Author: Poetrooper

There are numerous articles and countless comments out there on the web in the aftermath of the blizzard that failed to live up to its billings in New York. True, Juno did produce snowfall more in accordance with predictions in New England, but in the Big Apple, it was the big storm that wasn’t. And while the topic of the perceived overreaction of both state and city governments in New York has drawn much criticism, much of it is simply Monday-morning quarterbacking that we wouldn’t be reading had the storm performed as predicted.

In the articles and comments I’ve read about the media hysteria, as well as about the gubernatorial and mayoral overreaction, there has been solid complaint about the nanny-state governance that presumes to know when to tell its citizens to come in out of the cold. Both Governor Cuomo and Mayor de Blasio essentially suspended the civil rights of millions of New Yorkers to an unprecedented extent, based on the prediction of a weather event that, even had it been accurate, still would not have been unprecedented in the history of that region. In fact, in Massachusetts, where Juno did deliver its expected snow load, things are returning to normal, and no direct storm deaths have been reported to my knowledge. No surprise there; Yankees can handle blizzards.

Both politicians, now under fire for their overreactions and their unprecedented expansions of civil authority for an over-hyped weather event, are raising the shield of “Better safe than sorry.” They defiantly feel justified ordering ordinary citizens out of their workplaces, off the streets, and into confinement in their homes under penalty of arrest and prosecution, all under the guise of public safety. It is surely too bad that apparently no citizen was arrested and charged under this questionable application of authority, for it would certainly make an interesting test case to determine to what extent a governor, or especially a mayor, may deprive a citizen of his civil rights in order to protect that citizen’s well-being. With the way elected officials and civil authorities are expanding their so-far uncontested powers in dealing with natural and man-made (Boston Marathon lockdown) disasters, a challenge is bound to arise, which will likely make its way through the appellate process to the ultimate court in Washington, D.C.

There probably aren’t too many among us ordinary folks who would begrudge our civil officials the right to shut down certain roadways and close vulnerable neighborhoods in anticipation of unusual weather events and even to issue strongly worded warnings to stay in our homes. Most of us probably wouldn’t object to the closings of affected neighborhoods or even our governors issuing shoot-on-sight orders to National Guard troops to suppress looting following a disaster. The law-abiding citizenry understands that a true need exists for our civic leaders to have that kind of emergency authority.

But closing all the streets and all the means of transport in an entire city of millions of inhabitants and ordering all the citizens off the streets under penalty of arrest? I lived through a few hurricanes in Northwest Florida, and my experience is that sheriff’s deputies will bang on your door and warn you to evacuate, but they don’t arrest you if you don’t. Of course, that’s the conservative Old South, where you have the right to be a stubborn fool, and even to die like one. It is your life, after all. By the way, this fool, young and risk-oriented back then, sat out that first one but evacuated during all the rest after that intense initial learning experience. But the choice was mine, and my governor, a conservative Republican, nor even his conservative Democrat successor, didn’t usurp my basic civil rights to save me from my own foolishness.

And therein is the striking difference; both Cuomo and de Blasio are northeastern liberals and adherents to a belief system that there is no such thing as government too big, with too much control over every aspect of the lives of the citizenry. We have just witnessed a demonstration of what they believe are the limits of their civil authority, which are pretty much summed up as none, zip, nada.

Finally, we come to the most ominous lesson to be learned from Juno. These ultra-liberal Democrats ordered the citizenry off the streets and into their homes under penalty of arrest and prosecution for a coming weather event – not a civil insurrection or lethal epidemic or pending attack. And they did this to a constitutionally armed public, one armed in spite of the fervent desire and best efforts of these same two politicians and their Democrat party to disarm it. Please do not think that I am proposing that there should have been any sort of resistance to their overreach of authority. What I am trying to make you ponder is what, if any, limitations such big-government nanny-state politicians might see on their emergency powers if their party should ever be successful in disarming the public. And the worrisome truth is that those two bedrock principles of socialist governance, officious control of your life and government control of all guns, reside side by side in that fevered swamp that is the liberal Democrat brain.

To me, that is the real lesson we should be taking from Juno.

Crossposted at American Thinker

A retired Army lieutenant colonel, Anthony Shaffer, whom FOX News uses frequently to determine goings-on in the Pentagon, revealed last night that the Army is not the culprit in the cover-up of the Bowe Bergdahl investigation. According to the colonel’s internal Pentagon sources, the Army has already charged Bergdahl with desertion but has been stymied in pursuing the normal court-martial processes due to oppressive command influence from the White House. According to Shaffer’s sources, the immediate culprit is Ben Rhodes, current deputy national security adviser for strategic communication for Barack Obama.

White House fear is totally understandable. If you had traded five key terrorist leaders for one American G.I. and your hero turned out to be a deserter who willingly left his post and his unit and went over to the enemy in time of war, wouldn’t you be embarrassed? Worse, had you quite publicly invited said deserter’s parents to stroll congenially and intimately through the White House Rose Garden with you, and then had that event broadcast ’round the world, wouldn’t you be embarrassed?

However, their fear is in no way defensible. If the president is embarrassed by his reckless diplomacy and his foolishness in courting the family of a possible traitor, so be it. Were I the president, heads would be rolling for allowing such a public relations disaster to occur and for making me look like such a naïve fool. Of course, the possibility exists that the president was fully aware of a completed Army investigation that had concluded that Bergdahl was a deserter and that this was merely another one of Obama’s long-middle-finger gestures to the nation he purportedly leads.

But in no way does the extant situation justify a national cover-up of the truth surrounding this soldier’s treachery. The Army has determined that sufficient evidence exists to court-martial PFC Bergdahl (a PFC when he deserted but promoted in absentia to SGT) for desertion in the face of the enemy. Also, he most probably bears some legal culpability for the several deaths of those soldiers who went searching for him in the belief he might have been kidnapped by the enemy. Most importantly, the military and veterans’ communities are entitled to a legal resolution of this situation, as it bears directly on the preservation of military rules of duty, honor, and country.

This situation stinks worse than my cat’s litter box, and it is unseemly for our commander-in-chief to be in this particular cat box doing his very best to cover up the political pile of poop that Bowe Bergdahl has become. Obama can delegate Ben Rhodes to kick all the presidential sand he wants, but no amount of White House effort is ever going to cover the huge political stink that the Bowe Bergdahl affair is about to become.

Crossposted at American Thinker

I know that it’s easy, if you watch television or surf the internet much, to assume that blacks constitute a much larger segment of American society than they actually do. Foreigners with no knowledge of America’s demographics could be forgiven for believing that blacks make up almost half of this nation’s population if American advertising and entertainment are their only sources of such information. In both television programming and advertising, the liberal powers in both industries go to laughable extremes to portray America as the multicultural ideal, seizing every opportunity to depict any gathering of citizens as being populated with a healthy representation of non-whites.

And with the way NCAA schools have prostituted football by exploiting black athletes with worthless degrees either unearned or in valueless degree fields such as African studies, unaware watchers of collegiate games could also be forgiven if they assume blacks to be in the majority in America based on their numerical superiority on the playing field. Then, of course, the NFL continues the exploitation of these black athletes by squeezing the most out of them for a few short years of high pay and hard hitting, a profession that fewer and fewer white athletes are willing to submit themselves to. NFL watchers might also assume a larger black presence in America than the reality of somewhere around 13%.

All that is by way of understanding how some people may miscalculate the true power of the black minority in America, as one of its more radical leaders appears to have done. Malik Zulu Shabazz, aka Paris Lewis, a former head of the New Black Panther Party, who fancies himself some sort of pseudo-military field marshal, wearing five stars on the stiff collars of his olive drab uniform, has recently issued a call to arms to the black community, intoning that 2015 is the year for them to “build up their army” and “go to the gun range.” Here’s a quote from Breitbart:

“And Mister Malcolm X, he consistently teaches us self defense,” Shabazz said. “The most honorable Elijah Muhammad continuously teaches us self defense. The honorable Marcus Mosiah Garvey teaches us self defense, and we know, our leader and our teacher the honorable Khalid Abdul Muhammad teaches us self defense. What am I saying? Right now it’s time to build up that army. Right now it’s time for us to build up those corps, those troops. It’s time to get strong. It’s time for lifting weights and working out and going to the gun range and all of that.”

Now, I understand that Mr. Shabazz – or Field Marshal Shabazz, whichever he prefers – is stressing the self-defense aspect of preparing for racial conflict. What I think he fails to comprehend is the true number of his forces and the rebound impact of his militant exhortations on the white people of America he would arm his black forces against. The most radicalized and militant segment of black America to whom Shabazz speaks are mostly urban blacks living in liberal Democrat-controlled cities where legal gun ownership is severely constrained and the presence of the type of gun ranges that lend themselves to combat-style weaponry training are in short supply. On the other hand, both such weaponry and such firing ranges are in plentiful supply in the rural areas that surround most of the liberal urban enclaves that Marshal Shabazz’s potential armed forces inhabit. And those surrounding areas are generally populated by conservative white folks, who, as another black leader noted, cling to their guns and their Bibles while generally viewing the kind of militancy called for by Shabazz with an attitude best expressed by their equally determined forbears:

“Don’t Tread on Me.”

Personally, I’m of the opinion that Shabazz should cut back on his television-watching and maybe go spend some time on the range. It’s a wonderful activity for tightly refocusing the mind.

Crossposted at American Thinker