Obama and The Bards

The collective guffaw over President Obama's Nobel Participation Prize may be just the beginning of a gigantic wave of laughter that sweeps the nation.  The media and the comedians won't be able to resist much longer, no matter how much they love his policies.  They have to make a living and laughter sells!  I notice that in the cartoons, his ears are getting bigger!

The tradition of making fun of the King is an ancient Celtic tradition. The bards were considered sacrosanct and having one set up in the castle gates and sing scurrilous songs about you could bring down your kingship in those days. The freedom of the press ideal is America's version of the ancient bardic system and if a president makes himself so at odds with us, that our "bards" succeed in making a fool of him, he fails and falls. The media and entertainment establishment tried with only partial success to bring down Bush with sarcasm in the same way. Unfortunately, enough folks approved of his war on terror, that they didn't find the jokes so very funny.

Obama may not be so lucky.

The Europeans think our contentious congress that can't get anything done is a bad thing. The Europeans are wrong. It's congress' wrangling and inability to do much of anything that has done more to protect our liberties than any other feature of our government. Every time they do get organized and meddle (except for a war or two), they wind up making a mess of things. Better they should do nothing. No man's liberty or wallet is safe while the Congress is in session.

By the way, I don't hate Obama personally because I make fun of his actions.  He's a nice man for a closet communist.  But, he actually believes big socialist government is better.  I believe governments can't be trusted with our liberties - the big ones even less so.

So, let me make this clear.  We conservatives will NEVER agree with him on that.  We CHERISH our liberties. We believe that what he is doing will cost us those liberties.  As Churchill said, we will fight him on the beaches, we will fight him in the streets, we will never surrender.  Nothing personal. We'd do it to anyone who wants to turn our homeland into the projects.  Humor is a weapon we use in that fight.

It has nothing to do with his race, party or personality.  We simply take him at his word based on his speeches and writing and he scares us. We will never give him a chance to try out his ideas.

Socialism has a very bad history of not going away once it's in place without outside aid.  Soviet Russia had Reagan's America working from the outside to bring down communism.

So who will help bring down the American socialist monster once we surrender our freedom? 

I'm just sayin'

Tom King

Two Four's and a Seventeen: Obama Wins the Peace Prize

Is it really going to be this simple to figure out?  About all that's left to make it any more obvious that we're being taken for a nasty ride is for the guys on the UN Security Council to put on those funny flat topped hats and grow toothbrush mustaches.  Maybe the guys on the Nobel Committee could speak with thick Germanic accents and award the Peace Prize to closet Marxists.

Oh........

The world is rapidly turning into one of those little cartoon books about the end of the world that some fundamentalist churches hand out to frighten people into being baptized.  The overblown dialogue, the improbable situations, the harshly lined faces of "evil" world leaders being blindly worshipped as superheroes by the ignorant masses; the two dimensional villains lurking in the background.

And that's just the nightly newscasts.

"In today's news, Super Obama was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize for pulling down America's pants and forcing the once powerful international oppressor of innocent, peaceful people's republics to grab its collective ankles. The Enlightened U.S. Congress expects the Super President's gesture to fill the world with love, peace and flowery praises from all.  Americans are advised that, 'You're all going to feel a little burning sensation...."

"In a related story, Super Obama today dispatched Air Force One to fly over Jerusalem and Tehran to take pictures for the cover of his new book, "Doing it to the Jews One More Time".

Come on, people!  The Nobel Peace Prize?  This has got to be the first time the Nobel's been awarded for "Participation".  It took almost a whole decade before people like Watson, Crick and Wilkins were recognized for their transformative work on DNA.   And Rosalind Franklin was left out entirely, though she deserved as much recognition as the rest of the team.  Why?  Because they took so long that she died of cancer 4 years earlier and you can't get one after your dead.

Mahatma Ghandi never got a Nobel Peace Prize.  He got passed over 4 times and was assassinated before they could give him one.  Jonas Salk never won a Nobel.  Ronald Reagan was the architect of the end of the Cold War, the removal of the Berlin Wall, the destruction of thousands of nuclear missiles and the collapse of the Soviet Union and freeing of its vassal states.  He certainly never got a Nobel!



But two weeks after taking office as President of the United States, Barak Hussein Obama is nominated for the Nobel.  And today, they announced that he won it.  The canned speeches have been pouring out all day as though they were spontaneous shouts of worldwide jubilation and not carefully choreographed elements of the propaganda campaign they really are.

There's a story about a couple of Aggies that decided to go into counterfeiting.  They were pretty good at it and came up with a whole stack of $25 bills.  When someone pointed out their mistake, they decided rather than waste the effort, to run up to Arkansas and see if they could pass them out up there in the hills where folks might not be as, shall we say, "observant".

They drive up to this little grocery store up north of Malvern and go in.  They handed the bogus $25 bill to the clerk with the two teeth and asked for change.

He said, "Sure, mister," and handed the Aggie two 4's and a 17.

I think the Marxist strategists have overplayed their hand this time.  I think they expected Obama to have passed health care and gun control and ended all war by this time and figured the Nobel would be a nice icing on the cake - like in movies like "Dave" and "The American President" where presidents just wave their magical policy wands and solve all the worlds problems.

Oops.

Missing the timing like they have, is a huge mistake.  The folks who planned this colossal screwup managed to make the Nobel Peace Prize look like some bizarre international version of a second grade play about preventing tooth decay.  Obama is the one dressed up as the big toothbrush.

I've been worried that we were on the edge of the Apocolypse, but we may be getting some breathing room here.  Surely people can't be so easily lead by simple-minded propoganda as this.  Surely they see how artificial and false all of this is.  Surely, we won't be manipulated so easily.

Surely not......

The Most Dangerous Man in America

A few weeks ago, I would have called the President the most dangerous man in America, but just yesterday, the Senate approved the appointment of a new guy that I think will put this president in the shade.  This guy doesn't worry me because of his charisma, his public leadership of his ability to lead.  It's his invisibility that is most troubling. It's the deceptively innocuous appearance of his job in the administration - Regulatory Czar.

Cass Sunstein, the president's appointment for Regularoty Czar would preside over a wide range of regulatory mechanisms.  This would make him arguably one of the most powerful figures in Obama's Wonderful World of Czars.

For one thing, he'd have regulatory power over the Internet.  About that, he said in his 2001 book, Republic.com, that the Internet may "weaken democracy".  Why?  Because it "allows citizens to isolate themselves within groups that share their own views and experiences".  Sunstein argues that these people cut themselves off from information that conflicts with their own preconceived notions and beliefs.  He even has a term for it - cyberbalkanization.

Sounds bad doesn't it?  Listen, I hang with conservatives a lot on the Internet, but I also read and hear from the other side of the fence as well.  Those people constantly come into our yard and throw poop on porch and run off laughing.  We may get together to share ideas, but there is plenty of give and take in a free market modeled Internet.  Sunstein thinks we ought to be "encouraged" to hear the full range of ideas (like the dozens of books he churns out on every subject known to man.  Sunstein would eliminate all such bunching up of like minds and artificially force us to spend equal time listening to the public debate.

On first blush, it sounds like something that would be a healthy thing, but unfortunately, when you get these intellectual guardians of public opinion going on what sort of things they want to do, they start out by eliminating sources of information that conflict with their own preconceived notions.  In Sunstein's media utopia, the debates would be controlled by regulation so that everyone would get a balanced view and extremist elements would fade away.  It's been described as a sort of, fairness doctrine for the Internet.

Isn't it lovely how these guys just want to make sure we get the "whole argument".  You have to wonder how that works when the first thing they want to do is eliminate the loudest and most effective debaters from the other side.  May God protect us from such politico-nannies.  They firmly believe that if everyone just heard their argument clearly without any effective noise coming from the right, that we would all just fall in line and accept what's best for us - like nationalized health care, gun control, animal rights, cap and trade and militarized civilian "security" forces just for starters. 

Even some of Obama's supporters are getting a little jittery about this guy - especially the guys who make their living blogging! If you put such a regulatory stranglehold on the Internet as it appears that Sunstein advocates, you better not hope we EVER elect another conservative to office.  What's sauce for the goose is sauce for the gander.  The same regs that silence conservative bloggers can also be used to silence liberal bloggers.  I think that's a mistake and so do some of my liberal colleagues.

The Wall Street Journal says that Sunstein's obscure job “wields outsize power”. In that job, Sunstein will be a key player in Obama's efforts to regulate financial services, implement global climate change "controls" and in implementing nationalization of American industry and business and the deployment of universal health care. You've heard the expression "The devil is in the details." Well Cass Sunstein is now Obama's guy in charge of the details.

What to do?

It's too late.  He's been approved.  We're stuck with this guy unless we turn a spotlight on him so bright he can't make a trip to the can without an audience.  At the risk of being branded a right wing "wing nut", I think we dog this guy till we can elect a new president.  By the way, I've always found wing nuts to be very handy and versatile fasteners.  If things get loose you can increase the pressure without having to drag out your tool box every time.  Wing nuts are great little gizmos for controlling the level of pressure you need to put on a big old screw!

Oh, well, if the Internet goes away, maybe I'll get more work done of the type my wife approves of.  If I can't blog anymore, maybe I can get in a little more of that manual labor my wife says I'm avoiding.  I've been wondering how long I'll last before I spontaneously combust!  Hey, if the news media suddenly goes 100% unicorns and flowers over the political news, maybe it will relive my blood pressure.

As it is, my long term survival may depend on whether we re-elect the Czar Maker on the next go-round or not....

Just one man's opinion

Tom King

The Screwworm Letters – Part 1

"with apologies to C.S. Lewis"

From:
Uncle Screwworm - Administrative Assistant
Office of Grand Marshall Goebbeleninstalin.
Bulgea 1313 Fifth Circle
Attila the Hun Memorial Administrative Complex, Hell

To:
President Wormtongue
The Whitehouse
Nation Whose Name is not Spoken Among Us, Earth

February 2010

My Dear Nephew Wormtongue,

Are you surprised, then, that your attempts to generate support for your reforms through open forums have been such a dismal failure. Have you actually begun to believe your own propaganda? Never assume the Americans are so completely asleep that you cannot disturb their slumber. I agree that the window of opportunity to initiate real reforms in this abysmally chaotic land is absurdly narrow, but you must remember the words of Caesar Augustus, one of the best reform leaders we ever had, "Make haste slowly." Using this method Augustus finished the Roman Republic once and for all and built an empire that lasted half a millennium.

Of course, it is obvious that intellectuals like yourself are best suited to lead the drooling masses. Our educational reforms have, over the past century, successfully reduced the intellectual capacity of the average American by some 20%. These sheep are so much more easily led these days. Most wander through life practically asleep, their minds fuddled with worrying over who is going to get kicked off the island, which girl the Bachelor is going to pick and who Brad, Jen and Angelina are dating lately.

Nonetheless, there are still large numbers of individuals in this plaguey country who slip through the educational system with the inexplicable ability to think independently. I blame that Andrew Carnegie fellow who tried to assuage his personal guilt for some small excesses as an industrial baron by building all those libraries. A nation with all those books lying about in the open is damnably hard to entirely control. Some of its citizens actually read for fun if you can imagine it!

If you overreach, grab for power too quickly, before you've adequately anesthetized the intellectuals, you may stir some of them to action. And by intellectuals, I don't mean the degree festooned boobs we've trained to run things down there. I mean the real intellectuals - the free thinkers; the ones that read things that weren't on our reading lists; the ones that don't ask what everyone else's thinking before they think themselves. If you wake these people up they will cause you no end of grief as you have discovered at your poorly planned health care forums!

Before the next phase of the transformation, you must move forward with the seizure of control of all sources of information. It must happen quickly, before an alarm can be sounded effectively. Remember, this useful argument. "The constitution is not a suicide pact!" You must escalate the climate of fear and urgency by fanning your two major smoke screens.

Catastrophic global climate change legislation needs a couple of good catastrophes to get it pushed through. The boys in disaster promotions are working on that, but you need to remember to insure that your people not don't call it global "warming". It's far too inflexible a term and leaves you no wiggle room. Stick with global climate change, then whatever happens, up or down, you can call you subjects greedy, blame them for the problem and give up some liberties to save themselves.

You've just about blown the health care ploy by moving too quickly without the proper preparation. Your plans to enlist children to help sell the idea is only going to rouse thinking Americans even further.  For now, I suggest you spend the rest of the month shopping with the missus, sailing and building sand castles with your daughters and let the home office see if we can salvage something from this mess you've made.

And since it's too late to cancel the public school speech, at least try to say something soothing and innocuous - preferably something Rush Limbaugh won't quote you on. And for goodness sake get some new communists for the Czar program - some that have the brains not to have admitted it on camera! We're really pushing fried foods with Glenn Beck, but he just won't die. In the meantime, tell your people to try and clean up all the embarrassing video, old books and tax problems before you have 100,000 farmers and truck drivers on the White House lawn with pitchforks and torches.

We won't be able to help you then.

Your loving uncle,
Screwworm

The Danger of Expanding Bureaucracies

Enough!

Stopping the uncontrolled expansion of the U.S. government has got to be the most important task facing conservatives today. The great danger in expanding the government is that doing so creates more bureaucrats. Once you create new bureaucrats, it becomes almost impossible to rid the place of them.

It is axiomatic that once you reach a critical mass of bureaucrats, the government ossifies and change back toward smaller government becomes virtually impossible. In fact, every attempt to reduce the number of bureaucrats only seems to increase their numbers. Nigel Hawthorne made a particularly enlightening comment about this phenomenon in his role as civil servant extraordinaire, Sir Humphrey Appleby on the BBC series “Yes Minister”. Here's the exchange with his boss the elected MP.

Jim Hacker, MP: Twenty three thousand! In the Department for Administrative Affairs? Twenty three thousand people just for administering other administrators. We have to do a Times-Motion study, see who we can get rid of.

Sir Humphrey: We did one of those last year.

Jim: And?

Sir Humphrey: It transpired that we needed another five hundred people.

Civil Servants exist to insure that nothing ever changes. They live in cubicles. They work seven days a week pushing papers around in an effort to basically avoid doing anything new or different. Change is meaningless to bureaucrats. It is anathema. Change means more work, something no bureaucrat welcomes.

Sir Humphrey on getting things done in civil service: "The Foreign Office aren’t there to do things. They’re there to explain why things can’t be done.”

Bureaucratic immobility is why every revolution in South America ends up replacing one corrupt government with a virtually identical one. They merely change the leadership. The civil service remains intact and in place. You can’t get rid of them. Bureaucracies are so hardwired into the fabric of a country that, if they were to suddenly disappear, we wouldn’t know what to do next.

Just look how much of our time is wasted appeasing bureaucrats. There’s standing in line at the post office, the DMV, preparing IRS forms, sales tax forms, forms your bank makes you fill out because some bureaucrat somewhere tells them you have to. In my years on the TxDOT Public Transportation Advisory Committee, I discovered that much of the paperwork, regulation and headache of getting transportation systems into place is not because someone passed a law, but because some bureaucrat in a tiny office somewhere decided they wanted some paperwork from you in order to justify their existence. And, because they have their ink-stained fingers firmly round your funding or approval for your project, you tamely submit.

I remember trying to find out why we were prohibited from solving transit problems with innovative, out of the box ideas. I was inevitably told we couldn't do that.

"Why?" I asked.

"Because it is policy that we can't do it that way?"

"Well, how do we change the policy? Do I need to talk to my representative and senator?"

"That won't help."

"Why?"

"Because it's a policy, not a law."

"And who came up with that policy?"

"I'm not sure."

"Then, who do I talk to about getting that policy changed?"

"I don't know?"

"What if I talked to the Director?"

"You can't do that!"

"Why?"

"It's against policy!"

This seemed entirely logical to this person. I attempted to go around the system and actually had some success in getting some policies changed. It was soon being whispered about that I was anti-transit and I only lasted one term. A local bureaucrat wrote me a letter in which he said it served me right for being arrogant!

A few years back when the state reduced the bureaucracy for human service related programs from 22 agencies to 5 there was a hew and cry about the land. They organized a series of local anti-change forums trying to stop the consolidation of departments and programs. Their arguments was that it couldn't be done without hurting poor and needy people.

I went to one of the anti-change meetings and listened. After a while I smelled a rat.

I stood up. "If we reduce the bureaucracies, won't there be more money for people in the programs?"

Speaker: "But the social workers will be overloaded and won't be able to process them all, so many people will not be served."

"What if we reduce the paperwork needed to process them."

Speaker: "Then we won't know if they are really eligible."

"Wouldn't it be better to miss a few welfare moochers and serve more people than to spend all our money on people sitting in offices pushing papers around?"

He paled a little and made a face like a fish trying to breathe out of water.

Then, I asked the speaker who he worked for.

Speaker: "I represent Citizens for Social Justice, a coalition of agencies....."

“No, I mean, who do you actually work for? Who gives you a paycheck?”

Speaker: "Uh, my, uh, regular job is with the Federal and State Employees Union."

"I see...."

That’s what I had guessed. The reason we have to stop this expansion of government is that once it happens, we’ll never be able to get rid of all the bureaucrats. Then, if we get all those new bureaucrats, they’ll make us waste even more time waiting in lines and filling out forms instead of doing our jobs.

I’m about ready to sell everything, buy myself a schooner and become a tramp trader in the islandes. The problem is, I could probably never get all the paperwork done to even get my boat out of port. I’d run off to the mountains, but I probably need a permit. Last time we had a church picnic, we had to reserve the lakeside campground 3 months in advance and leave a large deposit and fill out an environmental impact statement, insurance release, show proof of liability and proof of financial responsibility. I’m probably exaggerating, but not by much.

The only thing they didn’t ask for was proof of citizenship. That one I might have understood…

Tom King
Flint, TX

P.S. Also you might be interested in one more gem from Sir Humphrey on health care strategy in Britain:

“Yes, but we’ve been into that. It has been shown that if those extra one hundred thousand people had lived to a ripe old age that they would have cost us even more in pensions and social security, than they did in medical treatment. So financially speaking it is unquestionably better that they continue to die at the present rate.”

Climate of Fear: The War for America's Shy People

The rhetoric in this countryhas become ridiculous - on both sides! Saying this will not get me a large audience as a blogger. Many conservatives have decided that telling lies is okay as long as your intent is good. The hard left has been doing so for years. Wild stories and inflammatory language is one way to have a popular blog, though.

Me, I'm congenitally unable to do some of the things you have to do to be a successful blogger - among those, tell "good" stories if I know them to be untrue. I'm not very good at writing to be search engine optimized. It seems dishonest to write so that you repeat key words that are popular search words on Google, Yahoo, Bing and the rest. Technically, I should find a way to mention, for instance, Ted Kennedy, Mary Jo Kopechne, Chappaquiddick, Robert Novak, Michael Jackson or Rebecca Gayheart and Eric Dane (some sort of romantick entanglement I believe). All these are high on the most often searched list of keywords this week. Unfortunately, four years of Mrs. Creel's English classes taught me the evils of artificial writing and I cannot do it and feel good about myself, no matter if it would help me get one million "hits".

If I wanted to rile up some conservative readers and win their allegiance, I should mention Van Jones, Glenn Beck or Town Hall. I do, if I have something to say about those things, but writing an article where I repeat those names simply to get the search engine to move me up in a word search seems as disingenuous as Michael Savage calling himself by his full name instead of using pronouns like "I" or "me". Makes me want to smack him!

According to master blogger, Robert Stacy McCain, some other tricks include finding ways to insert popular women in not much clothing into your blog, picking fights so that you gain lots of enemies and spending a LOT of time self-promoting.

Ah, well, I guess I didn't really want to be a wildly successful blogger anyway. I think I'd rather write honestly. I sleep better at night that way.

Now that I've wandered off topic, let me get back to it. I read a piece in which a liberal someone had gone to a town hall and waved around a map with Iraq on it. He found (surprise, surprise) that 75% of those who opposed Obama's health care initiative were:

1. Unable to find Iraq on a map though it was brightly colored and in the center of the map.

2. All stupid white people who only memorized anti-health care junk that Rush Limbaugh, Glenn Beck or Sean Hannity had sent them by e-mail or were paid by some mega-insurance companies that had paid them to spread lies about Obamacare.

3. All were probably either on Medicare or Veteran's Care and were hypocrites anyway.

Again I am shocked.

Okay, that was sarcasm. I admit it. It's just that once again, we're getting the same old Democrat tactic. I remember it from high school where it was a popular way to keep the cool kids in power. No matter what happens, if you don't believe and act the way the popular kids did, you were labeled stupid and ignorant even if you have a 139 IQ, a 4.0 GPA and actually knew what you are talking about.

It's the rhetorical equivalent of the masterful comeback, "Oh, yeah!" The Democrats are masters of it.

They'er using it to marginalize the frighteningly large numbers of angry mainstream Americans who are showing up for Health Care Town Hall meetings this summer. The target to be intimidated and "guided" into correct liberal thinking by this particular anti-free speech campaign, however, is not the mythical moderates. It's not conservatives. It's not even the liberal base that supports the health care takeover. This tactic is aimed at people who, by nature, don't want to make a fuss. They don't want to get into a screaming match. They don't want anybody to be mad at them and they do not want to be thought of as "different". This is the group that is truly the swing vote in US elections. They are the go-alongs. It takes a lot to move them and fear that something bad will happen that will upset their world is one of the biggest things that motivates them to action. It takes a lot to get these guys out to a town hall meeting. It is not in their nature to go against anything, much less their duly elected congressman or woman. They don't really understand all the ramifications of political stuff like this because it really doesn't concern them. Only when something threatens the health, comfort and safety of their families. Why else do you think the message is, "Don't worry. Health Care Reform won't hurt you. It will make everything good for all Americans. Pay no attention to the man behind the curtain....."

If you go to a town hall, watch how these plain simple folk react when they get really angry at their congressman. Watch them shake their heads as they speak. It's as though they are saying "No, no, no, no, no..." all the time they are confronting this powerful person that they may actually have voted for because they were comfortable with him. They don't want to be there. They don't want to confront this person. They look over at the union guys and the liberal plants sent there to intimidate them and they just flat want to go home and hide. Even their body language says "I don't like doing this."

The problem is that even if they agree with someone, if that person or group resorts to the tactics of shouting, fear and intimidation, they drive those same people away. It's a careful dance between just enough intimidation and too much. Joe McCarthy failed to understand that back in the early 50's. He was right about Communists infiltrating Hollywood. It really was happening. Americans were frightened by it. But when he resorted to Gestapo like tactics, he lost America's shy people. There was a point in the McCarthy hearings where the country gave a collective cringe and turned off their radios. After that, no one cared how much of what he said was true. They weren't listening anymore.

At first, Washington, the Adams boys, Jefferson and Patrick Henry were considered rabble rousers and the American colonists by and large really didn't want to hear them. Mel Gibson captured the sentiment in his character's reaction to the revolution in "The Patriot". He just wanted to take care of his kids and his farm. He wasn't looking to confront power. He knew what the cost would be and he shrank from paying that cost.

I don't blame him. I don't blame any of the grandmas and grandpas that have driven to the town halls in their pickups and big grandma Buicks. It happened during the Revolution. Britain got cocky and pushed their grab for power too far too fast. They made the silent majority, the shy people of America fear for their way of life.

That's what's happening in the first months of the Obama administration. They chose the quick grab for power over the slow, steady approach. The Cap and Trade and Health Care Initiatives are the equivalent of a "Hail Mary" pass in football. I think they've decided that this is the last chance for socialism and if they risk it all on this one roll of the dice, they can win!

Bloggers, talk show hosts and conservative action groups are fighting a delaying action, hoping Americans will wake up to what's happeing before it's too late. We need to block that Hail Mary pass or time may actually run out on us. We'll be left with a frightening new system of government with the power to destroy all opposition in its way.

Delay and Sound the Alarm!

We need night riders like Paul Revere to wake up the country to its peril. We also need the informants that found out the British were coming and where they were going to. Soon we'll need the patriots at the bridge standing toe to toe with a foe that is disciplined, well-armed and confident. But on that day, which side will America's shy people be standing behind? That's the critical factor in whether we win or lose in this fight for freedom.

I think I can tell you which side they'll take. It'll be the side that best convinces them it can protect their way of life - the things they most value. The side that best articulates its case without malice or brutality (or at least without the appearance of malice and cruelty) will carry the field. As Ghandi and Martin Luther King, the original Martin Luther and Jesus Christ himself demonstrated, it may require some of us to have nerves of steel - the ability to hold our fire till we see the whites of their eyes. We may have to risk our lives and our honor, our wealth and our safety. Some of us may be ruined in the effort. Some may not survive. The way to win may well be for enough of us to go down with dignity and reveal the foe as a cruel tyrant by his behavior. We may lose talk radio, conservative news, religious broadcasting and independent publications before it's over. We may lose a lot of things we value before America fully wakes.

I hope not.

In this current, and what I believe may be final, conflict, we must tell the truth, no matter what. We must not pass along lies and rumors just because it works to make people believe like we do. Our opponents do that very well. They lie themselves and then convict us in the press of lies we never told. They make up things to support their agenda, no matter whether they are the truth or not. We must not do that too! We must not resort to the tactics of Goebbels, Stalin, Mussolini Saddam Hussein and their ilk simply because lying is an effective tool to get what you want.

Let us be careful in this conflict to tell the truth. I'm listening to both sides and there are many out there who believe that what our government is trying to do is wrong. Many tell the truth scrupulously no matter what their critics say to the contrary. Others say exciting things that will get them ratings without any concern for whether the things they say are true or not. If it sounds good, they'll use it. I get a dozen e-mails a day from people I care very much for with stories in them that are lies. They are great stories and may make me mad at people I should be mad at. Nonetheless they are lies and we hurt ourselves by telling them.

It is harder for a righteous man to fight a war. There are weapons we may not use; tactics in which we may not engage. The clerk at my local grocery store believes that Jesus's coming is imminent. That may well be the answer to the prayer that many freedom-loving Americans have been praying lately.

God help us!

Publish Post

The Coming CIA Purge*

The Obama administration has signalled that it may prosecute members of the CIA for "human rights violations". This does not surprise me at all.

If the left is to secure a permanent lock on power, one of the first things they must control is the flow or information. One of the chief sources of information for a president is the Central Intelligence Agency. When President Bush came into office, the CIA leaned significantly left after 8 years under President Clinton. My wife and I have a relatively who works for the agency. He predicted at the time that President Bush would be the worst president ever. The basis for his prediction was apparently that the president was a conservative. I got the impression that his opinion was also the corporate opinion at CIA.

That doesn't surprise me much. It's a romantic notion that intelligent spies could manipulate events and people to accomplish some greater good. It's the same notion that drives socialism, Marxism and other forms of tyranny - the idea of an intelligent elite who control things for the good of the ignorant masses. The idea of a conservative, that believes in smaller, less intrusive government, free markets and doing things in the world to stop evil-doers, rather than just observing passively and commenting with a know nod, probably frightened the bejeebers out of the CIA. Like the perfumed princes in the military, the lords of CIA much prefer pretending to be soldiers or spies. It's much safer than actually risking your life in a fight.

When George Tenet resigned in the wake of 9/11 and intelligence failures in the run up to the Iraq war, Porter Goss, his replacement attempted to make cultural changes to CIA. One thing he evidently did was instruct analysts to tell the president the truth. He wanted them to quit filtering the information and presenting analysis to the president that was colored by political ideology rather than facts. In other words, Goss wanted them to tell the president what was really going on and not what they thought the president ought to know about what was going on. This reduced the CIA role to being an encyclopedia and highly detailed news source rather than an influeintial policy advisor and, if truth be told, a manipulator of presidential opinion.

George Tenet, Bush's first CIA director, was a Democrat by training who served in the Clinton administration. His career as director was acknowledged to have increased morale at the CIA. It's little wonder. Bureaucrats tend to lean left. The left supports larger government, greater control by government and more intrusive control. No agency has a more congruent mission with the left than CIA. Goss's attempts to change the CIA culture were met with fierce resistance. There was rejoicing in the agency when he resigned and many left leaning agents returned to administrative positions in CIA. The coming of Obama was met with euphoria in the ranks and a wild hope for a restoration of the CIA to it's former glories. Obama seeks greater government control over events at home and abroad. The CIA with its massive information gathering capacity is the very agency to help him achieve that.

But first, before the left can solidify it's hold on the nation's premiere spy agency, the conservatives that have crept into the agency over the past 8 years must be dealt with. This past week, the President announced the beginning of what promises to be a pogrom of politically non-aligned CIA agents. The prosecution of those responsible for so-called "human rights abuses" is the perfect vehicle to accomplish that purpose. When the "cleansing" is done, the CIA will be a reliable tool for a powerful leftist government. Bush era appointees and recruits to the agency are probably working on their resignation letters and cutting deals to avoid prosecution right now.

The CIA is a dangerous thing. In the hands of the current administration and Congress, it a tool for making bad things happen quickly. The relative who works in the CIA told me once, "If you knew half of the stuff that goes on in the world, you wouldn't be able to sleep at night." I bet if I knew half of what was going on at CIA right now, I wouldn't be able to catch even an afternoon nap!

Just one man's opinion....

Tom King

*This blog is for entertainment purposes only. The author knows absolutely nothing about the CIA or President Obama or anything the Left is up to. Please do not hurt my kitty cat, leave dead horse parts in my bed or attach anything electronic under the seat of my truck as I am basically harmless and not worth the powder it would take to blow me up.

Sleight of Hand

Well in an apparently magnanimous gesture, the Obama Administration is sending signals that they are prepared to bow to the "fake" astro-turf roots trumped up phony pressure from all those hired insurance company goons that have been showing up to disrupt the Congress's peaceful town hall meetings.

They'll be telling us that this is a wonderful concession and that it won't destroy the insurance companies like everyone said and that this will not be just a wonderful little benign bit of legislation that helps some sick people get the help they need.

That's the hat, but where's the rabbit and what's up his sleeve - that's the trick. It's always misdirection with these folks. I knew a former missionary who used to get churches build using these kind of bait and switch tactics. It was in a holy cause, but I had to wonder what God thought about how we were getting our churches built.

Being Adventists in a Catholic country, getting churches built was sometimes difficult. The town fathers really didn't want any competing churches in the city and my friend found out pretty quickly that getting plans approved by the town council was pretty nearly impossible until they tried an old trick for getting approval from someone who didn't want to approve your project. It works like this:

First, they brought in 3 sets of plans for the proposed church. One set, the one they presented to the council first would be a huge ornate structure that looked like a cathedral that would dwarf the local Catholic church building. The town fathers were properly horrified.

Next they presented a very Protestant looking building along the lines of the Crystal Cathedral or something with a golden dome and an enormous lighted cross. They were further horrified.

Finally, our building committee presented the modest structure plan they had intended to build all along. The members of the town council were so immeasurably relieved that they voted instantly to approve the plans we'd wanted all along to construct.

I think this health care thing is the same tactic. So what's left in the health care bill that we're supposed not to notice? Well, how about access to our bank accounts, fines for the uninsured, expansion of government meddling in another American industry which they've already thoroughly screwed up just with Medicaid and Medicare alone.

We're inviting the camel to stick it's nose in the tent for no real benefit that I can see. We should be talking about cutting back government control of the health care system, not expanding it. We should take away the restrictions on doctors and the absurd pay systems with programs like Medicaid where providers wait 3 to 6 months for a check. We need to get the feds out of health care altogether and come up with something run at the state and local level that makes more sense. Give doctors tax incentives for doing pro bono work. Give local groups the power to figure out what works best in their communities. Quit trying to create a "system" that will work in every community in the nation. Big government-run bureaucracies are always woefully inefficient. They have the same problem as the carpenter who only had a hammer in his tool box. With only a hammer, every problem our carpenter encounters seems to call for a nail!

Let's just say, "No!" to ANY health care bill at all. There are surely options that allow health care to run on sensible free market principles without opening the door to even greater restrictions on our liberties and more new ways for the government to diddle in our lives.

How 'bout it? Had ENOUGH yet?

Just one man's opinion.

Tom King

I AM CRANKYPANTS

You may have heard about the White House’s new “fink on the people who disagree with nationalized health care reporting site” that Linda Douglass, White House Propa...., I’m sorry, ‘Communications’ Director has set up. Apparently the Drudge Report dug up an inconvenient old video of the President assuring supporters that a single payer health care system IS one of his goals, but that it might take a while to get there.

Apparently, Douglass thinks we loyal Americans need to let the White House know if anyone else is out there undermining our faith in socialized health care. She’s set up an e-mail address where loyal minions can turn in such troublemakers - flag@whitehouse.gov .

My question is, “What do they plan on doing with this information. Here’s the paragraph from the White House’s website.

...............

Facts Are Stubborn Things

There is a lot of disinformation about health insurance reform out there, spanning from control of personal finances to end of life care. These rumors often travel just below the surface via chain emails or through casual conversation. Since we can’t keep track of all of them here at the White House, we’re asking for your help. If you get an email or see something on the web about health insurance reform that seems fishy, send it to flag@whitehouse.gov.

http://www.whitehouse.gov/blog/Facts-Are-Stubborn-Things/

A whole lot of people have begun sending crank e-mails to the flag@whitehouse.gov site. I’ve started forwarding all those e-mails I’ve been getting from Dr. Ooalong Mobanga the son of the late Commerce Secretary of Nigeria who wants me to help him get several million dollars out of a secret Swiss bank account. I figure the White House might want to look into it as a way to fund health care.

Ben Sley recently posted an interesting note reminding us all of the scene in the movie “Spartacus” where, when the Romans defeated the gladiator revolt, the Roman general demanded to know which one of his captives was Spartacus. Virtually every man stood up and claimed to be Spartacus. He suggested that if they were looking for people who were spreading information about health care, maybe we should all contact the site and tell them, “I am Spartacus!”.

It’s a lovely bit of civil disobedience and I like the idea. Of course, one has to remember that the Romans crucified everyone who said “I am Spartacus”, so this sort of thing may actually have consequences. I do have an alter ego whose e-mail box I can use.

Let ‘em crucify Mr. Crankypants! See if I care!

Mr. Crankypants is Spartacus!

Mr. Crankypants is Spartacus!

Mr. Crankypants is Spartacus!

Hopeless and Changed!

I watched the president's speech last night - at least until my blood pressure pegged and I experienced shortness of breath. I had to watch two hours of the Home Shopping Network to flush out my brain before I could go to sleep.

Best I can tell the Obaminator plans to steal from the rich and give to the poor to make this health care thing work. Wonder what happens when the rich run out of riches?

Who's going to buy all those Sham Wow's

I'm just sayin'

Tom King