The Conservative Soldier

As dignitaries and the less dignified descended on Copenhagen for Friday’s gut wrenching 2016 Olympics vote, word spread like wildfire this morning across the ancient Danish capital.

The Red Coats are coming! The Red Coats are coming! It is official: the red state loathing, ideologically red-leaning Socialists/Marxists from America’s occupied White House, POTUS Barack Hussein Obama and the First Leftist Michelle Hussein Obama, are joining Chicago’s delegation for the pivotal final pitch in Denmark. And, of course, the Presidential Teleprompter will have a seat on Air Force One, too.

Remember the 2008 Presidential campaign, when the First Leftist rarely had been proud of her country? That was then. This is a new campaign season and Michelle Hussein is really, really proud of her hometown of Chicago, a candidate to host the 2016 Olympic Games. What’s not to love about the Windy City? In the Obamas’ Chicago you can reside in a $1 million-plus South Side home underwritten by a convicted influence peddler and money launderer. You can attend a church for 20 years that is built on a firm foundation of Black Nationalism (anti-white racism) without explanation, and still become a President of the U.S. who accuses all dissenters of being … tell ‘em, Barry … RACISTS!

Meanwhile, back in Copenhagen — the Salty Old Queen of the Sea long before anyone had heard of Barney Frank — the breathless countdown is on.

For the next few days, the Olympic ideal is cast aside for politics, campaigning and silent smearing of opponents. Copenhagen is regarded as Europe’s cleanest metropolis, but after Friday it will be littered by the broken dreams of supporters of the three candidate cities deemed unworthy to become stewards of the International Olympic Committee’s most precious asset, the Games. It might even be littered by alcohol soaked human beings staggering into the night, distraught in the aftermath of Friday’s balloting among the roughly 100 IOC voters. From the final four — Chicago, Madrid, Rio de Janiero and Tokyo — only one is chosen.

Writes one Olympic blogger waiting for Obama’s arrival: “The anticipation simply gets to build with delicious intensity all this week.”

Since approximately five minutes after the voters of the United States selected an unproven, unknown junior Senator from Illinois to become their President, speculation has run rampant as to whether B. Hussein would become the first American President to help with an Olympic pitch. Obama refused to commit until Monday. He has been too busy trampling on the Constitution, hiring radical policy czars and violating the law.

Wonder if he’ll manage to muster the support of French IOC voters in Copenhagen after failing to turn France’s Nicolas Sarkozy into a hope-n-changer last week at the United Nations? Sarkozy, the French President, was disturbed by Obama’s empty rhetoric, the very same rhetoric that turns so-called journalists from CBS and NBC into puddles of mush.

“We live in a real world not a virtual world,” he told the 15-member Security Council. “And the real world expects us to take decisions. President Obama dreams of a world without weapons … but right in front of us two countries are doing the exact opposite.”

Wonder if Obama will narrate as IOC voters are shown images of Derrion Albert, 18, a Chicago high school honors student beaten to death last week — as a bystander videotaped it — by three teenagers using two-by-fours as their weapon of choice.

Wonder if Obama will assure IOC voters that best-in-class health care awaits them when they visit Chicago, even as he uses every resource at his disposal to destroy the world’s greatest medical system? Wonder if he’ll mention that 56% percent of voters in the latest Rasmussen poll oppose his scheme to radically dismantle America’s revered private health care infrastructure?

Wonder of he’ll reference the sudden indifference of the U.S. toward escalating violence and Taliban-led terrorist insurgence across Afghanistan?

Byron York on Fox News Special Report observed: “(Obama) has spent more time with David Letterman than talking with (head of U.S. Afghan forces) General McChrystal.”

And, finally, who can help but wonder if Barack Hussein Obama will attend the 2016 Games should they be hosted by Chicago? By then, he will have been a private citizen for more than three years.

I heard a Chicago television reporter this week refer to U.S. President Barack Hussein Obama as an “international rock star”. This was not overheard at a Starbuck’s. She said it live, on the air.

Her gushing characterization came during a segment explaining why leaders of Chicago’s bid to host the 2016 Olympic Games are hanging on a thread of hope. They are said to be hoping Obama, for whom Chicago is an adopted hometown, will travel to Copenhagen ahead of the International Olympic Committee’s decisive 2016 vote on Oct. 2. So far, he hasn’t decided what to do. The IOC must choose between four cities — Chicago, Madrid, Rio de Janiero and Tokyo — then sit back and pray they’ve done the right thing seven years from now.

Chicago’s campaign team and, by extension, the public continue to view Obama as an earthly God who can enter a room and change the course of history by reading scripted words. Essentially, they are employing the logic of a crack cocaine addict. Just one more fix, man, and we can make the world right. If Obama shows up in Denmark, it’s game, set, match for Mayor Richard Daley’s All-Star Team. Never mind that Chicago’s bid is technically sound — in some areas superior — and is led by a widely regarded business icon, Patrick Ryan, and a famous mayor (Daley).

This Obama obsession prevails even though the former junior Senator from Illinois has not managed to end Washington gridlock or turn a massive U.S. economic tanker clear of jagged shores. He keeps reading the scripted words and rolling out his transformational agendas but the only tangible result is that more than 50% of the nation disapproves of his job performance.

The accidental President (by virtue of being an accidental Illinois Senator) is emerging, not as a Great Messiah, but as the reckless force behind an economic tsunami that threatens the influence and reputation of the United States. That’s why I am dumbfounded by those who insist Obama is Chicago’s trump card in its pursuit of the 2016 Games.

To believe he can be a game changer just by showing up is to demonstrate a fundamental lack of understanding of the IOC’s membership, and there has been precious little reporting by Chicago mainstream media that answers the question, “Who are these guys?”

The membership of the IOC is more than 54 percent European, along with roughly 22 percent North and Latin Americans (including just two U.S. members) and 19 percent Asians.

The people who decide where the Olympic Games go are a conflicted lot, to say the least. Many are U.S.-educated professionals who returned to Socialist, even Communist, homelands, using their intellect, family names and political savvy to secure lives of wealth and influence. The most powerful patriarch within the global Olympic movement is Spain’s Juan Antonio Samaranch, IOC Honorary President for Life. He once was an operative in the brutal monarchy of Gen. Francisco Franco (and son Juan Jr. is now an IOC member/voter).  The current President of the IOC, Jacques Rogge, is a surgeon from Belgium, a heavily unionized nation under a constitutional monarchy.

Additionally, more than a few IOC voters from Africa, Asia and Latin America have risen through the ranks of deeply rooted, tyrannical/dictatorial political systems, enriching themselves in societies where the world’s material and monetary spoils are not accessible to the masses, and where sports administrators wield great power.

Loyalties among IOC members are wildly fractured, which often causes balloting for Olympic host cities to be skewed by block voting and side deals having nothing to do with the merits of the candidates, or their elected political celebrities. If you don’t believe it, research the circumstances under which Lillehammer (Norway) won host city rights to the 1994 Olympic Winter Games, or Sochi (Russia) the 2014 Winter Games.

While the American Entitlement Class remains drunk on Obama Kool-Aid, cheering as Newsweek declares we’re “all Socialists now”, do not be too sure that IOC members will be enamored of a United States flirting with hope and transformational change.

The dirty little secret among IOC voters is that the privately financed, Capitalism fueled 1984 Los Angeles Olympic Games saved the Olympic movement from financial collapse. Does anyone think IOC members voted to put the 1996 Games in Atlanta (right) because they were turned on by the Coca-Cola museum, CNN Center or obsolete Fulton County Stadium? The Games were here in 1996 for the same reason they were in Salt Lake City in 2002. Free market capitalism and multinational U.S. corporations with deep pockets (not to mention General Electric’s National Broadcasting Company and the hundreds of million of dollars it has paid for U.S. broadcast rights) work wonders on the IOC’s bottom line. Plus, when the Games are here, IOC members have an excuse to squeeze in a visit to the Mayo Clinic, or Sloan-Kettering Cancer Center, or Cedars Sinai Medical Center, or any number of other beacons of America’s envied private health care system.

So, then, can anyone truly articulate the upside to a live Barack Obama pitch in Copenhagen? By 2016, this nation might well be a severely diminished Obamerica. Will it still be the go-to venue for the Olympic Games? Will these United States that IOC members rely on to prop up their increasingly irrelevant global sports event still be an economic superpower with world-class military and security personnel to protect the athletes and visiting dignitaries?

If Chicago really believes it needs an international rock star to prevail in next month’s voting maybe it should think about finding one that has memorized the words and sings from the heart.

Bud Eungard was a great guy. I admired him from the time I was old enough to understand that he was my uncle.

Uncle Bud was a cool guy. He had cool cars.

He had a Volkswagen Karmann Ghia, one of the first imported German two-seaters in America. I remember the day he gave me a ride. I can still feel that VW engine.

He had a 1967 Chevy Impala. Purple. Today, they’d call it plum. He had a 1976 Pontiac Trans Am. Red. Nice ride.

Uncle Bud was a resourceful guy.

He turned his big backyard in Plainfield, IL, into a dirt bike track. Like so many of his projects, this one was for his son, Bill, and his neighborhood buddies and his other nephew, Dave. Bill and Dave liked motorbikes and speed and danger. Their cousin, Steve (me), was not quite so adventurous.

But Uncle Bud never held that against me.

Uncle Bud had a motorcycle, too. As a matter of fact, through the eyes of a little boy, Uncle Bud had it all. He had tools and gadgets. He made things.

One winter he made some kind of a space-aged hovercraft. There are photos to prove it. He made it for the kids, of course.

When I was no longer a kid, I still admired Uncle Bud. I admired and saluted his service to our country. He enlisted in the Army in the 1950s,  straight out of high school, during The Korean War. He left his bride at home to serve a cause greater than himself. He served in Europe during that time, at the onset of The Cold War.

Uncle Bud was a true American. A Patriot. He wore the uniform; then he came home and went to work. He was married and had a son. He took care of his family. He was a wonderful husband and (cool) dad. He was devoted to his two sweet sisters, who were absolutely crazy about their little brother.

He lived his whole adult life in the same house in Plainfield. He rarely complained about anything. He loved to eat home cooked meals and good desserts. He told great stories and pulled off a lot of memorable pranks. He had a lot of friends. When they retired they took up golf. In recent years, Bud and I talked a lot about our shared frustrations with golf — and liberals.

Near the end of his life, when he could have been a bitter guy, he never seemed to change. He lived out his days in a wheelchair. It was no Karmann Ghia, to be sure. And he was not particularly happy about the Korean-made car he bought himself to replace an aging Ford.

But Uncle Bud was an optimist his whole life and that wasn’t about to change. The last time I saw him he told me why he bought the sedan made by the Korean car company, rather than a U.S.-made vehicle.

The Korean car had the longest warranty.