The Conservative Soldier

Everyone is afraid of something in America.

Afraid of John McCain or Barack H. Obama.

Afraid of gasoline prices and their precipitous rise.

Afraid of inflation. Afraid of job loss. Afraid of declining home values that will keep them from amassing huge home equity debt.

Afraid of salmonella. Afraid of tomatoes. (Will string beans be next?).

Afraid of guns. Afraid of the Supreme Court.

Wallow in all the fear you want. Dive in and wiggle your toes in it. Then grow up and shut up.

Let me tell you what we should be afraid of in America. He’s a 23-year-old guy in Idaho who phoned The Dennis Miller Show on Monday morning. At 23, he is fixated on the War in Iraq, the national debt, his economic stimulus check. He fears we are sending too much of “his” money around the world to support war and foreign aid.

He actually said the U.S. should stop sending food to “people who don’t appreciate it.” Now, I have no idea how often our 23-year-old Hangdog Harry has experienced hunger (beyond the normal pangs that young men feel between meals and snacks), but I have a sneaking suspicion he has no idea what he is talking about.

Dennis Miller, who does not attack guests (to his credit) even when they are really stupid and have teed themselves up for a verbal onslaught, calmly wondered aloud when the kid lost the natural enthusiasm once automatically possessed by youth in America. The 23-year-old did not have an answer. It was obvious he didn’t realize — until that moment — how ridiculous he sounded.

The Fear Syndrome in America is totally ridiculous, too. A democracy is not built on stimulus checks and right-of-birth cheap gas and guaranteed upward mobility. We have millions of people running around this country afraid that they’ll have to stop driving Cadillac Escalades and Lincoln Navigators and other over-sized SUVs, scared to death they might have to rebalance the family budget, worried sick that a third flat-panel TV planned for their homes might have to be put on hold.

But they are not afraid of the threat to America posed by radical Islam. They give nary a thought to the threat posed by Al Qaeda terror cells to stability across the Middle East.

We know this because a majority of vote-eligible Americans refuse to give credit to President George W. Bush for the number of terror attacks on U.S. soil in the past 2,500+ days since 09-11-2001. That number is zero. These same Sulking Sams and Samanthas absolutely refuse to acknowledge the building success of American military initiatives across Iraq. A lot of these folks make up the so-called youth vote, the sector that is underwriting Obama’s campaign $25 at a time (or so we are expected to believe) and will turn out in droves this fall to assure his ticket to the White House is punched.

If I am B.H. Obama, I am counting on these whiners at my peril. Most of them will be too depressed to get out of bed and haul their lazy behinds to a polling place. Count on it.

It also is likely these disillusioned youngsters never will come around. But let us be clear. They can bemoan the evolution of the global economy, which is seeing enormous upticks in oil consumption by China and India (and therefore impacting demand and worldwide prices). They can bemoan the normal economic cycles that see wages freeze and prices rise and jobs vanish and stock markets panic now and again.

Yet nothing we’ve seen to date will compare to the economic devastation that will be triggered by another terrorist attack on the United States. So let’s stop the whining and take a moment to wallow in something other than fear. Let’s put a toe in the waters of hope. Let’s take a second look at what the Bush Doctrine is achieving.

David Brooks, the acclaimed New York Times columnist, observes: “…Before long, the more honest among the surge opponents will concede that Bush, that supposed dolt, actually got one right. Some brave souls might even concede that if the U.S. had withdrawn (troops) in the depths of the (Iraq) chaos in (2006 and 2007), the world would be in worse shape today.”

And, from the monumental effort by author and embedded war journalist Michael Yon, entitled, “Moment of Truth in Iraq”, are these words from his book that affirm the power of American democracy in the world: “Maybe creating a powerful democracy in the Middle East was a foolish reason to go to war. Maybe it was never the reason we went to war. But it is within our grasp now and nearly all the hardest work has been done.”

Hard work. Staying the course. Waking up everyday, believing in the Founding Fathers’ vision. This is the life a 23-year-old male can choose, whether he is here at home enjoying American freedom, or walking through healed neighborhoods in Iraq in a military uniform, or cornering Al Qaeda militias in Afghanistan.

If young men and women in America really want change, let them get to work. Slogans and rehearsed rhetoric and tax cuts are not change. Change is an attitude, not a campaign pledge. When attitudes are restored, fear is defeated.

The Barack Hussein Obama brain trust has got to be positively awash in salivation as red flags pop up daily across the U.S. economic landscape. With each passing hour, Obama’s hollow campaign platform — CHANGE — surely will grow more powerful as Americans come to grips with significantly higher energy costs. Invest heavily in the blame game, his brilliant advisers will tell him privately, and coast into the White House on a tide of economic despair. The working class will be re-defined as the economy class, a group of Americans paralyzed by indicators and analyst forecasts, eternally waiting for their tax cuts and stimulus checks.

More government. More relief for the little guy. More unchecked spending in Washington. The Perfect Storm for B.H. Obama & Co.

But, lest we forget, Obama also has declared that during his presidency “the oceans will begin to slow” (in a lame reference to appease the global warming nuts). So he had better be careful about choosing the waves he rides into the seat of power. From this seat, empty campaign word crafting soon must be replaced by important, sometimes unpopular decisions. Waves can weaken into ripples and, next thing you know, you are dog paddling.

Sen. Obama, who has rarely ever engaged in writing or passing serious economic legislation as a Senator, is turning up around the country talking about his stimulus-in-every-pot strategy for “saving” the U.S. economy. The middle class will get tax breaks and free spending money to offset high prices — middle class to be defined by Obama on an as-needed basis. For now, we can assume middle class means all of those people making just south of $75,000 a year, or looking at it another way, people who are one pay raise away from becoming not-middle-class and, thus, subject to Obama’s massive income tax increases.

While the expanding economy class (expanding because, presumably, illegal immigration will remain rampant under an Obama presidency) becomes dependent on electronic direct-deposits from the U.S. Treasury, all of the “obscenely wealthy” small-business owners and independent investors finally will be derailed from the free ride they’ve been on for too long, Obama will preach. Oh, and while we’re at it, we’re going to ratchet up capital gains taxes to stop all of these insensitive white folk from clearing so much money from property and stock investing. (The consequence being that this is the very activity — investments returns being reinvested — that fuels economic rebounds and growth).

Oh, and don’t forget death and inheritance taxes. That one-two punch will surely come back in Obamaland, more destructive to more longtime family owned farms and other businesses than ever.

By any (even casual) historical measure, Obama will bask in a struggling U.S. economy at his peril. The nation was so blinded by its desire for “change” in 1976 that it ushered in the untested Governor of Georgia, James Earl Carter, who was run out after one term by crippling inflation and heavy taxation. It was so extreme as to overshadow his foreign policy ineptitude. At least Carter was not naive enough to try ramming nationalized healthcare down our throats.

Team Obama will not be deterred by historical warnings. In his twisted view, an America near collapse is a beautiful vision to behold. Gas prices spiking to $4.50, then $5, and beyond. Airlines parking airplanes and, in some cases, disappearing, even as Obama and the radical left wing ignore the public’s cries for energy independence. (”We can’t drill our way out of these problems,” the old liberal Matriarch, Sen. Dianne Feinstein, chortled last Sunday on one of the talk shows). Housing prices stagnating because legitimate real estate investors (not “flippers”) will avoid rising capital gains taxes if, as some predict, the tax doubles to 30%.

How can he relish these scenarios? Perhaps he simply does not care. Could not care less, in fact.

Writing for the electronic magazine American Thinker, Prof. Ed Kaitz explains Obama’s indifference by reminding us how strongly Obama is guided by anger (as are longtime associates and friends). For anyone who cared to listen, Obama stated this all too clearly in his much analyzed speech on race during the Democrat primary season. “The anger is real;” he said that March day in Philadelphia, “it is powerful. And to simply wish it away, to condemn it without understanding its roots, only serves to widen the chasm (between races).”

Kaitz, a UC-Berkeley educated professor, believe it or not, addresses the roots of Obama’s anger deftly in his American Thinker piece written soon after the Philadelphia race speech. He examines the stark difference between those in the black minority and those in Asian minorities. He recalls a conversation with a black acquaintance years ago that has stayed with him in which the black gentleman zeroed in on the differing attitudes between black and Vietnamese residents of the Louisiana Bayou.

“We’re owed and they aren’t,” the man told Kaitz.

Kaitz concludes that Obama’s race speech and, as I would interpret it, his campaign for President, tells us that Obama is not invested in the audacity of hope. He is invested in being, as Kaitz puts it, “a peddler of angst, resentment and despair.”

That’s quite a bit different than being an agent of change, isn’t it?

So it has come to this: Everyone who is critical, even fearful, of Sen. Barack Hussein Obama is not simply opposing the radical-liberal tsunami that he intends for our country. No, those who shudder at the possibility of Obamarama 2008 are fueling the “silent subtext of race that has been part of the contest since Day One.”

That’s how the current state of affairs is characterized by the vitriolic Chicago Sun-Times columnist Mary Mitchell, who is Obama’s unofficial fan club president in his adopted hometown. I can only imagine Mary has waited her entire lifetime for the opportunity to paint every opponent of a Presidential candidate of color as racist scum. As a columnist for a dying, irrelevant newspaper, Obama is a windfall for Mary. He gives her a platform upon which to play the political race card and, possibly, an excuse to keep her pathetic little newspaper on the radar, too.

Even as Obama declared Tuesday night that he is the Democratic nominee, history was unfolding, unimpeded by his empty, liberal boilerplate rhetoric. He’d better be careful wishing for change, because change is happening all around him, even faster than Obama’s speechwriting team can possibly type. Or hype.

On the day Obama declared a “defining moment” for America (his candidacy, to be precise), Iran’s little open-collared dictator Mahmoud Ahmadinejad was in Rome, attending a UN summit, where he warned (in softer terms than his previous “stinking corpse” description) that “Israel is doomed to go.” Clearly, there are different interpretations out there about when the defining moments will come and what they will mean.

On the day Obama vowed his campaign never will “use religion as a wedge”, his friend Rev. Michael Pfleger was quoted in an interview observing, “This is a dangerous time in America … where you have to whisper your thoughts.” These were his comments after he was blasted by the Chicago Archdiocese for, essentially, using religion as a wedge in a sermon in which he mocked Obama’s opponent, Hillary Rodham Clinton, from the pulpit.

Pfleger, an iconoclast for years, was asked to undergo a leave of absence after taking his act into Chicago’s Trinity United Church of Christ, where he was afflicted by the same self-absorption that beleaguered Obama’s former pastor at Trinity, the fashion challenged Jeremiah Wright. He, like Wright, forgot that leading the flock does not include campaigning for causes, or, in Pfleger’s case, the Obama presidential chase.

Pfleger expects us to believe that he never would have gone off on Hillary in a sermon had he known that Trinity’s streaming video technology had been restored just prior to his so-called Memorial Day weekend sermon. It would have been all right, Pfleger implies, to spew his pro-racism venom to a strictly private audience (similar to Obama’s audience in San Francisco, where he assailed the religion and gun clingers). Pfleger was obviously “victimized” by whatever techie fixed the equipment, not by his own arrogance.

And, on the morning of the day Obama declared himself the Democrat nominee (notwithstanding the angered delegates in Florida and Michigan), old mother Mary in her Sun-Times column was blaming “ugly politics” for trampling the sanctity of Trinity Church, and lamenting that “Obama has repeatedly been forced to cut ties with black leaders by people who are exploiting white fears.”

She can lament from now until November. The truth — an I am not whispering here, Father Pfleger — is that Revs. Wright and Pfleger have awakened the nation to the Obama agenda by virtue of their total disregard for the sanctity of worship. God and religion are mere props by which radical liberalism and creeping government encroachment on American life are advanced.

For a majority of Americans, the defining moment sought from Obama will be his willingness to demand the separation of church and hate. Resigning his 20-year membership from Trinity’s “Open Mic Night” stage is a hollow gesture, at best.