and into a distant galaxy where no normal person can see or recognize them.
Democrats Officially Side With Iran over America
In case you missed the excitement, the United States used a drone to rocket two Iranian terrorist leaders, who were in Iraq planning further attacks on the US embassy in Baghdad and against Americans living in America.
Both men had the blood of thousands of non-combatants on their hands, as well as being credited with the deaths of about 600 US servicemen.
In a normal world, the deaths of these two criminals would be the subject of rejoicing. But as we have increasingly witnessed over the past three years, one American political party has actually abandoned loyalty to America, to American citizens, to American taxpayers, to American children, to American military personnel. Instead, that political party has taken up the cause of every criminal border jumper, every pedophile illegal alien, every nation that opposes America existing as America.
We see Democrat Party members and presidential candidates all saying the same things: America is bad, America is immoral, America is wrong, America is unfair.
Let us ask: Compared to what is America all of these things?
After all, Iran slowly hangs to death young men who are merely accused of being gay. These aren’t quick executions, but a slow, agonizing choking to death as a crane slowly lifts the kicking, writhing young man into the air. America doesn’t do anything like this, nothing.
Iran’s regime is notorious for its use of severe torture methods on every person who falls into their clutches. Some for fun, some for supposed intelligence gathering purposes. But inhumane torture nonetheless. Especially for feminists who don’t understand their subservient place as women there. Again, America is the opposite.
We could go on with pages of examples of how America’s enemies like Iran, Russia, China, Cuba, Venezuela etc use severe torture every day to maintain power and control of their citizens. These countries have no freedom, no individual choice, no citizen rights. On the other hand, America provides every possible choice to its citizens, maximum freedom.
So how again is America so bad compared to these other countries?
And yet we have a political party here in America that is devoted to shielding these cruel nations from American defense, devoted to criticizing everything America does. The Democrat Party has taken the side of Iran in opposing the killing of the two terrorists. That is, the Democrat Party is against America and for Iran.
Mister and Missus America, how can you vote for the Democrat Party now? Is this the Democrat Party of your youth? No? You don’t recognize this political party any more, you say? And you don’t want to see an American political party actively helping people who want to destroy your own kid’s Little League baseball team?
Then don’t give the Democrat Party any support! Not until it has demonstrated that it is on your side, the side of America, the side of safety and security for Americans. It is illogical to support a political party that is openly supporting the worst, most dangerous enemies of your own country.
This seems so painfully evident to most Americans, but people are having trouble accepting just how badly the Democrat Party has abandoned them, abandoned us.
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.
Hillary Clinton: Public Threat #1
Had any Republican of note engaged in the same email account shenanigans as Hillary Clinton while she was employed by the American taxpayer to represent us abroad in the US State Department, his or her career would be over in seconds.
World-wide condemnation of her ham-handed use of unsecured, hackable email accounts to conduct secret official diplomatic business in a very competitive worldwide environment would have destroyed any Republican.
Never mind that Clinton’s secret, private email accounts were designed to avoid public scrutiny of transparent public email accounts. Public scrutiny of her emails might reveal the deep, dark corruption behind Clinton’s private sales of public influence through her role at the the US State Department to the Clinton Foundation.
The liberal mainstream media has given liberal Hillary Clinton multiple public opportunities to explain away her dangerous games that have cost Americans their personal security. But now even the mainstream press corps might have limits. Yesterday was apparently the end of the media coddling the Clintons have grown up with, because even liberal outposts like the Washington Post are now criticizing Hillary Clinton’s poor performance at her press event.
Would it not be rewarding to see Democrats subject more often to the same rules the media establishment apply to conservatives and Republicans? We might actually get some good government as a result. Or at least we won’t have an obvious, avowed public threat being considered for the most important, most influential public office on the planet.
The end of the Internet as metaphor
As intriguing as the thought of artificial intelligence may be, the truth is always so much more prosaic and humble.
The last frontier and the only real outpost of true free speech, the Internet was never broken, it needed no fixing. And yet the Obama administration, through the FCC and FEC, is planning on regulating it like a utility and then regulating its content.
If you have a website, like this blog, you will have to apply for a license, just like a radio or TV station. Imagine some government bureaucrat not liking the message of smaller, more accountable government on this or similar websites, and then not issuing the necessary license to have it in the first place. Your free speech, my free speech, is shut off, shut down, by the very government that is supposed to guarantee the First Amendment.
That is the FCC role.
And then if I write things that are supportive of one candidate over another, it’ll count as an in-kind contribution to that candidate’s campaign. Imagine an army of government bureaucrats monitoring free speech on the Internet, and writing down and tabulating what people say and write on their blogs as campaign contributions.
That is the FEC proposal, and it is none too supportive of free speech, either.
And mind you, the New York Times, Los Angeles Times, Washington Post, CNN, NPR, MSNBC and other establishment and legacy media will all get passes. They can continue to be active arms of one particular political party, and their writings, their endorsements, will not count as in-kind campaign contributions.
While all this government interference and control in our private lives seems insane to the normal freedom-loving American, it is, in fact, what is happening right now. “Net neutrality” sounds, well, neutral, and it is anything but that.
Tempting as it is to say “And then add this to the IRS political suppression and NSA spying scandals…,” the truth is that few people seem to care, no matter what Obama does. Americans are willingly giving up their freedoms, their control of government, their tax money, their security, to a man who clearly does not like America as it has been founded and run since 1776.
Apparently, government control of Internet content and our individual personal lives fits into that general malaise. Sad.
What is even sadder is that so many people so much want one particular party to have complete control that they will do all of this, plus grant amnesty to illegal aliens to overrun the established voters who built the nation. None of this is sustainable. No nation can withstand this.
Good movies hard to come by
Zero Dark Thirty takes its name from the old saw that military duty usually begins at some dark hour long before dawn, when most people are fast asleep in cozy beds.
The movie by that name contains the same message: Americans live comfortably, while brave warriors place themselves at great risk for the greater good, often without thanks or recognition.
It’s certainly a timely message, as our current president is reluctant to lead or give credit to those who do. Americans are in grave danger around the planet, and thankfully we have citizens who still believe in the greater good, even if their current political bosses do not.
Like the movie Act of Valor, Zero Dark Thirty gives a glimpse into the harsh reality of battlefields far away from daily American life, but without which our happy existence would not be possible.
A good message, a necessary movie.