A Simple Matter of Civility

In all the years I’ve been alive on this earth I don’t believe I’ve witnessed a more jaundiced political climate than I have over the last 10 years.

A while back, actress Jeannine Garofalo went after the Tea Party protesters, saying, “It’s about hating a black man in the White House. That is racism straight up. This is nothing but a bunch of teabagging rednecks.”

Hollywood trots these dupes out every once in a while. Garofalo hasn’t had much of a career since her standup days during the 1980s, so she works perfectly for the liberal elitist establishment in Tinseltown. Matt Damon shrewdly kept his politics to himself for years and enjoyed a meteoric rise, but then blew it all, calling Palin’s run for Veep, “a really bad Disney movie … ” and now he’s spouting this Iraq conspiracy nonsense. Memo to Matt: You’re about to be offered some great supporting rolls.

What is missing here, I think, are a sense of common civility and good humor. I believe they are inextricably linked. Garofalo I understand, she’s smarter than the rest of us, but to guys like Damon and former Boss Bruce Springsteen, I just want to say: Stop for a second and take a deep breath. Deeper. That’s better.

Now, go to your dresser in the bedroom. Yes, the bedroom, that’s right. The bottom drawer … or is it the middle drawer? Whatever. Way in the back, under the stash of Hustler magazines you think Jesus and your wife don’t know about, there used to be a sense of humor.

Freaking take it out!!!

In the brief few weeks since I launched the Ledger I have denounced liberal (excuse me, progressive) Republicans that forgot their glasses thirty years ago and checked the wrong party box when they registered to vote. I’ve gone after both Bushes as globalists, and scathingly criticized W for what can only be reasonably understood as his collusion with Vicente Fox to subvert federal immigration laws.

More recently I have taken on Barack Obama, who’s rapidly shaping up to be the greatest Chicago gangster since Al Capone left the Lexington Hotel for Alcatraz.

All of this being said, I don’t hate liberals. The late Daniel Patrick Moynihan was a wellspring of true liberal thought and Tip O’Neal had a great sense of humor. Which may be the problem because most of my favorite liberals are dead.

If the New York Times or the Washington Post – well, just about any daily newspaper – is your staple news-gathering medium, I know, you think that conservatives are hateful, intolerant, and dangerous bigots, who would rather squash a liberal like a bug, than run their Bedtime For Bonzo CD on a Friday night.

Wanna count gay friends? Bet I have more.

Seriously, what has happened to the sense of civility in our society? I have deep, abiding, unwavering beliefs as to why I think Barack Obama is bad for America, but I think the President is a good family man with two lovely daughters, and a guy who loves B-ball, golf, and dogs can’t be all bad.

Perhaps the more appropriate question is, What has happened to civil debate?

America is bipolar. It’s the nature of the beast. We are a two-party society and a third party will never take root here without replacing one of the existing parties. Why? Because it’s the American way, and something about this great experiment in Democracy works in spite of the most vicious attempts to destroy it. Heated debate has and always has been a part of the American tapestry. But lack of civility in the war of ideas is and always has been unacceptable.

What deeply disturbs me lately is our society’s waning ability to know the difference between extremism and just being American.

What I don’t understand is this seeming inability to know the difference between a gangbanger smuggling an AK-47 into school, and a child trying to make an impression at Show-and-Tell. The six-year-old suspended for kissing a little girl on the playground. Remember that one? I mean, sheesh! Pin knives and cap pistols and kissing girls until they kick your shins are a boy thing to do. It’s the stuff we laugh about when we see each other at class reunions.

Honestly, I see this lack of civil humor surfacing much more in liberals nowadays than I do in conservatives. Yes, it exists on both sides, but I don’t hear very many conservatives slinging around words like racist, dangerous, and intolerant, when someone says something offensive about them, and liberals deal them out like Pez dispensers.

This guy Grayson, in congress. I mean how do you reconcile sewage like that spewing out of a man who walks the hollowed halls of the greatest legislative institution in the history of the world? Saying the other party wants people to die? Calling someone who disagrees with you a whore? I just don’t get it. I understand it; I just don’t get how anyone can be that hateful.

Jimmy Stewart and Henry Fonda were fast friends for fifty years. Fonda was one of Hollywood’s most ardent liberals, and Stewart was an archconservative. Yet, every Saturday morning for decades the two met at one or another’s home and built model airplanes together.

Since when have our beliefs become so fragile that we can’t disagree to disagree as adults? Since when have personal attacks become acceptable? Hollywood I understand, most celebrities need an encephalic enema, anyway. But the personal vitriol I’m seeing from senators and congressmen and from the mainstream electronic and print media is plain out of line.

Everyone has an opinion and everyone has a right to express theirs, but when I hear of Administration plans to go after the Internet and talk radio, because some have the audacity to disagree, it horrifies me.

If Americans on both sides don’t stand up and demand an end to these attacks, and quickly, some administration — whether this one or another — will own us.

And that, my friend, will be the true demise of civility.

The Obama Juggernaut to Change

Barack Obama went on the road this week to ramp up his crusade to usher in sweeping climate change legislation.

In an address to MIT students, according to the Washington Times, the President touted the support of a “convergence” of military leaders, businesses, environmental groups and young people in his forced march to green America. He went on to say to his audience of adoring fans, “The naysayers, the folks who would pretend this is not an issue, they are being marginalized.”

Not me, Mr. President. I’ll meet you in the schoolyard.

Cap-and-trade energy legislation will make staggering changes to the lives of every American and render this country unrecognizable to anyone who has grown up here. It will cost countless billions of dollars a year and limit our freedom to cool and heat our homes and run our businesses, all in the guise of “cleaning up the environment.”

America is sitting on the largest natural gas reserves in the world and arguably enough untapped petroleum deposits to last at least another two hundred years; we have an unlimited ability to build nuclear power plants and new refineries, yet we are following energy-destitute Europe in their quest for unproven solutions. Why?

I mean have you ever asked, Why the march to Europeanize the American dream? When in the history of this country have France, Germany, or Great Britain led us anywhere but to war? When have Sweden, Norway, and Denmark given us anything but leggy blondes and sex-change operations? When have Russia or China ever been anything but our enemies?

What Obama isn’t telling the American people—and he surely knows—is that his juggernaut into our daily lives has absolutely nothing to do with greening the planet or stabilizing the economy. It has nothing to do with providing health care to 30 million Americans.

So what does the President want? What is his true motivation for bankrupting the American economy?

I think to know that, one has to go back in time to look at the man, become the proverbial fly on the wall in the shaping of the 44th American President.

An old Japanese proverb says, “When the character of a man is not clear to you, look at his friends.” During the campaign, the media ran blocking patterns to prevent Americans from knowing the future president that should guarantee them a place the NFL Hall of Fame.

I am not normally a conspiratorial thinker. Frankly, I don’t see Obama as the sinister genius that Hannity or Glenn Beck do, although I do believe Beck is on target in his analysis of the Administration’s skeletal structure.

In the clear light of day, Obama is a citizen of the world. He has not the slightest regard for American sovereignty, not because he’s evil, but because he doesn’t have the slightest conception of what made this country great. His mother was a counter-revolutionary America hater, and the grandfather that raised him had strong Marxist-socialist leanings. He has no strong roots in this country, he spent his formative years in Indonesia where he attended madras, and afterwards he went to live in Hawaii and was mentored by Frank Marshall Davis. He is not a Muslim but his sympathies clearly lie with them rather than Israel.

Barack Obama is a true believer. In fact, he is probably the truest true believer to sit in the Oval Office since Woodrow Wilson. He sincerely believes that America’s day, as the world’s only superpower is over, that we must now bring the country fully into the New World Order. He is on the same page, paragraph, and line as former Russian president Mikhail Gorbachev. Neither man is communist; both are globalist.

Aires, Wright, and Rezko were bit players in the 47-year-old President’s lifelong kabuki. In his entire existence Barack Obama has never had a conservative friend. He has steeped himself in the counterculture worldview tutelage and training of men like Davis, Saul Alinsky, and myriad Marxist professors and radical social activists.

Obama’s broad sweeping plan to “fundamentally change” America is a work of tactical brilliance, crafted to drown us in minutiae and irrelevant facts, to overload the system, to distract when things heat up. He didn’t develop the tactics or their underlying strategy. He is strategizing directly from Saul Alinsky’s playbook: Rules for Radicals. “Pick the target, freeze it, personalize it, and polarize it.” Obama and his right-hand men Rahm Emmanuel and David Axelrod have mastered Alinsky’s game plan.

“The Prince was written by Machiavelli for the Haves on how to hold power,” said Alinsky. “Rules for Radicals is written for the Have-Nots on how to take it away.” He went on to tell his converts, “Goals must be phrased in general terms like ‘Liberty, Equality, Fraternity, Of the Common Welfare, Pursuit of Happiness, or Bread and Peace.’” Listen carefully when the President speaks.

The Organizer-In-Chief has been following this game plan since his days in Chicago and it has worked from the beginning. He is indeed thin skinned, because he sees all criticism as an attack from his enemies, hence his drive to destroy Fox News and Rush Limbaugh.

Cap and trade, health care, nationalization of industry, followed by a takeover of media and the Internet, Barack Obama makes no secret of his plans to do it all. And I believe him.

The President has been selling his bill of goods for thirty years and people have been buying in bagsful. The American people bought it last November on credit.

And now we’re paying for it.

The Weekend Round Up …

Geez, I’m sorry for the long Sarah Palin post the other day. I’ll cut ‘em a little shorter from now on.

You know, the Left has so overreached on the race issue over the the last 30 years that most of us don’t really know what racism is. During the 1940s when jazz singer Billie Holiday sang “Strange Fruit” there is no question that the great “Lady Day” had experienced it.

But, even when I was growing up during the late fifties and early sixties, I don’t believe most white Americans were racist. There were a set of perceived proprieties that we lived by and they were wrong. We’ve made such headway since then, but the Leftist media label anything right of center as radical, racist, or un American.

When Michael Richards went postal on stage a few years back, I don’t believe for a second the former Seinfeld co-star was racist. He was angry at the heckler, who was attacking him where it hurts, in his pocketbook. Since Seinfeld went off the air, Richards had made his living doing standup. He was tired and the heckler was getting to him, so he hit back where it hurt most.

That was racial, not racist … and it is not unpardonable.

That is probably at the heart of this debate. Jesse Helms and Strom Thurmond were unpardonable for their past actions, but Robert Byrd gets a pass. The race baiters show their true colors there.

When you can walk in to 7-Eleven these days and hear a group of young blacks using the N-word like they’re ordering a Slurpie, and then you’re told that the word is the greatest sin since Judas betrayed Jesus Christ, something is very wrong.

If a word is wrong it’s wrong. Period.

Warren Ballentine’s comment to Juan Williams was racist, Rush Limbaugh’s comment about Donovan McNabb was not.

Billie Holiday’s “Strange Fruit” was about the lynching of Negroes in the South. Granted, there are lesser actions that are racist, but most young black Americans haven’t experienced them.

On the Afghanistan front, Obama has now shown himself to be the most indecisive president since Andrew Johnson. Johnson had an excuse, he was alcoholic, Obama doesn’t. He is without question trying to play this out until the elections in New Jersey and Virginia are over, and it’s a high-risk play. Men’s lives hang in the balance.

Finally, probably some of you have recognized that I’m a little tough on a few of the Republicans, both politicians and pundits. I want to clarify that.

Lindsey Graham, I’m sure, is a good and decent man, but he needs to retire. The GOP is in a critical fight for its existence, and Graham and former senate leader Trent Lott are the kind of Republicans who put us there. That’s not to say that they’ve sunk to anything near the Randall “Duke Cunnigham” level of betrayal, but nevertheless, they have bent over backwards to be “civil” with an enemy that doesn’t know the meaning of the word.

Politically, the New Left are the enemy, and we can take no prisoners if we’re going to defeat them. Graham’s vote for Sonia Sotomayor is an example. The woman isn’t qualified to preside over traffic court and George H.W. Bush appointed her to the federal bench, and now Graham helped put her on the High Court. These things profoundly effect our everyday lives.

Nuff said …

Given the alternative I would take George W. Bush or his father over the most conservative Democrat, but he walked darn close to treason on the “Illegals” issue. Nothing in this country is more sacrosanct than our borders.

What I can say about both Bushes is that both of those boys know how to run a war. But there is no question that they are a big part of the dismantling of the Reagan Revolution.

As far as Romney and Huckabee go, they are fine men. I am a Christian and they are on the right side. Jesus told us to love our enemies not to help them get elected. Huckabee makes a great talk show host and I’m sure he’s a good preacher. I know and like many fine Mormon people, I even dated one, but it’s a club. Romney sold out conservatism to get elected in Massachusetts and he’ll do the same thing in the White House. That is unacceptable to me.

Pundits like Joe Scarborough and Peggy Noonan bother me most, because they’re phonies. Noonan’s now infamous “Hot Mike” episode with Mike Murphy proved it in her case. And if she’s punching the clock for a paycheck she should get into another line of work. She’s outted herself now and speaks openly against Palin, but her hypocrisy was shameful.

Palin, I fear, is about to make a serious mistake. I believe she could be the greatest Republican president since Ronald Reagan but her acceptance to appear with Oprah Winfrey (even to sell a book) may signal a disturbing shift in direction. Winfrey snubbed her nastily as the Veep candidate, and Sarah shouldn’t juice the Liberal’s ratings now. No doubt she feels the GOP left her to twist in the wind after the 2008 campaign but deserting the party–if that is what she’s doing–is a mistake.

Gosh, some of you have left great comment in my first week and a half. Thanks so much!