Fox News Commits Ritual Suicide: What Can Be Done?

 

BUD LITE:  "I KNOW HOW TO DESTROY A WHOLE COMPANY."

FOX NEWS:  "HOLD MY BEER!"

Boys and girls once again we are witnessing successful conservatives shooting themselves in their collective foot. Though the news doesn't seem to have reached our three amigos at Bill Whittle dot com, Fox News just gave away it's cash cow, having "parted ways" with its news superstar, Tucker Carlson after surrendering to Dominion Voting Machines for 3/4 of a billion dollars and also refusing to pay Dan Bongino what he's worth.

What is it about conservatives that we fracture into insular subgroups and snipe at one another from behind rocks. What are we, Pharisees tearing at each other over the smallest deviation from perceived orthodoxy? Are we Sadducees preaching the gospel of "When you're dead that's all she wrote so godliness is determined by how much money you make." Are we Scribes - bureaucrats of the Temple of Conservatism, writing down everything to the vast confusion of the laity?

What I hope is that Fox had to pay Tucker through the nose to break him out of his contract and that Carlson can, as Rush Limbaugh did in his time, inspire a wave of collegiality and courage among fellow conservatives. Perhaps those news people and commentators among us could band together and create some kind of Conservative version of Netflix that incorporates Daily Wire, The Blaze, Bill Whittle, Sean Hannity, Laura Ingram, Dan Bongino, Mark Levin, Greg Gutfield and refugees from Fox. Hannity, Ingram, and company are going to suffer from the absent lead-in of Tucker Carson.

I wish we could create a combination conservative entertainment and news network that brings all the best conservative content together under a single paywall. Tucker Carlson would bring enough of a following with him to jump start a conservative version of Netflix or Amazon Prime or something like that.  Add on some of the more family oriented entertainment networks like Hallmark, Pureflix, Angel Studios and such and such a streaming service would bury the mainstream media in no time.

Ronald Reagan said that anybody that agrees with you 80% is a friend and ally. If conservatives took that advice to heart, we'd be unstoppable. As it is Revelation talks of an "image to the beast". It's beginning to look like the United States is working on carving out that image in support of a globalist socialist scheme.

To paraphrase Dylan Thomas, we must not go gentle into that rotten night. We must rage against the dying of the light that has for 2 and 1/2 centuries shined as a beacon of hope in a world ravaged by evil and hopelessness.

Tom King

Shoveling Air - The Assault on Conservative Memes

I posted this quote by Thomas Sowell. I though it was pretty obvious what it meant, but right away one of my left-leaning friends who claims to be utterly independent took a shot at it. He objected that if you put out a fire, you have to replace it with something after all. Sowell, he said, was "...ignorant if he thinks we don't need to replace an extinguished fire with something."

Air! If a fire is extinguished, apparently we need to replace it with air, according to my "independent" left-leaning friend. He was particularly harsh in his criticism of Sowell's analogy.

• Sowell is stupid. Of course you replace the fire with air. D’uh. Or is he so ignorant that he thinks air = nothing?

He missed the point and actually proves the point on a second level. Sowell's point is that WE humans don't actually have to replace the extinguished fire with air. It happens naturally. Government programs like the Affordable Care Act can be ended and don't have to be "replaced" by some government law or program. You missed Sowell's analogy. You can end Obamacare and you don't have to pass some new government program to replace it. Let the medical community and free market forces take care of "fixing" it. It's exactly like extinguishing a fire. That's all you have to do. Nothing else.

It's not like the firemen have to shovel on some air when they put out a fire. Instead, the air rushes in of its own and restores things to the their previous state. The analogy applies perfectly to the repeal of the ACA. My lefty friends always demand that we tell them what we'd replace the ACA with it if they repeal it. And I keep telling them we don't need to replace it with anything. The free market will revert to its natural state. Air had been there the whole time the fire was burning. Without it the fire cannot burn. Without the energy of free market capitalism, socialism rapidly burns out and collapses. The market returns to fill the space. The government doesn't have to do anything to replace a bad government program.

I posted this second meme and once again was pounced upon. The meme points out that if the prey is armed the predator thinks twice about attacking. My left-leaning buds pounced again, posting a picture of lions hunting down and killing a porcupine and telling me, in essence, that arming the prey does no good at all. I promptly scared up a set of videos of porcupines fending off seven lions and a leopard and escaping, leaving its attackers with noses full of quills.

Lately, it seems that any time I post a good analogy with a conservative message, the loyal opposition pounces on it and nitpicks it to death. Seems to be a new strategy. I guess they're tired of me taking apart their memes.

Someone called what is happening in our country a Cold Civil War. Indeed that's the best description I've heard for it yet. It's a Civil War all right, but it hasn't descended to a shooting war yet. I hope it never does. What we need is a Ronald Reagan to bankrupt the left and end the war.

I didn't think Trump was it, but I was pleasantly surprised when he kept his promises. But the left will be back. They are relentless and unless Jesus comes very soon, we can always hope the resistance finds a way to, well, RESIST.

© 2018 by Tom King

Do I Want to Be Associated with Nazis and the KKK?

The 1924 Democratic National Convention
Affectionately known as the Klanbake!

There is a fiction that all conservatives are somehow allied with white supremacists and Nazis. I had one gentleman honestly ask me if I really wanted to call myself a conservative and be associated with Nazis, white supremacists and the KKK.  He said it as if I had some kind of choices. First off, I choose to be a conservative, not any of those three vile things. To associate conservatives with Nazis and the KKK is patently false.

The truth is the Nazis, KKK and alt-right are closer to the radical left than they are to people like me.  The left doubles down on Saul Alinsky's Rules for Radicals in that they label their political enemies  as extremists. I am a solid conservative, not an extremist.  I love everybody. I believe in free enterprise, equal opportunity for all, personal freedom and that the government should serve the people not vice versa. I believe in small government because power attracts the corruptible.  I'm a strict constitutionalist. I believe in freedom of religion, not freedom from religion. I believe in freedom of speech, assembly and the rest.

I constantly get called racist, a Nazi, etc.. While there are those kinds of people out there, I find just as much of it on the far left as on the far right. The prejudices are simply different. About the only prejudices they seem to have in common though is that they both hate the Jews for some reason.

I don't hate anybody, but my politics are thoroughly conservative. In all my time with the Tea Party, I never met a racist in the bunch, although I met more than a few fake racists pretending to be Tea Party folk. I worked for years with bipartisan advocacy groups, so I knew the local leftists and recognized the little buggers.

I find "progressives" paternalistic, divisive in the way they promote what they call "diversity", and their foreign policy and military policies to be misguided if not downright dangerous.  But I don't call liberals "communists" unless they've actually signed up on the party and I don't appreciate being called a Nazi or white supremacist if I have given no evidence that I am.

Do I like being "associated" with Nazis or the KKK?  Hell no, but then I'm not the one doing the associating. It's liberals who insist on associating perfectly lovely people like me with Nazis and the KKK.

Besides Nazis were socialists and the KKK were Democrats. I'm a free market capitalist and Republican and therefore neither of those.

© 2017 by Tom King

 

The Rise of the Invisible Candidate: Why a Third Party Should Happen

© NPR - 1/29/2016

I've noticed something during the last three elections. Every candidate that I like because they are a solid conservative seems almost immediately to disappear from the media's attention and loses the support of the Country Club Republican GOP leadership. Look at NPR's time chart (right) showing who got to talk at the debate last night. Notice who got the least amount of mike time? Ben Carson is being ignored and I believe it's deliberate.

This appears to be a deliberate tactic to eliminate candidates the GOP big shots don't like. I liked Fred Thompson a lot when he ran. He sounded so much like Ronald Reagan. Then, all of a sudden, everywhere it was "Thompson doesn't have the fire in the belly to be president." Then everybody just stopped paying attention to him. Worse, they pretended he wasn't even there. Later I liked Col. Allen West. He got ignored right away even though he was saying things that made conservatives shout, "Hallelujah!" Same thing happened to Herman Cain. They dug something up on him and then made him disappear. Condoleeza Rice, who, I think, would be a fantastic candidate, can't get any traction either. The Republicans won't give her the time of day. Notice anything peculiar about my "lost" candidate list?

I loved Thompson's wit. I'm sure it terrified the GOP leadership.

Except for Fred Thompson every candidate I've liked lately has been of a certain ethnic background. Now the color of one's skin, in my experience, doesn't bother us Tea Party conservatives at all. In fact, self-identified Tea Party conservatives liked every one of these colorful potential presidential candidates and formed a large part of their base. The trouble is that neither the party, nor the media would give them the time of day.

And before you crank up about how racist the Tea Party is, it's balderdash. The Tea Party has a lot of black members and we're proud to have them. The only racism I've ever encountered at a Tea Party gathering has come from Democrat operatives pretending to be us. It's obvious they weren't. All you had to do was to follow them back to their Priuses after we ran them off for causing trouble and saying stupid racist things. It was pretty obvious where these guys were coming from.

Ben Carson is fearless without the bombast.

This time around, my favorite is Ben Carson. The establishment and media did give him some attention at the beginning because of his populist support and it was good press for Republicans to have a black candidate. Unfortunately, for them, Carson jumped into the lead in the polls and gave them a terrible fright. Then the sniping started and the character assassination began and the Grand Old Party most definitely did NOT come to Carson's defense despite the fact that all of it was made up of whole cloth lies by liberal reporters and George Soros supported operatives like "The Young Turks".

To my dismay, I'm beginning to think the country club elites that run the GOP are a bit uncomfortable with an actual descendant of freed slaves taking over as boss of the party. That really reflects badly on the party leadership. Grass roots conservatives of all colors are firmly behind Carson and behind Ted Cruz as well. These two gentlemen are actual conservatives. The only reason that Ted gets the time of day is because he's a senator and the GOP bosses believe they can control "experienced" politicians. They are deluding themselves, of course, because Ted Cruz has shown every indication that he won't dance the Washington shuffle. The GOP is hoping desperately that Trump will drive him off.

Allen West is simply an honorable man.

People like Carson, however, really frighten them. The very idea of an honest man in the Oval Office badly frightens the Washington good old boy network. Shoot, Fred Thompson scared the hell out of them too because he wasn't very good at marching to the party drumbeat when he was in the senate. And they know that an honest man like Carson will be hard to control if he gets into the big chair. Cruz scares them too, but they think they can better handle Cruz by letting Trump pick a fight with him and then sit back and let them destroy each other while they put their boy Marco Rubio forward as a compromise candidate. And really, the only ones compromising in that deal would be the GOP fat cats who wanted Jeb Bush, not Rubio. But they can't have Bush because the conservative base is being obstreperous and they are afraid to lose that many votes.

So what are they doing about Carson? They've decide to give him the "big ig", hoping he'll go away. But there are a lot of us out there who want a nonpolitician in the White House and we can't stand Trump. Why? Because Trump appeals to the worst in all of us. Carson on the other hand appeals to the best.

We need a party Ronald Reagan would be proud of.

Just once before the Apocalypse, wouldn't it be nice to have the best of America in the White House instead of the worst?  Aren't we tired of congenital communists, crooks, liars, traitors and frauds telling us we need to all become part of the obedient collective?  The folks who voted for Reagan and turned down John Kerry and Al Gore are still out there if you can give us a decent man to vote for. You may not have liked George W., but he WAS a good man and I felt good about voting for him and have been proud that he was my president given all that he's done after he left the White House.

I don't know if the GOP leadership has a color problem or not; perhaps, instead, what they have is a character problem. Steely-eyed conservatives and especially steely-eyed conservative black folk seem to make them nervous. Karma is, they say, an angry beast when it visits. I wonder whether Trump is the Republican Party's visitation by karma?

The leadership needs to listen to the conservative base or they're going to cut their own legs out from under them. Like some ponderous fat man, they're busily trying to build up the party from the "moderate" middle and, if they succeed, like some wildly obese senior citizen, their neglected legs are going to buckle beneath them and the party will topple onto its face.  Certainly if Trump becomes the nominee, rock-ribbed conservatives like me will leave the party and go elsewhere. And before the Ron Paul folk get all atwitter, I can tell you we won't go Libertarian - way too tin-foil hat, those people!

Perhaps, we don't have to cling to a dead elephant OR surrender to jackasses! We don't even need to win a majority. Perhaps conservatives can win control another way. If instead of trying to win 51% of the seats of the House and Senate, we could win control of the government by winning just 20-25% of the seats. What we should really do is create a solid, constitutionalist conservative party.  It may take a while to capture 20-25% of the Congress, but it might be the only chance we have to save our country for a few years longer. We could arm-twist the GOP and, for that matter, the Democrats with a relatively small fraction of the votes. Neither of the Big Two parties would have enough votes alone to form a majority. They'd have to suck up to us in order to get anything done. At the very least we could stop them from writing 76,000 page laws that gum up the economy and stifle innovation, kill creativity and discourage risk-taking.

By pulling together all those frustrated, people out there who are being pushed aside and treated as irrelevant and their invisible-to-the-media leaders into a coherent, serious political party of bright-eyed unabashed conservative Americans, we might just thwart the takeover of our nation by crony capitalist, progressive socialists and other "elite" upper class Americans who think they should rule us all by divine right, genetics or how many billions they have in the bank. 

I'm sick of those people, pushing us around. Aren't you?

Just sayin',

Tom King © 2016

Should We Shun Political Correctness?

by Tom King  (c) 2013

I just got jumped on with both feet by a conservative Facebook Friend. She was not happy with me because I posted this in response to another poster who stated that "If I had a nickel for every 'retard' who thinks he can stop the climate from changing......"


I responded with this.

• "Retard" Really? Dan, it's not people with developmental disabilities who think we can stop the climate from changing. I wish you wouldn't use that word as an insult. I have a Down's Syndrome nephew who doesn't believe in global warming either. As President Reagan said, "It's not so much what our liberal friends don't know as it is what they do know that ain't so." IQ has little to do with it. First, let me make it clear, I never said I was offended.  I simply addressed the use of an easy to use insulting expression that I see a LOT of shrieking liberals use that is kind of offensive. They call US that. What I wanted to express was that it is not actually the  low IQ folk who are pushing this. We need not be afraid of ordinary folk or even developmentally challenged people.  It's people with just enough intelligence to think they are smarter than everybody else that think they can run the world. 

Then it got ugly with another commentator jumping in and claiming I was stupid to be "offended" by every little thing and that I was the reason the world was in the shape it is.

So I thought I had a little 'splainin' to do.  I've made this comment to several conservative friends lately with regard to using the word "retard" as an insult.  Don't get me wrong.  I'm not arguing political correctness here.  What I'm arguing in favor of here is the Golden Rule.  It's got nothing to do with political correctness, just kindness.  I think if we're going to argue in the public square against socialism, global warming hysteria, big government or excessive taxation, that we ought to we beat them, not with name-calling, but with logic, reason and facts.

To his credit, Dan did apologize for using the word as an insult and I respect him for that.  It really is frustrating to get pounded day after day with this stuff and to not lash back.

Those of us who are Christians are under orders with regard to the whole name-calling business.  Christ said that he who calls another a "fool" is himself in danger of hell fire.  That's pretty serious and calling someone a "retard" seems awfully close to doing what Jesus advised us not to do.  I say better safe than sorry.


I'm not without sin in this.  I've used words like idiot and moron before and I'm not terribly proud of it.  Sometimes, when frustrated beyond endurance we do resort to name-calling. It's not something we should ever do casually and something we should always be willing to apologize for instantly.  Name-calling is niether a reasonable, rational nor particularly effective argument on behalf of your opinion.  Your ability to put down other human beings on the basis of their disabilities, race, creed or color does not factor into whether or not your ideology is correct.  Usually it only makes you look less credible. After all, if you're reduced to name-calling, how good can your argument really be?


Good manners used to be important.  I miss civility and I believe that, as conservatives, we should embrace a return to civility, lest we find ourselves down in the mud with those who would make our society harder, nastier and more thoroughly enslaved.

My proposal is that conservatives like me and you at least act MORE intelligent than our opponents.  Name calling makes you look like you have a weak argument.  Liberals do it to us all the time and the truly self-centered herd-follower types clap in approval and fall in line behind the name-caller.  Do we really want to encourage that sort of behavior on our side?  To win in the court of ideas, we must be better than our opponents; smarter, kinder and wiser. 

I do understand the frustration with political correctness. But I would argue that good manners is not political correctness - not if you exercise your free will and choose to be polite.  Scripture counsels let your yes be yes and your no be no. The willingness to argue a point on merit alone instead of on mere rhetoric is something else that has been, sadly, rather lost in this debate. 

Political correctness comes from fear of what others think; fear that you might be spurned by the herd.  If you are not afraid of the herd's collective opinion and I am not afraid of the disapproval of the herd, then why don't we choose not to act like them.  Name calling is a technique used by thugs and bullies to keep the herd in line.  It's just not something people with as good an argument against global warming and socialism as we have should dirty our hands with.  That's all I'm saying.

Tom

Meals on Wheels Fur Dogs and Cats

Only in East Texas

KETK, the Tyler Texas NBC affilliate posted this story this past week.  A new nonprofit charity has been organized in East Texas to provide food for pets belonging to elderly folk.  Dubbed "Meals Fur Pets", the organization is mostly volunteers and works with Meals on Wheels to deliver pet food to elderly folk along with their meals on wheels lunches. 


Somebody figured out that seniors with pets are healthier and live longer than those that don't.  They also figured out that some seniors were sharing their meals on wheels with their pets because they either couldn't afford pet food or couldn't get to the store to buy it.  In short order, a new program was organized and began collecting donated pet food and distributing it to seniors through Meals on Wheels.


This is a lovely idea. Meals on Wheels is already delivering food to seniors.  Throwing on a few bags of puppy kibble and kitty chow isn't a problem and the benefits for seniors is huge. This kind of projects is one of the reasons I believe that private sector charity is more humane than government charity. If this had been done by the government....

1. It never would have been done, especially in East Texas which is hard shell conservative and no friend to the folks in DC.  Our Congressman, Louis Gohmert is a perpetual thorn in the liberal side up there.
2. It would have taken an act of congress to get approved and two years to get the enabling legislation through committee.
3. There would have been a three million dollar rider attached to the bill providing funding for the Barney Frank Center for Alternative Lifestyles.
4. It would have required 300,000 new federal workers to administer and 60% of the budget would have been "admin costs".
5. There would have been 25 pounds of paperwork required to even qualify for the program.
6. You'd have had to prove you belonged to a minority, were an illegal alien, refugee, were disabled or a registered Democrat to be eligible.
7. You'd have had to be able to get into town to the Office of Companion Pet Food Distribution because the website would be beyond the average seniors capacity to locate on the Internet.
8. You would have had to wait for six hours in the waiting area at the OCPFD before a surly little man took your 25 pounds of paperwork and set an appointment for you to return in 3 weeks for an evaluation of your application.
9. The program would not be promoted or advertised for fear that the program would be flooded and the government would not have enough funds to insure that everyone approved received services.
10. Finally, you'd have had to prove your dog or cat was a registered Democrat in good standing. 
    

Instead a bunch of volunteers put the whole thing together in a few weeks, found a way to distribute the food, store the food and collect the food and just started doing it.  No permission needed.  They get tons of corporate support from local food store chains and distributors.  People buy pet food and leave it in collection barrels at stores, churches, schools and community centers.

And that's how conservatives solve a problem!  Hey, even East Texas liberals get in on the act too. We know how to work together, we Texans.  Makes me proud to be a Texan.

Tom King (c) 2013

Picking on Rubio

Why Conservatives Can Be Their Own Worst Enemies.

(c) 2013 by Tom King

Rubio offers a solution - let the paranoia begin!

The redneck right has turned on Marco Rubio.  Let's not confuse these guys with Tea Party conservatives.  They come to the events, but these guys occupy the seamier corners of the Tea Party movement and once in a while we have to show them the gate to get their attention.

Their latest target is Tea Party supported Senator Marco Rubio.  His efforts to create a workable immigration bill have put him in the dog house with the wingnut libertarian/conservative far right crowd - you know the ones that skirt the edges of racism in public. "Some of my best friends are......" some of them say when I know for a fact that they have not one friend who sits across or even astride the racial divide and that privately they use colorful descriptive words when referring to anyone outside their narrow slice of the culture.

The problem is that these guys draw too many well-meaning conservatives into their web of conspiracy theories, paranoia and pseudo-patriotism.  They've turned on Rubio because he has dared to suggest a tough, but fair path to citizenship for illegal immigrants already in the states.

This isn't like the one the Democrats created back in the 80s that promised, but never delivered, border control and merely served as a magnet for attracting more illegals to come to America to work on farms and in factories belonging to Democrat (and even Republican) campaign donors.  The Rubio plan makes it tough to win citizenship for anyone who came here illegally.  They have to learn English, work, pay taxes, pass the citizenship exam and wait a couple of decades to get their papers.  This all comes after the border gets slammed shut and hard.

The redneck right (and I can call them that since I possess my own deeply redneck roots) has freaked out because there is ANY citizenship provision at all.  Their solution is a giant roundup with train loads of shivering women and children being shipped wholesale to the Mexican border and pushed across it back into a country festering with crime, drug wars, disease and poverty.  It's pretty cold-blooded if you ask me and it has not a prayer of being supported by a single practicing Christian in a nation whose principles were built on the Golden Rule.  This is something communists would do, not Southern Baptists, Catholics, Methodists, Presbyterians and Adventists. Anyone who says he is a Christian and supports a modern-day "Trail of Tears" that would result from mass deportations is a Christian In Name Only (CINO).  I think that's what I'll call them from now on - CINOs.  It's a good description.

They are exaggerating the issue first of all. The crap going around about it being cheaper to deport all illegals is just that. We'd lose a workforce we can't afford to lose, leaving gaps we don't have workers enough to fill. If I'd ever heard one of these self-righteous prigs complain because he couldn't get a job plucking chickens in the Tyson's plant or picking the thorns off roses in 105 degree heat and 100%  humidity under an East Texas sun, I'd be a bit more sympathetic. It all smacks of self-righteousness and "good Meskin" style racism to me.

If you turn on Marco Rubio, the man leading the charge in the senate against creeping socialism, for offering to allow people already here to become citizens after a whole lot more hard work than most of the people bitching about it are willing to do, then maybe the whole thing does have something of a racist element to it.  I never expected it of some of my conservative friends, but there it is.  People did the same thing to the Irish, the Italians, the Chinese, the Japanese, the Vietnamese, the Poles and virtually every immigrant group that's ever fled their miserable countries and come to America.  There have always been some Americans who were terrified of strangers and were responsible for a lot of shameful chapters in our history.  The attitude this time is even worse because the immigrants live just across our borders.  We've seized on the whole "ship 'em back" idea this time and it has been as much a part of the mess as has the government's protection of their cronies' source of cheap labor. 

Because we haven't dealt with it, we've created tens of millions of slaves who can be treated badly, housed in company colonias, paid starvation wages denied any ability to escape their poverty. Too many politicians have protected this vile trade in human flesh in exchange for campaign contributions.  It's time conservatives said "ENOUGH"! 

The Republican party is the party of emancipation.  We've finally sent a senator to Washington who is an emancipator and as conservatives, we should be foursquare behind him.  Period. Americans at large are not a people capable of mass cruelty.  We have some who would gladly drive the deportation trains to the border, oblivious to the human suffering that would cause.  Most Americans will never support uprooting people who have become their neighbors and friends and tossing them back into poverty and the middle of a massive drug war. The thing is most of us don't blame them for swimming the Rio Grande to get away from Mexico. You wouldn't catch me going down there for any reason.

Rubios plan gets some justice going and gets taxes into the system and prevents liberal industrialists from making defacto slaves out of illegals that they lured here in the first place. And it closes the border hard - and does it before anything else. If the border isn't closed, none of the rest of it happens.

You want to deport somebody, how about deporting the guys who hate being Americans and want to turn our nation into some European socialist/Marxist worker's paradise. How about let's deport THEM to Mexico and keep the hard-working Mexicans who risked their lives trying to get here. Them we can use! We share a lot of values with the immigrants who came here from Central and South America. They believe in hard work, family values and they're pro-life to boot. 

What are we complaining about? If we bring them out in the open, then they will start working legally, make a decent living, start businesses and become Republicans! I've never met an illegal immigrant that expected a handout. That all happened to keep the compliant so they couldn't escape from their slave jobs.
I think it's about time we lifted us up some huddled masses yearning to be free and once again raised that lamp "beside the golden shore."  Heck, we've stolen the smartest, most hard-working people from every civilized and uncivilized nation on the planet that way.  A few more won't kill us and if we make them citizens, the welfare sugar-daddies will quickly lose their power over a people from a culture that prizes family, hard work and faith.  They're already half Republican.

I think Rubio's plan is scathingly brilliant, myself.  If we did it right and started recruiting former illegals into the Republican party, the threat of 40 to 50 million new conservatives would send the Dems running pell-mell for the border to slam it shut so hard you'd hear the thud all the way up here in Puyallup.

I'm just saying.

Tom King

Romney's Real Problem

What? Me worry?

Romney may well win the Republican nomination for president. If he does, I predict he'll have an uphill go of it. If he wins, it won't be by much and it's not because enough people don't dislike President Obama.

It will be because most of us will be too busy holding our nose while voting for another "moderate" just because the country club Republicans have decided he can get the moderate vote. They've bought whole hog into the idea that the moderates will only vote for moderates.  Au' contraire.

Moderates sit on the fence and tumble right or left depending on who does a better job of telling them what they think. A conservative can do that just as easily as a liberal and probably more easily since more than 65% of people call themselves conservatives. Ronald Reagan did it in 1980 and again in 84 and swept the country. Bush sr. managed one term on Reagan's coattails, then lost. Dole lost, then Bush jr. pulled off a squeaker. McCain lost.

Now it's Romney's turn according to the big boys in the Republican party. The problem is, taking turns in presidential politics is a sure way to lose.

What's going to make it tough for Mittens is this. Most conservatives dislike the Obama administration so much they'd vote for the Budweiser Clydesdales over President Obama if that's the only choice they have/ But as for getting out and getting excited over this candidate?  Ain't gonna happen, just like it didn't happen for John McCain.  At least McCain had the good sense to select Sarah Palin for a running mate. I doubt Romney will choose so well. He's heavily on a conservative gimme' so he's not really courting us anymore.counting

As a result, most conservatives will simply sit on their hands if Romney is the candidate. Oh, they'll cast their good soldier votes for Romney, but they won't swell the hallelujah chorus and that chorus is what sells the moderates. Obama has a regular choir behind him, creating the illusion of massive support. Against that cacophony, Romney brings lackluster conservative support to his battle for the confused middle of the roaders. It's kind of like the Mormon Tabernacle Choir vs. the Wharvey Gals, only the choir won't be singing behind their homeboy.

I fear this is NOT going to turn out well!

Just sayin'

Tom

Are Bloggers Journalists?

(c) 2012 by Tom King


(c) Some rights reserved by Andrew Currie

You know, I kind of resent that question.  I'm kind of tired of journalist trying to get themselves up in white robes and to masquerade as some sorts of informational holy men.

The idea that journalists are unbiased news priests, delivering information without opinion is absolute balderdash. If you are a person you have an opinion. Merriam-Webster says a journalist is a "person engaged in journalism, especially a writer or editor for a news medium. Webster also says "a writer who aims at a mass audience" is a journalist.

By that second definition, bloggers are definitely journalists. Surely, Americans with our long history of freedom of the press, are sophisticated enough to realize that every journalist out there is pitching the news according to his own conscience, editing information to tell a story he or she wants to tell. That's Journalism 101. Sure they tell you to be unbiased and then propagandize you shamelessly, usually with leftist opinions, though there are a few conservative and moderate journalism professors out there who have managed to keep their jobs, if not to actually gain tenure.

The fiction that all true journalists are unbiased is just that - fiction! A journalist is a writer of news - that is all. Even if you choose to be "fair and balanced", choose to show an even-handed look at the news as best you can, all that means is that you believe in making news as moderate or independent as you can. It is still your opinion that this is the best way to present the news.

Even journalism icon, Walter Cronkite was obviously and unapologetically progressive in his leanings, though he did his best to appear neutral when he was sitting in the anchor's chair at CBS news. Everybody knew what Uncle Walter thought by how he selected the news clips he presented. It was as much what he didn't say as what he did say. He was brilliant and while I disagreed with him on many fundamental issues, you had to respect the guy's integrity.  He never took his talking points from the DNC or the RNC. No political icon was immune if Uncle Walter thought said politico was doing wrong as poor old LBJ found out to his utter dismay. Cronkite's opinion was always his own.

The belief that you should present an unbiased opinion differs not a whit in moral superiority from Keith Olbermann and Chris Matthews who believe news should be interpreted from a liberal/progressive viewpoint or from Sean Hannity or John Stossel, who believe that a conservative interpretation is the correct way to spin it. Whether the journalist is a liberal, conservative or so-called "unbiased" moderate; whether he or she is a reporter, editor, blogger or a TV news anchor, what you receive from these folk, never forget, is information molded by an opinionated journalist to suit his personal value system or that of the folk that write his or her paycheck. Given that....

Opinion is damned well too journalism!

And bloggers are damned well too journalists!

Beyond that, it's just a matter of quality.

Just one blogger's opinion....

Tom King

30



There Ain't Enough Youtube Videos in the World...

(c) 2011 by Tom King



What?  Me worry?

 Why is it that Ron Paul people think that if you just watch enough Youtube videos you'll finally recognize the genius of Ron Paul and join their cult?
I'm sorry if that offends some of you. I have some friends who are rabid Paulistas and I do realize they have come to support Congressman Paul as a result of many hours of viewing Youtube videos and studying conspiracy theories. I know this because they keep sending me the same cut and paste Ron Paul talking points and keep repeating the same things over and over and over without variation. They send me link after link to videos that will "absolutely convince me".  If I present any argument whatever, they inevitably ignore it completely and accuse me of "not watching the videos I sent you".

Let me repeat this one more time.  I've read Ron Paul's writings. I've seen the videos about "blowback", about what really happened with 9/11, about how the Jewish bankers are destroying our economy, about how Israel doesn't need our support and we're only making it worse, about how our mere presence in the middle east is why Muslims hate us, about how the Japanese wouldn't have attacked us at Pearl Harbor if we hadn't provoked them by not selling them oil and war materials for them to use in their slaughter of Chinese, Koreans and Southeast Asians (the latest new Paulista talking point).

Every video I view, every Ron Paul speech or debate appearance I see, every cut and paste, 20 page e-mail I've read has only served to convince me even more that Ron Paul is not someone I'd vote for.

Period!

End of discussion.
I'm almost voting against Ron Paul's supporters.  Congressman Paul, I actually kind of like, even though he's way off base on Foreign Policy (and yes I've seen that video too).
Here we are at the end of the world and I'm watching the devil slice up the last remaining humans who have any sense, setting them against each other and confusing them with lies, conspiracy theories, racism, drugs and arrogance.  It's live and in color and ends with the Second Coming.

Those of us who manage to avoid being anal-probed will be heading for the mountains to hide soon. They'll be coming after us because of our unbelief in whichever "messiah" ascends the throne next, whether it's Obama or Ron Paul. Either one of them - their followers give me the willies. I promise you, if it's Ron Paul vs. Obama, I plan to fake my own death and disappear into the forest. Thank goodness I'm carrying enough weight on me to last a few months after the food runs out.

Just one man's opinion though. Feel free to pay no attention at all.

Tom

Stubborn Ideology

Why Evidence Doesn't Work With Liberals

 by Tom King (c) 2011

Paul Gleiser points out in his "You Tell Me" blog this week, that Texas is a living breathing example of conservative principles like smaller, unintrusive government, low taxes and minimal union influence. There is clear evidence that these principles have given Texas a healthier state economy that has held strong despite a massive national recession. Gleiser ends by asking why liberals find it so hard to understand something so simple.

I think the reason so many on the left are so obtuse is that ideology is such a powerful thing. People get awfully attached to their belief systems, particularly if they believe that that ideology makes them somehow superior to others. Ideologies have always held great power and those who subscribe to them find it hard to change opinions, especially if the evidence flies in the face of the tenants of their belief system.

Racism

Ideology was the reason it was so hard for the South to let go of racism. The racist ideology says I am innately better than someone else because of the color of my skin. The Southern racists clung to the idea of white supremacy for more than a hundred years after the Civil War, despite abundant evidence that black people could perform every bit as well as whites given the proper education and opportunity. To acknowledge the evidence, meant giving up their "natural" rights to power and supremacy in their communities and to acknowledge that there was no longer anyone they could safely look down on.

Nobility

The ideology of blood superiority goes back to ancient times in which "noble blood" entitled you to rule. The nobility clung to the idea of their genetic superiority despite the ravages of in-breeding, hemophilia and insanity among the noble classes. To give it up, meant to give up their power, despite the fact that it could be a bloody dangerous business to hold onto that power. To give up the belief in the divine right of kings was to become merely ordinary. You think the nobles were going to willingly give up their hereditary place on top of society simply because the evidence showed they really weren't all that superior after all?

Liberalism/Progressivism

The liberal/progressive ideology accepts as fact that liberals are smarter than conservatives. If you accept this as true, it makes the liberal/progressive the new nobility and entitles them to a secure position as the ruling class by right of their high levels of (supposedly inherited) intelligence. For the intelligentsia, Darwin was a Godsend. Darwin's theories were enlisted to support the idea that smartness is innate and passed from generation to generation. And just in time too! It followed, then, that these hereditary smart people should be the ones to rule in place of the old fading aristocracy.   Liberal Progressives have the same problem as racists and the nobility with altering their ideology.  In the face of evidence that their ideology doesn't work, they simply reject the evidence.  It's not in their social or financial interest to accept that conservative ideas work. It would cost them their perceived right to power if they accepted the evidence of their eyes.

That's why evidence is so slow in convincing idealogues of anything. Despite the hope and change rhetoric, liberals actually are hoping nothing changes. If it does, they might find themselves out of the halls of power and back home trying to find consulting jobs in the defense industry.

I'm just sayin'

Tom King - Tyler, TX

Shoot Your Own Side First!

The Enemy is Among Us

© 2011 by Tom King



(c) Fundraw.com*

 I have been watching the progress of the movement since its inception and I see waves of attacks occurring against conservatives from within. Legions of leftist trolls and imposters come to places like Facebook, conservative discussion groups like the 9/12 project and other forums and create abnoxious caracatures of us. They post things that they think we would really post if we were just "honest". They pose as the worst sort of redneck bigots and psychotic paranoid conspiracy theorists to draw discredit to the movement and hoping to get us to admit how stupid, paranoid and bigoted we really are in some unguarded moment.

We have to recognize them for what they are and minimize their impact by rejecting their ideas - chiefly by ignoring them. We need to openly oppose such people, yes, but we also ought not engage them in long arguments. They are sent amongst us to sew confusion, hatred and discord. They are tools of Satan in my opinion, but that is my opinion alone. I have not heard from God on the matter, so before you start my dear trolls, I am NOT speaking for God, nor do I claim to.

Be careful what you believe, dear friends. Of course we want to defend our liberties, of that there is no question. What we must NOT do, however, is to attack our own, like-minded allies. That only serves the bad guys. I have seen conservatives attacked right and left by so-called "tea partiers" who impugn their motives and question their ideological "purity" (and boy howdy does that sound like leftist rhetoric to me). One guy gave himself away by calling himself a "tea-bagger". Another used to write posts that quoted passages from KKK literature from the 40s. They are trolls and fakes. They've recently attacked Sarah Palin and Glenn Beck in particular. The attacks come in waves as though orchestrated. The attacks tend to include the exact same talking points over and over as though the poster could not be troubled to be original, but was sticking by a script.

The progressive left MUST fracture and divide conservatives if they are going to win in 2012. If they can do it from within, so much the better. Their usual methods have done virtually no good so far.

The left thinks in terms of central planning when it looks at movements like the Tea Party. That's because progressivism is very much centrally organized and driven from the top. They, therefore assume that the Tea Party MUST be centrally controlled. They reveal this in their attacks when they assume someone like a Sarah Palin, Glenn Beck, Rush Limbaugh or the Koch brothers MUST be behind all this. That's why they dogpile on these spokespeople all the time. They think that if they bring down the "leadership", the whole thing will fold like a house of cards.

So long as the 9/12 movement and the Tea Parties remain very much local and grass roots driven, no amount of attacks on our so-called leaders will be effective. If we recognize what they are doing and support those brave people who speak out so eloquently about the principles we cherish and defend, then we frustrate the enemy.

There was a Christian folk song I heard once back in the early 70s in which it described the Christian Faith as an army whose sergeants gave the troops this battle cry - "Shoot Your Own Side First!"

That is what is happening with the fake sergeants amongst us. On the eve of battle, they tempt us to believe that our personal beliefs are entirely holy and pure and that evidence of sin among our fellow soldiers should be purged by gunfire. These fake sergeants are careful to define sin as any disagreement with our own narrow and sacrosanct beliefs.

Friends, if we shoot our own, we are lost. We cannot survive as a movement if we allow that to happen and continue to encourage that. We must remember, as one general put it, pointing across the battlefield, "The enemy is there!"

There is room among us for disagreement over fine points. There is room for anyone in our movement who believes in liberty and the founding principles of our country. Remember that the men who wrote those founding documents disagreed widely with one another on many issues. One thing, however, that they did NOT disagree on was who the enemy of their liberty really was.

So long as any man agrees that I have the right to worship God or not in any way I see fit, that I have the right to speak and assemble, to write and do business, to defend my home and to have a voice in how this country is governed, then that man or woman is my ally even if he thinks we ought to do some things a bit differently than I do.

God bless America. We are truly a city on the hill; a beacon of hope to all mankind. Let us be careful not to let a bunch of phonies and trolls turn us into a network of slums and warring factions. Let us keep our eyes on the prize. Let us remove the log from our own eyes before we go trying to pluck the speck from our neighbor's.

Just one man's opinion....

Tom King - Tyler, TX

*This artwork contains clipart that is Copyright © 2006-2008 FunDraw.Com

Infiltration - The Greatest Threat to the Tea Party Movement

(c) 2011 by Tom King

The dreaded two-faced troll.

Lost a couple of friends this past week. One I blocked. He's a "moderate' and we've had some interesting discussions, but lately he's allowed a phony conservative to post bigoted racist comments while posing as a Christian and good conservative. Any real conservative would have been kicked off Leon's threads for that, but this cartoon "redneck teabagger" has been allowed to post with impunity. I think they're hoping he'll help them "out" conservatives like me that they are sure really are closet bigots, but we're just pretending to believe the things we say. They I've discovered that progressives hate reasonable conservatives.

The second guy defriended me after he launched an attack on Glenn Beck, hot on the heels of one on Sarah Palin. Skip's pretended to be a conservative for a long time, but he's struck me as a bit too organized for what he purports to be - just a guy talking about politics. The 2012 election is approaching and progressives know that the conservative opposition MUST be disorganized and fractured as it was in 2008 if they have a hope of a chance at getting this president re-elected.

Subterfuge is one of the devil's most cherished tools. Sewing confusion and discord is one of his favorite methods of over-coming the forces of goodness and light. And you needn't ask - I absolutely believe my side is the side of the angels just as progressives believe their path is the righteous and holy way to world peace. Why should I not believe we are doing God's work in defending liberty and the constitutional principles this country was founded on? Why should we be ashamed of that?

Subterfuge works like this. You send imposters into the ranks of your enemy. They attack your morale, sew confusion in the ranks and do their best to sully your reputation at large by committing heinous acts in your name.

Based on what I've observed in the past months, there seems to be an organized effort to attack the Tea Party from within. It's difficult to do since the Tea Party movement has no elected leaders. That's why so-called tea-baggers are such a danger to the progressive movement. The "leaders" are all at that local level by and large. Without a central brain, the beast is too hard to kill. The progressives are adept at neutralizing centrally-organized groups like the Republican Party by going after their leadership. Leaders make an easy target and the Republican Party leadership is pretty well riddled after years of focused attacks by progressives.

The only thing remotely like leaders the Tea Party has are Sarah Palin, Glenn Beck, Rush Limbaugh and the rest of the talk radio lot.  Their apparent strategy right now appears to be to go after Palin and Beck by appearing to snipe at their credibility from within the Tea Party itself. It's as though somebody recently signalled the trolls and sleeper cells to start finding fault with Palin and Beck. There was first a Palin wave and now they're hitting Beck. I believe, you are going to hear a lot more anti-Palin and anti-Beck stuff coming out on the conservative blogs and forums in the coming months. At this point, they only take occasional swipes at Rush as he's far too well-respected and too cagey an old bird to be much damaged by that sort of thing. But you can tell they are watching for a chink in El Rushbo's armor.

The purpose of all of this is to occupy conservatives by encouraging them to snipe at one another instead of at the president. For those still interested in an honest discussion about conservative issues', that's still to be had out there. As for the trolls and imposters that keep popping up among us? I'd just ignore them. Don't let them lure you into anger or name-calling. It doesn't help the cause at all. 

Take a cue from my favorite conservative, Ronald Reagan. It's best to simply be above that sort of thing. Say your peace and ignore the yapping lap dogs that nip at your heels - no matter how tempting it is to occasionally punt one of them through the nearest open window.

Just my opinion,

Tom King

How Do You Solve a Problem Like Ms. Palin?

(c) 2011 by Tom King

Sarah Palin gets it from both sides. The left practically froths at the mouth every time you mention her name. On the right, there's a nasty-tempered lot that call her "quitter" and a "lightweight" and all manner of other perjoratives. It's a symptom of the fascination of political hacks with candidates who have "political savvy" - as if possessing political smartness somehow gives you the magical power to fool the ignorant masses into voting the way your side wants them to.

The charges that Palin abandoned her post are at the very least overblown. At worst, they are the product of "political savvy" which makes those who believe those charges part of the "ignorant masses" the politicoes count on swaying to win elections.

If you remember what was happening at the time, Palin was being overwhelmed by frivolous lawsuits and attacked from every side by the media. She had almost got to the point where she could not do her job. To her credit, she took into consideration, not what would be best for her own political future, but what would be best for Alaska's future. She had a splendid lieutenant governor and once she stepped aside, she drew virtually all the political firestorm being ginned up from the left to her.


The left had no interest in the new governor, so he was able to complete what Sarah had started. She knew that it would likely destroy her chances for future office, even among her supporters. All her advisors and practically every pundit you cared to listen to said so. Better to weather the storm than be considered a quitter.

Instead, Governor Palin did what was right for Alaska and she did so at great personal cost. Enough people understood that. Few of us had seen that sort of selflessness in politics in so long that it thrilled us.  We demanded to hear her speak and rewarded her for doing so.  She actually made money. Of course, the left criticized her for that. You knew they would. They will not be satisfied until she is dead or politically discredited with every man, woman and child in America. She quit to make herself rich on speaking fees they charged.

That's a flying load of fertilizers. Palin had NO way of being sure that any of her supporters would stand by her after she resigned.  Her advisors warned her that everyone would turn on her. Many did turn on her. Yet, many also believed she was right to do what she did for Alaska, even at risk to herself and her political career.  Sarah was rewarded because enough people saw the good sense and bravery in what she did.

Good on' her I say. You can, of course, make a strong case for her not having political "sense" in resigning as governor. The question is, do we want someone with good "political sense" in public office or someone who cares about getting done what's best for the people who elected her.

Sarah, in essence, fell on a grenade to save her state. If she'd have continued, the horde of leftist locusts that had already descended on the state would have drained millions in taxpayer dollars from Alaska's treasury. Alaska would have exhausted itself dealing with lawsuits and legal maneuvers that would have crippled the government of a state that is long on resources and land and kind of short on taxpayers and the kind of big state political machinery it would have taken to cope with the onslaught from the left and their "willing accomplices in the media" as Rush calls them.

Sarah is still drawing fire from the rabid left, which gives us the opportunity to find a candidate for president that they haven't swarmed and mauled yet. It's sad that the left will apologize for and excuse their guy despite his miserable record. They forgive him everything he's done or not done. Meanwhile, the right turns on our best, most honest and intelligent leaders at the merest suggestion from the media and the CINOs (conservative in name only) in our midst. They move among us stirring us up against each other; taking down anyone who looks remotely like Ronald Reagan. They can never let that happen again. They took Reagan for a bumbling, elderly actor with no political savvy and didn't consider him a serious challenge to the "man of the people" the Democrats had created in Jimmy Carter. Reagan buried them by being honest and real and genuine, without guile or craft.  They cannot let that happen again. And THAT is what scares them about Palin and why they can never stop piling on to her.

I say God bless Sarah for her sacrifices for the cause. I hope she gets richer than Midas off her speaker fees!  I'd vote for her in a heartbeat if she ran for president, even if not one other person in this whole blessed country did so. The rest of you go look for some plastic candidate with oodles of political savvy. I like my leaders to be real people.

Tom

Not This Little Black Duck!

Why Are "Conservatives" Attacking Reagan Now?

(c) 2011 by Tom King

We're hearing from the fringes now that Reagan was part of the Bohemian Grove conspiracies and helped set up the New Word Order and internment camps and heaven knows what else. I am here to say "Balderdash" and not just because I like that word, although it has its uses, this being one of them.  I've found websites like Rex 84 and folk like Alex Jones to be a very unreliable source of information about what's "really" going on. I've studied Ronald Reagan and the whole New World Order and internment camps for troublesome Americans thing doesn't fit the vision of America I see in his writings and actions. It doesn't fit what I know of the man Reagan. I don't think anyone could lie that well.  I'm convinced Reagan really did believe all that stuff in his speeches.


I would plead with my conservative friends to please be careful with the Bohemian Grove, Bilderberg, Illuminati, New World Order stuff. The conspiracy theorist crowd really loves to credit the devil with far greater organizational ability than the self-centered denizens of hell have at their command.

My read on it is that what's going on in the world in the way of conspiracies, works out to more of a confluence of interests of the rich and powerful than any highly organized plot. The best information out there says the Bohemian Grove stuff is mostly a rich guy's play date rather than an evil conspiracy. What the country club Republicans and high level Democrats want is power. It's a big game to them and both use the same tools to play it, that's why they look so much alike when they are in power.

I've seen how things work in the halls of power personally. It's all about positioning and horse-trading influence and nobody really knows what's going on because everybody keeps secrets like a dragon hordes gold. The flow of information to our political leaders is controlled to an appalling extent by a gigantic army of black coated poli-sci interns or recently graduated doofuses that a couple of months ago were attending wet T-shift contests and all-night keggers. Washington is a chaos of self-interest and incomplete information.

All those inflated egos that show up at the Bohemian Grove party (along with that noted world leader, Jimmy Buffett, who is also a member) could never agree on a master plan for the New World Order.  They couldn't agree on what color the flag should be, much less who's going to be the Big Kahuna! These guys are tools and the one who's really doing the manipulation can be counted on to create mostly chaos and precious little order. He's orchestrating events toward a crescendo and into the chaos created, he will step to "save" us. At least that's the way Scripture paints what is to come.

Because the big tool of power is manipulation, these guys keep secrets from each other. Secrets give them the illusion of power. The beauty of the Constitution is that it has for so long limited the ability of the powerful in the U.S. to establish an oligarchy that has more than transient power. These guys are not wielding the tools, they are being wielded, and by a power that is NOT human.

We do not fight the devil using the devil's methods. We fight secrets and conspiracies and manipulation with patience, with unfailing decency and with a determined effort to teach our children and ourselves to value goodness and beauty and the creator of all of that. We do not fight evil by crawling down the hole where evil lives to take a look around.

The first time you hear someone shout the battle cry "Shoot your own side first!" you can be certain the order did not come from our Commander. It is an emmisary from the evil one who has infiltrated our ranks. We should not obey that order. We should turn and face forward and continue to strive to be better human beings - kinder, more patient with one another. We close ranks against the darkness by believing the best, expecting the best and trusting the intentions of each other.

I've long expected this very attack on this movement. The Tea Party has gathered far too many good, decent people under one banner and united their efforts to good purpose for Satan to tolerate it's continuation. He knows he cannot fracture us from without, so he seeks to defeat us from within.

My attitude toward Ronald Reagan is an example of how I believe we should respond to this very real threat to the movement we have come to cherish. I believe Reagan's own words. I believe he meant exactly what he said because I have the evidence that God blessed his efforts. I also believe the words of people like President Obama and his advisors and those words tell me what they intend to do. That's why I oppose them, not because some conspiracy theorists says they have a secret plan, but because they say what they are planning right out in the open for all to hear.

Reagan said clearly what he believed. You can see throughout his career how that belief came to be. As a result of Reagan, as president, acting on those clearly stated principles, the Soviet Union died and freed a vast host of people to turn back to God. There was a massive revival of Christianity in the days following the fall of Communism. I believe that God used Reagan as a tool to accomplish this purpose and I honor Mr. Reagan for his willingness to be used as God's tool.  I simply refuse to entertain the attacks upon his character, that I am certain are false and only intended to confuse and break down the solidarity of the growing band of good people who believe in God and the principles upon which this country was founded. And when I say that, I know some of the members of the movement don't claim to be Christians. But God knows His people whatever they call themselves and I believe He calls them to Himself in spite of their reluctance to come.

I believe we are seeing the final days of Earth played out before us. It is time we stand together. It is time we lift each other up, I don't care what faith or denomination or philosophy set you on the road home. As the old song says, "Red and Yellow, black and White, all are precious in his sight." The only way we win this final war is with kind words and loving acts, not by shooting our own.

It will not matter that Armageddon comes upon us. Reagan actually believed Armageddon was coming, but as we are called by God to do, he did all in his power to hold back the winds of strife. I believe angels stood in that oval office and guided that man in the decisions he made. Why? To buy us time to open the dark places of Earth to the Word of God. Angels stood behind John Kennedy, Dwight Eisenhower, FDR, Lincoln and others too, to buy us time to finish the work that must be done.

We Children of God are a ragtag, motely band with so many flaws you can't name them all, but together we are a mighty force for good. Our weapon is our love for one another and for the whole world and with that weapon, we are irresistable. We are an army that will stand for the right though the heavens fall. We will lay down our lives if God requires it. We will suffer any trial and we will not yield.

The folks that burn coffins in the Bohemian Grove could not possibly understand that and if they ever come to, they won't likely return to the grove because they will no longer have the patience to endure such foolishness. We have a choice like Joshua said. We choose this day, whom we shall serve. His commands are simple and do not include playing spy among the enemy or using Satan's methods or his tactices to manipulate our fellows. If we follow God's orders to the best of our ability, we need no tricks or deceptions. If we follow His orders, we are undefeatable.

I have seen nothing in those orders that indicate to me that shooting our own guys first is a good idea.

There's the old story of how Lie met Truth in the road, beat her up and stole her clothes. He walked around the town in Truth's clothes lying to everyone and though what he said sounded like a lie, they believed it because Lie was, after all, wearing Truth's clothes. In the meantime Truth recovered and ran after Lie to get her clothes back.

Meanwhile, Lie was teiling another whopper to an old man standing outside his store, when the old fellow glanced up the street and saw a startling thing.

"You know," he said turning back to Lie. "You look like the Truth, you're wearing Truth's clothes and I don't know but what you sound like the Truth, but I know for a fact that you lie because yonder," he pointed down the street, "Comes the naked Truth!"

When you suddenly start hearing attacks on the icons of our movement, you have to wonder why all of a sudden this stuff is coming out. In the past year, I've seen attacks ramped up on Lincoln after we countered charges of Republican racism by pointing out that Lincoln was a Republican. There were attacks on Limbaugh, Hannity and others. Then as Beck started playing tapes of what these guys were actually saying on television, they really went after him. Now it's Reagan. Do you realize they are trying to leave us without any leaders at all? And we're falling for it. That's what is incredible. We know this is right out of their playbook and still we fall for it?

"Well," to quote a certain animated waterfowl, "Not this little black duck!"

Tom King