Category: Social Commentary
Don’t believe your lying eyes

Don’t believe your lying eyes

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Don’t believe your lying eyes. That’s the message from this bungling and utterly dishonest administration. And from the lying and corrupt State Media that allow them to try to pull the wool over the country’s eyes.

Bidenomics — the misguided but unintentionally descriptive term for Biden’s disastrous economic policies — are working just fine. Don’t believe your lying eyes that tell you something rather different whenever you check out at the grocery store or gas station.

The border is secure. Never mind that new records of illegal border crossers are broken on a nearly daily basis now and illegals are creating true crises for blue cities, from New York and Boston to Chicago and L.A. Pay no attention to hordes of illegals walking across our alleged border and camping out on a sidewalk near you. Or those 100,000+ Americans killed by Fentanyl carried across the Southwest Border or the 82,000 children “lost” by this administration. Don’t believe your lying eyes! The border is secure and everything is just fine!

Crime isn’t on the rise. The statistics say otherwise, as do the experiences of ordinary people in virtually every city of any size. But don’t believe your lying eyes. If there is more crime it’s undoubtedly the Republicans’ fault and, besides, those criminals are probably just hungry.

The president is fit as a fiddle, right on top of his game. Ignore that his stumbles, verbal, mental, and physical, have been happening with such alarming regularity that White House staffers are charged with overriding his impromptu policy statements and keeping him from falling since his competency to serve as President is seen as just one fall away from serious challenge. Don’t believe your lying eyes (or ears, either, in this case).

The “Big Guy” didn’t profit from his son Hunter’s overseas business imbroglios. All that money didn’t get to him in any way and didn’t influence his actions as an alleged “public servant.” Don’t believe your lying eyes! Or what your brain tells you (oh, you have a brain? Turn it off immediately! No logic or thinking is allowed!)

Biden didn’t retain pallets of classified documents from when he was a senator and vice president and had no right to them. No! Look away! It’s Trump who is your culprit, not Biden! Those papers were all safe there in that unlocked garage with his Corvette and Hunter. Don’t believe your lying eyes!

Of course we have a system of equal justice. The administration would never think to skew things its way nor persecute the president’s main opposition candidate. The horror of the very thought! We rend our garments! Don’t believe your lying eyes!

Our respect on the international stage has returned. Don’t for a moment believe that other heads of state, friend and foe alike, have noticed the bungling senile fool that serves as our head of state and haven’t taken note of his mental and physical debasement. Don’t believe your lying eyes!

And perhaps the most glaring and critically important thing of all: Clearly the president is in charge of everything and it’s not true that he is just a figurehead for a ruling junta, where the real power resides and is exercised. No, no! Don’t believe your lying eyes!

The term for this process is gaslighting, one of the Left’s pet terms they like to level against the Right. It’s hard to imagine more blatant examples of the process, defined by Merriam-Webster as “psychological manipulation of a person usually over an extended period of time that causes the victim to question the validity of their own thoughts, perception of reality, or memories and typically leads to confusion, loss of confidence and self-esteem, uncertainty of one’s emotional or mental stability, and a dependency on the perpetrator.”

In other words, don’t believe your lying eyes!

The Emperor has no clothes

Yes, yes, I know. It’s a cliche to compare the current state of affairs in modern-day America to Hans Christian Andersen’s Nineteenth Century folktale, “The Emperor’s New Clothes.” But these are cliche times in which we live and few comparisons apply as well to them as Andersen’s 1837 parable. Sadly, we lack that astute child who noticed that the emperor had, not a resplendent new suit, but no clothes on at all.

I don’t know if it’s unique to America to have political charlatans masquerading as medical or psychological doctors, but the other day I heard one such charlatan wax enthusiastic about Joe Biden’s great condition and how fit he has kept himself. This about the guy who falls off his bike, repeatedly falls up stairs going on Air Force One, and can barely move his flimsy little lawn chair on the beach where he goes to fill the 40% of his term that he’s spent on vacation. Meanwhile, this same Dr. Charlatan had the temerity to call Donald Trump “a heart attack waiting to happen.” Now I’m not prepared to predict who might or might not have a heart attack — it’s a pretty imprecise science, as far as I can tell. But I do have a set of still fairly good eyes and a functioning brain that tells me, were I to put my money on who was more physically and mentally capable and astute, Biden or Trump, I wouldn’t move my chips to Biden’s spot on the board. Sorry, but I will believe my lying eyes!

On the border, I recently saw a leading member of the State Media try to shut down a guest who had been to the Southwest Border and saw with his own eyes how it’s wide open by insisting — in verbatim lockstep with the liar at the White House’s podium — “the border is secure.” The smirk on the face of the interviewee was priceless. Like me, he was willing to believe his lying eyes, even in the face of derision from the State Media spouting the official and 100% false administration line. And then I heard another minion of the State Media explaining how your dollar is going further now than it was a year or two ago. Whether she is a shameless liar or a total moron lacking in any knowledge of basic economics with no understanding of inflation, how does such a person get through J-school, let alone get hired by a major media company? And how many of her viewers buy into the nonsense she peddles? Hopefully they’re believing their lying eyes.

A little bit of background is called for. While the examples cited here don’t arise directly from members of the White House Press Corps, that’s where the official party line from the administration begins and then propagates through the system. When I was a practicing journalist my colleagues and I largely saw the White House Press Corps as a band of journalistic whores (actual word we used). That was nearly four decades ago, and compared to the current White House Press Corps, its members in those days would be nuns or monks in relation to today’s travesties. Daily White House Press Babler KJP stands before the corps and tells the most bald-faced and easily disproven lies and, with a couple of exceptions, the whores in the corps of alleged journalists nod their heads, take their notes, and go forth, with their colleagues, to lie to the American public. This is what passes for journalism in contemporary America. And you’re not supposed to believe your lying eyes?

Twisted up in their own petards

I’m not sure what a petard is, but I have to admit it’s becoming increasingly amusing to watch as those in the State Media who, for the past three years, carried water for the Biden fabrication machine and crime family suddenly to become unsure of what their mandate is. This confusion has arisen as Dem power brokers, to whom the State Media are largely beholden, begin to express their doubts about whether Jell-O Joe is capable of a second term. Never mind that most of us didn’t think he was capable of a first term, the issue now has become the potential second term and whether he’ll finish his first term.

One recent poll showed that 72% of Americans, including 79% of independents and 48% of Democrats, don’t want him to run again. Some polls have shown as many as 75% of Democratic and Dem-leaning voters don’t want Jell-O Joe to run again. Apparently more people are believing their lying eyes and the State Media is in a quandary how to deal with that inconvenient fact.

As I’ve opined before, and will continue to since it’s the absolute 1,000% truth, the real threat to American democracy lies not within the government nor any given administration nor even within any insidious social or political movements, but with the lack of a free, fair, and unbiased news media. As I recently said, repeating sentiments frequently expressed over the years, “What we have is a government-media complex — akin to the military-industrial complex that President Dwight Eisenhower warned the country about and arguably even more dangerous — that functions largely as a state media. And with that democracy simply cannot survive.”

So now that the cat is out of the bag, anyone with two functioning eyes, or two functioning ears, combined with one functioning brain and the willingness to look beyond the official party line, can see that Joe Biden is incapable of being president. The quandary now for Dem power brokers, deep-state actors, and their media client sycophants, has become who will replace him on the ticket. This is largely an existential question for them since they are looking down the barrel of a deeply embittered Donald Trump, currently beating Biden in the polls by as much as 9 points, who is determined to finally and definitely clean out that swamp that Washington and the federal establishment has become. And even in the highly unlikely event that Trump isn’t the Republican nominee, the other leading candidates on that side of the divide also have strong inducement to do the same.

Faced with an opposition party with a deep bench of qualified candidates, the Dems have a dearth of possibilities that could effectively fill the seat. They also have to deal with the Kamala Problem, what to do about the vice president who was put in as a poison pill to keep Biden from being removed from office and who has proven to be even more unpopular than her boss. Can she be bypassed without raising a storm among the Democratic Party’s various constituencies in its divide-and-rule strategy based on racial and sexual politics?

The party, I’m quite sure, would have no issue with another figurehead candidate while pulling the strings of power behind the scenes. But are voters willing to accept another such sham and insult to democracy? Already the Dems are rolling out their dirty tricks to make another go at stealing the 2024 election if they can’t win it through fair and legal means, and their hope is that voters won’t believe their lying eyes for another 12 or so months, when early voting begins.

Don’t be one of those gaslit voters. No matter what anyone tells you, believe your lying eyes. There is plenty there to see. All you have to do is open your eyes and look.

Featured Image: Eyes, Noelle Otto, via Pexels. Used with permission.

Retina: Basila Vlad, via Unsplash. Used with permission.

Iris: v2osk, via Unsplash. Used with permission.

This piece also appears on my Substack, Issues That Matter. Read, share, and subscribe here and there.
Back Posting: The Myth of the Independent Voter

Back Posting: The Myth of the Independent Voter

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In this early lead up to the 2024 presidential election we hear a lot about the role that independent voters will play in the outcome. According to some analysis, independents — voters who are not adherents of either of the two major parties — will likely determine the outcome of the election. There also could be a major impact that results from a determined third-party movement, itself formed by candidates and voters disaffected with the two-party system. But the question I ask is the same one I raised 13 years ago, in the second year of Barack Obama’s first term: Is there really such a thing as a truly independent voter?

I am putting up now the piece I wrote then to look into this question. While there have been some significant shifts on the national electoral scene — substitute, for instance, “Maga Republicans,” Joe Biden’s derisive and divisive term of artifice for adherents to Donald Trump’s version of electoral independence, for the Tea Party movement of 2010 — I think the overall question remains a legitimate one. I offered a possible way forward in my original piece. I still think the approach presented then might still be a viable one, though I’m somewhat more skeptical today that a sufficient number of voters could coalesce around the tenets I posit as the “LCD” principles that could bring most independents together.

While actual party registrations, in states that allow voter registration by party, don’t necessarily reflect it, surveys of voters show an ever greater trend toward those who see themselves as independent — 49% versus roughly 25% who identify either as Democratic or Republican — and so that key element of my initial piece remains valid, if only more so.

Read the piece and draw your own conclusions. I’d be interested in knowing readers’ views on the question.

Originally published on May 3, 2010

In America today the largest group of registered voters is neither Democratic nor Republican. It is independent – no party affiliation. It is how I have been registered my entire voting life.

Independents form the plurality – plurality, not majority – of voters in this country today. That would appear to give independents huge political power and a force in their own right to be reckoned with.

To some extent, that is what we have seen, whether in the power of independents to elect Barack Obama President, or their power to defeat Obama candidates in Virginia, New Jersey, and most recently, Massachusetts. They have held the “swing” power, and are likely to hold it in the mid-term elections in November and very possibly in the next presidential election in 2012.

Some of the biggest proponents and promoters of this trend, such as economic and political commentator Lou Dobbs, author of the book “Independents Day,” see it as the future wave in American politics. And to some extent, Dobbs and others of like mind are right. But there are serious flaws and limitations to this theory and to the real long-term effect of the independent force in America.

The main flaw and limitation has to do with the source and driving motivation of these non-aligned voters. Many – perhaps most – are just disenchanted with and disabused of both the major political parties. Some are fed up with the state of American politics in general. Some just have not decided to pick a party (and in some states this allows them to pick which party primary in which to vote), some just want to keep their options open while still being mostly inclined to vote for one of the major parties. Or, as in my case, remaining unrecorded with any party enables us to maintain an appearance of being truly independent and unaligned, as much as the reality of our actual voting patterns might indicate otherwise.

Now this is where the theory of the independent movement is flawed and ultimately breaks down, and why I call it a myth. It is because the motivation of the independent voter is so varied and, in fact, is neither monolithic nor ideologically driven. Some have come out of the Left, believing the Democratic Party has not gone far enough in pursuing a leftist-liberal agenda, as well as others who believe it has become too liberal. Others have come out of the Republican Party, believing the G.O.P. has lost its way, has become too liberal or, for others, too conservative. And there are others – perhaps the truest of independents – who despair of both parties and the very political process and system and who want to see an overhaul of the process.

Given this diversity of origin and opinion and, ultimately, objective, this is where the theory of the power of the independent all comes unglued. Independent voters may help vote in an Obama or vote out a Corzine, but they are like an unruly herd of buffalo galloping back and forth between the fence lines of the political pasture. On closer examination, there is no given trend or makeup, whether political or ideological, to this vast herd of independents. And this is a key reason why there is no, nor can there be, any viable “Independent Party.” If we consider the two major parties fractured, so much more so would be this mythical “Independent Party.”

What we have seen are movements – or more precisely, one movement in particular – emerge from this larger movement (trend would be more accurate), and that is the Tea Party movement. While Tea Party adherents clearly derive from a range of more mainstream political views, the bulk one can say are from the right-of-center persuasion, primarily the Republican Party. And this is the issue, that there is no one center of political thought around which independents might gravitate.

Were the Tea Party movement, for instance, to congeal into a Tea Party Party, it almost certainly would be doomed to fail and, in effect, would in most cases likely serve to elect those liberal left-of-center candidates the Tea Party people would most like to unseat. No, with all due respect to Lou Dobbs and his persuasion, the independent trend as it currently stands is not a viable political force and, as such, is a myth.

That said, there may be one way and one way only to move this independent trend (I resist calling it a movement) forward into a viable and cohesive political force. And that is to distill and draw upon the points of the LCD – Least Common Denominator. Not in the pejorative sense of that term, but in the sense of getting to the very basics upon which most independents either already base their independence or to which they can be drawn.

Admittedly this is open to some argument, discussion, even disagreement, but the two that I would propose as most basic core values and to which the greatest number of independents of all origins might be drawn are adherence to Constitutional principles and fiscal responsibility. I believe that for a majority of those who now consider themselves independent, these two values are those they can most likely get behind. There might be some wiggle room in how these principles are interpreted, or how strictly they might be adhered to, but I think these are the LCD core values that would form the basis of any viable independent movement that might lead to significant electoral victories.

This would not be a third party, which I think the facts still indicate would not be viable in America, but rather would represent a shift in voting patterns that would elect candidates, regardless of party affiliation or ideology, who at least adhere to the two LCD core values.

Eventually this would result in profound and ostensibly lasting changes in the two major parties. Though what is truly needed, in the words of educational philosopher Alfred North Whitehead, is a state of continual revolt and not revolution which, in the end, just returns things to where they started. With this pressure of the independents and their insistence on adherence to the two core principles, we might then expect to see a real paradigm shift in the politics of this country and perhaps – though it is a lot to expect – a diminution of the political polarization we now see.

Ideally the two core principles might be expanded on with two additional principles – those of individual responsibility and limited government – but then one risks losing some of the adherents who can agree on the two most basic core values. These added values, however, might draw in those independents who, like me, are of a more libertarian bent. It is when things are pushed into the realm of social legislation – a range of issues that include anything from lifestyle choices to abortion – that cohesion again begins to break down. But here adherence to Constitutional principles might limit the push for such social legislation and hold things together.

In other words, you might not approve of some of my lifestyle choices any more than I might approve of yours, but the Constitution, notably the First Amendment, gives us both the right to believe and act as we wish provided we do no harm to anyone else. My desire to reach out my hand ends at the tip of your nose. Even such a recognition would mark a major step forward from where we are now with polarization of the political dialogue and everyone trying to run everyone else’s life.

Featured Image: Cutting an Independent Path, Stephen Leonardi, via Pexels. Used with permission.

Different Folks, Different Votes: Cotton Bro Studio, via Pexels. Used with permission.

Read my other essays and commentaries on this site.

This piece also appears on my Substack, Issues That Matter. Read, share, and subscribe here and there.

 

Summer Solstice
Back at That Time of Year Again: Thoughts on “the Longest Day in the World”

Back at That Time of Year Again: Thoughts on “the Longest Day in the World”

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It has become an annual ritual, on the Summer Solstice, that I repost this piece. It initially appeared six years ago, on June 21, 2017, the Summer Solstice in the Northern Hemisphere. I originally posted the piece on this blog, and subsequently it became an annual event to post it each year on June 21. Three years ago I began posting it on my fiction blog, Stoned Cherry. It now appears on both blogs and on my Substack, Issues That Matter. Today, June 21, 2023, it is once more the Summer Solstice, and the actual solstice officially occurs at 10:58 a.m. EDT/02:58 p.m. UTC. The time and other references and weather comments in the piece are as they were six years ago, when the post first appeared. It’s been five years since I lived on the boat, and there have been other changes. This year it has been 54 years, well more than half a century, since my father’s death, and Sunday was Father’s Day here in the U.S. I hope you enjoy the piece. And play the music at the end.

It’s June 21, the day of the summer solstice in the Northern Hemisphere, the winter solstice in the Southern Hemisphere. It’s a day that holds various meanings for different peoples, and its significance goes back millennia. The solstice, whether summer or winter, officially took place at 12:24 a.m. U.S. Eastern Daylight Time this morning, or 04:24 UTC.

Just to set the record straight and dispel any questions about my scientific knowledge, I know it’s not the longest day in the world. It’s the longest day of the year in the Northern Hemisphere, the shortest day in the Southern Hemisphere. But we’ll get to this a bit later.

It’s been a mixed bag today here on the West Coast of Florida. We’ve been having a lot of rain, something we didn’t have much of over the winter, and the rainy times are interspersed with sunny breaks. Right now, as I look out the window of my boat, the sun is mostly out but I’m looking at the light through rain-drop spattered glass. At least we’re not getting the effects of Tropical Storm Cindy, which is much further west and at this moment dumping lots of water on the upper Gulf Coast.

In this country, the summer solstice marks the official beginning of summer, though in other places and other cultures it marks the middle of summer, as indicated by the name Midsummer Night, which can occur anywhere from the 20th to the 24th of June. And really it is midsummer, since the days, which have been lengthening since the equinox three months ago, now will start to grow shorter, the nights longer.

The sun has reached its apogee in this hemisphere, as it stands today directly over the Tropic of Cancer. I feel summer ending, we already are on the downhill side, the side that will take us through the hot coming months but already on the slide back into winter, the cold time of year. Just as in the Southern Hemisphere the days will begin to grow longer as the seasons move back to summer.

A year ago on this day I was in Alaska, where there never really was a night. Where I was, well below the Arctic Circle, the sun went down sometime around midnight, but there was a kind of twilight that lasted until the sun rose again a few hours later. Above the Arctic Circle on this day, the sun never sets, and it truly is the Land of the Midnight Sun.

My thoughts turn to other things on this day. Someone asked me the other day, which was Father’s Day in the U.S., what thoughts I had of my father on that Sunday. But really, I think of Father’s Day as a commercial holiday. I also remember the last Father’s Day I had with my father, and how my mother did her unwitting best to create conflict between me and my father. While I may wish a happy day to the fathers I know on Father’s Day, it is today, the day of the solstice, that I think of my father. June 21 was his birthday, which in most years coincides with the solstice. I was told as a child that it was the longest day of the year, which I translated in my own way into it being the longest day in the world, and I would go around telling everyone who would listen that it was.

“It’s the longest day in the world!” I’d exclaim each year on his birthday, from morning until night.

I think today of my father on this day, the 21st of June. Gone now, for nearly 48 years. And I think back to the day of his birth, June 21, 1913. One hundred and four years ago. Even had he not died young as he did, just 56 years old, it is hard to imagine that he would still be alive today had he not died when he did. A prolongation of the inevitable.

A factoid I learned earlier is that today is not the longest day in the history of the world, as one might imagine it to be given that the earth’s rotation on its axis generally was slowing. Rather, the longest day in the history of the world is believed to be June 21, 1912, and things like the earth’s tides and recession of the glaciers have caused a slight increase in the rate of the planet’s rotation since then. My father was born a year later, which arguably could have been the second or third longest day in the history of the world, if not the actual longest day in the world.

I wonder what it was like on that June day, the day of the solstice, the longest day of the year, the day my father was born, in Jersey City, New Jersey. Did his father and mother, his Italian parents, my grandparents that I never knew, know it was the solstice? Did they even know of the solstice? Regardless, I’m inclined to think they did not think of it, if for no other reason than that they had something else on their mind that day. And then I think of the things people from then knew and were taught and how many of those things have been lost today, in these encroaching new Dark Ages in which we find ourselves, and I have to wonder. Perhaps they knew, better than most people today know. Or care to know. And they did note the auspicious day on which their son was born.

I’ll think of my father again on July 27, the anniversary of his death, and by then even our summer, the summer as we define it, will be half over.

The solstices, like the equinoxes, serve as a kind of punctuation for me. I watch the ebb and the flow of the days, the seasons, the years, and they mark the passage of time, time that increasingly slips by way too quickly. All of life is punctuation, I think. Slowing. Stopping. Breaking things, even waves on the water, into different parts, different pieces, different rhythms and fugues and movements and phrases and sentences. It is through such punctuation that we mark our lives, mark our transit through summer and back into winter, from day into night, from life into death. Watching, as a reader of a story does, while the time of our lives flows past. When we lose that punctuation, everything blends into one big mass, and we feel lost in the current, flailing and drowning as we’re pulled inexorably along. At least I do.

Enjoy this song, which I found today amid my files, and with which I end this post, and enjoy the time that nature and life give us.

 

Click here if song doesn’t play.

 
May Day: Looking at the passing of a friend, and a consideration of values

May Day: Looking at the passing of a friend, and a consideration of values

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I’m writing this post a day later than I wanted to. I intended it for May 1, for reasons I’ll explain in the post, but most of the text that I needed to include was in an email. And, for the first time I can recall, my email server was subject to a DDoS attack and I lost all access to my emails until today. So consider this posted on May 1, even though it’s May 2.

May 1 is celebrated as May Day around the globe. In ancient tradition, festivities on the day marked the beginning of summer. In more recent times, it came to be International Workers’ Day, following the 1886 Haymarket Riots in Chicago, and subsequently a day for marshall demonstrations in Communist countries. Later that day evolved into Labor Day, as it’s celebrated in many countries worldwide today. But, unknown to most of the world, it held a special place in my own panoply of personal holidays which I came to have when I was in high school in the 1960s. In that personal holiday schedule, May 1 was known as John Gaffney Day, in honor of my close friend by that name, John Kevin Gaffney, whose birthday fell on the date.

John and I always had what could be termed a complex friendship. Friends, and yet competitors, a sardonic way of conversing, a skeptical kind of mutual respect. My first girlfriend lived in the same community as John, and he knew her growing up. And he made a point of stealing her away from me, just to do it, not out of any real interest in her. I tended to follow John about almost slavishly after school. One day, in the Port Authority Bus Terminal in midtown Manhattan, I suddenly realized how I’d just been following him around and I announced, “I’m revolting!” To which John replied, “Yes, I’ve know that for years.” When I had my empire, the Franconian Empire, in high school, John was my Prince of Passaic and, as I recall, Prince of Warren, the New Jersey counties where, respectively, he lived and went to Boy Scout camp. There was incessant internecine rivalry between members of my imperial court, and John played no small part in that.

Politically we aligned in our early days, and together we campaigned for Nelson Rockefeller for Governor of New York. At one point John and I shared a house in Wayne, New Jersey, in our 20s, and he ran for township council. A memorable night was when he returned from some political meeting to find my girlfriend at the time sitting out on our front lawn with her suitcase. John was livid, how he was being embarrassed. He later told me he didn’t remember the incident. I never forgot it.

For awhile John and I both worked for the New Jersey Division on Civil Rights, the job he introduced me to and helped me get, my first real job after college.

In 1978, in Providence, Rhode Island, a drunk driver ran a red light and struck the car John was riding in. He barely survived the accident and wound up paraplegic and in a wheel chair, in which he remained the rest of his life. I often pushed that wheel chair, including up and down steps and up and down over curbs. It inspired me to try to design a wheel chair that can climb stairs. I think today there are such things.

John was my best man at my first wedding, in Quebec City, and we remained in contact through the subsequent years as he moved around the country and I moved around the country and then the world. Perhaps it was the zeitgeist of the 2000s, but our political views began to diverge, which by itself was no surprise. What was a surprise, what came as a shock more than a surprise, was when John announced one day in 2014 that our values had diverged. He disagreed, vehemently, with a position I had taken on some nominee before the Senate and he wrote me, in an email, “Most of all, though, I am saddened to see how far different our values have become. Or did I always misunderstand?”

I never felt our values had become different, even if our views on some things had. On March 12 of that year I wrote him in an email an exposition of how I did not see my values changing, at all, and I expected him to at least engage on that and respond. He never responded to my exposition, nor to a subsequent message, a birthday greeting on May 1, 2014, and it became clear that in his political zeal, in his very illiberal defense of his alleged liberalism, he had thrown 51 years of friendship on the dust heap of the same political division that was transforming and, in truth, destroying the country. I never heard from him again. And then yesterday I did a search, just on a hunch, and found he had died, of heart failure, on Easter Day 2020. In the finality of death, so much for that friendship, and so much for any denouement in resolving our alleged divergence of values or views or whatever.

I still feel it is important to state how, even if our views changed, our values had not. So here is my restatement of values as I sent them to John in March of 2014:

So you are sad to see how far different our values have become and you wonder whether you always misunderstood? I don’t know that our values differ all that much, even if our views do. But let’s take a brief inventory of my values and views “then” and “now”:

I was an advocate of the rights of the individual and openly challenged repression of those rights. Still am, still do.

I questioned authority and believed the government that governs least governs best. Still do.

I opposed violence, even in furtherance of one’s just causes: Still do.

I believed in fairness and equality of opportunity for everyone. Still do.

I have long detested “liberals” and their self-serving, half-hearted, hypocritical pretenses. Still do.

Even when I was religious, which I decidedly am not now, I detested hypocrisy, especially among self-proclaimed religious people. Still do.

I had respect for our Constitution and Bill of Rights then. Still do, perhaps more than ever.

I’ve always believed in a free, unfettered, and most of all independent press. Still do, and see its near-disappearance as the single biggest and most intractable threat facing our country.

I learned and adopted, then, Alfred North Whitehead’s precept that what a society needs is continual revolt, not revolution. And that is still what I believe.

I’ve always cut my own course and refused conformity to any one model or image. Still do, to the extent that I reasonably (and occasionally unreasonably) can.

Now I do think change is a hallmark of a living, sentient being, and so some things have changed, perhaps less in my value system than in my views.

For instance, I remember a time when I wrote “Bomb Hanoi Now!” on the envelope of every letter I sent, influenced by a certain John Kevin Gaffney, who urged me to put that on envelopes, as did he. I don’t think I would do that now, as I stopped doing it not too much after when I did it then.

I also remember campaigning for Republican candidates like Nelson Rockefeller, coincidentally influenced by a certain John Kevin Gaffney. I was a big supporter of John Kennedy, too (even though JFK would be considered a conservative today), and still am. I was led to believe that Barry Goldwater, on the other hand, was going to bring on the end of the world, and I have since come to see through that — to use a word in vogue — slander.

I’ve leaned Democratic and Republican at various times, but always considered myself an Independent, and I have never registered with any party in any state. I voted for, and against, when they did not live up to their promises, both Richard Nixon and Jimmy Carter. I voted for Bill Clinton, and would again. I voted for both Al Gore and John Kerry, and have since come to deeply regret both those votes, not that I am any fan of George W. Bush. I voted for Bob Barr simply because I could not in good conscience bring myself to vote for either Barack Obama or John McCain. Today, I mostly feel a pox on both major parties’ houses would be in order (though at this stage, more on the Democrats’ house than the Republicans’). If I identify with any political belief system, it would be libertarian (with a small “l”). And this perhaps best sums up the reality of my beliefs and values, if not always my views, all along.

I did go through a Socialist stage, it’s true. It took me awhile, but I eventually came to learn something about economics and human nature and thus to see how that economic and political system doesn’t work, though some elements of it can serve some societal purposes. I have come to often say, “I’ve been rich and I’ve been poor, and I can tell you rich is better,”  an expression I think I first heard from one — ready for this? — John Kevin Gaffney.

Do we see a pattern developing here?

By the way, if you want a cause to get behind and a petition to sign, here is one that I think embodies real injustice:

http://www.change.org/petitions/my-brother-was-sentenced-to-life-without-parole-for-a-nonviolent-drug-offense

Anyway, you’ll believe what you want, as will I, and if you choose to be sad, that’s your choice, though it’s on your account, not mine. Maybe that little inventory will at least help clarify things for you.

Your independent friend,

Frank

Featured photo, John Kevin Gaffney, photographer unknown; from Options Magazine, used under Fair Use.

This piece also appears on my Substack, Issues That Matter. Subscribe here and there, share the piece, and please comment.

 

 
One Year Later We Must Not Forget: Disgrace

One Year Later We Must Not Forget: Disgrace

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This piece initially appeared a year ago following the biggest surrender and debacle in U.S. history, all overseen by Joe Biden. It is important we don’t forget this event which long will live in infamy, both for the damage it did to the reputation, prestige, and credibility of this country and to its security and that of other countries. We also need to remember the needless deaths of 13 U.S. service members and hundreds of Afghans due to the incompetence of this administration. That number has now been eclipsed by the deaths of many other innocent Afghans and those who assisted U.S. and allied efforts over 20 years, unconscionably abandoned by Biden, and still more deaths in Ukraine resulting from the Russian invasion which was encouraged by the U.S. failure in Afghanistan and the abject weakness of this administration.

In a normal country in normal times, those responsible for such an enormous debacle as what those at the top in our country caused to happen in Afghanistan in recent weeks would resign in disgrace. And if they didn’t, steps would be taken by those charged with oversight to remove them from office, even try and punish them. But this is not a normal country and these are not normal times, and there seems to no longer exist any sense of shame, disgrace, or even admission of failure. Instead, as the alleged president just did, again, they take a victory lap and spew lies and distortions touting how brilliant and insightful they are, and hope everyone is as imbecilic and full of guile as they are.

Listening to Biden’s words a short while ago made me more angry than I can ever remember any political figure, in my entire life, make me. And that is saying something. I shouted out my anger, and I struck my head wondering how a single human being — as despicable and useless as this rotten excuse for a human being is — can be so profoundly stupid. And arrogant. Surely it has to be a team effort. And the ulterior motive a powerful one.

The insult I used as the title of my last piece on this subject — Ignorance With Impudence — barely touches the level of ignorance nor that of impudence put on full display today.

You see those hands in that photo above, showing a collapsing Biden last Thursday when he was challenged by Fox News’s Peter Doocy on his attempt to blame his Afghanistan catastrophe on his predecessor? Look carefully and you’ll see that they’re drenched in blood. The blood of 13 of our service people killed at Hamid Karzai International Airport last week. The blood of hundreds of needlessly dead Afghans in the same attack. The blood of the Americans, the blood of the Afghans who risked their lives to support us, deliberately left behind while surrounded by rabid terrorists intent on rooting them out and killing them. Also there is the blood of the hundreds, thousands, who will die in Afghanistan, in the United States, and elsewhere in the world as a result of the incredibly bone-headed and callous decisions made by this incompetent and those who allowed and facilitated him to make and carry them out.

If ever there was a time to say there is plenty of blame to go around, this is it. But since Biden is at the top of this heap of excrement and claims the buck stops with him — as if he actually means it, as Harry Truman did — he bears ultimate blame and responsibility for what happened, what will happen. To paraphrase the immortal 1988 words of Senator Lloyd Bentsen, back when Democrats still had some honor and a tad of sense, to vice presidential candidate Dan Quayle, Mr. President, I served with Harry Truman. I knew Harry Truman. Harry Truman was a friend of mine. Mr. President, you’re no Harry Truman.

Stalemate

Once more I find my post taking a different direction than I initially intended. The news continues to come in so fast, and it’s so awful, it’s impossible to keep up with it. I’m not a news service and this is not intended to be either daily reporting or a book. Any one with a fair mind and open eyes can see the reality, the actual events and people creating them, the results of those events and those people, and they don’t need me to continually point them out. My job, as I’ve executed it for more than four years now, is to put the pieces together, to analyze them, and to do what I can to bring people a clear view of the reality. To the extent many of my readers already have a clear view, they read my pieces and nod their heads and occasionally let me know they agree. And I try to give clear views to those readers who don’t see, or don’t want to see, the reality, and I hope I can bring some around to at least consider views other than those they are fed by what I’ve come to call the State Media, the corrupt and biased mainstream media and Big Tech whose lies and coverups in large part brought us to the terrible place we’re now at.

Initially I was going to call this piece Stalemate — the point in a chess match where a player has no legal moves left that won’t land his king in checkmate. It’s a draw, and the game is over. As a nation, we’re now in stalemate, and there are no legal moves left that will get us out of it. As a nation, we’re forced to live in this stasis, which was engineered by the Dem strategists and whoever is calling the shots behind the scenes of the party, and one has to hand them kudos for that achievement, as despicable and dangerous as it is. We have a clearly mentally incompetent president who, by almost any measure, the 25th Amendment was written for. But then, even if he could be removed from office either through that amendment or impeachment, we have a poison pill, the repulsive and dangerous Kamala Harris, as vice president. We get rid of the top guy, and we’re left with what might be an even worse substitute. And below her is the power hungry and vicious Nancy Pelosi. So, three layers deep, we’re left with no good legal moves, and that was the plan all along.

Those same Dem power brokers counted on what they see as the stupidity of the American people, for whom they have no respect other than to use them for their own purposes, and then along came the gift that keeps on giving — the COVID pandemic — which allowed them to flaunt and just plain throw out constitutional protections of our vote. That fraud allowed them to engineer a victory for a doddering old fool you wouldn’t trust to drive your kid’s school bus, let alone head the most powerful country on earth. And they knew that, even in his dementia, given the chance to grab the top accolade of his long and feckless political career — the presidency — Jello-O Joe would put the interest of the country aside and go for it. For this he won my top Profile in Cowardice award.

As I point out in that piece, it wasn’t always this way in American politics, even among the Democratic Party. Read the piece and see, if you forgot or weren’t around at that time, how Thomas Eagleton — a far more capable figure then Joe Biden — stepped down from being George McGovern’s running mate in 1972 when details of some issues with depression Eagleton had dealt with came out. At that time, the good of the country took precedence. That now seems like a prosaic concept.

An Unmitigated Disaster of a Presidency

For anyone who voted for Joe Biden — and, to be perfectly frank, you have to bear some responsibility for this debacle — I defy you to name one single thing Biden has done, one decision he’s made, that has made life better for ordinary Americans. I’ll go one further, and defy you to name one single thing, one single decision, he’s made, that hasn’t made things much worse for this country and its residents. We are so far beyond fucked at this point, it’s hard to even find a suitable word to describe it.

Whether it is throwing open our southwestern border to every ilk of criminal, drug runner, COVID-carrier, and terrorist who cares to cross it, in thorough disregard for our laws and well being — now being augmented by thousands of unvetted Afghans arriving and being sent willy-nilly around the country — taking our focus from competence and merit to attempting to inculcate divisions and distrust in our military, in our corporations and other institutions, and in society at large, to flaunting the Supreme Court and the rule of law to undermine the ability of property owners to pay their bills and stay afloat, to creating what can only be described as confusion on the coronavirus front, this president and his puppet masters have done what they can to sew discord and disorder in the nation. Crime is allowed to spiral out of control, unbridled federal spending is driving inflation, and he took us from energy independence to once more being dependent on the Middle East for our energy.

On the international stage, he has now shown this country to be weak and untrustworthy, and as we’ve learned, weakness breeds instability and tempts bad actors to take chances they would not otherwise. Despite the lies Biden told today — and there is no other word to describe his ridiculous and readily disprovable assertions — we have now created a terrorist nation in Afghanistan, and given a safe haven to not just the Taliban, but their close allies, al Qaeda, the Haqqani Network, and ISIS, among others. Even more mind-boggling, by leaving behind $83 billion in military hardware, we’ve made this terrorist state the fifth best equipped military in the world. The Taliban now have more Black Hawk helicopters, as just one example, than Australia.

Make no mistake. The same bunch of misguided idiots — Biden, Secretary of State Antony Blinken, Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin, child-moron Jake Sullivan who purports to be National Security Adviser, throw in Joint Chiefs Chairman and blowhard Mark Milley, and other members of the Obama foreign policy (sic) team — that brought us the ISIS caliphate in Syria and Iraq and the Iranian nuclear deal have now undone 20 years of progress, as difficult as it was, in Afghanistan, and created a mess and a threat that will be our nemesis for decades to come.

Perhaps most poignantly telling are the comments of the parents and spouses and siblings of the 13 slain service people, who spoke of Biden’s insensitivity, his self-absorption, his incessant talking about the death of his son Beau — who did not die in combat — his checking his watch each time, 13 times, a coffin came off the aircraft at Dover Air Force Base. I’ll end this piece with the words of Kathy McCollum, the mother of 20-year-old Marine Rylee James McCollum, killed in the attack on HKIA, who says it better than I ever could.

Calling in to a talk show Friday, McCollum said this:

“My son was one of the Marines who died yesterday. Twenty years and six months old — getting ready to come home from freaking Jordan to be with his wife and witness the birth of his son. And that feckless, dementia-ridden piece of crap just sent my son to die. I woke up at four o’clock this morning, two Marines at my door telling me my son was dead. So, to [have White House Press Babbler Jen Psaki on] right before me and listen to that piece of crap talk about diplomatic crap with frickin’ Taliban terrorists who just freakin’ blew up my son and no, nothing, to not say anything about, oh my god, I’m so sorry for families. So, my son is gone.”

McCollum’s son is gone. And as tragically, so is our national honor, and very possibly our security and our future with it.

Featured image, Biden’s Collapse, Al Drago, Bloomberg News via Getty Images. Used under Fair Use.

Stalemate, from rutrackerpulse.weebly.com. Used under Fair Use.

The Three Heads of the Poisonous Serpent, Jim Watson, Getty Images. Used under Fair Use.

This piece also appears in my Substack community, Issues That Matter. Please comment and share the piece and subscribe here, and there.