The Conservative Soldier

It is therapeutic, indeed, amid the countdown to Obamanation to know there are credible voices beyond the predictable dinosaur media. Because I care about the future, and about all of you, I dig deep into print and electronic media to shed light on these authoritative voices, even while striving to join their ranks.

If you are not subscribing to free internet columns by Dick Morris, visit DickMorris.com today. Add him to your opt-in list.

Dick Morris, 11/14/08: “Is Barack Obama seriously considering appointing Hillary Clinton as his Secretary of State?

Obama would do well to remember the history of Harry Truman and Jimmy Byrnes in 1944.  Byrnes, known as the “assistant president” in FDR’s third term, was widely thought to be Roosevelt’s choice to replace Henry Wallace as his running mate on the 1944 ticket.  At the last minute, FDR re-considered and decided Byrnes, a South Carolinian, was too conservative and went with Truman instead.  But the Democratic Party establishment clearly was disappointed.  While they wanted to get rid of the almost-Communist Wallace, they wanted Byrnes not Truman.  (Just like the party establishment really wanted Hillary, not Obama, to be the presidential nominee).

So Truman named Byrnes to be his Secretary of State after he took office on Roosevelt’s death in 1945.  Byrnes, who thought he should have been president, proceeded to make his own foreign policy.  He flew to a meeting in Europe with the allied foreign ministers and barely kept President Truman posted on the deliberations.  He became a loose cannon who thought he was the president.  After a year of this nonsense, Truman fired him and brought in George Marshall to take the job.”

Christopher Hitchens, 11/15/08: “I might possibly have voted for (McCain-Palin) all the same, clothes pin clamped over my nose in the voting booth, if only because of the crucial struggle for a free Iraq and an autonomous Kurdistan. And, in such a case, I would have been very annoyed at the suggestion that my vote was a racist one. ‘Historic,’ yelled the very headline across the top of my morning newspaper. (Just the news, please, if you would be so kind.) Would the letters have been so big for the first female vice president? And isn’t it already historic that millions of white Christians voted, win or lose, for a man with one Kenyan parent, that parent having been raised as a Muslim?”

More Hitchens, from the same 11/15/08 rendering: “More worrying still, there are vicious enemies and rogue states in increasing positions of influence throughout the world, yet many Obama voters appear to believe that the mere charm and aspect of their new president will act as an emollient influence on these unwelcome facts and these hostile forces. I can’t make myself perform this act of faith, and I won’t put up with any innuendo about my inability to do so.”

Rush Limbaugh, writing in the subscribers-only Limbaugh Letter, Nov. 2008: “Using government power to allocate ‘wealth’ — by first confiscating it from the producers — has failed every time it’s been tried. The socialist doctrine has an unalloyed record of catastrophe : impoverishing every society it has shackled, spreading nothing around but misery, scarcity and want.”

And, finally, I direct you to the latest assault on our intelligence by a Beltway pundit, the finger wagging Clarence Page of the formerly great Chicago Tribune. Click here to read his Sunday column. The Kool-Aid is really talking in this one. Below, my retort:

There is a reason why talk radio, cable television and the blogosphere thrive today. These are sources of intelligent insight and commentary. We no longer find these in dying newspapers like the Tribune. Clarence still believes that an old Beltway pundit can get away with publishing complete misstatements of fact, if not blatantly erroneous arguments. His dramatic crescendo in today’s column references the Iraq war going “sour”; Afghanistan re-erupting; Hurricane Katrina (yes, that’s still Bush’s fault); and, my favorite, Congressional Republicans “plagued with individual scandals.”

Let us examine these in the context of reality, not Beltway soapboxing.

The United States has WON the war in Iraq. We are no longer winning. We have won. That’s a “W” for “W”.

The war on terror is ongoing. Yes, it will re-erupt in a lot of places, including Afghanistan. We must fight terrorist groups wherever they emerge. (How we will do this when Obama slashes military spending is a question for another day).

Katrina? That unpreventable natural disaster is blamed on the Bush Administration when, in fact, the state and local governments responsible for a swift first response completely and tragically failed thousands of people. These victims had bought into the “change” that a Mayor such as Ray Nagin pledged to bring the downtrodden of New Orleans. He did not care about them, as it turned out. New Orleans’ decades old denial that it would ever be hit by a massive hurricane did not change until it was too late.

If you want to shed light on Congressional scandal, look not to individuals’ human frailties, look to the the biggest scandal in recent American history — the blind eye turned by mainly Democrat lawmakers to uncontrolled lending fueled by the bloated Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac. These Democrat Congressmen (Barney Frank, et al) cheered from the sidelines as millions of Americans took on huge debt (easy home loans) they would never be able to repay, or even pay incrementally.

When I decide not to renew my subscription to the “re-designed” (unreadable) Tribune, it will not be because I detest the silly new multi-font tabloid look, it will be because Clarence Page and other fellow dinosaurs have lost touch with American core values in their lust to discredit President Bush and elevate a pretender named Obama, their hometown hero.

As my 11-year-old daughter was falling off to sleep on the eve of Sept. 11, 2008, I mentioned that today was an important one for all Americans. She recently entered sixth grade. I wondered aloud if an observance was planned at the local middle school. Her puzzled expression got my attention.

My kid has little recollection of 09/11/2001 and, apparently, no understanding of why 09/11 matters.

That’s not her fault. It’s mine and, to a degree, the fault of local public schools.

Parents well remember the dilemma we faced in the hours and days after the attacks of 09/11 seven years ago. What do you tell a four year old? Do you let her watch the endless television images? Surely not. How can we allow him to be potentially haunted by the World Trade Center jumpers on that tragic morning, or scenes of the collapsing towers, the billows of dust and smoke, the smoldering Pentagon? They haunt me still. What might they have done to the fragile psyche of a child?

It was too much for a child below a certain age — and we didn’t know what age, exactly — to comprehend words like “terrorist”, “hijacker”, or “attack”. How do you tell your precious son or daughter that the United States had been attacked this beautiful September day, not by an army or another country, but by an ideology rooted in violence and ruthless, large scale killing of innocents? How do you explain that people simply going to work died for no reason? That flight attendants and passengers on commercial jets had become front line soldiers in the new war on Islamic Radicalism?

We did not want to try to explain it then. I fear that as the years have gone by we have continued our silence. We make passing remarks about the post-09/11 world, or the “damn terrorists”, or the indignities of airport security checkpoints and bans on hair gel. We fly our flags on Memorial Day, Independence Day and Labor Day without pausing to remind our kids what these capital-D days are all about. Why would we bother with explicit narratives about The Day That Changed America?

We should end the silence. Today is a good day to start. Isn’t it sadly ironic that so many adults deplore the notion of leaving our kids an environmentally damaged, or energy challenged, planet, yet seem to think nothing of passing along a nation, and a way of life, that is viewed by Islamic Jihadists as one great big bulls-eye?

The numbers of educated parents and professional educators who view 09/11 as a fluke, an aberration, are incomprehensible. And there are legions who also believe that somehow the U.S “had it coming”. How dare we impose democracy or freedom on the world beyond our shores.

Our innocent sons and daughters are seven years older. I wish I could be certain they are seven years safer. I wish I could guarantee that they will never awaken on a September morning to TV images of next-generation terrorism, to mass destruction of America’s energy infrastructure. I pray they’ll never see another towering symbol of America’s promise blown off the face of the earth.

But I do know that silence about the events of 09/11/2001 is not an option. We should arm our children with a deep and somber understanding of how the attacks were orchestrated, how the victims died, how the airplanes-turned-missiles not only ended nearly 3,000 lives but shattered the lives of thousands and thousands more, and why 20 suicidal warriors were so motivated to wreak unthinkable terror on American soil.

Our children need to become intimately acquainted with the heroes of 09/11, too. There are countless heroes. The law enforcement and fire department crews that ran toward the World Trade Center even as hundreds ran the other way. The passengers aboard United 93 who charged the cockpit to avert the plane’s mission to destroy the U.S. Capitol or the White House. They never were going to save themselves but think how many hundreds they chose to save in that darkest hour?

If 09/11/2001 does not become a capital-D holiday, a day of solemn observance and remembrance, then it should at the very least become a day on which time is set aside in our schools and homes to repeat two powerful words: Never Forget.

If our memories of this day fade so, too, do our hopes that it will not happen again.

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.