Pay No Attention to That Man Behind the Curtain

The Ludicrously Obvious Guerrilla War on Conservatives

(c) 2011 by Tom King



Che Gorilla - Leftist Infiltrator

The left would like nothing better than to fracture conservatives into factions. Look at any conservative forum thread on potential candidates for president in 2012. We can't even remotely agree on a leader for the movement at this point.  How do you suppose we can expect to hold out against even a minority when that minority is solidly behind their latest messiah?


We can take a lesson from how they attack us. They viciously go after anyone they think is a potentially articulate and catalyzing conservative leader -- Limbaugh, Beck, Palin for example. They do it well. In the last election, they sold conservatives a bill of goods on Fred Thompson.

"No fire in the belly." was a liberal talking point that they hammered on single-mindedly ad nauseum because, frankly, the idea of Thompson in the oval office frightened them more than any candidate in the list. Then they started the Romney, Huckabee, Guiliani whispering campaigns and we wound up with the candidate they chose for us and handed us our heads in the 2008 election.

The truth is, Fred Thompson's apparent reluctance was his biggest selling point with me. It reminded me of two other reluctant presidents - Washington and Reagan. Both men initially resisted a career in politics and only took it because people convinced them they could do some good. Because Reagan took the job in order to do something good and not because he lusted to be President, the man confounded all his opponents. The slick politicians of the 70s and 80s never did understand what made that man tick.

Now, I know people will feel the need to take shots at me because I suggested Thompson over their pet true believer candidate - Ron Paul, Herman Cain or someone like that, but you don't have to. The infighting about a potential candidate only serves the purposes of the highly focused left. Conservatives will get the candidate the left maneuvers us into taking if we can't stop squabbling over little things and do like Reagan - keep our eyes on the prize.

You can bet the progressives socialists have their eyes on the prize and they are willing to do anything, no matter how repugnant to them, in order to win the power to make this country into their idealized "worker's paradise". Their pundits' and bloggers' sudden recent mass appreciation for Ronald Reagan and how much Obama is like him is proof of that. Some of them had to take massive amounts of dramamine in order to write those blog posts, you can bet. But they do know how to present a solid front.

The work of the propaganda machine is so obvious, but since all the cool people are busily pretending not to notice, we think it impolite to mention it. I am reminded of The Wizard of Oz.....

"Pay no attention to that man behind the curtain!"

Thank God we have a few brave souls like Beck, Limbaugh, Palin and Hannity, who, like Toto, have the gumption to pull back the curtain to allow us to see what's going on behind there. They pay a heavy price for pointing out what is patently obvious -- someone's messing with us.

Unless cooler heads prevail and conservatives quit chewing on each other and everyone else, we're going to find our movement marginalized. Unfortunately, conservatives don't like stifling anyone's freedom of speech, so we don't discipline our hounds very well.

Don't get me wrong, I still think it's counterproductive, not to mention impolite, to bite the man behind the curtain on his big fat butt, but, unfortunately, some of our less disciplined hounds can't resist a fat haunch.....

I Saw Three Unclean Spirits Like Frogs.....

Self-Righteousness: the Devil's Favorite Tool

"And I saw three unclean spirits like frogs come out of the mouth of the dragon, and out of the mouth of the beast, and out of the mouth of the false prophet.  For they are the spirits of devils, working miracles, which go forth unto the kings of the Earth and of the whole world, to gather them to the battle of that great day of God Almighty."  Revelation: 16: 13-14

Something is worrying me lately. When I see liberals on the left and conservatives on the right converging on talking points, I begin to wander what's the devil up to. Two I'm seeing a lot of just in the past few days:

1. Glenn Beck is a wacko. (Hearing it from MSNBC and the Weekly Standard)
2. Reagan and Obama aren't that far apart. (Time Magazine and conservative blogs).

A strategy the enemy uses is to confuse the issue is to create common targets and issues that his enemies can share to distract them while he does his real work. He's got liberals saying Obama is more like Reagan than Sarah Palin or Glenn Beck. In knee jerk fashion, now conservatives are pointing out that Reagan was "not so hot and made lots of mistakes" in an effort to further distance themselves from the liberal talking points. Sadly, it puts them on the same side as the liberals in muddying the character of Reagan.

The Arab proverb, "The enemy of my enemy is my friend," tain't necessarily so, but it is a great way to forward an agenda - especially an evil one. Both sides figure they can agree for now and slip a dagger into the other guy's ribs later if they need to. Acquisition of power is the most important thing to people like this. The devil uses such "deals with the devil" to manipulate for his own ends. The left/right sanctimony over Reagan and Beck is really a sad commentary on how petty and naieve some folk can be.

I think the conservative community has become so enraged with how things are going that we've abandoned clear cool logical thinking. There's a reason somebody is orchestrating an attack on conservative icons like Reagan and Glenn Beck (and Abraham Lincoln for that matter). It's what you do if you want to confuse your enemy and marginalize its leaders.

If you can, you turn your enemy against its own leaders; against their own symbols.  Then, you can convince them they are more holy practitioners of their particular political philosophies - whether it's conservatism or Marxism it does not matter. Get them all puffed up with pride before you stick a pin (or a knife) in them.

If you are intent on seizing power, it's best to eliminate or marginalize anyone with passion and you do that by setting them up for a fall. That's what happened to Robespierre during the French Revolution. He became a fanatic and convinced of his own righteousness and invincibility. As a result he wound up with his own head in a basket.

There's the story of the Greek King who showed a neighboring king how to rule his people and hold his power. He had his soldiers go into a ripening cornfield and lop of the heads off any corn stalk that stood higher than the others.

It's a very effective technique for crowd control. It seems lately the strategy is to fertilize any potentially troublesome stalks so they can grow large enough to warrant pruning. We must not let them get away with it. Particularly, we need to protect our prophets and preachers from ourselves.  Any human, no matter how effective he or she is, no matter how sincere their beliefs or how righteous their cause can be found to have flaws. Let's not convince ourselves that we are so righteous we need to lop the heads off anyone who isn't as righteous as we are. "Pride goeth before destruction," it says in Proverbs, "And a haughty spirit before a fall."

The Satanic method of rule is to find flaws in your opponents and attack them, turning their own supporters against them if possible.  There's no tool quite so effective as self-righteousness for doing that. Jesus' method is to let us find those flaws in our own selves, bringing those flaws into the light of his love, where he forgives them and then forgets you ever had them.  Lots of men and women, whom I believe God called to service at key moments in history, had forgiven flaws.

• Lincoln set aside "habeus corpus" while trying to figure out how to hold the United States together in the middle of a bloody Civil War.
• FDR talked pacifist, almost lying to the American people, while building an army to fight a war he knew would come.
• Teddy Roosevelt bought into some pernicious socialist ideas, while breaking up some nasty business trusts and strengthening America's position in the world at a time when foreign powers were eyeing the Americas with thoughts of conquest.
• Reagan compromised with Democrats to accomplish things he felt were more important - like ending the nuclear threat and bringing down communism..
• Beck was a drunk who cleaned up and became a spokesman for hard work, family values, clean living smaller government and the preservation of the constitution.
• Martin Luther was an obsessive compulsive self-abuser who led the Protestant revolution against the excesses of a politicized, corrupt church.
• Joan of Arc had problems with authority, but led her nation to independence.
• Martin Luther King had indiscretions with women and inspired the civil rights movement with his "I have a dream" speech.
• So did Kennedy who pointed the way to the moon and possibly Eisenhower who quietly held us together during the darkest days of the cold war.
• The Apostle Peter used swear words under pressure, buckled under social pressure and allowed racism to raise its ugly head in the early church and yet he always admitted his guilt freely and came back to lead the fledgling church to become a great movement for good.
• St. Paul had some issues with women, admitted he had a secret problem he did not share with others that made it hard for him and admitted that he sometimes spoke on his own hook without God's express guidance on the subject, but wrote some of the most inspiring words of scripture and raised up churches far beyond the borders of Israel.
• George Washington had some impulse control issues, but didn't lie about it. He set the model for what a president and principled leader should be for every president that came after.
• Ben Franklin was a rake and dandy, but he brought a keen intellect and love of freedom to the creation of a new nation, conceived in liberty..
• Thomas Jefferson was lonely and fond of a black girl that worked for him, but he also wrote the breath-taking Declaration of Independence and made sure the constitution included a bill of rights for all Americans.

The great men and women of history have inspired us to be the best we can be. So, why all of a sudden are we going after our own icons. Why are their flaws suddenly so important? Is someone trying to take our eyes off the prize? Ships once depended on lighthouses along the coast to warn them of rocks ahead. If an enemy wanted to confuse and wreck the coastal commerce of its enemy, it burned the lighthouses so the ships could not find their way. I think that's what is happening now.  I look for more of it in the future.

It may come as a surprise to some of my readers, but I HATE POLITICS!. It's a nasty evil power game that illustrates perfectly what Satan's world would look like if he ran things - a seathing, self-dealing bureacracy intent on growing itself until it encompasses and controls all life on the planet.

 

This world may not survive much longer against the encroaching evil that Revelation talks about. Preachers will tell you they know who the three frogs are. Perhaps they do.  But it doesn't matter what powers will unite to bring the kings of Earth to Armageddon. Glenn Beck suggests three such powers that may be linking up to dominate the world. My own church believes it's a slightly different three. The mainstream media says it's all balderdash and there is no one in the world who wants to be Tolkien's "One ring to rule them all."  I'm here to say the media are wrong. Evil forces do crouch in wait, ready to pounce at any opportunity like the "roaring lion" Scripture talks about.  They walks about seeking whom they may devour. 

 

While the world lasts, it is our duty to keep the lights burning bright upon the heights. It is our mission to make clear what is right and good and beautiful.  We have to resist with all our might, being pulled down into the mud to wrestle pointlessly with one another while the devil stands over us and laughs. Let's focus on the real issues and not on whether Ronald Reagan should have signed an unbalanced budget or Lincoln sat in on a seance to appease his mentally ill wife.

 

Let's turn our eyes to the heavens from whence cometh our help and not obsess over the dirt at our feet, which only bogs us down and offers no help at all.

 

Tom King - Tyler, TX

© 2011 by Tom King

Is American Religious Freedom a Myth?

And is that an excuse to scrap it in the New World Order?

(c) 2011 by Tom King

David Sehat wrote a muddled article on the Huffington Post that seems mostly aimed at complaining that religion has too much influence in politics. When a majority of Americans belong to churches and formal religious bodies, it seems inevitable that religion should inevitably impact public policy, though that influence is an indirectly shaping influence rather than a directly controlling one because of the Constitution that prohibits the government from "establishing" a state religion..

I had difficulty identifying what Sehat's beef was with the first amendment. Sehat's complaint about America's system of religious tolerance seems to be not that people aren't allowed to attend the church of their choice, but that the way we guarantee that right makes it almost impossible to elect an atheist to public office because of the indirect effect of religion? Is he suggesting that we fracture the influence of religions like Christianity by turning churches into political parties?

There is some hint at that based on his "I'm smarter than you" toned article. He suggest that the European model is more honest in that churches participate directly in political parties. He wants us to stop congratulating ourselves and feel properly guilty about the failures of our ancestors to meet the ideal of religious separation from government.  Once we feel properly guilty, we are somehow supposed to become more honest in our political debate.

And how is that?  Will that mean we change our beliefs on size of government, spending, abortion, energy policy, global warming? 

It's ironic that he quotes de' Tocqueville for support, an author whose home country, France, murdered and persecuted religious groups like the Waldenses, the Hugenots and finally the Catholics, brutalizing the faithful via government and sometimes government/religion partnerships. Of course, the French revolution gave them an openly atheist form of government and after years of bloody pogroms, the country was left with few openly religious people. Is that what Sehat wants?  Religion minimized rather than respected and celebrated? Is that what's so insidious about the "Myth of American Religious Freedom".

The article came out on National Religious Freedom Day. Sehat doesn't think we should celebrate that.

Yes, America does have a checkered past where religious liberty is concerned as it does with every other element of the Bill of Rights. What Sehat doesn't allow for is the time it takes to change an entire culture. If you start with the ideal and make progress over time towards the ideal, you wind up with a country that is always rather better than when it started. We did that with civil rights, women's voting rights, freedom of speech, and the press and assembly. We've had to fight it out in courts and legislatures for 200 plus years. As a result we're better than we were.

I never can understand why people think that because we were once less than true to our ideals, that it gives us a reason to go backward - to accept less than the ideal we worked so hard to achieve.

My own church's members were locked up in Tennessee for farming on Sunday (we go to church on Saturday) in the early 1900s. We fought that in courts and unjust Blue Laws were ended.  Just because Americans haven't always achieved the ideals we hold sacred, doesn't mean we should scrap the whole constitution in favor of a socialsit/progressive remake that sacrifices those ideals for some sort of illusion of security.

I hope we are smarter than that.

Tom King