This ain't Hell, but you can see it from here

Category: Historical

  • Sarkozy; America liberated us. This is an eternal debt.

     

    Photo from Whitehouse.gov

    Coming back from vacation, I’m trying to catch up news and found the headline quote in a link from Fausta’s Blog. I thought maybe I’d been away longer than a week – it was a quote we could have only dreamed of a scant few months ago. It’s been a long time since a French leader recognized the United States as anything except an adversary – most of my half-century of life on this planet.

    The quote (as reported by the BBC) from Sarkozy came from the speech he gave to Congress, but the rest of the paragraph is more heartwarming;

    “America liberated us. This is an eternal debt,” he said, adding: “I want to tell you that whenever an American soldier falls somewhere in the world, I think of what the American army did for France.”

    The BBC also reported that Mr. Sarkozy was at Mount Vernon yesterday discussing events with President Bush (press conference video here). That’s particularly significant to me because of what resides there (besides George and Martha Washington). On the wall in the entranceway to Mount Vernon hangs an ancient key.

    It’s the key to the west portal of the Bastille prison, where many of the French monarchy’s political prisoners were held. The storming of the Bastille on July 14th, 1789, to the French, equates to our own Boston tea party or the skirmish at Boston Commons. It was the opening salvo in their own fight for liberty.

    In 1790, General Lafayette sent the key to the Bastille to George Washington – to me, that key represents France’s indebtedness to the United States for influencing their own struggle for freedom. Unfortunately, that link has been diluted by five French constitutions, and communism (or socialism, or progressivism, or whatever you want to call that crappy religion to which the peawitted are clinging these days).

    I’ll never forget the first time I saw the key when the guide explained it’s history. Always the cynic, I thought “Ungrateful frogs”. I’d wished that the whole country of France could see that key on that wall – maybe it’d cause an national epiphany. Then I bought a replica which is now on my bookcase between the bronze busts of Washington and Reagan.

    Fausta quotes from the translation of Sarkozy’s speech to Congress earlier in the day;

    What makes America strong is the strength of this ideal that is shared by all Americans and by all those who love her because they love freedom.

    America’s strength is not only a material strength, it is first and foremost a spiritual and moral strength. No one expressed this better than a black pastor who asked just one thing of America: that she be true to the ideal in whose name he, the grandson of a slaves, felt so deeply American.

    I still can’t shake the feeling that I must be dreaming.

    Say Anything has video of Sarkozy’s speech to Congress. Rob echoed my thoughts exactly while I watched it;

    He speaks of America in such glowing terms that you almost wonder if he isn’t, in some ways, more American than certain Democrats I could think of.

    And if you went looking for reports of Mr. Sarkozy’s speech this morning in the Washington Post, you’d have been disappointed. The first article I came across was a Reuters attempt at serious journalism – which failed, by the way;

    French President Nicolas Sarkozy returned home on Thursday from Washington to face skepticism about his new transatlantic friendship and a month of strikes that signal a growing pile of domestic problems.

    I wonder when the rest of the Left is going to recognize America’s contribution to liberating the world.

  • It Would Have Been More Apropos To Use A Bat…

    A glass monument to dead commie Che Guevara has been shot and shattered in Venezuela.
    Apparently, someone didn’t think honoring a man who beat people to death with bats was in good taste, no matter how well T shirts with his picture sell.
    Brietbart has the story here:

    Breitbart/AP image
    They should have used a bat on it…

  • The Cow and the Putz want a Woodstock Museum

    Also from the Examiner, written by Susan Ferrachio, more pork from the Senators for New York; “Schumer, Clinton get skewered over $1M Woodstock earmark”

    It was a little like throwing a juicy steak into a pit of hungry lions. Republicans could hardly contain their glee Thursday at the prospect of skewering Democrats on the Senate floor over a $1 million earmark for a museum in upstate New York commemorating the 1969 Woodstock concert.

    The earmark was requested by New York’s two Democratic senators, Charles Schumer and presidential contender Hillary Rodham Clinton, who said the money would help build a performing arts center that could boost the area’s depressed economy.

    “I’m proud of this earmark, it’s the right type of earmark,” Schumer said on the Senate floor during a debate over a Republican amendment to remove the money from a health and human services spending bill.

    Yes, that’s what New York needs – a museum to celebrate smelly hippies. I’ll give Mr. Schumer a little history lesson about the “area’s depressed economy” – Mrs. Clinton should read, too, because I’m sure the carpetbagger doesn’t know about New York recent history.

    In the 70s, Upstate New York was a booming economy – manufacturing and retail facilities across the State. Several chain stores were founded there, auto manufacturers, typewriter-makers, breweries, even chocolate factories kept the hard-working locals employed. Then we got Mario Cuomo for governor.

    Before Cuomo, there was a six-month residency requirement before anyone could collect welfare in New York State – which paid some of the highest benefits in the country because the economy there did so well. Cuomo waived that requirement.

    Well, a blind man could see what would happen next – welfare recipients streamed into New York State from the South and cashed in on their good fortune. New York State’s economy flourished for a while, but the State government had a hard time paying out the benefits to so many people – so Cuomo’s answer to the problem was what you might expect from a tax-and-spend liberal. Raise taxes on businesses – and a blind man could also see the impending result. Businesses left New York for the lower tax States in the South.

    Now Upstate New York is a wasteland of closed factories and department stores. But Albany still can’t get off of the tax teat – despite 12 years of Govenor Pataki (who was quite a disappointment to me) – and Spitzer isn’t helping either. New York State is like a third world country – since there is no real money in the State, they depend on out-of-Staters to bring them cash in the form of tourist dollars.

    Now Schumer and Clinton want to perpetuate that strategy by using taxpayer dollars to build, of all things, a Woodstock Museum – a monument to sloth and marginal talent. Why attract musicians to New York State? They don’t have any money – that’s why they’re musicians. 

    UPDATE: Apparently the museum was shot down in the Senate, but I suspect that Republicans wouldn’t have blocked it if it’d been two different Democrats trying to spend tax payer dollars. For example, if the museum was being built in Nancy Pelosi’s district. 

  • “Don’t shoot, we’re Republicans”

    Here’s an interesting bit of history I found this morning from the always entertaining “Finestkind Clinic and Fish Market“ about the US Navy ship William D. Porter that almost sunk President Roosevelt;

    Sometimes the things that almost happened are as interesting as the things that did. Nearly every photo history book of World War II shows the famous picture of President Franklin Delano Roosevelt meeting with Winston Churchill and Josef Stalin at Tehran in November 1943. The accompanying caption usually mentions something about the meeting solidifying the alliance that would go on to win World War II. Rarely mentioned, however, is that the historic moment might never have occurred — because the president, the entire Joint Chiefs of Staff and numerous other top American leaders on board USS Iowa were nearly victims of a torpedo attack on the way to the summit.

    […]

    After 1943 the ship was commonly hailed by other ships with the greeting: “Don’t shoot! We’re Republicans!” Willie Dee became a black sheep, and sailors like Bill Glover, a 17-year-old from Montgomery, Ala., when he joined the destroyer in 1944, were not happy about being assigned to it. “In less than a year after launching, it had done several things we heard about, so I didn’t want to go to the Porter,” he said. “They acknowledged it when I got on board, laughed about it some. Nobody had gotten hurt, so you could joke about it some. And plus, there was a war on so we had other things to do.”

    Read the whole story at History Net – it’s long but interesting.

  • Clinton, Clinton & Co.

    The Wall Street Journal’s Jackie Calmes writes that Hillary is easing her “husband” back into her campaign in “Two-for-One Deal” – as if we’ve completely forgotten that 90s brought us to the point where we are today;

    Hillary and Bill Clinton kicked off her fall campaign for the Democratic presidential nomination, a rare joint effort calling to mind the uncharted waters of a White House with an ex-president in residence. Many voters in their audiences, even some nonsupporters, saw the potential precedent as a plus.

    The Clintons’ Labor Day weekend of stumping in New Hampshire and Iowa, the states with the first nominating contests in four months, was the third time they have publicly campaigned together this year. The campaign has focused on letting the New York senator make her case independently of her husband.

    Yes, she made her case independently of her husband – and her campaign, using the tactics of her husband’s 1996 campaign, began taking in money from shady characters, as documented quite thoroughly by Curt of Flopping Aces, Gateway Pundit and Michele Malkin.

    mRed at Invicible Armor tells us that, in true Clinton form, Bill says you could have knocked him over with a feather when he found out that yet another Chinese businessman handing the Clinton campaign cash was a crook. You’d think that it’d be the other way around, wouldn’t you? I’d be more surprised that legitimate Chinese businessmen were contributing to the Clinton campaign.

    Bill Gertz in today’s Washington Times recounts some of the events we have forgotten from a decade ago;

    The Senate Governmental Affairs Committee investigated what it called the Clinton campaign fundraising “scandal” in 1997 and issued a report showing that four persons were linked to large illicit contributions thought to have come from China’s government through Hong Kong.

    […]

    William C. Triplett II, a former Senate Foreign Relations Committee staff member whose 1998 book “Year of the Rat” highlighted the 1996 funding scandal, said he suspects that the Chinese are involved in Mrs. Clinton’s presidential bid.

    “What we saw in 1996 was similar,” Mr. Triplett said. “Whenever the Clintons have money trouble, they turn to the Chinese and the Chinese don’t let them down. Perhaps it is only a coincidence that both 1996 and 2008 are Years of the Rat in the Chinese calendar.”

    The WSJ story quotes the most ominous statement from Hillary yet;

    “The day I’m elected,” she said, “I’m going to be asking distinguished Americans — including my husband — of both parties, to start traveling around the world, and not just talking to governments and leaders, but talking directly to people and telling them that America is back.”

    Yeah, that crooked, panty-waisted America that kept turning the other cheek towards al Qaeda, handed out money to bribe corrupt governements and apologies for things we’d never done  and sold off our defensive technology to China in exchange for illegal campaign cash will indeed be back.

  • Castro; Clinton/Obama endorsement

    According to Reuters and CNN, Tio Fidel is endorsing a Clinton/Obama ticket for next year;

    Ailing Cuban leader Fidel Castro is tipping Democratic candidates Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama to team up and win the U.S. presidential election.Clinton leads Obama in the race to be the Democratic nominee for the November 2008 election, and Castro said they would make a winning combination.

    I guess this will do wonders for them – just like the Osama bin Laden endorsement for Kerry/Edwards in 2004. I’m sure the left is positively giddy about this high-profile endorsement from the docile, harmless Castro.

    It seems he had some other nice to things about our other worthless Democrat Presidents;

    Castro said former President Bill Clinton was “really kind” when he bumped into him and the two men shook hands at a U.N. summit meeting in 2000. He also praised Clinton for sending elite police to “rescue” shipwrecked Cuban boy Elian Gonzalez from the home of his Miami relatives in 2000 to end an international custody battle.

    […]

    He said his favorite U.S. president since 1959 was Jimmy Carter, another Democrat, because he was not an “accomplice” to efforts to violently overthrow the Cuban government.

    See, anyone willing to forget that Castro is a bloodthirsty tyrant with hundreds of prisoners of conscience rotting in jail cells is just fine and dandy.

    Reuters also mentioned that Eisenhower cut off diplomatic relations with Cuba – but they neglect to mention why, I will. The first year after Castro toppled the Batista regime, in 1959, he sent a small ragtag force of his guerilla army to invade the Panama Canal Zone. The small force of about 50 was rounded up as they landed on the beach at Colon, Panama by the Panamanian National Guard under the cover American air power and naval batteries with no casualties and sent packing back to Cuba.

    The intent was to incite the Panamanians to drive the evil gringos from the Canal Zone. So it’s really no wonder that the President cut off relations, since the Cubans tried to invade US territory, is it? And you’d think it’s be worth mentioning.

    Reuters also neglected to mention that during the Carter years, the Soviets stationed 10,000 Soviet combat troops in Cuba in the event that Carter decided to react to the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan. And Carter allowed Cuban troops to have their run of Africa (Rhodesia, Angola, South Africa, the Congo) and Central America (Columbia, Panama, El Salvador, Honduras, Guatemala, Nigaragua) inciting armed conflict and terrorizing the populations where ever they could. 

    Is it any wonder he’d endorse a corrupt Presidential candidate with an half-witted idiot for a running mate?

    Stix Blogs wonders why the world’s thugs support Democrats whereas I don’t have to ask.

    Ace of Spades says that fugitive felons also support Clinton. big endorsement week for her, I guess.

    George Moneo at Babalu Blog has a memory like mine.

  • The surge against the surge is failing, or not

    Carl Levin and Dick Durbin concede that the surge has had spectacular results against al Qaeda – as if they could even begin to believe their lyin’ eyes. But they add the proviso that the Iraqi government is failing the progress our troops are making for them. The Washington Post, in the meantime, chooses to follow the leader of Congress’ “Out of Iraq Caucus” Jan Schakowsky; adament, unbendable intentionally ignorant of the realities of the world;

    …the outspoken antiwar liberal resolved to keep her opinions to herself. “I would listen and learn,” she decided.

    At times that proved a challenge, as when Deputy Prime Minister Barham Salih told her congressional delegation, “There’s not going to be political reconciliation by this September; there’s not going to be political reconciliation by next September.” Schakowsky gulped — wasn’t that the whole idea of President Bush’s troop increase, to buy time for that political progress?
     
    But the real test came over a lunch with Gen. David H. Petraeus, who used charts and a laser pointer to show how security conditions were gradually improving — evidence, he argued, that the troop increase is doing some good.

    Still, the U.S. commander cautioned, it could take another decade before real stability is at hand. Schakowsky gasped. “I come from an environment where people talk nine to 10 months,” she said, referring to the time frame for withdrawal that many Democrats are advocating. “And there he was, talking nine to 10 years.”

    Imagine that! A part of the world that has been steeped in turmoil for more than five decades won’t be tamed in the next few months – it may take another decade to make 6th Century throwbacks stop bombing schools and marketplaces. Of course, this realization only reinforces Schakowsky’s knee-jerk, emotive calls to pull the troops out of Iraq and condemn the region to another several decades of horror and injustice.

    The lack of political progress among Iraq’s rival factions and Petraeus’s estimate of the time needed to stabilize the nation left Schakowsky all the more convinced that Democrats must force Bush to begin bringing troops home.

    Insuring that in another 15 years we’ll be forced to go back and finish the job AGAIN. The Democrats and the media forced us to abandon the attack on Hussein in 1991 – before there was al Qaeda, before the cowardly actions over Mogadishu made the world less fearful of American resolve. Before our response to agression became a few cruise missiles fired at empty tents, empty buildings and asprin factories – before we merely put terrorists in jail for their attacks on the World Trade Center.

    But Democrats aren’t happy to undermine our own security, they especially enjoy deriding the Iraqis – causing our allies to lash out;

    Nouri al-Maliki, who is fighting to hold his government together, issued a series of stinging ripostes against a variety of foreign officials who recently have spoken negatively about his leadership. But those directed at Democrats Clinton, of New York, and Levin, of Michigan, were the most strident.

    “There are American officials who consider Iraq as if it were one of their villages, for example Hillary Clinton and Carl Levin. They should come to their senses,” al-Maliki said at a news conference.

    The New York Times decides that what the Vietnamese went through wasn’t so bad, so maybe we should let the Iraqis suffer for a few decades under the boot of radical Islamism;

    Vietnam today is a unified and stable nation whose Communist government poses little threat to its neighbors and is developing healthy ties with the United States. Mr. Bush visited Vietnam last November; a return visit to the White House this summer by Nguyen Minh Triet was the first visit by a Vietnamese head of state since the war.

    “The Vietnam comparison should invite us to think harder about how to minimize the consequences of our military failure,” Mr. Bacevich added. “If one is really concerned about the Iraqi people, and the fate that may be awaiting them as this war winds down, then we ought to get serious about opening our doors, and to welcoming to the United States those Iraqis who have supported us and have put themselves and their families in danger.”

    I love how the Left likes to point out the “military failures” in Vietnam, yet they can’t point to a single military defeat. The only failure in Vietnam was the anti-war crowd’s failure to admit that we should have shut down the Ho Chi Minh Trail in Cambodia in the early years – that would have cut the time we fought the war in half and South Vietnam would be a democracy today. Just like we should seal off Syria and Iran from Iraq today – but like Nixon’s actions in Cambodia, the Left would call it an “expansion of the war” – instead of an attempt to actually win the war.

    On August 5th the Washington Post started a series on Congressmembers in their districts during their summer recess and explained the dilema facing them;

    With Congress beginning its summer recess, supporters of the war are expecting attacks and protests from war opponents, and many lawmakers are looking for bipartisan consensus on a new war strategy that has so far eluded them.

    Maybe they’re having such trouble because instead of finding a “bipartisan consensus” they should be looking for a working military solution – or they should sit down and stfu.

    I wonder why Tzun Tsu and vonClauswitz never mentioned that wars should be fought by committees and consensus? Maybe because it doesn’t work – have the Democrats never heard of “unity of command”?

    Of course, in a last desparate attempt to save the surge against the surge, the Left turns to Huffington Post to undermine the good order and discipline of the military  (hat tip to COBDanny) and urges General Pace to fire President Bush. Ya know, like the militaries in third world countries do all of the time. And HuffPo commenters heartily agree;

    Unfortunately, the fact remains that there are serious reasons to consider any and all scenarios, or remedies because of GWB, the worst President ever. Why should anyone else care about the rule of law when he hasn’t concerned himself with it for the 6 long years while he has crapped all over the Constitution and ignored law after law?

    I think that the creative thinking by Mr. Lewis should be commended and that if General Pace is the patriot he claims to be, he should consider the suggestion. My God, our nation as we know it is at stake. 

     I’d like to know, just for my own reference, what laws the President has ignored and when he “crapped on the Constitution”. Fortunately for me, I won’t be waiting with bated breath.

    But the anti-war Left loves this country and the Constitution, don’t they?

    I BELIEVE IT IS NOW TIME TO DEMAND AND SCHEDULE THE SECOND CONSTITUTIONAL CONVENTION.

    We have GOT to get this little problem of hubris and ‘reinterpretation’ by the Whiggy ones settled once and for all, so U.S. can move forward.

    They love the Constitution so much, they want to rewrite it – as if I’d just stand aside and let them. Maybe they should put it to a national referendum – but they couldn’t do that, actually. Then they’d find out how many Americans oppose them in an undeniable actual vote count instead of one of those vacuous polls to which they cling so dearly. Or a lopsided Electoral College vote that favors the people who drain the country’s coffers over those who fill it. I doubt it’d even be close.

    CoBDanny reads my mind, and even pirates my legal research into the Smith Act to explain to the little worm why his idea just won’t work and why he should probably do some jail time for good measure.

    The death throes of the surge against the surge will be played out on September 15th in Washington – and I’ll be there to chronicle the last desparate gasp. So, too, will the Gathering of Eagles. Anyone else going?

  • Remember Stalin

    In her article “Reins on Rememberance” Marsha Lipman in the today’s Washington Post laments Russia’s tendancy to forget it’s own bloody history during the Stalin purges of the late 1930s;

    This month marks 70 years since the drastic surge of Stalin’s terror: In 1937 the Kremlin butcher scrapped even the faintest appearance of court procedures. The infamous “troika trials” — a system of justice by rubber-stamped death sentences — killed more than 436,000 in one year. The anniversary observances were intended to honor the victims. But the ceremony held earlier this month at Butovo, the site of mass killings on the outskirts of Moscow, revealed the government’s desire to keep the public’s mind off reflections about terror and its perpetrators.

    The Russian Orthodox Church oversaw the ceremony, a religious service focused on the martyrdom of the executed, not on the crimes or who committed them. In an interview about three years ago, the superior of the Butovo church said he thought it best not to differentiate between those who were shot and those who shot them: “One shouldn’t search for who was right and who was wrong.”

     

    Well, that might be convenient for the Russians today, but publicizing who was “wrong” could save another million-or-so lives in the near future.

    There are still purges occuring throughout the world – most notably, in Iran, but the Serb government was just purging it’s territory of Kosovars just a scant few years ago. The Rwandans were ridding themselves of each other less than ten years ago. Zimbabwe is busy freeing themselves from starvation by killing farmers and their families.

    I used to read voraciously about the Stalinist years since I was a teenager when Alexander Solzhenitsyn finally published his books in the west. My favorite has to be “One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich” which described in great detail a single day as a prisoner in the gulags – the reader can’t help but feel relief at the conclusion of the book/day. Another was Robert Conquest’s “Harvest of Sorrow” and perhaps a fitting appendix to the era was Martin Ami’s “Koba the Dread”.

    I guess my point is that, although it’s probably to be expected that a Church would urge people to forgive and forget, to forego judging our antecedents – because afterall, it’s up to God to make final judgements. But in the meantime, all of us mortals should remember what misjudgements of the past brought to the world, and how close to the brink of total anhilation we came all in the name of a single man