Sad State of Affairs

In light of the recent election results I’ve taken particular heed to some of the Democrats stated  ambitions, those of: Packing the SCOTUS, admitting PR and DC to the union, defunding the police, government control of health care, amnesty to all illegal immigrants, abolish the electoral-college, rescind the Second Amendment, reparation for African Americans, greater regulation of commerce and education, increasing taxes. What’s not to like,  huh?

And, soon there will be no Red States to oppose them, in having been over run by Blue State escapees-,  fleeing lawlessness, high taxes and social depravity-, but bringing their warped sense of a social preferences with them. A socialist curtain is descending upon us America-, one party governance is waiting in the wings! Farewell land of the free, home of the brave-, where once life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness abounded.

Our bloated government is determined to tax us back to our ancestral European socialist beginnings! Have you ever thought to ask yourself, why should we pay for things we don’t want, that the vast majority of us never receive; why should they take our money and property and give it to others to garner their favor, ensuring their position of power; enhance the governments revenue stream and their personal inordinate entitlements! We American’s had a government of the people, by the people and for the people that governed in compliance with our once revered and thought sacrosanct constitution. Today that is not the case! A cabal of bureaucratic anarchist have undermined our representative democracy skewing it toward a socialist inclined oligarchy. 

Protest Spin

The Wall Street Journal wasn’t particularly sympathetic to the cause in the wake of the recent D.C demonstrations .  All of a sudden, they had fallen in line with the detractors, adopting the same set of adjectives.  Where we once had “voting irregularities”, and hundreds of affidavits attesting to it, we now have “unproven” allegations, “false” accusations, and the old Trump standby: “lies”.  Instead of showing the public that these claims are being taken seriously, a matter that was addressed when it was Gore doping the accusing, the 80 Million Trump supporters are being told that there’s nothing here people, you lost, go home. After four years of relentless attacks on a duly elected president, our elected officials are telling us to shut up and just accept a loss, something the other side has never actually done. And the piling on continues. Many of you are not a fan of Tucker Carlson, but I think he got it right.  Trump was still full of his swaggering, incendiary bravado, but he certainly didn’t instruct the crowd to breach the Capitol.  Like all marches in DC, he called for the crowd to march to the Capitol to protest at the site where the flawed election was being ratified.  No more.  Did it get out of hand? It sure did. But no more out of hand than the riots in Portland, New York City and Kenosha.  I didn’t see the city burn and businesses looted.  The “people’s house was violated”, they screamed.  Yes it was.  By the people, we the people.  And video shows repeated examples of the Capitol Police opening barricades and stepping aside.  And by barricades, I mean bike racks.  And it’s not your house, Nancy, not the aristocracy’s house, not the house of the elite, despite the exclusive hair salon and private gyms. It belongs to the people that you brushed off and disenfranchised, chose to ignore and belittle. Even Anderson Cooper, an elitist of the Vanderbilt dynasty, mocked the protesters on CNN, suggesting that they will “go back to the Olive Garden and to the Holiday Inn they’re staying at, or the Garden Marriott…..”   The unfortunate aftermath will be more demagoguery, mostly directed at threats to Democrat power such as senators Hawley and Cruz.  It’s going to be an ugly four years, but this style of ugliness has not been brought on by Trump alone, rather by a power hungry Democrat cabal and their complicit media.

I'm Back!

Did you miss me? Well I’m back, and hereafter I’ll tell you why. But know, in the passage of time since my last post, my tolerance to suffer political pundits of any stripe and their antics, has decreased exponentially. As a consequence, you might find my rants more personal and biting then before. If I offend, mea culpa! 

So we begin, my opening 2021 Conservative Slants is a culmination of responses to recent affronts to my sensibilities by CCN, WSJ, PBS, DP and FOX news. A little long winded, but I wanted to set a tone in my return.

I’m Back.  Rejoining the ranks of the “deplorables”, “clinging to our guns and religion”.  We “insurrectionists”, Trump supporters who staged a “coup”, the “mob” that “stormed the Capitol”, mounting a “siege” against the “people’s house”.  How many times will we allow the left to paint us with a broad brush? When did conservatism become the enemy of the people?  How has the conservative label become a negative, whereas liberal and progressive have become something spun into a positive, a brand that has become a shiny commodity, something our youth want to acquire, to proclaim loudly, even violently, that they adhere to a set of values and principles that is antithetical to our Constitution, that will fundamentally change America?  

 

When exactly did the two parties decide to switch identities anyway?  The Democrats were once the party of the people, representing the blue-collar working class and the poor.  Now they represent Big Tech, the wealthy elite, white, college educated suburbanites and city dwellers, and they lay claim to all the supposedly disenfranchised minority groups that identify by color and sexual orientation.  They firmly believe in big government, cradle-to-grave entitlements, identity politics, and that identity should be a measure of your merit.  Republicans have come to represent the working class and the rural poor, small business and capitalism, America’s heartland where traditional values of family and religion still have value. They believe in a smaller less intrusive government, a strong military, and strong borders, and are guided by the Constitution.  They believe in meritocracy.

 

But words and symbols have been hijacked by the left and have been reserved as their own exclusive property or, worse yet, morphed into something else.  Identity politics has become the order of the day, where offending one of the protected categories carries with it the scarlet letter, a brand of one of a myriad of “-isms” and “phobes” the left have used effectively at the point of the spear to further isolate and divide.   Sexist, Misogynist, Homophobic, white supremacist, and of course the universally applicable and most damning of all: Racist.  A hangman’s noose and the word “lynching” for example, have been made the exclusive property of the black experience in this country where even a loop of rope hanging in a garage bay turned NASCAR upside down this past year in a wave of identity politics. Gender specific words such as him, her, he, she, mother, father, sister and brother have been recently banished from the floors of Congress in favor of gender-neutral terms such as parent, sibling, and the grammatically preposterous “they”.  Yes, the “party of science” believes, and more importantly wants you to believe, that there are more than two genders, and that those words are insensitive and not “inclusive”.  The Confederate flag, once thought to represent the pride of being from the south, has been branded a symbol of hate, a symbol of our racist past, and it too has been banned from state flags and personal display.  Professional sports team’s names and logos are being dropped for being racially insensitive and demeaning, leading us to impressive, awe-inspiring appelations such as The Washington Football Team. My personal favorite is when the left calls Trump and his followers Nazis, failing to recognize that Nazi is a shortened version of Nationalsozialistische , which translates to national socialist, when they themselves are proponents of a socialist state.  Hilarious. Even the very definition of “Patriot” has been linked with “nationalism” where the most common connotation used to be “devotion to the interests or culture of a particular nation-state” but has been cast aside in favor of the more negative definition, “a particular culture or ethnic group deserving of political self-determination”, which has been extrapolated into “white supremacy” and racism, now inexplicably but permanently linked to MAGA and Donald Trump’s presidency.   And let’s not forget the height of word-absurdity when Representative Emanuel Cleaver (D-MO), in delivering the opening prayer on the first day of the 117th Congress, a prayer filled with Christian themes and scriptural references, waded into politically correct, all-inclusive territory by closing with “we ask it in the name of the monotheistic God, Brahma, and god known by many faiths. Amen….and AWOMAN.” What an idiot.  Amen is not a gender specific term, rather it is derived from the Latin, meaning “so be it”.  But facts never seem to get in the way of the leftist agenda.  Florida Republican Matt Gaetz sarcastically quipped: Don’t they know that gender isn’t binary? What about the 42 other genders?” Tennessee Rep Tim Burchett remarked, “This is political correctness gone way off the rails.” Now that’s an understatement.

 

And with the Democrats seizing control of the House of Representatives, the Senate and the White House, expect it to get worse………a lot worse.  Already, in a profound demonstration of how to be a sore winner, Pelosi and Schumer are calling for Pence to invoke the 25th Amendment and remove Trump from the Presidency a mere 12 days before Biden’s inauguration.  If not, they intend to proceed with, and are already preparing articles of impeachment. Republican Senators Hawley and Cruz, who challenged the Electoral College certification process on the grounds of claims of voter fraud, are being attacked by their Democrat colleagues, led by the reprehensible Delaware Senator Coons, who is calling for their resignations. It would appear that in the typical “never let a crisis go to waste” tactic first outlined by Obama advisor Rahm Emanuel, and recently repeated while discussing the coronavirus pandemic, the Democrats will be employing a scorched-earth policy of eliminating all potential obstacles to their radical agenda.  Twitter, Facebook and Instagram have all banned Trump indefinitely from their platforms, effectively silencing the President of the United States.  Even the uber-liberal ACLU has taken up the case as a violation of First Amendment rights to free speech.  When exactly did Mark Zuckerberg and Jack Dorsey, two reprehensible human beings if there ever was one, become the gatekeepers and arbiters of what the President of the United States of America can say?  This should disturb everyone, regardless of what your political affiliation may be.  And as an extension, the relatively new platform Parler, which is a Twitter-like app that has marketed itself as a non-biased, free speech social media platform focused on user’s rights, has been removed from Google’s app store, followed by Apple and Amazon in suspending the app from being active on their servers.  Why?  Because Trump is using it to communicate.  When such a blatant violation of Constitutional rights occurs amidst radical calls from the left to silence Trump supporters, suggestions to prevent Trump supporters from flying or staying in hotels, calls to place restrictions on conservative talk radio, you are witnessing a descent into tyranny.  

 

Recall Saul Alinsky, the American community activist and political theorist who penned the book: Rules for Radicals: A Pragmatic Primer in 1971. He is largely credited with developing strategies for confrontation and community organizing to advance social justice.  Disturbingly, we see Rule #12 being implemented by the left today: “Pick the target, freeze it, personalize it, and polarize it.  Cut off the support network and isolate the target from sympathy.  Go after people and not institutions: people hurt faster than institutions. (This is cruel, but very effective.  Direct, personalized criticism and ridicule works).”  We are seeing this being played out to great effect against Donald Trump and conservatives in real time.  With a complicit media acting as a propaganda branch of the Democrat party, we are under attack, we are being silenced, ridiculed, isolated and in effect, cancelled.  We are indeed under siege, there is indeed an insurrection, and as our forefathers predicted, we are being overwhelmed by mob rule.  Yet is not a mob of conservative sympathizers that is a threat to the Republic.  It is the new Democrat party and their radical leftist, progressive agenda, emboldened by their success in taking back the Congress and the White House under dubious circumstances, emboldened by a complicit media and a compliant public that has swallowed their rhetoric and has forgotten the principles of the Constitution. That is why I’m back.  To shine a light on the hypocrisy that rules the current political landscape. To add my voice to the Patriots who choose to defend the Constitution from tyranny. While we still can.  

                                                             

Tom Swift

That's All Folks!

This time for real...I'm away! Appropriate don't you think? What with new year resolutions' and all, apropos? I used to tell my business colleagues back in the day, there comes a time when you should just move on, enough is enough-, your relevance, your impact in the grand scheme of things wanting and/or not wanted.This blog was essentially a by-product of requests for comments from a conservative perspective on current political events-, inquiries made of me by friends and associates deeply immersed in mother academia's liberal womb. In as much as they wanted real time unabridged spontaneous responses, so that they could spin them as they saw fit in their teaching and literary opposing posturing .... I was all too willing to lend a voice. But, now those very same friends and associates find themselves in a quandary. My prognostications ringing too true for their liking, striking to close to home, my arguments too substantive. In that said, the time seems auspicious for a lateral arabesque, a segue for me to move on. Further, I felt I had reached the point of overshariing my opinions on the political landscape.

I have a few new interests I'm anxious to pursue; some old obligations to fulfill. Aside, thinking about taking up fishing, albeit somewhat concerned about my patience quotient or lack there of, never big on Zen-like activities. Shooting maybe, there is a range near by, and the way things are going of late increasing my firearm proficiency may not be a bad idea. I've enjoyed our time together. It did me good to vent my spleen, better out than in my grandfather would say. Any way to dissipate the corrosive effect of impotence in the light of perceived threatening adversity; the frustration of witnessing our country's social, economic and cultural decay was therapeutic. An American once was entitled to nothing save for the inalienable right to be all he or she could be, unencumbered by oppressive governance at any level or station in life. Today that is not the case, more of us are recipients of entitlements unearned; a willingness for our fate to be largely determined by others, others in my opinion of nefarious governing motives and intent. But, so much for beating a dead horse! For your attention thank you.To those who found ways to lend encouragement and purpose to my political flaying about, both liberals and conservatives alike, I appreciated your candor and shared concerns. I was humbled by the audience we amassed over these past four years. As a patriot I will always be with you in spirit! If fortunate and history will have it...somehow, someway our country, we the people, will recover from our perverse fascination with political correct social reform and a wrong headed appreciation of how to preserve America the beautiful for posterity. To all, good luck with that!

Let Me Count The Ways

His and their opportunities (you do know who I'm talking about here) to embarrass, offend, repress, divide, baffle, confuse we the people, appears unending. With countless critical issues to be addressed/resolved; fences to be mended, bridges to be built-,  our illustrious politicians choose to dwell on social, international and diplomatic diversions of negligible consequences in the grand scheme of preserving the productivity, sovereignty and reputation of this great republic of ours. This regime, as alleged here before, are masters at deflection and deception. We become so embroiled in political theater minutiae, that the end-game in play escapes us! Again, we simply don't get it, we are being subverted! A blatant strategy to subvert our democratic government is afoot and our attention is being successively diverted by debilitating masking tactics! A Washington cabal of unsavory elected and appointed officials of all political persuasions are in the process of intentionally or unintentionally wresting away our inalienable rights as citizens of the United States to constitutionally reining in these rogue politicians and their acolytes. It appears by the time we come to our senses; assure the separation and sanctity of our three branches of government and restore their order of practice and balance, the prevailing laws of the land will be unrecognizable! This behemoth of a government we have created has a life of its own, not easily deterred from clinging to it by any means possible. Our window of opportunity to do anything about it is slowly but ever so steadily closing.

I'm going to give it a rest for the holidays. I've told my antagonists who essentially prompt these blogs-my redundant whining is starting to get on my nerves. Hopefully it's all paranoia on my part and the new year will some how promote fathomable liberal issues of meaningful substance and consequences in themselves for future accord, debate and/ or comment, sans a hidden agenda. Yea right! Merry Christmas and a Happy New Year!

Cops and Criminals

For starters, just to know we are all on the same page, definition wise: Cops in their many forms and guises are essentially purposed to enforce the law. Those laws levied by our duly elected and/or appointed legislators and/or officials. Criminals are the ones who break those laws. Ipso facto the catalyst that brings the cops and the criminals together is the suspicion or commission of a crime, the breaking of a law. For emphasis, the cops don't make the laws... As said, those laws are ostensibly made by we the people, through our elected and/or appointed legislators, as is the practice of our jurisprudence system. To this point I can't imagine our opinions being at odds with one another. That said I for one am having difficulty with the appraisal of many of you in the much publicized resent committed crimes in Missouri and New York, their enforcement, in turn their subsequent adjudication. No question "our" laws such as they are were broken, the cops duty bound to enforce those laws were directed to do so, did; the legal procedure to process the results of the apprehension of the criminals, grand jury decided. In knowing what that grand jury was changed with judging i.e the apprehending cop's motivation at the time of the confrontation, was it appropriate or inappropriate by the prescribed rules of engagement-, decided it was appropriate. To this point the required legal protocol adhered to was apparently observed and carried out, right? Now, were the laws broken, in themselves appropriate-, the force used in the apprehension of the criminals in itself appropriate? Therein lies the rub! And, I note our judicial system provides for resolution of those questions beyond the grand jury's verdicts going forward. Change the law; change the rules of engagement and punishment of the criminals to be apprehended and tried in breaking those laws; try the case itself in Civil Court for thought to be appropriate reparation of the crime allegedly committed. Again that said, I persist in feeling these crimes and the criminals apprehension, as unjust and tragic as they might appear, were not racially motivated but criminally instigated and dealt with accordingly. Ask yourself, what if both of these young men said...." You've got me Officer, I got caught up in the moment.."  What do you think would have happen? I can't imagine them being shot or asphyxiated......And don't get me wrong, I have difficulty in dealing with our sometimes over zealous, storm trooper garbed, military armed policemen that have replacing the once affable neighborhood beat cop of yesteryear. But, times have dramatically changed, criminals more violent, seemingly more of them, and far less tolerant of police intervention of any kind. I know the prevailing statistics on the subject are an anathema to the black community, but they are what they are!

I'm In Free-fall

Pushed over the edge by Ferguson, not so much by Ferguson itself, but by our standing government's response to Ferguson! When Al Sharpton of Towana Browley infamy can command a seat next to our President and Attorney General to inflame this travesty to our judicial system our sensibilities, I blanch! To add yet further insult to injury when across the nation mindless supportive demonstrations with smoldering racial overtones take to our streets, our places of business, our media with reckless abandon and malicious intent-, my spirit falters! I've witnessed the likes of Watts, Newark and a host of other racially incited civil unrest, feeling they were perpetrated largely by lawless malcontents on both sides of those ginned-up so called protests, that they knew not what they were doing. That, in light of conspicuous progress being made here in the United States on racial relations before and after, felt in the foreseeable future such foment would be negated. In fact the election of Barack Obama, aside from politics would surely have signaled the extent of the progress being made, certain to dissuade the likelihood of such racial strife in the future. No need to tell you this president, this administration has not only failed us economically, perhaps irreparably damaged our reputation as a world leader, but has divided our society to the near point of irreconcilable differences. Under their aegis civil disobedience has never been so distorted, manipulated, unproductive, violence masked and condoned-, the dreams and intent of Reverend Martin Luther King so trampled. It's beyond me, my white, black, beige, brown and assorted other complexioned friends have more common ground than uncommon ground, how can we be the exception, we are so atypical! Could it be we are being propagandized to best serve a hidden agenda.There I go again with my conspiracy paranoia. What else can explain this multifaceted, diverse attack on all things once so American! I wait impatiently for a sign that this too shall pass. Regretting these niggling little whimpers of frustration, telling you what you already know, sharing my frustrations with the choir, affording our detractors whoever they might be the satisfaction of knowing we are in disarray as what to do.