Quadrennial Circuses

In his speech on Wednesday evening (delivered too late for more than a handful of people to hear it in the East), President Obama said Hillary Clinton was more qualified for the presidency than any other president in the nation’s history.  That LIE was almost as huge as the LIE he and Clinton mouthed about the Benghazi Massacre in the Rose Garden the day after that atrocity and later—even worse—to the victims' survivors. Think Hillary in terms of Washington, Lincoln, FDR, Eisenhower and Reagan. Egad!  

The Democrat Convention was at times a comedy of errors, soap opera, and just screaming.  It opened on the note that the DNC chairwoman and the committee she chaired had rigged the game against Clinton’s main adversary, Senator Bernie Sanders.  Too embarrassing to be seen in public, she was denied her role of opening the convention and later forced to resign, though Hillary engaged her to be a “surrogate” during the campaign.  So much for integrity!  

This was not the first such reward.  Obama appointed Susan Rice to be National Security head honcho after she blatantly lied to the entire nation on five TV networks about that massacre.  No one knows yet where Obama was during that blood-bath when four Americans were butchered, but Hillary said in a hearing that she was at home alone.  She apparently wanted no 3:00 a.m. phone calls.  

The Baltimore mayor was finally chosen to open the convention.  She became famous after the Freddie Gray affair a while back when she said protestors should have their space for burning and looting activities.  Ironically, all charges (and convictions when she made the charges) by the prosecutor against the six police-persons were dropped during the convention.  

The actual activity was kicked off by a trio of rappers.  Rap is the latest form of “art” delivered to the world by the black community.  It’s called music—at least for entertainment awards—but it’s just a percussive beat with a lot of spoken words and no discernible melody.  It glorifies cop-assassinations, rapes of mothers (that mother-f*** thing) and being serviced by or beating the hos (the current term for whores), the activity that brings unfortunate children to life to be sustained by various government agencies, certainly not their fathers, who may or may not be known to their mothers anyway.  

Currently, the top rapper is Drake.  In his classic called “The Motto,” he raps about the fuckin' man, the bitch, the real nigga and shit. This is his phrase in Motto: “almost drowned in her pussy so I swam to her butt.” Another: “I tongue-kiss her other tongue.”  Think of that in terms of legendary black entertainers Nat King Cole, Louis Armstrong, Duke Ellington, Johnny Mathis, Sammy Davis, Wynton Marsalis or Quincy Jones.  This set the tone for the proceedings. Coarse! The two people who led the pledge to the flag faced the audience, not the flag. Weird.

The conventions mean nothing, of course, since the only reason for their convening is to nominate a candidate already decided by the primaries, whose rules vary from state to state and always favor the super-delegates—head honchos, gofers and party hacks. Poor Bernie had lost before he even announced since Hillary had sewed up the super-delegates. To her great chagrin she was forced to actually campaign (remember that roped-off march) to get the requisite number. The debates on Saturday nights were designed so no one would watch and give Bernie some recognition.

The overriding consideration for her candidacy and the convention has been that she is a WOMAN, ipso facto, automatically qualified, never mind FBI Director Comey's scathing press conference/hearing in which he said unequivocally that she LIED, an appellation that has been applied relentlessly and accurately in other matters. She lied under oath to a Congressional committee but AG Lynch refuses, obviously, to indict her for perjury, the crime for which hubby Bill was impeached, though he attempted to define the word is in the process, becoming the Grammarian-in-Chief.

The convention was strictly themed “women and blacks only.” They seemed to run the show, designed, whether consciously or not, to exclude men (at least white men) as extraneous to governing (if not dangerous), though ISIS was not mentioned, perhaps not least because men come in handy when wars are to be fought or actual police/firemen are needed, not girls.

I listened to a few major speeches in both clambakes. Veep Biden approached hysteria in condemning Trump and felt the need to memorialize his son again, playing on the emotions of the crowd. Incredibly poor taste. Veep-candidate Kaine fell into speaking Spanish a la Jeb Bush and Rubio—strange at a time when most folks think English should be the only language. Cheap gimmick. Michele Obama predictably reminded everyone that slaves built the White House. Trump spoke too long in Cleveland.

Perhaps the cheapest shot at Trump at the DNC circus was delivered by a Muslim whose American GI Muslim son was killed in the Middle East, who (Trump), unlike him (the father), had never made such a sacrifice. The only sacrifice made was by the son, not the father, but in any case had nothing to do with Trump but with Hillary. Muslims do not need to lecture Americans about anything except perhaps Obama about his rape of Libya.

Hillary made her grand entrance wearing a solid white pants-suit with white blouse. Imagine a man doing that—the white-suit thing. Caveat: I didn't listen to her. It's hard to listen to anyone who appears to be a compulsive liar. Anyway, she's about as charismatic as a hibernating bear. Maybe she should try rap.

In the good old days pre-1972, conventions meant something. The candidate was actually chosen then. I can remember that as a child 75 years ago, fortified with a full box of raisins, I was glued to the radio (no TV, a precious blessing) all day and into the evening and about as excited at the various roll-calls as at a football game. There were numerous roll-calls without those silly little speeches until a candidate finally received a majority of votes. Today's convention—a costly ego-driven sham!

And so it goes.
Jim Clark

Minister Repents of Racism

This is the first sentence of an op-ed of 23 July in the Lexington Herald-Leader by Presbyterian minister Robert Cunningham: “I’ve spent most of my life ignorant of racism.” He claimed to be 35, also rolled his eyes at the notion of white privilege and that all forms of hatred were “doomed” when he became a Christian, presumably after age 18.  

This is the Merriam-Webster definition of racism: “a belief that race is the primary determinant of human traits and capacities and that racial differences produce an inherent superiority of a particular race.”  There’s no mention of hatred but further definitions of race include mistreatment of others so could involve hatred...or not.  

Cunningham wrote that he became convinced of personal racism and is repenting of it but was “slower to admit racial injustice as a social phenomenon.”  As an example, he noted that band-aids are the color of whites (not noticeable) but stand-out on blacks, thus causing them to look (feel?) different.  Actually, a check with Amazon indicates that band-aids come in “skin-tones” and can accommodate all people of color.  Look in pharmacies, as well.  What a stretch!  

He then juxtaposed Pearl Harbor/9-11 with Jim Crow/slavery, the former solemnized and the latter suppressed and patronized (by whites?) as in “It’s time to move on.”  Ask a white kid about Pearl Harbor and get a blank stare.  Ask a black kid about slavery and get an earful.  Perhaps Cunningham doesn’t realize that the most monumental statue on the Washington Mall is a sculpture three-stories tall of Martin Luther King, Jr.  

Cunningham, after a homily about Christ, ends with his intention to ask people of color how to help him use his new-found (white?) sense of personal privilege.  He's fallen into the Jackson/Sharpton trap for whites that consigns them to self-flagellation for the sins of their fathers, as if one can apologize for something for which he bears no responsibility.  

Some religious folks have a self-guilt problem.  In the annual meeting of the Southern Baptist Convention in 1995, a resolution asking for forgiveness of and exhibiting repentance for slavery was passed and presented to the three largest black Baptist denominations, whose leaders laughed it to scorn.  At least one accused the white Baptists of an attempt to proselytize.  Learning nothing from that, the SBC did the same thing last month, well-intentioned but stupid.  

In 1960, almost 75% of black families were headed by a father and mother.  The bulk of the civil-rights and entitlement legislation was passed in the mid-60s.  In the mid-90s, some 75% or so of black babies were born to “single mothers,” and had no documented fathers.  This is still the case, and slavery had nothing to do with it. Fornication does.  

The Jackson/Sharpton approach is that black children must be indoctrinated asap concerning their victim-hood, not because their fathers have abandoned them but because their ancestors were slaves.  The approach does not include the fact that the initial slave traders were blacks in Africa who kidnapped other blacks or physically overcame another tribe and enslaved it or sold its members to the white slave-traders for mere trinkets.  

Nor does the J/S doctrine include that slavery was introduced not by Americans but by British colonists in the seventeenth century long before there was a U.S. and that American citizens banished slavery in far less than a hundred years at the cost of 625,000 lives, mostly white American men.  Cunningham wrote that before his conversion, apparently, he thought the race-card was overplayed.  No!  That card was/is overplayed every day in the black community and by white politically correct morons, lest common sense prevail.  

My great-grandfather (wounded once and near death by disease once) and two great-uncles volunteered (couldn’t be drafted in Kentucky) and fought in the Union Army.  All three were born in England and had no slaves in Pulaski County, Greenwood area.  As a Baptist, I take no responsibility for slavery; rather, I’m part of the generation that tried in the 1960s to be of great help to blacks, but that well-intentioned legislation destroyed the black community, now a permanent underclass.  

The above is politically incorrect but so is Truth.

And so it goes.
Jim Clark

Columnist Skewers Ark-Evangelicals

Eblen Is No Ignorant Rube

One of the loudest critics (newspaper-wise anyway) of the Noah’s Ark project near Williamstown, Ky., has been Lexington Herald-Leader columnist Tom Eblen, who recently wrote that he had an attack of curiosity, never mind that such a thing (ark, not curiosity) ever actually existed, and made his way via I-75 (aka as Death Alley) to see the figment of imagination of whoever wrote Genesis.  

He described the ark (wooden but mythical, of course) and its dimensions, which were as close as possible to those described in Genesis.   It’s roughly the size of the baby-aircraft-carrier (USS Palau) on whose flight-deck I pushed Corsairs around in the late 40s (not 1840s, for Harvard graduates who get the usual revisionist history).  The carrier was 500 feet long, as is the ark, but the ark has more mass, I’m sure.  

Eblen made a point of the $40 ticket price (steep for viewing something that never existed) and the $10 parking fee which probably had no time-limit.  For a bit of perspective, I checked the best-seat ticket-price for the Taylor Swift concert in Austin, Texas, next October—$429 with fees of $17.70 (compared to parking?) and $1.47 for a total of $448.17.  

The ark-proponents insist that the earth and everything connected to it, including mankind’s earliest existence, is about 6,000 years old and made by God in six days.  Eblen wrote that the “scientists” (didn’t name any) claim the figure to be 4.5 billion years, making it terribly hard to explain away a differential of some 400,000,000,000 years.  Other scientists say it’s about a billion years older but who’s counting anyway, especially since not a living human can comprehend even 6,000 years, much less billions.  

Eblen is flustered because neither he nor the “scientists” can prove the ark-gang wrong.  There are virtually no written records except the scriptures that go back roughly to 4,000 B.C.  Some figures chiseled into rock have been found but no one knows when or what they mean.  Caveat: I don’t accept the 6,000 figure, mainly because scripture also says that to God a day is as a thousand years.  But I definitely accept the ark as a real boat in a real event, the flood. Anyhow, literally accepting the day-as-a-thousand-years figure, the time-line would call for 2,190,000 years instead of 6,000.  

According to livescience, dinosaurs disappeared 65 million years ago, assuming they (the scientists, not the dinos) actually had a clue, which means by my accounting that they were gone long before the time of the ark, according to the ark-gang accounting, thus destroying the doubters’ favorite arguments concerning how to even catch them (the dinos, not the doubters) without being eaten, much less herd them onto the ark and keep them fed and peaceful.  

Eblen claimed to be a “mainstream” (as opposed to “evangelical?”) Christian and so predictably led his essay into “evolution” (presumably of mankind), claiming that most “mainstream” Protestant denominations and the Catholics and Jews buy into that theory.  Exponential nonsense!  At least for me, a plain old Baptist.  

I definitely haven’t evolved from a one-cell slime through the ape ages to the Now, and I laugh heartily every time some arrogant anthropologist insists he’s found the “missing link,” only to discover the tail still affixed or the knuckles not dragging the ground consistent with arm length.  The evolutionists consider themselves the intellectual elite, and the evangelicals as poor, ignorant rubes.  Eblen is welcome to his orangutan ancestors but I’ll take mine any day...straight from Adam through the ages.  

I stand with the rubes and agree with them that man and woman were spontaneously created, no matter when.  I believe they were formed whole in an instant on the sixth day, no matter its time, length and place.  I doubt that dinosaurs (already extinct) ever saw the ark, but if they did, so what!

And so it goes.
Jim Clark

WHITEWASH

FBI Chief Comey the Scapegoat

At least 99% of the time when a citizen appears before the judge account receiving a speeding-ticket and offers the explanation of not knowing he was speeding, the judge will proclaim ignorance as no excuse and levies the fine. This is essentially comparable to FBI Director Comey’s predicament regarding Hillary Clinton and the accursed unprotected private server(s) in her basement and elsewhere upon which she conducted the nation’s business.   

After brilliantly making the case that Clinton was guilty as sin in his official/shocking announcement of her innocence, Comey, in the House hearing on the matter, reckoned that perhaps she was simply not sophisticated enough to recognize the markings of “top secret” on her emails, even though she had been a senator and, more damning, the secretary of state and therefore exposed to those markings for years as a matter of course.   

Using a private server, whether protected or not, she surely knew was an absolute no-no and might have put many people in danger since hackers in other governments and even ISIS could have gained access to classified material including names and places. Comey as well as said that anyone else in government who did what Clinton did would be cashiered if not charged with a crime. Security clearance would be out of the question. Imagine a president without security clearance.  

Possible lack of sophistication was an amazing conclusion on his part and an insult concerning her level of understanding.  Even more amazing was Comey’s assertion that during his office’s investigation no one monitored her appearances before congressional committees, something any citizen could do just using C-Span or any other network covering them.  He did indicate that she lied in those hearings but not to the FBI and said that a referral from Congress was necessary to monitor them, something beyond belief.  

This, of course, left her open to perjury charges since she was under oath in the hearings so it would seem that AG Lynch would insist on action concerning that matter.  She, however, has said the case is closed, meaning that Clinton can get on with her campaigning, and Obama let Air Force One be her campaign commute to North Carolina right after Comey had insisted that not even the president knew when and what his report would be.  Obviously, this was not true since the president would never have allowed that excursion absent the supposed privileged information already being in his possession.

Comey let her off the hook, he said, because an intent to do wrong was not provable. The speeder alluded to above probably did not intend to do wrong, either, and was just careless but that made no difference to the judge. It made a difference to Comey, who said that Clinton was “extremely careless,” so that apparently was okay because her carelessness handling secret documents did not rise to the culpability level of speeding.

This affair explains why people have such a deep distrust of government. Add into the mix that Bill Clinton had a 30-minute tete-a-tete with AG Lynch just before Comey’s announcement that he said nobody knew about…and the plot thickens…or sickens...or both. The agents guarding that meeting declared that no pictures or recordings of it could be made, as if that could happen.

So now the State Department is having its own investigation. This is John Kerry’s turf. Will he consider if Clinton receives any more briefings or a security clearance given that, as Comey might say, she is irresponsible and either stupid or is not acquainted with truth-telling…sort of like her humongous subterfuge regarding the Benghazi massacre, in which the president participated.

The whitewash is in. Comey cited the law concerning this matter but indicated that it had been used only once in 99 years so, presumably, couldn’t be used again. What rubbish! Resignations are in order. Don’t count on that!

And so it goes.
Jim Clark

Minister Takes on the Tolerance Movement

In an op-ed of 02 July, the Rev. Robert Cunningham asked, “How tolerant is your tolerance?”  He noted that the ideal tolerance is easily managed in one’s own “tribe” but in the presence of someone from another “tribe” its limits are defined in light of “progressive values.”  He noted that an opinion “not in line with the narrow parameters of our increasingly secular society is now disregarded or even scorned.”  

Far from narrow, the parameters of a secular society (if it feels good, do it) are virtually nonexistent.  Most anything goes.  Cunningham sympathized with the “tolerance movement” (whatever that is, probably political correctness or diversity or multiculturalism) since he said it’s a reaction to the history of shameful hatred endemic to conservative fundamentalism.  

Hatred of whom or what?  Cunningham, who described himself as conservative [but not fundamentalist], didn’t say, but one infers via such strong condemnation that he’s intolerant of conservative fundamentalists, though he wondered if they have inspired the tolerance-movement into becoming severely intolerant, i.e., militant against anyone or institution they accuse of being racist, homophobic, gender-insensitive or in any other way offensive to them.  

Regardless of the cause, though fundamentalists could hardly be blamed, the tolerance movement has become so powerful and vicious that homosexuals, for instance, can bankrupt businesses which do not cater to them.  In this, the tolerance movement has had inordinate help from the government, whether legislative, executive, or judicial, as the general public has had tolerance-movement views imposed upon it.

Strangely, Cunningham insisted that an individual has the right to impose (defined as “to establish or apply by authority”) his beliefs on others and that anyone who disagrees with that position subscribes to “an incredibly naïve and self-defeating construct,” never mind that the nation was founded on the principle that such imposition never be allowed.

Cunningham finally gets to the inevitable point – dialogue with humility, civility and love, the way of Jesus. This is people talking out their problems, of which the nation has had a surfeit for decades with virtually nothing accomplished. Political correctness has exacerbated the dialogue approach since it demands that no one be offended, i.e., be made to think or be so thin-skinned that they can’t absorb reality-talk.  

Intolerance, however, has its place and Jesus Christ was if anything inordinately intolerant.  He also didn’t seem to dialogue very much but considered his positions/teachings inviolable.  He made a whip and lashed the unscrupulous vendors who had turned the temple into a bazaar and threw them, animals, birds, tables and money out into the street – no dialogue there.  He did not impose his beliefs on either government or populace, merely preached, prayed, taught, acted.  

Per the middle parable in Matthew 25, he upbraided the slothful servant, who was fired on the spot.  At the Last Supper, he told the disciples to buy swords even if they had to sell clothes to do so and explained a few hours later that the weapons were for defense/protection, not aggression.  Jesus was not a wimp looking to dialogue with folks about truths he knew to be immutable. He looked the head honchos of his own faith in their faces and likened them to whited sepulchers full of dead men's bones and uncleanness...not much dialogue there.

In other words, Jesus made it plain that absolutes exist and are not susceptible to dialogue, which in the so-called mainline denominations have been compromised amidst all the dialogue that has already occurred, with the tolerance-movement winning the day. These denominations are dying.  

Cunningham got it right at the end when he wrote that the way people treat each other is more important than dialogue.

And so it goes.
Jim Clark