The Conservative Soldier

I ate lunch today at my favorite sushi place. While I savored my selected delicacies, I was thinking about Beijing and the Olympic Games beginning there Friday night.

I know, I know. Sushi is of Japanese, not Chinese, origin. But anytime I am struggling with a pair of chopsticks I am reminded anew about our obsession with cultural sensitivity. I love sushi, but I know I would love it more with a knife and fork, and I am sure there are quite a few Hollywood liberals who’d argue that I would “offend” the Japanese by taming my sushi with blatantly Anglo-Saxon utensils.

I am going to make a prediction about the Beijing Games, even while extracting chopstick slivers from my tongue. I predict that we will observe a steady procession of American Olympic athletes, coaches and officials issuing apologies for misguided words and deeds that are obviously offensive to the warm and humanitarian people of China.

It has begun already. Apparently, the mainstream media intend to treat the Chinese like one billion Barack Obamas. Even the hint of criticism will be strictly off limits.

Just yesterday I had to send an email to a journalist friend scolding him for his characterization of four U.S. cyclists arriving at Beijing’s airport. Writing for NBCOlympics.com, he observed that by showing up in surgical or hygienic masks they were guilty of “one of the sorriest breaches of good manners any American Olympic athlete has displayed.” And, as we live in an era when Americans are increasingly embarrassed, if not downright apologetic, for being, well, American, my friend further ranted that our Olympians must be “sensitive always and in all ways to the ways in which Americans can be perceived overseas.”

To be sure, Americans have demonstrated poor judgment and behavior during the Games in recent years. I will grant that. In Seoul in 1988, there were the swimming Olympians who removed a lion’s head sculpture from a hotel lobby. In Nagano (Japan) in 1998, American ice hockey players trashed a few Olympic Village sleeping rooms on their way out of town.

“Duh, they’re hockey players,” didn’t seem an adequate explanation for the Japanese.

As there seems to be trouble in Olympic years ending in 8, perhaps we know why U.S. Olympic officials required every 2008 American qualifier to attend a series of cultural sensitivity seminars. It is not only criminal stuff like stealing or pillaging they’re worried about. Of equal concern is that one of our louts will inadvertently hug a Chinese person. They don’t hug. Which is sad, really, in a nation where so many downtrodden, neglected people appear to be in desperate need of one.

The Wall Street Journal reported that the seminar includes a warning to America’s finest athletic ambassadors to avoid “spearing” food items with chopsticks. Try to explain that to the javelin or fencing guys.

As for the mask-shrouded cyclists, their lungs were clear but U.S. Olympic officials later decided their consciences need a good scrubbing, too. They strong-armed the athletes into issuing a public apology for drawing attention to Beijing’s absolutely horrendous air quality. Some media members were particularly upset that the masks were worn indoors, inside the airport terminal. (Indoor air is pristine, apparently).

“We deeply regret the nature of our choices,” the apologetic statement read, in part.

I deeply regret that the U.S. Olympic Committee made the masks available to any and all team members who asked for them, then immediately made an example out of four who elected to wear them. I regret that somehow it has become culturally insensitive to hammer away at a country that has demonstrated blatant disregard for its air quality, that has no emissions standards, and that had the nerve to present itself as a worthy Olympic Games host in the first place.

Just wait until an American athlete takes a baiting media member’s sashimi morsel hook, line and sinker and goes off on the myriad human rights abuses that seem to be as much a part of China’s fabric as democracy is part of America’s.

The idiots in the U.S. House of Representatives believe American should apologize for the part of its past when citizens owned slaves. But we dare not so much as raise an eyebrow at a Chinese government that enslaves activitists by throwing them in prison and enslaves citizens (living far outside of the Olympics’ bright lights) by ensuring they endure unthinkable poverty.

Please, slap the hands of Olympians who go into a foreign country and mock the language, or the clothing, or the food, or who commit immature, even criminal acts. Send ‘em home. Call ‘em out.

But let’s not spend the next two weeks apologizing because someone wears a mask (Asians wear them quite frequently as a practical defense against smog and germs), or observes that, wow, your pollution really sucks, Mr. Hu.

It is not a question of if, but when, a well intentioned American kid fumbles a piece of fish on a minor chopstick infraction in the Olympic Village.

My advice: Ask for a fork and tell your Chinese hosts the apology is in the mail.

Sen. John McCain’s trusted adviser and campaign co-chairman Phil Gramm was absolutely right when he dismissed our nation’s economic malaise as largely “mental”. There are always going to be people struggling, but in its frenzy to elevate the presidential aspirations of Sen. Barrack Hussein Obama, America’s shameless mainstream media have worked overtime to convince average citizens that we are experiencing an economic freefall.

As Monday’s Exhibit A, I submit Page 38 in the Chicago Sun-Times and a headline above a dispatch by celebrity gossip columnist Bill Zwecker. The headline reads, “Recession? … what recession?”

Zwecker’s column detailed elaborate summer bashes hosted last weekend in the Wisconsin vacation estates of a pair of Chicago’s wealthiest families, the J.B. Pritzkers and the Richard Driehauses. Rod Stewart was flown in to perform at the Pritzker soire.

Guys like Zwecker love to shake a bony finger at these undertaxed rich people, as it is obvious that they should not be partying during an era in American history when (gasp!) some other folks are not equally rich. Not fair. They should give all their excess money to Obama (although J.B. Pritzker was once an avid fund-raiser for Hillary Clinton). Then they should park in front of CNBC and join the national hand-wringing, just after driving their evil, gas guzzling Escalades and Yukons and Hummers into Wisconsin’s Lake Geneva.

This is a typical example of what has been going on for months. The U.S. economy is NOT IN A RECESSION yet headlines like the Sun-Times’ are popping up all over.

Americans would rather fixate on Obama running around the globe apologizing for the spread of democracy than take a few minutes to notice rapidly declining oil prices and a slew of American companies that have reported excellent profit news in recent weeks, blowing way past analysts’ estimates.

And while I think financially secure people should be able to throw a party whenever they desire, I do hope J.B. Pritzker’s sister, Penny, an Obama campaign finance insider, is thinking ahead to the Obama celebration most likely in planning stages for the evening of Nov. 4, 2008.

When Obama loses that night, Election Night 2008, what’s going to happen to all of that chilled jumbo shrimp and Cristal Champagne?

We hear a lot about Washington gridlock. Conventional wisdom holds that Washington is broken, that there has not been so much decay found in Washington since General George opened his mouth and shocked his dentist.

But I am pleased to report that I’ve come back from Washington with good news:

Sorry to disappoint the economic doomsdayers, but Americans are going on vacations, seeing sights and spending money. And, people from across this nation and around the world remain awe struck by the symbolic grandeur of Washington, D.C., and its famous monuments, even though, we are reminded constantly, the United States is increasingly “unpopular”.

Presidential pretender Barack Hussein Obama and power-crazed Democrat leaders desperately try to convince Americans that we are a fragile, despised nation, a shrinking world power, and that we have no hope for the future, at least not without them in charge.

But this sense of futility simply was not apparent as we visited the Washington area last week. The Metro transit system was jammed with tourists. Lines were well out the door in front of attractions such as the National Archives. Lunchtime at Union Station’s mall and food courts was total chaos. Out-of-towners queued up everywhere to devour midday meals. The crowds inside the U.S. Capitol were positively suffocating.

At the Lincoln Memorial, amid sweltering afternoon temperatures, visitors descended from Indianapolis and India, Joplin and Japan, Fresno and France, honoring Abe and perching themselves upon those massive steps to better take in The Mall and the distant Washington Monument.

We need a lot of things in this country. We need more energy independence. We need tighter borders. We need a rebound in the housing markets. Despite our having become rather needy, I was buoyed by my D.C. visit because I came away with a sense that we are certainly not needy when it comes to optimism.

Optimism remains the No. 1 intangible of a thriving democracy, and it is our leading export to be sure. I didn’t hear complaints in Washington. I heard fathers reading from The Constitution — the original version, beneath the glass — to their sons. I heard marveling about the courage of George Washington as we toured his lovely Mt. Vernon above the Potomac River. I heard chuckling over the audacity of Thomas Jefferson, paying off an artist to make him taller than other founding fathers in a portrait that hangs in the Capitol Rotunda.

And, as we stood outside the Oval Office in the west wing of the White House last Sunday, I heard the sound of awed silence, shattered only by the beating of my heart. The Oval Office does not need a President standing in it to blow you away. It is not a room. It is the epicenter of America. It is optimism’s Ground Zero. It was far more emotional to see in person it than I’d anticipated.

At a press conference last week, President Bush reiterated his optimism for the future in the face of tough questions about gasoline and food prices. His upbeat view is born out of knowing how Americans buck up when things get tough.

“The market works,” Bush said. “People can figure out whether they can drive more or less. They can balance their own checkbooks. The American people are plenty capable, plenty smart people.”

Bush has adorned the Oval Office with portraits of plenty capable figures Washington and Lincoln, among others, and a western oil painting, entitled, “A Charge to Keep I Have”, a constant reminder of his job description. There are busts of Eisenhower, Lincoln and Winston Churchill. And, on the center table, sits a bowl bursting with sherbet-hued roses, a special rose breed named after the First Lady, Laura Bush.

The Oval Office stirs the senses, and the mind’s eye. You can clearly see LBJ slumped at his desk, the weight of Vietnam crushing his spirit. You can see Gerald Ford, leaning back contemplatively in his chair, his pipe smoldering. You can see JFK looking his brother Bobby in the eye, calculating the threat of Soviet weapons in Cuba. You can see Ronald Reagan scribbling a note, a jar of jelly beans at the ready.

It is difficult to comprehend what it must feel like for a President to walk in on Day 1 of his new job, and more incomprehensible how it feels to walk out on that final, chilly January morning. The Oval Office has a sobering effect. It is a place that demands courage, love of country, and the unwavering belief in the march of freedom and the sowing of freedom’s seeds, attributes that come naturally to Sen. John McCain. It is not a place for damning America, for belittling the sanctity of democracy, for appeasing Islamic Jihadists, for self-absorbed rhetoric.

The abundant optimism that washes over (most of) us every day in America, and that I saw on the faces of people who flocked to the Nation’s Capital last week, originates at 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue. The Oval Office is its wellspring.

As I turned to go, I wondered if Barack Obama has ever, even once, thought about that.