Ideology, Principles & Common Sense

I believe in clinging to an ideology; I believe in strict adherence to one's principles. But I do not believe either tenet should defy common sense. Here are some examples I have watched:

Ideology. Fox New channel has completely swamped all the other cable news channels in ratings. Why? Because Fox insists on giving air time to both Conservative and Liberal voices. People are eating it up. But CNN & MSNBC continue to sneer at Conservative views and dominate their program schedule with angry, snarkey liberal voices. Where's the common sense in that? They prefer to hurt their bottom line, rather than bend on their Liberal ideology.

Principles. in a Washington Post column, distinguished pollster Andrew Kohut wrote that the GOP is estranged from America: You can review it here. And, Kohut is but one of many voices declaring the Republicans to be extreme in their principles, their policies.

If that is true, why are urban centers which adhere to GOP policies so successful and cities which follow liberal Democrat policies such failures... as pointed out in a Wall Street Journal article by Arthur B. Laffer and Stephen Moore?

Where is the common sense is continuing to demonize successful policies while advancing failing policies?

And, where is the common sense in prominent Republican spokesmen insisting that the GOP should become more like the liberal Democrats if they want to win elections? Thomas Sowell recently called them 'me too' Republicans and pointed out the fallacies of their ideas.

I am a Conservative. I watch Fox News Channel. I would love for FNC to dispense with Alan Colmes, Juan Williams and Bob Beckel. But that would be wrong. Even though these men are argumentative, they interrupt, they filibuster and they are often proven wrong. A broadcast entity, or a printed publication, cannot call itself a news medium, if they fail to present both sides of an argument.(even in their opinion sections).

Besides, it is just common sense to let some of these Liberal voices destroy their own ideology. Thanks Alan, Juan, Bob.

There oughta be a law!

Yes, I've said that many times, but I never really meant it. There are already too many laws. What I've really meant is that I observed a behavior so offensive to me, I wish that behavior could never again be observed.

I suppose it is all in the eye, or ear, of the beholder, but a behavior that most often offends me is the tendency of people to promote their position on a topic over which they apparently have no knowledge. Or, very limited knowledge. I love reading opinions of people who are truly knowledgeable. I learn from one of these people nearly every day.

Then there are the idiots. The most offensive are the idiots who advance some hair-brained idea and push it as a brilliant, new revelation. The current push for gay marriage is an example. First, they say, homosexuality is not choice... it is predetermined at birth. So, surely homosexuality existed in ancient times? If it did, do they think that no one ever considered gay marriage in the past?

British Historian, Paul Johnson said, "It is humbling to discover how many of our glib assumptions, which seem to us novel and plausible, have been tested before, not once but many times and in innumerable guises; and discovered to be, at great human cost, wholly false.”

Tradition is not tradition because our ancestors were too dumb to know better. It is tradition because people experimented with ever-blossoming new ideas - kept the ones which 'worked', discarded the ones which did not.

Should we continue such experimentation? Absolutely! That is what has advanced civilization. But, when a new idea seems to counter a long standing tradition, examine it carefully before replacing what our ancestors have practiced over the millennia.

So soon?

The 2012 election ended and many of us, no matter the results, looked forward to a respite from political bickering. No such luck! The 2016 fighting is already upon us.

The national news media is partly to blame. By keeping a horse race going, they build tomorrow's audience. Every time any political figure does anything that attracts attention, it starts a buzz that he or she is seeking some political office. Maybe it is true. I am still sick of it!

Then, there is the continued re-hashing of last election's news. Didn't we cover that adequately in the nearly four years of the 2012 presidential campaign? During the campaign, opponents, or opossing groups, would take a candidates' utterings out of context, distort and embellish them, and scream it from the rooftops. Now, in the post mortem rehashing, they embellish and distort things even more than during the first time around.

It will be a long four years!  

Another Constitutional scrap in Congress.

 This time in the Senate Judicial Committee hearing on a bill introduced by CA Sen. Dianne Feinstein. seeking to ban certain firearms.

TX Sen. Ted Cruz wondered if the CA Senator would support the same selective application to the 1st and 4th amendments, as is being proposed for the 2nd amendment.

Senator Feinstein got all snarky and reminded Cruz that she had been on this committee for twenty years.
My first thought was that that was 14 years too long. It is time for the lady to retire and return to California.

Cruz, after all, was the attorney who successfully argued the 2008 District of Columbia vs. Heller Case before the U.S. Supreme Court, overturning the ban on handguns in Washington, D.C., . Feinstein, like many politicians, believes that holding a political office trumps all.

What angered me most was when, following a mention of the free speech protection of the First Amendment, Illinois Sen. Dick Durbin asserted that none of the Constitutional Amendments are absolute. Well, that argument has been around longer than me! In 1926, President Calvin Coolidge said "When we say, 'All men are created equal', that is absolute".

But, back to the recent hearing, someone yelled that the First Amendment did not protect pornography as free speech. Really?Does anyone with half a brain think the framers wrote the First Amendment protection for free speech to permit pornography? Or, that other bit of idiocy about falsely yelling 'Fire' in a crowded theater.

That is why John Adams said, “Our Constitution was made only for a moral and religious people. It is wholly inadequate to the government of any other.”


Certainly, the Framers were moral and religious people. Not the kind, as perhaps would be some of our current United States Senators, who believe it is a constitutionally protected right to cause panic in a crowded theater, or engage in the distribution of pornography.

That could never happen!  Or, could it?

The Second Amendment, protecting American's right to bear arms, has nothing to do with shooting sports, or even personal protection. If you are in doubt, check Dr. Walter E. Williams evidence here.

No, we old-fashioned Americans believe we need protection against the possibility of a tyrannical government. This is where we are called foolish. First, they say, a citizenry armed with sporting weapons, even the semi-automatic rifles currently being described as 'assault weapons', could never match the firepower of a modern military organization. Tell that to Syria's President Assad.

Second, they say the United States military would never use force against its own people. That would give pause to the Holocaust survivor who may have felt the same way about the shiny-faced young German boys who became part of the brown-shirted Hitler Youth.

There is an old maxim to remember: Never say never! And, as Mark Steyn reminded us in a recent column, "...while the notion of unmanned drones patrolling the heartland may seem absurd, lots of things that seemed absurd a mere 15 years ago are now a routine feature of life."

Sixty-Seven years ago I was undergoing U.S. Army Infantry basic training at Fort McClellan, Alabama. I've forgotten the details, but during the course of that training, some pretty serious rioting broke out somewhere in the United States. Serious enough that our standard infantry training was suspended and we engaged in riot control training.

I mostly remember that we were formed into a 'wedge' of soldiers, shoulder to shoulder in a V-shaped formation, marching down a simulated event of a street filled with angry rioters. Soldiers filled the width of the street, building edge to building edge in full combat gear, rifles held straight out in front of us with bayonets fixed. Behind the 'wedge' marched additional troops, ready to instantly fill any gaps that may develop in the front line. It was a formidable force, to say the least.

I was seventeen at the time. I doubt if any of the troops were older than nineteen. We had only recently taken an oath to obey our orders, and we were filled with determination to be good soldiers. We were fully capable of carrying out any orders our commanding officer issued.

I can promise you that if we were ordered to clear a street, we would have cleared the street, American citizens ahead or not.

Of course, it seems ridiculous to think we would have held firm if actual killing began. But, who knows? Once real trouble starts, it is impossible to predict how events will unfold. The Kent State/National Guard confrontation of 1970 is convincing evidence that things can go horribly wrong. In that incident, the guardsmen fired 67 rounds over a period of 13 seconds, killing four students and wounding nine others. Mind you, these were unarmed college students the guardsmen confronted.

Could it happen? Who knows. I certainly don't think so. But surely it is better to be prepared - even for the unthinkable.

Dow Jones Industrial Average hits all-time high!

Really?  Not really.

My, how we are misled. Bernanke and company, at The Fed, keep printing money, worthless paper dollars. You and I could do the same with our ink jet printers and our paper money would also be worthless - but we could go to prison for doing it.

Today the DJIA hit $14,330.91, the vaunted new high. That's what it would cost to buy one share each of the 30 industrial stocks tracked by Dow-Jones. But remember, that's Bernanke Bucks. Imagine if we were to buy those shares with gold, money with real value. The average price of gold for 2013 stands at $1,578.00 per ounce. That means, it would take about nine ounces of gold to buy those thirty shares.

Back in 1929, the year of the great stock market crash, the DJIA averaged $381.17. That same year, the price of gold was $20.63. That meant it would have taken almost 18.5 ounces of gold to equal the DJIA. In other words, the DJIA in 1929 was over twice as high as today.

In America, we are so conditioned to believe that the value of a dollar is consistent, that when the dollar price of something increases, we think it has actually increased in value. If we still had those good old Silver Certificates of yore to spend, that would be true. Not so with Bernanke Bucks - officially known as Federal Reserve Notes.

Take back our country?

Recently, journalist Sam Donaldson said the thing that angered him most during the 2012 presidential campaign was the Tea Party adherents insistence that they wanted to "take back their country'. It is no longer your country, Donaldson insisted.

That caused mixed feelings of anger and frustration among many of us. But now, thanks to the insight of Arnold Ahlert, we realize that the correct feeling should be one of pity.

To understand, please take five minutes from your life to read Ahlert's column: "Too many Americans will never know what they missed."

The problem with Donaldson's point of view is that he just doesn't understand what we considered "our country". But, Ahlert sees Donaldson's position as widely shared, and pleads: "How do you explain to these people that America was once a nation with a largely intact and understandable sense of right and wrong? How do you tell them there was once a time when most men were real men, not oh-so-sensitive self-absorbed metrosexuals? How do you tell them most women were once strong enough to handle themselves, as opposed to being the angry/helpless creatures that feminism and/or sexual harassment laws turned them into?

Surprisingly, age is not at play here. Donaldson is scarcely five years younger than I. Nor is his life experience all that different from my own. He was raised in the Southwest, not in the liberal bastions on the East or West Coast. He did have a college education, which I did not. He was attracted to a career in radio broadcasting. He worked as a volunteer in Dwight Eisenhower's 1956 presidential campaign, and later enlisted in the U.S. Army. I fairly closely mirrored that path, though my Army experience was before Eisenhower's political career.

What happened? Did Donaldson become so steeped in the Washington scene that he missed what was happening? Or did he just forget?

Ahlert speaks of younger Americans who never knew and probably will never know the America we so loved. But Donaldson is as far removed from our understanding of what America should be as are any of the 'Occupy' crowd.

I feel sorry for Sam, and all those unwashed kids who camped out in city parks across the nation, demanding, who knows what?

But mostly, I feel sorrow for my own grandkids and great-grandkids who will likely be deprived of  the wondrous life we lived... when it was 'our country'.

Humans or Beasts?

Have you ever watched a cat play with a live mouse? The cat playfully swats the mouse around. If the mouse tries to escape. the cat secures it with one paw, then releases it and swats it around some more. Eventually the tiny creature succumbs... perhaps to physical injuries. Perhaps to a heart attack.

Have you ever watched video of an Orca swim close to shore, grab a live seal and swim back out to deep water. There the orca playfully tosses the seal into the air and catches it. Eventually consuming its prey.

At least these beasts are driven to food. Apparently not hungrily, or they would quickly devour their catch. Humans don't do such things.

Yes, they do!

In the early years of World War II, Japanese soldiers in occupied Nanking, China, reportedly tossed Chinese babies into the air and caught them on their bayonets. The catching soldier in return removed the infant from his bayonet by tossing the bleeding child into the air again for one of his comrades to catch. When they tired of the game, they left the tiny carcass lying in the street.

Equally, or perhaps in an even more grotesque accusation, Japanese soldiers, upon spotting a pregnant Chinese or Korean woman, placed bets on the sex of the unborn child. They then slit the pregnant mother's abdomen, ripped out the fetus, determined its sex and collected on or paid off their bets.

Inhuman? Yes, but is it more so than the abortionist who clinically does essentially the same thing? Not placing a bet on the unborn child's sex, but perhaps because of it?

Now we hear of another act of inhumanity by humans, this from the halls of academia. At Hunter College in Manhattan, the most populated school in the CUNY group, students (identified as 'mostly boys', so apparently some girls participate) have devised an 'abortion game'. Opposing players inflate a balloon and stick it under their T-shirt. Each player is armed with a plastic fork, and the objective is to pop your opponent's balloon.

As two players dance around, stabbing at each others 'belly', onlookers chant "Kill that baby." If you have the stomach, you can watch it here.

Even the most ardent pro-choice Liberal has to shudder at this story.