The Thomas Chronicles

He sits comfortably in an armchair facing an interviewer. His fingers lightly press together in the form a triangle, and his legs cross at the knee. Calm, confident. He tilts into a slight recline and smiles a gleaming white smile as if in a kind of repose for avid cameras.

He is the Everyman. He is the prototypical American politician.

He is you. He is me.

The interviewer wants to be fair and asks a soft question. He smiles and discusses the sad, sordid state of our fair country. How the poor are downtrodden and disenfranchised, while the rich and famous receives caviar from caravans of golden sanitized spoons. FDA approved.

A genuine tear escapes and darkens a spot on his immaculate, sharply pressed suit.

The interviewer, lost in the vision of an America gone astray, chokes back the glistening in his eyes, already forgetting he asked about his position on military intervention.

He is the smooth, sincere Bill Clinton; the confident charismatic Barack Obama; the elegant Mitt Romney; the plebeian Rudy Giuliani; the aristocratic, un-centered John F. Kerry; the wide-eyed, business-like Hillary Clinton…

Evading faster than a speeding question, we can dodge honest (even harmless) inquiries with the ease that would make Superman seems as slow as a moving locomotive. We speak in vague generalities and enigmatic intentions.

When everything is political, the stuff that makes up relationships gets elbowed through the nearest exit. The magic and the manners (the WD-40 that smooths the rough edges of our ego), disappear and leave the cold calculation of self-advancement in its wake. People aren’t to be enjoyed but to be used as a means to further our careers, our societal standing, our blinding sense of self.

We are Noncommittalists, waiting to barter one person for another another– if the price is right. We are never for something. Never against. We hang idly by the rear, so if anything unravels at the front, we could always stand to welcome the other side.

We are terribly practical and terribly equivalent in our judgments. One is no better than the other. Who can say? Let us eat our food, watch our football, drink our beer and drive our cars. Pizza! Hey, who wants pizza?

We are cool calculating men, aren’t we? We, Noncommittalists.

Some time in the last couple of years suddenly the term “liberal” was out and “progressive” was in. When did this radical shift in terminology start and where did it come from?

Like so many other things in our subjective world, things are decided one day according to the consensus of opinion, and suddenly they just… are. Nevermind the fact that “liberal” and “progressive” describes the same party or mode of thought.

Ever since John Kerry’s lost in the 2006 presidential election, “liberal” has become anathema to the Democratic party. The GOP’s campaign in 2006 to peg “liberal” as being wishy-washy about national defense and opposed to virtually everything American (”I love the troops!”… “Our troops have commited massacres!”… “I love Europe. It’s so much better than American consumerism.”), the “liberals” are reinventing themselves, Madonna-fashion, into the brand-spanking new “Progressive” ideology. This haven’t changed their beliefs one iota, just their name.

Progressive denotes movement, evolving into something superior to its previous incarnation, enlightened really; as oppposed to retrogressive and backward. Or Metro (Blue State) versus retro (Red State).

I find it interesting how self-professed subjectivists, like most liberals, without fail, hog the terminology/definition game. As infantile as it seems, for them, controlling the terms is controlling reality– or as one Progressive, formerly liberal, subjectivist once told me, “Reality is just a consensus of opinion. This exists because we all say it exists.”

How very existential…

Progressive also implies that everything outside of it is backward. It is very much the “winner” and “loser” ethic that’s so pervasive in our society. The term implies upward mobility, ascendecy toward something higher, emergent evolution, etc.

And here I thought the Progressive Party was Teddy Roosevelt’s party of rugged individualism and who staunchly believed in American exceptionalism. But I guess the liberals– oh, excuse me– progressives are co-opting that term now. I suppose trying to trace your party’s origins back to Teddy Roosevelt is much better than tracing it back to Thomas Jefferson, the man who assassinated his friend’s character (John Adams) and held onto all his slaves when he said he’d release them.

You know, I pine for the day when I can, in good conscience, vote for a Democrat. What happened to all the Scoop Jacksons and the Harry Trumans and the FDRs? What happened to the liberals who confronted fascism and defeated them; who acknowledged human frailty but tried to give the average “Joe” a slice of the economic pie? I guess they lost their nerve with the A-bomb and Vietnam.

For the moment, I don’t trust the Democrats not to sell us all out to the globalists/ transnationalists. In fact, they are the party of the globalists. Too many of their proposals would incapacitate the sovereignty of the United States, such as turning every oil discovery into a national park or wildlife preserve. This makes these discoveries untouchable to drilling and further exploration. Hell, we could be an oil exporter by now if we drilled just half the known sites of oil deposits. ANWAR is the least of it.

Please, find me a candidate who is strong in defense and national security (America first and paramount) and liberal on social issues. Now, that’s someone I could vote for. Not this ridiculous “Progressive” business.

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Just weeks after the Democrats won the Mid-term election of 2006, they have already reneged on their campaign promises. Most of the entering junior Democratic senators and congressmen campaigned on a “Blue Dog” platform that promised not to cut and run from Iraq. If anything, these candidates presented themselves as further to the Right on the war than Republicans.

Then they won and suddenly they didn’t look as hawkish as they seemed.

Less than a month after their victory, Senator Richard Durbin said:

“We have got to start moving American troops, redeploying them out of Iraq, and start bringing them home.”

Growing ever bolder with them finally seated in Congressional power, Durbin, speaking for the entire congressional Democrats, said this of the President’s speech:

It’s time for President Bush to face the reality of Iraq. And the reality is this: America has paid a heavy price. We have paid with the lives of more than 3,000 of our soldiers. We have paid with the sacrifice of our men and women in uniform. And we’ve paid with the hard-earned tax dollars of the families of America.

And we have given the Iraqis so much. We have deposed their dictator. We dug him out of a hole in the ground and forced him to face the courts of his own people. We’ve given the Iraqi people a chance to draft their own constitution, hold their own free elections and establish their own government.

We Americans, and a few allies, have protected Iraq when no one else would.

Now, in the fourth year of this war, it is time for the Iraqis to stand and defend their own nation.

It doesn’t look like anyone in the Media is going to call them on this overt manipulation of the American public. They win control of Congress by reassuring the American public that they are determined to win The War on Terror and in Iraq. No cut and run. But they’re not even hiding behind the pretense anymore.

I must, however, try give them the benefit of the doubt on this because I don’t like their ideology and behavior. It could very well be that they are privy to information that I cannot possibly know, and from this information, they have revised their stance on the war. The brief hawkish period of the Democratic party lasting for the duration of the 2006 campaign could have been an attempt at a real genuine change that events didn’t allow them to continue.

Who knows? I don’t have a window into the souls of men.

Regardless of their intent, however, I think someone, anyone, should call them on this reversal of position.

What do you, Constant Reader, think of the Democrats’ flip-flopping on this issue of war?

Is it expediency to achieve power or action flowing from conviction?

For weeks now, we have been bombarded with pseudo-speculation about what the President plans to do to win in Iraq.

Here is a glimpse of the headlines the media’s been pounding us with:

CNN: Third tour for troops who led 2003 invasion
USA Today: Bush accepts responsibility for ‘mistakes’
NY Times: Bush’s Plan for Iraq Runs Into Opposition in Congress
LA Times: Bush commits 21,500 more troops
ABC: Democrats Pre-Empt Bush Plan with New Resolution
Washington Post: Bush’s Iraq Plan Meets Skepticism On Capitol Hill
Houston Chronicle: Bush’s Iraq strategy runs into fierce opposition

Do you catch the drift here? After reading just the headlines, you get the sense that the President’s plan was ill-conceived and rotten right out of the chalks. But this is a bit misleading. These headlines didn’t just appear the day after the President’s speech. Headlines similar to these have been drenching us for over a week and a half before the President addressed the nation.

I think Joseph Goebbels would have been proud of our media these past few years, but especially so these past few weeks as President Bush outlined his revised strategy for winning the war in Iraq. You might have very well asked yourself, “Well, what did the President propose?”

That is a very good question. If you didn’t catch the President’s speech, and if you don’t have the knack for digging after news, like so many of us news junkies, you cannot know his plan through the mainstream media without it being completely tainted with half-truths and the clever twisting of facts.

Their reasoning is as follows: If the President is going to make a speech on his revised policy of how to win in Iraq, it must be wrong, perhaps even evil. If it is wrong, then it must be opposed. Thus, in order to oppose it effectively, the President and his policy must be attacked first to sway the American people to believe he is wrong.

Nowhere in this reasoning does it address the President’s actual policy. After President Bush’s speech, the media and the liberals continued their droning disdain for the President.

Last year, they accused the President of not putting enough troops on the ground. The President’s plan calls for more troops. Now, they say the President is unnecessarily risking American lives by increasing troops, since this mess should be given back to the Iraqi government.

Last year, they accused the President of drifting and not having a plan for winning. The President presents his plan to surge troop numbers to hold the 9 districts of Baghdad along with the Iraqi troops, so that insurgents won’t be able to slither back into place once our troops move on to another “hot spot”. Even though the plan was conceived with the help of top generals, top foreign policy experts and the Iraqi government, they are calling this plan an “escalation” much like Vietnam. Some on Capitol Hill accused the President of not listening to his generals, when that is clearly not the case.

Senator Richard Durbin said in his response to the President:

Escalation of this war is not the change the American people called for in the last election. Instead of a new direction, the president’s plan moves the American commitment in Iraq in the wrong direction.

In ordering more troops to Iraq, the president is ignoring the strong advice of most of his own top generals. Gen. John Abizaid — until recently the commanding general in Iraq and Afghanistan — said, and I quote, “More American forces prevent the Iraqis from doing more, from taking more responsibility for their own future,” end of quote.

Twenty-thousand American soldiers are too few to end this civil war in Iraq and too many American lives to risk on top of those we’ve already lost.

So, he quoted General Abizaid as making the flat statement that more troops would mean less responsibility for the Iraqis to refute the President’s plan. This, however, is really shallow thinking. The purpose of this troop surge is not to give power back to the Iraqi government, although that is our long term goal. It is to defeat the terrorists by taking and holding real estate rather than employing a strike and maneuver strategy. The latter is great at defeating armies but not so great at defeating asymmetrical enemies, like terrorists and indigenous insurgences.

You can almost hear the screeches of the liberals: Quagmire! Quagmire!

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I just posted a rather long comment on La Shawn Barber’s Corner concerning the relationship between public schools and Christianity. I don’t think that the topic is particularly controversial, but then again, I don’t have kids.

To see her post and my subsequent comments, just follow the link.
Christians and Government Schools.

I would like to say first off that I am not a fan of Miss Winfrey’s show, and her ideas and my own diverge at myriads of points. Glean from this what you will.

At the risk of being a wet blanket, I do not view Oprah Winfrey’s latest act of philanthropy with the exaltation many have been conferring on to her. Apparently, Miss Winfrey has built an opulent school for South Africa girls, ages 12 to 13 years old, called “the Oprah Winfrey Leadership Academy for Girls”. Lush doesn’t quite cover the 28 building complex, with yoga studios, theaters (indoor and outdoor), and beauty salons– paradisical is more accurate. The stated mission or purpose of this school is to “inspire” these girls to elevate themselves and their country out of poverty through “leadership skills”. Miss La Shawn Barber, whose blog made me aware of this, opined, “I think Oprah has done a good thing, opulence and all.”

Others commenting on Miss Barber’s post, like Sharon, said:

“I’m not a huge fan of Oprah either, but I say God bless her for what she has done. I’m sick and tired of the moaning and groaning and class envy in this country. Americans don’t know what poor is anymore. We have so few pockets of real poverty that most Americans think poverty means not having a TV and a dishwasher. I wish more people could travel to third world countries and get a look at what real poverty looks like. I prefer to send my money to places like Africa.”

I, however, cannot help but look at Oprah’s effusive display of wealth as rather distasteful. Generally speaking, I couldn’t care less where a man (or woman) spends his money, but by building a veritable palace in the midst of rank poverty is profoundly disturbing. Everything from the china served at their meals to the thread count of their bedroom sheets were chosen personally by Miss Winfrey– all of which bespeaks an affluence few can even dream of possessing, even here in America.

Oprah calls the school “the fulfillment of my work on earth.” But God is in the details. She personally chose the china and the pleated uniforms, the sheets and the beds—she actually sprawled out on each one to check for comfort. She also insisted that the dorm rooms and the closets be extra large, even though the girls have minimal amounts of clothes. “People asked me why it was important to have closet space, and it’s because they will have something,” she says. “We plan to give them a chance to earn money to buy things. That’s the only way to really teach them how to appreciate things.”

Buy things? With what money? Money Miss Winfrey has bestowed up them? I am quite certain these children, girls 12 to 13 years old, would know how to “appreciate things” in a way we never will, and I am not sure “buying things” would augment their gratitude.

Here is the problem. In a country with very little prospects, and even fewer prospects for women, Miss Winfrey has built this school on the presumption that these girls can elevate their country out of poverty through leadership skills.

This sort of reasoning is what I find objectionable in Miss Winfrey’s view of the world. Generally, it is Nietzschean “Will to Power”, swirled with pop Freudian analysis, and baked with New Age cosmology, which usually come in the form of stock phrases like, “It was meant to be” or “Visualize success”, etc.

Does she really think that these children can go to school for a couple of years and suddenly lead the country out of its destitution? Do compliments and self-esteem create wealth? (”… They’ve never been told they are pretty or have wonderful dimples. I wanted to hear those things as a child.”)

And what about those girls? Once these girls are “educated” for a couple of years, where do they have to go but back to their tribes, back to the poverty that is endemic to their society. In a word, they will be given a taste of what it would feel like to be American royalty– then have it snatched from their hands. Can these girls, then, bear the envy that is bound to trail them afterward by their own people?

(Come to think of it, what about the boys? Personally, I am getting sick and tired of all these props helping women become “equal” with men. Roughly 60% of college students are women and that number is rising. Are we really going to disenfranchise men in the name of “equality”? Don’t these feminists have sons and brothers they don’t hate? If you lock out college, you lock out a middle-class living. But this should be for another post…)

I am not the only one of this opinion.

…many people believed Oprah shouldn’t be reaching back, at least not in this way. The South African government has never said precisely why it pulled out of the project, though it’s not hard to guess. “The country is very obviously poor, and so few children have a chance at education,” says one South African school official who asked not to be identified because he didn’t want to offend Oprah. “It is hard not to see that many feel that what Ms. Winfrey is doing is too much.”

Instead of respecting the country and culture she is trying to help, she blatantly ignores their timid protest. It doesn’t seem from her statement that she has given much thought to the people she’s supposedly helping.

Her response to such criticism is:

“I understand that many in the school system and out feel that I’m going overboard, and that’s fine. This is what I want to do. I wanted to take girls with that ‘It’ quality, and give them an opportunity to make a difference in the world. I’d like to think I have as much good sense as I have money, so that’s a lot of good sense.” [I’ve made things bold print and italicized things for effect. See a pattern?]

Like so many other examples of gross condescension of another culture these past couple of years– from Madonna “adopting” an African girl and Angelina Jolie touring Africa making speeches– this latest example ranks close to the top. To be fair, however, Miss Winfrey’s philanthropy could have been done out of genuine goodwill and charity. And because she IS Oprah Winfrey, it could be the case that anything she does will be visible to the public and can’t help but be ostentatious. I don’t know.

It really is no wonder the rest of the world are envious of us. It is not just in movies, music, and television that we blare our affluence at the world. We also have celebrities getting up close and personal to rub their own poverty in their faces by our excessive displays of wealth.

I really don’t people mind spending money to help the poor. Charity is wonderful! I just wish charity was done more anonymously.

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A constant refrain from our leaders in government is the constant accusation of playing politics with national security issues. Democrats wail at Republicans, Republican point the finger at Democrats, and in the meanwhile, our ship of state lists back and forth in the tumbling tides of public opinion.

As the ship tosses to port, then to starboard, the moderate American middle stands atop the slippery deck sliding to and fro nauseated.

The Republicans are at the helm. In the general quarters, they point their ruler to a distant point on the wall-map. “This,” they tell us slapping a red “X” on the map, “is where we’re going. We’re know we’re making progress by sighting landmarks, or milestones.”

An intrepid hand raises, “So… what’s the path we’re going to take?”

Pause. “We’ll know when we round the Cape.”

“But that’s five thousand miles away!”

After two and a quarter thousand miles and a few men overboard, after hearing the Republicans say, “We should stay the course. We’ll get there!”, and after hearing the Democrats say, “We should have never left. It’s all a lie!”, the crew decided the Democrats should take the helm. In the transition, the Democrats also had erected a wall-map. The crew eye-traced a sinewy line from the Carribbean to Nova Scotia, to the Aleutians, to …

“Excuse me,” perked a burly midshipman with a gray beard. He well-known aboard the ship, but not for his eloquence. “Excuse me, Mrs. Democrat. Where in the hell are we going?” The crew noticed the red “X” erased but still slightly visible.

Executive Officer Pelosi waved her hand irritably, “Never you mind. We are prepared to govern!” The new officers behind her beamed and vigoriously shook each other’s hand.

Hip-hip hurr… Yaaa…. sniff, sniff.

I’m gonna grab some chow. Will someone wake up Wilson?

I had hoped that being together on a ship surrounded by a wasteland of seawater and with treacherous enemies and shifty “allies” at every port, we’d be a bit more civilized.

But humor aside, after Sept. 11th, we should have been as one on issues of national security since one of the primary functions of government is to protect the people from foreign enemies. This is pretty straightforward, not controversial at all.

People want to kill us. That’s bad.

And yet we find ourselves bickering amongst ourselves over wiretapping, imprisoning enemy combatants, and even killing our enemy on the field of battle! This is not about politics; this is common sense.

For two generations now, we have demonized ourselves, our values, our way of life. If that were true, it logically follows that whatever we do would be evil. Self-loathing is endemic to our society. That is how a person can wave a posterboard decrying everything the United States stands for and believes he is as patriotic as a soldier risking his life.

I don’t believe this is true. At heart, I don’t think the majority of Americans believe that, even if they oppose the war.

But let us not kid ourselves. Our national doubt and self-loathing is every bit as dangerous as our enemies. How can we stand as a nation if we destroy ourselves?

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