The Civility War - 2011

A friend wrote me a note chiding me for calling the president, "President Obama".  He suggested a particularly nasty string of epithets as an alternative.

While I might have my differences with the president, I will not use that sort of language in referring to him or to anyone, no matter his politics or religion. I unashamedly believe in the Constitutional process that elects our presidents. Our guy may lose the election, but respect should be shown to the office whoever holds it. However much I might disagree with the policies of the man holding it, I will not resort to cheap name-calling.

Every president is limited in what he can do while in office by the two other brances of the government and by the voices of the people which cannot be silenced without abolishing the constitution. I don't think that will happen any time soon.


In the meantime Mr. Obama is the president and I will speak respectfully to him. I was taught growing up to be polite to the least child of God out there....or the most powerful.

And one more thing. People who are black have asked me not to use the n-word, so out of respect for their wishes I don't. It's always been a crude word and I have always instinctively avoided it's use. My friend's use of the world is shameful if, as he seems to be, he is claiming to be a Christian and Conservative.  He blocks access to his profile information, so, for all I know, he may be a liberal. There has been a lot of race-baiting by liberals in disguise lately on the Internet. I think they are trying to lure vocal conservatives into revealing their "true racism". I don't think they will succeed. After all, we're not racist, no matter how many times the left keeps telling us we are.

Scripture warns that by beholding we become changed. The danger of obsessing over our enemies is that we are in danger of becoming like them. I will not stoop to the level that many of my liberal colleagues do when they verbally abuse me. Jesus said treat others the way I would like to be treated, not the way they deserve. That's God's business and I'll leave it to him, thank you very much.

And I appreciate my liberal friends who also believe in a polite exchange of ideas over name-calling and ridicule.  There is a fascinating debate going on between Americans of good will on both sides of the political fence that is being completely missed by extremists on both sides who prefer to flail at each other verbally to little effect.

The righteousness of your cause can often be demonstrated by the decency of its adherants. While it might feel good to "let 'em have it" verbally once in a while, it is morally wrong to do so.

At least that's what my Commander says.

And It's Up Against the Wall......Are Conservatives Fear Mongers?

(c) 2011 by Tom King

Had a liberal commentator on one of the forums today who criticized conservatives for promoting fear. They always call us fear-mongers. It's in the playbook. But it's not because they are deliberately lying about that. Folks on the left really do fear conservatives.  They fear we are going to cramp their sex lives. They fear we are going to make them go to church. They fear we're going to take away their entitlements and starve children and old people. And so they assume that we fear them in the same way they fear us and what we'd do to them if we did things our way.

I was chided by this one woman who told me our fear of the progressive movement was unfounded and that we should just sit back and "give it a chance". She promised we'd like the change.

Yep, kind of like the Russian middle class wasn't afraid of to embrace the revolutionary change that Trotsky, Lenin and Stalin brought to the Russian people. Many of them even tried to embrace the change, right up until the new government virtually obliterated the Russian middle class.  Just like the Jews dismissed any worries about the new Fuehrer as an "over-reaction". Like the Hugenots who expected the Catholic church to tolerate their beliefs because they thought that surely the Hugenots contributed so much to the economy as the core of the nation's middle class. In that, they greatly under-estimated the penchant of the powerful for cutting off their own noses to spite their faces. They dismissed any fear of the clerical authorities right up untill the Inquisition began setting fire to French Hugenot shopkeepers, forcing a mass flight to America. Hey, it was great for us, enriching  as it did, our growing economy with an influx of ready-made middle class traders and shopkeepers. I suppose Idi Amin, Sadaam Hussein, and "Baby Doc" Duvalier all seemed like they'd be okay if you just kept out of their way - till folks discovered how hard it is to stay out of the way of people like that..


History's megalomaniacs have long depended on the fact that the great majority of people in any stable culture refuse to believe anything unpleasant will every happen to them.  They use this stubborn deliberate refusal to believe the worst in order to buy time for them to secure enough power to enforce their peculiar vision of how society should be ordered. By the time the people figure out they've been duped, it's most always too late.

It was getting that way in America before the revolution, but having already been through the process back in Europe, most Americans saw what was coming and dug their heels in - rejecting an insane king and an oppressive British government that seemed intent on wringing the lifeblood from the colonies for the profit of the nobility.

ANYBODY who thinks that they know how to plan a perfect society is dangerous as far as I'm concerned. If things don't go as they plan, they never consider that something may be wrong with their plans. Then they go looking for someone to blame and it's "Up against the wall!" Too much power inevitably corrupts the holder of that power.

As to the direct accusation that I am afraid of what I believe is coming if we don't do anything about it......she's wrong.......I am not afraid at all. That's what the left doesn't get about the Tea Party. We see what's coming and we're NOT afraid. If we were afraid, we'd sit down and shut up and hope no one noticed us. That's how most of the people in the Third World do it. They try to take care of themselves very quietly and to avoid drawing any attention to themselves from the government.

Conservatives are well aware that we are painting a bulls-eye on our own chests and that historically, it's crazed leftists behind the trigger - almost ten to one on presidential assassination attempts alone.

AND WE ARE NOT AFRAID. I figure that if God is done with me, getting run over by a tank or stoned by a mob is nothing to fear. The manner of our death changes nothing. My next conscious moment after my death, I will be looking up to see Christ coming to take me home. I'm only passing through this world anyway. My only task is to do what's right. I learned a long time ago that after a while, a beating doesn't hurt anymore. Refusing to stand up for what is right - that hurts forever.

Knowing what's coming doesn't make me afraid. It makes me determined and I don't think liberals will ever get that. They see the world through their own stubborn ideology and everything must conform to that ideology, even if it obviously doesn't work like their ideology says it ought to. The fault is never with the ideology no matter what. It's particularly hard for folks who do not believe in God to accept flaws in their ideology because for them their belief system is all they have - a hollow substitute for God that doesn't quite fill the need. It's why there is such a powerful need to silence anyone who challenges their ideology.

Like I said in a previous post.  Socialist revolutions are bad about putting their own people up against the wall when they are done with them. Political ideologies are cannabalistic by nature. They devour their own to stay alive. Kind of the opposite of how God works.  The whole idea that the leaders among us would be the lowliest - the servants of all - makes no sense to those who believe in top-down rule by a privileged class of supposedly smart people. You can see why they don't understand us at all. 
 

Bullies and Cliques and Progressives.....Oh, My!

All someone has to do to get the leftists on Facebook going is to mention "Glenn Beck" and they go all conspiracy theorist and start spitting on their keyboards as they type. One guy today described Beck as a charismatic cult leader and said that those who listen to him are .  He doesn't know what he's talking about.

Glenn Beck is about as charismatic as the Pillsbury Doughboy. He makes a good argument. I listen to him sometimes. I admit it. I also listened to Ed and Keith and read the Huffington Post on occasion. When I do the background reading, though, I have to tell you. Beck has a point. Sometimes his speculation gets a little deep, but one thing he always does is give you the references and tell you to check it out yourself.

I do information research for a living and I'm here to tell you, "It's not what Glenn Beck says that frightens the bejeebers out of me." It's what Barak Obama says and has said in the past. It's what liberal leaders and presidential confidents like Dr. Piven, George Soros, Saul Alinsky, Cass Sunstein, the Stern brothers, Nancy Pelosi, Harry Reid and the rest of the crew say. It's not Glenn Beck's interpretation that gives me the willies, it's their own words that give me pause. They've been telling us what they plan to do to this country for years. We just don't want to believe it.


When I listen to liberal pundits, read liberal think tank reports and peruse the pages of the Huffington Post and Daily Kos, I see a movement afoot to fundamentally change the character of our government. That movement states very clearly that we need more government bureaucracy, more government power and a curb on free speech, assembly, religion and the right to keep and bear arms. They want to create a no-risk nanny state with an economy that is centrally planned by the federal government.

There is an arrogance in the very tone of their words that says, "I'm smarter than you so shut up. I'll tell you what you need to think." I'm getting none of that from Glenn Beck. I get that from people on the left.

When I was growing up I found myself at odds with two groups of kids in school - the bullies and the cliques. As near as I can tell they all grew up to be progressive socialists.
 
One of them said, "Even Chris Matthews thinks Beck is nutty." 
 
She said that Matthews accuses Beck of distorting history.  Wow! She really believes Matthews is an unbiased reporter. Incredible!  Chris Matthews is hardly one I'd suspect of spending a lot of time studying dusty old history. I'm telling you I've looked this stuff up. I've read it. I've seen the film of people like George Bernard Shaw, the darling of progressives to this day talking about how he thought we ought to have a local board that every 5 years we all had to appear before to justify whether we had contributed enough to the community to be allowed to continue living.  The man was dead serious.


I read the entire three volume set of HG Wells' History of the World. I have it in my library. It turned me off Wells as a writer. The books make the case that certain races and cultures and individuals are superior to others. The man was the worst sort of racial supremist and he was one of the fathers of the Progressive movement.

That's horrific, but my liberal friends quote Shaw constantly as though he was a really smart guy with all the answers. Talk about not knowing history. Glenn's turning up uncomfortable stuff under history's rocks and openly leftist people like Matthews can't disprove it, so they go after the messenger.  It's a textbook leftist tactic. It's almost cliche'.

Like I said, it's not Glenn Beck that scares me. My friend pointed out that there are thug Republicans too. They really don't get it at all.  I don't like progressive Republicans either. They compromise their principles for power and they aren't any better than those that are trying to make us a socialist nation. When they all get done, we'll be a third rate world power and they will be the new nobility.

And let me make sure I am clear. I'm not afraid of people like my liberal friends. They really believe this hopety change stuff will make us all better and that those who are resisting the holy "change" are somehow bad people. But I really don't worry about them. It's the guys in the legislatures and congress and White House that are working like bees in a tar bucket to make it happen before we can do anything about it that worry me in the night.

The sad thing is that one day we're likely to wake up in a country we don't recognize. Tragically, it's always the odd folk, the ones that flock to the progressive banner thinking the new government will protect them, that get lined up against the wall first when the revolution ends. Check your history. It's whatever religion that's out of favor, it's homosexuals, the disabled, old people, people who disagree, people the new regime considers "immoral" Look at German socialism and Russian Communism. They murdered Jews (the out of favor religion), the weaklings, those who disagreed politically went to the Gulags. They "eliminated" the elderly, disabled and infirm. They sent the decadent and the mentally ill to re-education camps and "hospitals" where they were experimented on and finally euthanized. They made soldiers and jailers out of children.  And every bit of it was done in the name of the greater good.

I hear the same rhetoric that preceded all the most heinous socialist regimes being repeated on television and radio, on news and in the papers by progressives - the same vague promises. They use marginalized and unhappy people as foot soldiers to seize power, then such regimes inevitably turn on them once they have control and no longer need them..

When the president (I heard him say it myself) says we need a special civilian law enforcement agency with all the power and equipment of the military, it frightens me. I can't help think Gestapo and KGB. Unlike many of my friends on the left, I don't trust Barak Obama any farther than I could toss him. He has given me little reason to do so.

So, unless the left succeeds in removing our right to speak, people like Beck, Limbaugh and me are going to say our peace. When they do remove our right to speak in the name of "tolerance" or "public safety", the progressive movement will stand revealed for what it is.

I could no more remain silent than I could the day on the playground in 1967 when I told a crowd of bullies to leave the little ones they were tormenting alone. Oh, I stood my ground alright. Lost a good deal of blood in the process!

I really dislike being so stubborn, but it's a lifelong habit that continues to cost me blood and a comfortable place at the table with the cool kids.

Tom