300 Million, Western Civilization...and Oblivion?

The nation was 125 years old before its population reached 100 million, but gained its next 100 million in only 52 years and its next 100 million in less than 40 years. Its center of population was in Maryland in 1790, Kentucky in 1880 and Missouri by 2000. By 2050 there will be well over 400 million citizens, less than half of them Caucasian for the first time in history. Counting the some 55 million people potentially accruing to the 47 million abortions since 1973 and the potential offspring of the earliest aborted fetuses, the population might have been 355 million. Life expectancy at birth was 47 years in 1900, 68 in 1950, and about 78 today, but anyone making it to 76 can expect another 12 years, on average.

The demographics are simple enough and the reasons, though not the methods, for the phenomenal changes are not complicated. Life expectancy at birth in the African nations of Swaziland and Zimbabwe is only 33 and 39, respectively. Their people are time-warped back to the Middle Ages, when life expectancy in Medieval Britain was 33 years. By contrast, Europeans developed a “Western Civilization” that carried over to this country.

This doesn’t mean that everything regarding Western Civilization has always been civilized, defined as “characterized by taste, refinement, or restraint.” Slavery, the backbone of the economy of the entire world for millennia right into the 20^th century, could hardly be reckoned as a product of civilization, though the ending of it can. Saudi Arabia (not Western-oriented) did not officially end slavery until 1962, but that was only100 years later than the U.S. Germany’s perpetration of 11 million deaths in the total holocaust of the 1930s-40s is another case in point.

The keystone of Western Civilization lies in its emphasis upon individualism, education, curiosity, and the understanding that anarchy is anathema to survival, or at least “quality” survival, whether thwarted by the abuses of monarchy/dictatorship or simple communal mayhem – every man for himself. These characteristics were embodied in Martin Luther, perhaps the father of the Reformation and certainly the driving force in successfully establishing that the individual stands on his own feet before God and man, his obeisance to the former fashioning his relationship with the latter.

The arts and sciences as developed in Western Civilization, tempered with the importance of recognizing the Judeo-Christian God as the Supreme Being defining the “way to live and let live,” have afforded this nation the dominant position it maintains among all the nations. Painting, music, writing have flourished in an atmosphere of freedom secured by technologies used to both enhance the quality of life and protect the citizens against danger from both within and beyond the nation’s borders.

The relatively well-educated products of Western Civilization who came here were searching for a place to live and maintain a society. Their counterparts went to South America concurrently but just searching for a place to do business. The differences between North and Central/South America connote the result. Though the neighbors to the south, blessed with abundant natural resources but sadly lacking educational opportunities and leadership, are making progress in pulling themselves into the 21^st century, they are light-years behind the U.S. For instance, the GDP of Brazil, the same size as the “lower 48,” owns a GDP of $1.5 trillion ($8,100 per capita), while the U.S. GDP is $11.8 trillion ($40,100 per capita). The colonizers left a dark continent eventually, but stable governments are sadly absent throughout the region and conducted mostly by despots, while poverty is extensively pervasive.

The colonizers of the U.S. stayed the course and invited the world into its “melting pot” of humanity, with successes virtually too amazing to believe. A strange paradox is obvious, however. There are now those, particularly in academia and in mainstream religious denominations, who constantly try to lay a “guilt-trip” on the nation for the very success it has enjoyed. Inherent and most important in the progress of the nation have been unity of purpose, one official language (English), and the nuclear family as the basic unit of society.

For the last three decades, the notion of unity has been degraded by the elitists in favor of multiculturalism and diversity. In other words, the people’s differences with each other have been deemed more important than their similarities, one outgrowth – among many – of this approach being the insistence upon Multilanguage, notwithstanding either its silliness or obtuseness with regard to practical considerations and as a unifying concept.

This approach destroys the effectiveness of the tenets of Western Civilization, since by definition multiculturalism advances other forces as equal when, in effect, they are not. This is not to disparage other cultures; rather, it is to insist that the approaches of other cultures have not produced the results endemic to this nation. For example, African music has contributed to posterity little more than rhythm and simple instruments and harmonies with virtually nothing written, while musicians in the countries of Western Civilization have produced instruments of every description and everything from simple ditties to complicated symphonies to majestic church music, with elaborate methods of producing written notation and text.

Technically, the American Indian had not even made use, at least extensively, of the simple wheel when the first settlers arrived, having remained primitive when people in other parts of the world, principally those of Western Civilization, had been inventing everything from printing to sailing vessels to guns. Again, this is not to disparage the culture, intelligence, or lifestyle of people; rather, it is simply to state the obvious.

Since the 1960s-70s, the era of “if it feels good, do it,” the family has been under attack, to the detriment of the society and even to the extent of states having to pass constitutional amendments forbidding the “marriage” of a man to a man, as if such a thing is possible in the natural order of things. In 1921, the number of divorces was 13% of the number of marriages and in 1960 the figure was about 25%. Today, the number of marriages and divorces are equal at 50%. The behavior leading to this sad state of affairs belies the “characterized by taste, refinement, or restraint” description of civilization.

Since the 1980s, the hippy-dippy, flower-children generation of the 60s-70s and their offspring have been operating the nation’s institutions as its social fabric – the family – has disintegrated. Not even the magic of Western Civilization will hold together a society marked by coarseness even as it is availed of the brightest brains in the world, such coarseness defined by men and women unable to form inviolable commitments to each other and their children.

It is the element of Western Civilization that has made this country what it is. If those who are in the process of rewriting history to make this nation the devil of the ages and multiculturalism the new foundation undergirding the society are successful, the United States will pass into the oblivion that overtook other great civilizations, such as Rome and Greece, which also rotted from within.

And so it goes.

Jim Clark

"Domestic Partner" Con Game

The trustees of the University of Kentucky are facing the domestic-partners-benefits question having to do with whether or not to extend to unmarried “partners” and their alleged dependents the same rights and privileges accorded only to eligible employees and their families/dependents. According to the Merriam-Webster Collegiate, 11th Edition, a domestic partner is “either one of an unmarried heterosexual or homosexual cohabiting couple especially when considered as to eligibility for spousal benefits.” So, for university purposes, the domestic-partner issue has to do with cadging unauthorized perks from a citizen-owned institution the things legally authorized and officially documented only for spouses and families, principally those contingent upon the marriage contract.

On 02 November 2004, Amendment 233A was overwhelmingly approved by the voters and made a part of the Kentucky Constitution: “Only a marriage between one man and one woman shall be valid or recognized as a marriage in Kentucky. A legal status identical or substantially similar to that of marriage for unmarried individuals shall not be valid or recognized”.

In Kentucky, homosexuals may not legally be married to each other, thus the “partners” are not accorded standing accruing to spouses for consideration(s) provided by the state or institutions regulated or supported by it. It would appear that no benefits are available for any individual not legally married to an eligible recipient, or a dependent not having family standing, as in the case of children in either homosexual households or heterosexual shack-ups. The law – actually carrying the weight of the Constitution – seems quite clear.

Even if the institutions are self-insured and employees usually pay part of their health-insurance premiums, the state has the power to regulate them. A land-grant college or university is an institution that has been designated by its state legislature or Congress to receive the benefits of the Morrill Acts of 1862 and 1890. UK, a land-grant institution, is subject to governance by the legislature, which has the last word as to how the higher-education institutions (indeed all publicly supported institutions) will be operated, notwithstanding the responsibilities of respective trustee/governing boards.

Kentucky law – actually Constitutional mandate – does not even recognize an undocumented relationship, the obvious conclusion consequently being that no public institution may do so for any purpose, including those concerning financial matters. The taxpayers of the state pay the freight, as do the parents of most students, and these taxpayers have spoken in a landslide vote extending the ironclad fist of the Constitution. This is true for all other states where this is an issue. Private institutions can do as they please, and a couple of Kentucky colleges do the domestic-partner thing, as do some industries in Kentucky.

Lexington, Ky., Mayor Teresa Isaac tried to impose the domestic-partner benefit on Fayette Countians by executive order in 2003, but was turned back immediately by the governing Council. Her bizarre action was perpetrated by the claim of a homosexual city employee that his partner (lover, whatever) should be entitled to the benefits of a wife. The partner was neither infirm nor unable to work and pay his own way…and certainly could never be a wife.

Those who insist that this domestic-partner issue is related only to a religious belief – therefore not a matter with which government can be concerned since it automatically becomes a church-state issue – are widely off-base. It’s a social issue, first and foremost, since it derives from what can inarguably be called the “natural order of things.” Letting down the bars on this “natural order” is tantamount to condoning perversions on a grand scale. One has only to look at nations such as the Netherlands, where both same-sex marriage and “consensual incest” are legal, to see the result. What’s next – legalized bigamy…tripartite marriages…harems…all supported by the state?

Perhaps the most egregious reason given for the domestic-partner perk (not counting the overarching one of political correctness) is that its inculcation is necessary to bring UK into research-university top-20 land; in other words, the brightest and the best brains are so overwhelmingly owned by homosexuals or those unwilling to make a marriage commitment that they must be cajoled and pampered into blessing the university with their superior abilities. What hogwash! The basic unit in the society is the family, already under enough attack without an institution of higher learning condoning its anathema. Even if the perk were legal, on the basis of plain common sense it would be intolerable.

And so it goes.

Jim Clark

Speaker Hastert - Political Scapegoat

The latest scandal in the Congress has to do with Florida Congressman Mark Foley’s lewd e-mails to pages who have served in the House of Representatives. Apparently Foley never touched one of the pages, all boys, but his e-mails have certainly marked him, a homosexual and at least a potential pedophile, as unfit to either serve in the Congress or be in the presence of young people.

This is an election year and so the opposition has its long knives out, strangely aiming a stab-in-the-back for Republican House Speaker Hastert, accusing him of not protecting the pages, even though Foley never touched them and Hastert claims to have learned of the e-mails only recently. How have other speakers fared when similar situations have arisen? Consider the cases of Illinois republican Dan Crane and Massachusetts democrat Gerry Studds. Crane had sex with a 17-year-old female page and was never reelected; Studds had sex with a 17-year-old male page and was subsequently reelected five times.

The difference between the Crane and Studds cases (1983) was caused by demographics and the same outcome would be the same today regarding the same circumstances. Folks in Illinois took a dim view of Crane’s actions, while Studds’ lurid act of perversion was perfectly acceptable to folks in Massachusetts, in which marriage between homosexuals was legalized in 2004. In 1983, Studds, the homosexual who had violated a 17-year-old boy, actually mooned (virtually, of course – turned his back on) the House when he was being censured.

Stephen Gobie ran a homosexual prostitution ring from Massachusetts Congressman Barney Frank’s home. In 1987, the Washington Post broke the story. An attempt to expel Frank, himself a homosexual, from the House of Representatives failed on a vote of 390-38, but he was censured with a vote of 408-18. Frank's political career has survived and he still serves in the House of Representatives, in line to chair the House Financial Services Committee if the democrats recapture the House in November. The speaker in 1983 and 1987, Democrat Tip O’Neill Jr., kept his office.

In 1974, Democrat Wilbur Mills, chairman of the powerful House Ways and Means Committee, was caught up in his affair with stripper Fanne Fox, billed as the “Argentine Firecracker.” While out with Mills, Fox, with two black eyes, was found thrashing around in the Tidal Basin on the Mall in Washington, while Mills had scratches and broken glasses. Both were drunk. The speaker at both times, Democrat Carl Albert, stayed right in place.

Current House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi supported California Congressman Gary Condit’s candidacy five or so years ago for reelection despite his affair with an intern, Chandra Levy, who was later murdered. In California, where homosexual marriage was approved by the legislature last year, that’s not a problem for Pelosi – another case of demographics. The democrat House leader, presiding over landslide-size majorities, was not expected to resign in any of these cases, so the drive against Hastert is purely political. He was not hounded to resign in the Condit affair, either. Foley apparently didn’t touch anyone, but Crane, Studds, Mills, Frank, and Condit did.

In October 1964, just weeks before he faced reelection, President Lyndon B. Johnson was told that his close friend and most trusted aide and father of six, Walter Jenkins, had been arrested on a sex charge, caught with another man in a YMCA toilet. Jenkins, of course, resigned. Even though Jenkins had high governmental clearance at a time when such was never granted to a homosexual because of the possibility of blackmail, Johnson’s opponent, Senator Barry Goldwater, did not make an issue of the matter, another way of not holding one man responsible for another man’s behavior.

The quintessential example of sexual perfidy in government, of course, was provided by former president Bill Clinton, who apparently had a great time dallying with intern Monica Lewinski and others, even coughing up $800,000 to Paula Jones and her lawyers to settle a lurid suit out of court. Besides the well-publicized hands-on violations/perversions, one wonders how a phone-sex conversation would compare to an e-mail. Clinton was impeached in 1998, not for the sexual misconduct, perverted and otherwise, but for perjury and obstruction of justice in his attempted cover-up. The Senate did not think the matter serious enough for removal, so the democrat rush to judgment regarding Hastert is not even small potatoes, though unbelievably hypocritical, even by Washington standards.

And so it goes.

Jim Clark

Military Madness

The recent brouhaha caused by the allegation that female members of the National Guard unit headquartered in Danville, Ky., had posed nude or seminude for pictures while handling military equipment remarks the detrimental effect that militant feminism and the idiotic obsession with unisex philosophy has had on the nation’s military. While it remains an imposing fighting force, it is beset with social-engineering problems that have unnecessarily weakened it.

As noted in the Heritage Foundation publication of November 6, 1997, “the Army's initial experiment with gender-integrated training lasted from 1977 to 1982. The experiment ended after it became apparent that male recruits were not being challenged sufficiently and women were suffering too many stress fractures.” Also noted in the article: “President Clinton's assistant secretary of the Navy, Barbara Pope, has averred that ‘We are in the process of weeding out the white male as the norm. We're about changing the culture.’”

Therein lies the problem. The notion that men and women are exactly alike and would therefore function with equal success – except in Pope’s view implying the superiority of the “female norm” – was totally discounted by 1982 in the gender-integrated boot camps, but the lesson was totally ignored during the Clinton administration, when they were again integrated sex-wise. According to the New York Times of March 17, 1998, “Defense Sec.William S. Cohen rejects recommendation of special panel that armed forces segregate men and women for much of basic training … .” Neither Clinton nor Cohen had served in the military, but that didn’t mean that they had to lack plain, common sense.

Also on the social side, Clinton’s first Defense Secretary, Les Aspin, had to deal with the thorny question of servicewomen in combat. In April 1993, he announced that the services were to allow women to compete for assignments in combat aircraft; the Navy was to open additional ships to women and draft a proposal for Congress to remove existing legislative barriers to the assignment of women to combat vessels; and the Army and Marine Corps were to look for opportunities for women to serve in such components as field artillery and air defense. This was social engineering at its wackiest. The Marines, in obvious disobedience to this day, have not even allowed gender-integrated boot camps, but the Army, Air Force, and Navy have hewed the line.

Social engineering was a Clinton specialty with regard to the military, which he famously admitted loathing. During the 1992 campaign, he promised that homosexuals would be acceptable in the military in his administration. When he exercised the executive order to implement this promise, among his first acts as president, he ran into an unyielding cadre of commanders, who said “Enough!” The order was rescinded and the “don’t ask, don’t tell” approach was adopted, a relatively meaningless face-saving device. Military morale tanked during the 1990s.

This is not to say that there’s no place for women in the armed services. Indeed, whereas in 1973 the services were 2.5% distaff, women made up 15.2% in 2004, but the nude-picture fiasco, as well as the Abu Ghraib pictures involving women troops doing unseemly things along with their male partners in obscenity, might not have happened, obviously, if the sex-mixing had been foreclosed. The point: gender-integration in operating units practically screams for dysfunctional outcomes. Gender-segregation practically guarantees that this sort of morale-destructive lewdness will not occur.

The more serious matter has to do with the efficiency of the fighting force. The military is designed to break things and kill people, objectives that through millennia men have proven themselves to do quite sanguinarily, whether in the right or wrong. This is because they are emotionally equipped for the task and strong enough to carry it out. Assuming enough sense to function, if either the will or strength to win is absent the fight is lost. Collectively, women lack the strength, though not the intelligence, to be good fighters. They also lack the “killer instinct,” as chauvinistic as that sounds.

The seriousness is exponentially multiplied when the genders attempt to function together in combat, especially guerrilla warfare in which the enemy is all around – no front lines. Men, on whom the burden actually lies, instinctively protect their female colleagues at a time when their job is killing the enemy. Women, collectively lacking the strength and the will to be killers, become part of the burden.

War is not an exercise in social engineering, and no GI, male or female, should be used as a pawn in the damnable political-correctness game. In any case, men (vast majority in Congress, the military, and the administration) who will place women in a position to be abused in their own service and/or captured and face the brutality of torture, gang-rape, and merciless death by an enemy are flawed creatures, undeserving of their positions.

And so it goes.

Jim Clark

The Torture Question

The big deal in Congress currently is how to treat detainees at Guantanamo, even though the Detainee Treatment Act was signed into law in December 2005 and stated as a general mandate that “No person in the custody or under the effective control of the Department of Defense or under detention in a Department of Defense facility shall be subject to any treatment or technique of interrogation not authorized by and listed in the United States Army Field Manual on Intelligence Interrogation.” There have been no complaints.

At the beginning of the conflict precipitated by 9/11, the president, having no precedent to follow with respect to captured combatants not part of an organized, uniformed, national army, ordered that Al Qaeda prisoners be tried in military tribunals, such commissions authorized by the Constitution (Articles I and II). Last June, the Supreme Court overturned the process, particularly citing Common Article 3 of the 1949 Geneva Conventions. This is the appropriate section concerning prohibitions as placed in force in October 1950:

(a) Violence to life and person, in particular murder of all kinds, mutilation, cruel treatment and torture; (b) Taking of hostages; (c) Outrages upon personal dignity, in particular, humiliating and degrading treatment; (d) The passing of sentences and the carrying out of executions without previous judgment pronounced by a regularly constituted court affording all the judicial guarantees which are recognized as indispensable by civilized peoples.

The SCOTUS decision was by a 5-3 vote, but Chief Justice Roberts didn’t participate since he had joined in the opinion affirming the president’s action in the Appeals Court opinion preceding the High Court’s decision. The sticking point, however, lies in the fact that Al Qaeda – not even a government – has never been and could never be a party to the Geneva Conventions and has no standing in the world community. Indeed, its proclivity for beheading people flies in the face of Article 3, even if it had standing. The Court’s action is indicative of the need for strict constructionists, not warm-fuzzies interpreting the law.

In a recent speech, the president indicated that 14 detainees involved in Al Qaeda had been transported to Guantanamo from other countries, where they had undergone interrogation by the CIA. He asserted that they had experienced “stressful questioning” that had produced results saving thousands of lives but had not been tortured. No one has furnished any proof otherwise. On the basis of the Court’s decision, the president/court has placed the ball in Congress’s court, with the CIA interrogating procedures also a matter to be handled, since the prisoners are in a U.S. facility.

The lawmakers despise the situation, since the president is demanding that they be specific regarding acceptable interrogation procedures, lest the CIA operatives run afoul of what anyone can say the law is. Some lawmakers insist that the prisoners not be hassled, lest Americans in some future conflict face retribution, notwithstanding what happened to prisoners in Vietnam or those in the Balkans or those Americans captured by Saddam during the Gulf War under the Geneva protections.

The keyword has been “water-boarding,” an interrogation-activity said by some senators to be inhumane, though no one is injured by it, either temporarily or permanently. Water-boarding – without the board – was the treatment for non-swimmer recruits in naval boot camp in the 40s. They were simply made to jump from a small tower into the water until they either figured out how to swim a prescribed distance or were near drowning, at which time they would be pulled out so they could get their breath and repeat the activity.

The irony lay in the fact that it didn’t matter if they never learned to swim…and some didn’t. Thankfully, the activity helped me to a case of pneumonia and 18 blessed days in the hospital, skipping KP, swimming classes (not supposed to go in water because of ear problems, in the first place), and ten days of the camp. So much for the “torture” of water-boarding.

Defining torture, dignity, humiliation, etc., is in the mind of the definer, and folks don’t agree, but when considering the extraction of information people usually don’t say much about procedure because they still see 9/11, with all the flames and the bodies hurtling down from 80 stories. Being made to listen to the Red-Hot Chili-Peppers or losing some sleep in a cold room – and even water-boarding – seen in that light is like a stroll in the park.

And so it goes.

Jim Clark

Fein & the Power-balance

There’s been great conflict lately over the “balance of power” protections built into the Constitution by the founding fathers, understanding, as enunciated by Lord Acton, that “power corrupts and absolute power corrupts absolutely.” The recent brouhaha in Washington regarding this matter has accrued to presidential “signing statements” in general, President Bush’s use of them in particular, and the tension between him and the Congress concerning alleged torture of prisoners.

A highly respected Constitutional interpreter in Washington is Bruce Fein, who said in the “signing statement” hearing of the Senate Judiciary Committee in June and regarding the Detainee Treatment Act of 2005, “President Bush’s signing statement was tantamount to a constitutionally impermissible line item veto.” In a column in the Lexington Herald-Leader of Sept. 17, he said, “The Supreme Court gives life to the Constitution not because it is infallible, but because it has no partisan political agenda that distorts judgment and systematically subordinates fair process to instant political results.”

Fein said in the District of Columbia Bar of February 2005, “President George W. Bush should pack the United States Supreme Court with philosophical clones of Justices Antonin Scalia and Clarence Thomas and defeated nominee Robert H. Bork. … Senate Republicans should vote the Senate filibuster rule as applied to thwart a floor vote for judicial nominees unconstitutional and unenforceable.”

In these statements is seen the confliction of one who eloquently articulates the “balance of powers” concept juxtaposed with the reality of politics. Regarding the presidency and notwithstanding the acknowledged Constitutional powers of the “signing statement” all the way back to Andrew Jackson, for all practical purposes Fein condemns the “signing statements.”

Fein insisted that the Supreme Court has no political agenda, yet strongly advanced the notion that the president should appoint justices who obviously conform to his concept of Constitution-interpretation arbiters – a not-so-thinly veiled recognition of a type of partisanship. He didn’t forget the Senate and thoroughly thumped it for engaging the “filibuster rule,” something nowhere mentioned in the Constitution. Indeed, it was only through the action of the “gang of 14” senators who screamed “Enough!” that Justices Roberts and Alito made it to the SCOTUS.

Fein is a lawyer and as such perhaps views the judicial arm as the most important in government, not least because its members are tenured for life and therefore less apt to bow to the same sort of corruption so easily seen in the elective process and subsequent actions by the elected that are designed to protect their incumbencies and in many cases enhance their fortunes.

In his DCBar commentary Fein said, “A decent respect for government by the consent of the governed does not foreclose the Supreme Court from voiding acts of Congress, the president, or the states. The whole purpose of a written Constitution is to deny absolute power to the political branches.” But in the same article and regarding Roe v. Wade, Fein said, “But Roe required an hallucinogenic flight. Blackmun [writer of the opinion] relied on penumbras and emanations of the Constitution.”

So, Fein recognizes the possibility of either an agenda on the Court or a quintessential ignorance, or both. He explained that the Court’s action effectively removed from the public and its deliberative bodies even the possibility of debate on what is probably the thorniest social issue ever to face the nation, the ramification of which has meant the depriving of life from some 47 million potential American citizens.

The “torture problem” is now front and center. The president must protect the country, though he’s not interested particularly in being told by Congress how to do it as long as he does it legally. The Congress doesn’t want to tell him how to handle torture with any specificity because its members see their votes as stingers with respect to incumbency. They’re determined to scream about “Geneva Convention protocols” and let the president stand or fall on how he interprets them; however, the Court has said that he must have authorization from Congress.

The bottom line: A vague law to which the president will add a “signing statement.” The whole thing may go to the Court…some day. In the meantime, the nation will continue on its messy way, proving that in the foibles attendant upon any human exercise the system can work, though perhaps in spite of its glaring inefficiencies rather than because of the goodness – or even the intelligence – of people.

And so it goes.

Jim Clark

John Kerry - 2006 Chamberlain?

As reported by the Boston Herald-Reporter, in a speech in Boston Sept. 9 Senator John Kerry said, regarding the Bush administration, “It is immoral to treat 9/11 as a political pawn (to) excuse the invasion of Iraq. They [9/11 victims] were attacked and killed not by Saddam Hussein but by Osama bin Laden.” Cynicism – especially regarding morality – of this magnitude does not speak well for the senator. Al Qaeda was not mentioned as a reason for invading Iraq in 2003, but to wipe out what the intelligence agencies of a number of nations insisted was Saddam’s WMD threat. No one has proven yet that he did not move those weapons to another country before March 2003.

Quoting the Boston Globe of March 25, 2004, “In a question-and-answer session before a Senate committee in 1971, John F. Kerry, who was a leading antiwar activist at the time, asserted that 200,000 Vietnamese per year were being ‘murdered by the United States of America’ and said he had gone to Paris and ‘talked with both delegations at the peace talks’ and met with communist representatives.” At the time, Kerry was a reserve naval officer committing an act of treason (defined as “the betrayal of a trust: TREACHERY”) with the enemy while Senator McCain and others were caged like dogs and tortured in the Hanoi Hilton.

This means that by the time he made that statement (his exact words, “So what I am saying is that yes, there will be some recrimination but far, far less than the 200,000 a year who are murdered by the United States of America …”), Kerry’s comrades/nation had murdered [his word] 1.6 million Vietnamese 1964-71 (or almost 4 percent of the population for 1970), mostly civilians – women, children, and old men. He’s never offered a scintilla of proof for that wacky accusation. Regarding morality, he betrayed his country in 1970 in France, lied to Congress in 1971, and spewed hatred on Sept. 9, using a monumental tragedy in a blatantly political act of disingenuousness.

Civilian as well as military deaths inevitably accrue to any war, but Kerry would not have made his statement Sept. 9 if at the end of fighting in May 2003 the Iraqis had behaved as most civilized people do. No sane person could have predicted that Iraqis would actually MURDER their own people – civilians, Muslims against Muslims – and that they would do so in the name of their god – Allah. Americans killed each other during the Civil War, but as soldier upon soldier, not as brutal thugs terrorizing and dismembering women and children and not for any religious reason.

In a recent Op-Ed piece for the New Hampshire Union Leader, Kerry said, “Iraq has made America less safe. The terrorists are not on the run. Terrorist acts tripled between 2004 and 2005. Al-Qaida has spawned a decentralized network operating in 65 countries, most of them joining since 9/11.” According to Kerry, terrorists in significant numbers apparently have just started crawling out from under the rocks in the last three years, but they’ve been crawling all over the world for decades, especially during the 1990s, when his democratic administration seemed totally unable or unwilling, or both, to even significantly try to stay their hand. Witness the WTC, 1993; Somalia, 1993; Riyadh, 1995; Dhahran Khobar Towers, 1996; U.S. embassies in Kenya and Tanzania (at least 257 dead), 1998; USS Cole, 2000, and, finally, 9/11. Does Kerry believe the Girl Scouts were at work in those catastrophes?

In his speech to Congress on Sept. 20, 2001, President Bush said, “Americans should not expect one battle, but a lengthy campaign, unlike any other we have ever seen.” In a speech in Atlanta on Sept. 7, 2006, he said, “In the early days after 9/11, I told the American people that this would be a long war, a war that would look different from others we have fought, with difficulties and setbacks along the way. The past five years have proven that to be true.”

Kerry and his ilk complain constantly about the fact that the conflict should be over, never stopping to realize (or being too ignorant to know) that this country’s revolution began in 1775 but that Washington did not take office until 1789, after 14 years of bitter war and argument.

And so it goes.

Jim Clark

Iran - First Shot?

In an appearance September 01 on NPR’s All Things Considered, Director of National Intelligence John Negroponte indicated that Iran is 5-10 years away from manufacturing the bomb, but carefully hedged his assertion since intelligence-gathering in Iran is difficult. Other experts consider the time-frame much shorter.

In any case, the UN Security Council will be hamstrung by China and Russia with regard to enacting sanctions against Iran. China imports much of its oil from Iran and signed a contract in 2004 to develop an Iranian oil field, while Russia is currently working with Iran on a billion-dollar nuclear-development contract signed in 1992. The UN is not a player in the current picture. UN Secretary General Annan’s recent trip to Tehran was a meaningless gesture.

With the Iranian refusal on the August 31 deadline – set by the UN – to foreclose its nuclear operations, the ultimate goal of which is development of a bomb, notwithstanding claims to the contrary by President Ahmadinejad, the United States and other nations, either individually or collectively, are forced to consider action since Ahmadinejad has made it clear that both Israel and the United States (by extension, all other infidels) are in Iran’s crosshairs, to be erased from the Earth.

According to Radio Free Europe/Liberty in an article last December, “Iranian Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei last month expressed support for Ahmadinejad and said criticism of the president must stop.” Ahmadinejad says nothing without the permission of Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, spiritual ruler in Iran, commander-in-chief of the armed forces, and actual head of government. Last December, Khamenei also said, “Achievements of the Palestinian nation [Hamas-controlled] over recent years, particularly expulsion of the Zionists from Gaza Strip, are owing to their resistance and Jihad against the Zionist regime."

Combined with Iran’s and Syria’s recent use of Hezbollah as their proxy force in attempting to destroy Israel just weeks ago, Khamenei’s acknowledged acceptance of the militant Hamas organization as conducting a Jihad, defined as “a holy war waged on behalf of Islam as a religious duty,” further expands the proxy and tightens the noose around Israel on its west side.

The greater proxy-expansion, however, is seen now in Iran’s flagrant use of the Iraqi Shiites to expel the United States from Iraq and guarantee that the Iraqi government will be controlled by fellow Shiites. As noted August 31 in Iran Focus, a non-profit news-service provider that focuses on events in Iran, Iraq and the Middle East, “In a meeting with Iraqi Deputy Prime Minister Barham Saleh on Sunday, Iran's national security adviser, Hassan Rowhani, said the Iranian presence in Iraq was a sign of ‘strong bonds’ between the two Shiite neighbours, adding that Iran wanted to be involved in ‘bringing security’ to Iraq because the two countries’ security interests were ‘tied to each other.’”

According to a January 2005 account in Iran Focus, sources within the Iranian opposition confirmed that Iran's intelligence and security apparatus was connected to insurgents carrying out attacks in Iraq, and its personnel reported to a senior commander in Iran. There can be no doubt that Iran, equal in land area to Alaska and sharing a porous 500-mile border with Iraq, is supplying the Iraqi Shiites with war materiel and physical help in their fight with the Sunnis over control of the Iraqi government.

To the extent that the combination of Shiites of both countries impacts the Coalition, Iraq acts as Iran’s proxy in dealing with the U.S. and the West, thus in effect declaring Jihad regarding the infidels. An attack by North Korea on South Korea would be an attack on the United States, since nearly 33,000 American troops are stationed there. The similarity with the Korean circumstance is obvious.

The most ominous element has to do with Iranian motivation for mischief, i.e., as a religious undertaking authenticated by Ayatollah Ali Khamenei and well documented. The only thing worse than a fanatic is a religious fanatic. A fanatic believes the ends always justify the means. To an Islamic fanatic, destruction of an infidel (9/11, for instance) is a means to an end, the announced Islamic reconfiguration of the world. For this reason, the West is on notice by a nation – not just a terrorist outfit such as Al Quaeda – that no holds will be barred by Iran and other Islamic nations in attempting its downfall. Iran has fired the first shot.

And so it goes.

Jim Clark

"Pavlov's Dogs" and Race

Perhaps she was a bit overdue on her racism-as-punditry-excellence project, so Merlene Davis, Lexington Herald-Leader columnist, weighed in on September 03 to remind everyone that racism is alive and well and that something must be done about it. She even explained the method: “There has to be an open and honest dialogue in this country about race, and it must be soon.” Dialogue is defined as “a conversation between two or more persons” (Merriam-Webster Collegiate, 11^th edition). Ms. Davis didn’t mention who the persons are who should be having that dialogue, but perhaps that information will come later.

Ms. Davis was driven to her claim by the recent statements of a drunk, a politician, and a former ambassador to the United Nations, all of whom said racist things – she said – about Jews, Indians, Koreans, and Arabs. She reasserted her position that this country is a salad rather than a melting pot, but probably did not see the irony of that statement with regard to race. A salad, of course, is a hopelessly non-integrated, divided piece of menu marked by the tension each part exerts upon the other parts, the resolution of which is achieved when the whole mess is destroyed in somebody’s alimentary canal and winds up as…well, never mind. A melting pot, however, holds its amalgamated contents forever, in spite of their diversities.

Ms. Davis, of course, rises above the dialogue level. That’s why she can pontificate about the need for it, having already arrived at non-racism Nirvana. In a column of July 25, she had this to say about President Bush upon the occasion of his speechifying date at the annual NAACP clambake: “Instead of the strutting cowboy, sidearms shiny with notched handles, Bush portrayed a man sincerely seeking to make amends. And he needed to.” Some folk might consider a statement like that a bit racist, but it can’t be because Ms. Davis would never make a racist statement – even if she “needed to.” She merely pointed out that the prez sought to make amends but was kind enough not to mention his sins that called for amends. She rose above the fray by not accusing him of being a strutting cowboy who has wasted many a good man. One can only guess at the miracles she could wreak if she were to join the “dialogue,” favoring it with her noticeable gravitas.

She elaborated some more about the prexy in that article: “It was Bush's first appearance as president before the civil rights group. He had turned down five other invitations, letting it be known he didn't really like how the group's leadership portrayed him.” Notice how Ms. Davis didn’t accuse Bush of being “uppity” because he was a no-show for five years or how she didn’t accuse him of being “snobbish” because he didn’t like what NAACP Chairman Julian Bond said in July 2001: "[Bush] has selected nominees from the Taliban wing of American politics, appeased the wretched appetites of the extreme right wing, and chosen Cabinet officials whose devotion to the Confederacy is nearly canine in its uncritical affection." Folk might accuse Bond of being racist, but not Ms. Davis. She didn’t even call Bush a cowboy or gunslinger.

Ms. Davis further complimented the prez on July 25: “We've heard promises before that disappear off political radar right after votes are counted.” Well…okay, that was a sort of backhanded compliment, since she actually did sound a bit racist in suggesting that the non-strutting, non-gunslinging non-cowboy had been a liar up to that point. Cut her some slack, though, and just mark that slip-up to a bit of unexpectedly ripe rutabega in the potato salad.

There was a puzzlement, however, in that July 25 column. Concerning the voting habits of African Americans, she said, “It's a Pavlovian reaction, a learned thing, a conditioned response, a reason a majority of black folks -- who are by and large conservative -- don't vote Republican.” Her reason for that statement accrued to the actions of a handful of republicans who didn’t vote to suit her on the recent Civil-Rights renewal bill that passed both houses of a republican-managed Congress. The Senate vote was 98-0 and the House vote came in at 390-33, so the Pavlovian reaction naturally beset the black community on such a close vote as that, actually a combined 480-33.

Ivan Petrovich Pavlov, Russian physiologist/psychologist/physician (1849-1936), performed experiments on dogs, causing them to salivate under certain programmed circumstances. The phrase "Pavlov's dog" is often used to describe someone who merely reacts to a situation rather than uses critical thinking. So…Ms. Davis seemed to say that blacks are “Pavlov’s Dogs,” too dumb to recognize the scope of a super-landslide plurality like that. That would have been a racist remark, except that Ms. Davis is African-American and has every right in the world to talk about her own folk in any way she pleases. That makes the salad all lettuce! But…what if some white Anglo-Saxon Protestant male had said that? Whew…back to the old “melting pot,” and soon!

And so it goes.

Jim Clark

Presidential "Signing Statements"

In its annual meeting this month, the House of Delegates of the American Bar Association (traditionally at odds with republican administrations) approved the report of an ABA taskforce regarding “presidential signing statements,” addendums provided by the president to bills passed by Congress and enacted into law with his signature. The report began with this resolution: “That the American Bar Association opposes, as contrary to the rule of law and our constitutional system of separation of powers, the issuance of presidential signing statements that claim the authority or state the intention to disregard or decline to enforce all or part of a law the President has signed, or to interpret such a law in a manner inconsistent with the clear intent of Congress.”

Presidents from the time of Andrew Jackson have issued signing statements, considered valid under the Constitution. The ABA had no problem with this; rather, it claimed that the current president used this instrument excessively. In June, the Senate Judiciary Committee held hearings on the matter, though only one republican senator other than Chairman Specter participated, along with five of eight democrats, the implication being that the matter was purely political.

A comprehensive definition of the signing statement was provided in a 1993 memo prepared by Walter Dellinger, an assistant attorney general at the time, for Bernard N. Nussbaum, counsel to President Clinton: “These functions [signing statements] include (1) explaining to the public, and particularly to constituencies interested in the bill, what the President believes to be the likely effects of its adoption, (2) directing subordinate officers within the Executive Branch how to interpret or administer the enactment, and (3) informing Congress and the public that the Executive believes that a particular provision would be unconstitutional in certain of its applications, or that it is unconstitutional on its face, and that the provision will not be given effect by the Executive Branch to the extent that such enforcement would create an unconstitutional condition.”

The memorandum includes a thorough discussion of the subject, to which Dellinger appended, “Conclusion: Many Presidents have used signing statements to make substantive legal, constitutional or administrative pronouncements on the bill being signed. Although the recent practice [1993] of issuing signing statements to create ‘legislative history’ remains controversial, the other uses of Presidential signing statements generally serve legitimate and defensible purposes.”

The president is faced with either signing a Congressional Act with which he almost completely agrees or vetoing the whole act; so, as the first person to make a judgment regarding its constitutionality, he sometimes signs the act into law with his written reservations and explanations for them. For instance, President Lincoln decided to veto the Confiscation Bill but changed his mind, signed it, and attached as his signing statement the draft veto-message he had initially prepared. Rather than vetoing the whole act, Lincoln signed the bill but served notice of how he would treat it. Many other examples are furnished in the memorandum. The statements are particularly pertinent at times of national emergencies such as the current one regarding the war on terror.

The “hot button” issue regarding treatment of the Guantanamo prisoners helped precipitate the current brouhaha over signing statements. No president has been faced with disposition of imprisoned combatants not a part of another country’s army, thus no precedents have been in place. The president signed the Intelligence Authorization Act of 2005 but issued a signing statement democrats claimed was designed to allow for torture, a subject covered in the act. Indeed, any president may explain how he (subordinates included) intends to administer any law.

If it is suspected the president has misused a law, a suit can be brought precipitating an injunction by a federal judge to stay his actions until the matter is resolved by the courts. One such injunction has recently been enacted by a judge in the Sixth District, stopping an intelligence-gathering procedure (NSA wiretap program). Her action will probably be decided by the Supreme Court soon, since national security is the issue. The balance of power remains in effect whether with respect to signing statements or varying interpretations of law.

In the final analysis, one must consider part of Article 2, Section 3 of the Constitution, which states that the president must act "in a manner consistent with the constitutional authority of the president to supervise the unitary executive branch and as commander-in-chief, and consistent with the constitutional limitations on the judicial power." Also, the president’s duty under Art. 2, Sec. 3, to “take Care that the Laws be faithfully executed,” does not distinguish between bills he has signed into law and other laws.

The tension among the three branches of government is always in play, but neither Congress nor the executive is always right, and the Court – with its own biases, collectively or individually – must rule. This can be messy, but it works.

And so it goes.

Jim Clark.

Fletcher - Standing Alone

There’s no argument with the fact that Kentucky Governor Ernie Fletcher’s chance of being reelected in 2007 lies somewhere between slim and none. His problems have less to do with how he’s governed policy-wise and how he’s worked with the legislature than with how he’s governed as a practical matter – the methodology involved, or lack thereof. At the beginning of his tenure, he made the almost always fatal mistake of appointing inept people to the top jobs – not inept as a matter of intelligence but as a matter of inexperience and lack of technical know-how – apparently without firmly outlining the ground-rules to be followed.

Whether with his knowledge/instruction or not, a number of these appointees assumed that the system would be exploited in the usual ways, i.e., mainly through patronage. The actual business of government doesn’t change all that much from one administration to the next since career employees actually run things, making changes as directed by the legislature. Fletcher was the first republican to hold the job in 32 years, but had been in government in elective offices on both the state and national levels long enough to know how things are done.

Without question, he knew that there would be shakeups in the assignment of jobs throughout the state (to-the-victor-belongs-the-spoils thing), but it appears that neither he nor his lieutenants had yet arrived in the age of electronics. They didn’t realize that the use of cell-phones and gadgets like the popular blackberries generate trails as good as or better than the ones left by paper. Though operating just as the democrats had for 32 years and decades before that in applying the “patronage principle” (unfair as it is most of the time, especially regarding protected “merit” jobs), they left well-defined documents outlining just a few instances of mismanagement. Whereas the attorneys general throughout the 32 years preceding 2003 were democrats and never raised an eyebrow to the malpractice in the merit area, the current attorney general, Greg Stumbo, with his own aspirations to be governor, is also a democrat and pulled out all the stops in prosecuting alleged merit violations.

Rather than fighting the relatively harmless misdemeanor charges that were bogging down government while causing enormous attorney fees, Fletcher pardoned all who were indicted, including the state republican-party chairman, Darrell D. Brock, Jr. At this point, this problem – and virtually only this – is what stands between Fletcher and another term, but it has been used like a hammer by both democrats and some state newspapers, notably the Lexington Herald-Leader, the state’s 2^nd largest, to crush Fletcher’s operation.

Lieutenant Governor Steve Pence, a former federal prosecutor, bailed out of the reelection effort in June, making his announcement to desert the ticket while the governor was out of state. This, however, is what he said in August 2005: "The power to grant pardons is a privilege the governor has every right to utilize … I am sure he feels, as most Kentuckians do, that it is time to get back to doing the state's business" (Lexington Herald-Leader, 30 August 2005). In looking back through the records during the course of the current inquiries, investigators found that violations such as the ones cited had been rampant for decades, some of which were actually not clear of the statute of limitations when the current AG took office.

Fletcher’s predecessor, Paul Patton, pardoned two state officials and two union officials facing felony indictments accruing to election irregularities in his 1995 election, and used state police and state vehicles in carrying out sexual assignations at various locations with his patronage dispenser in a western Kentucky county. The attorney general, democrat Ben Chandler, forced the election matter, but either saw no need or felt no need for looking into the patronage/sexual matter, obviously fueled by the marital infidelity on the part of both participants.

It has been ruled at the lowest level of the court system, the District Court, that Fletcher cannot be prosecuted for a crime – or at least a mere misdemeanor – while in office. It remains to be seen as to whether or not Stumbo’s office (the AG has been barred by the court from personally handling the matter) will appeal that ruling. Stumbo’s conflict of interest is transparent, especially since he is on the record as stating he would be interested in running for Fletcher’s job if the governor became “unpopular.”

There’s one declared candidate for the Republican ticket in 2007, Billy Harper, Fletcher’s statewide finance chairman in 2003. Two or three other high-profile republicans are considering the race, with Senate President David Williams expressing doubt that Fletcher can be reelected, and it seems apparent that Senator Mitch McConnell, if not rebuking Fletcher, is also not supporting him in a reelection bid. Fletcher has not dislodged Brock from the chairmanship of the party, but Brock, one of the pardoned, should resign that post.

And so it goes.

Jim Clark

County Tax-Cheaters

A recent editorial in the Lexington Herald-Leader called attention to the fact that in a number of eastern Kentucky taxing-districts, the matter of collecting revenue is so badly handled (more likely, not handled at all) that unpaid property-tax bills are sold to collection agencies that, largely because of Kentucky laws, can reap huge profits, collect humongous attorney-fees, and ultimately own a lot of property. What this actually means, of course, is that taxpayers throughout the rest of the state pick up the tab – for instance with regard to funding education – for the shortfalls from the eastern counties. The unpaid-bill-collecting entrepreneurs can let the bills go unpaid for years, if they choose, with the passing of time allowing huge increases in interest charged and attorney-fees, but remitting no funds to county or state coffers.

Sound familiar? Of course! This is the situation that obtained when in the late 80s the legislature was confronted by a judge with the mandate that it “equalize” things with regard to the funding of education. This resulted in the Kentucky Education Reform Act of 1990, perhaps the biggest pork-barrel (and tax-increase) legislation that ever came down the pike. Unfortunately, in the process of “equalizing” education-funding throughout the state (actually robbing Peter to pay Paul) the legislature in its wisdom decided to even enact pedagogical requirements, action so out of its expertise as to be laughable. Results have been predictably terrible and much of this part of the act has been rescinded, bringing about some improvement.

The truth was that in many counties, especially in eastern Kentucky, citizens refused to adequately enhance state taxes with sufficient local taxes to support good school systems. They were content to have their schools operate almost entirely on the funds received from the state, with many systems comprising the most important business enterprise in the county and therefore inevitably corrupt, political patronage being an ever present fact of life. The school-systems in independent/county districts in which citizens were willing to tax themselves in behalf of providing the best educational opportunities possible were far superior to those that simply “lived off the state.”

As pitiful as local support was, the tax situation vis-à-vis collections – not even sending out tax bills one year in Elliot County (one of those suing the state for “equity”) – was deplorable. The worst twelve counties in the state in the matter of tax-collection in 1989 were all located in eastern Kentucky. For instance, more than 18% of all tax accounts in Pike County, the eastern-most county besides being the largest county in the state, were delinquent in 1989. This lack of collecting taxes in eastern Kentucky allowed those counties to impinge on all other counties, forcing them to pick up the slack.

Disappointingly but not surprisingly, nine of those 12 counties noted in 1989 for lax tax-collections were among the 12 worst counties in 2004, a full 15 years later, while all 12 of the worst counties that year were also in eastern Kentucky. By contrast, only three of the best tax-collecting 12 counties in 1989 were among the 12 best counties in that category in 2004. So…did some counties figure they were being had and acted to ease up on collections? Probably not, but would they have been justified in taking that approach?

When the dust settled in 1990, it was discovered by the local systems that had “gone the extra mile” in funding their efforts, as well as collecting taxes, that they were being sorely penalized by the state, with huge sums going to the systems in districts that had leeched off the state, while they received a pittance in comparison. In 1990, for instance, Danville citizens paid 50.8 cents per $100 on property and 66.9 cents per $100 on motor vehicles in school taxes. The Danville board collected locally 25% more per student than the state average – $909 and $727, respectively. Under KERA, the Danville system realized an estimated increase in state funds from the 1988-89 allocation to the 1990-91 allocation of less than nine percent, while Pike County, which didn’t bother with collecting more than 18% of its school taxes received an increase from the state of 25%. Indeed, all 12 of the worst tax-collecting counties received a whopping and immediate increase of 25% in state funds. Fayette County, whose citizens had voted extra funds for excellence received an increase of only eight percent.

According to the 2004 figures, the situation hasn’t changed much, though the worst counties in 1989 have smaller percentages in delinquent taxes. Pike, for instance, was delinquent to the tune of 7.61%, while Menifee County was the champion worst with a delinquency rate of 9.19%. So…it’s no wonder that tax bills are being sold to the highest bidder. Local officials have decided to take a pass, impinge on other counties, and let the devil take the hindmost.

And so it goes.

Jim Clark

Boy Columnist and Republican Helpers

Whether or not one believes Governor Fletcher has done a good job, one has to admit that the effort to damage him by especially the Lexington Herald-Leader and even some in his own party has been beyond the pale. Boy Columnist (aka Larry Keeling) of the H-L editorial board began early with his appellation for Fletcher as “Boy Governor” – this appellation attached to a former fighter pilot, former state and congressional representative, current physician, ordained minister. This is reminiscent of the H-L’s editorial cartoonist Joel Pett’s depiction of former governor Wallace Wilkinson and his wife as weasels, a relentless ridicule of them 15 years ago…and they were democrats. One wonders why he hasn’t used the ferret, a domesticated usually albino, brownish, or silver-gray animal that is descended from the European polecat (M-W Collegiate, 11th Edition) as the proper depiction of Fletcher.

Perhaps Boy Columnist had an excuse when he began his “Boy Governor” and “Kiddy Korps” stuff early in the Fletcher tenure, noting in a column a while back his partial incapacitation due to inhaling the fumes from his lawnmower. Later, he got into the “blackberry jam” mode, when the state-of-the-art devices were misused by state officials in their ignorance of how information could be gathered by unintended parties…or parties who figured they were doing nothing any different from previous administrations – all democrat-controlled for the previous 32 years and beyond reproach, especially since no attorneys-general (all democrats) had made much of a ruckus over the same operations…but perhaps more egregiously in 2004 under A-G Stumbo because of the statute of limitations. Perhaps Boy Columnist has engaged in producing “elderberry jam” as he ages in the commentator mode.

Then, there was Boy Columnist’s being shocked and appalled when the governor had a door installed between two offices in the capitol…something that might be expected of any governor, but is still mentioned as some nefarious shenanigan to keep the public from information or the press at bay or both. Who knows? And what about the time (still mentioned occasionally, though Fletcher had nothing to do with it) when the guv’s airplane misdirected itself over bad territory? And…of course there’s always that three-misdemeanor trial coming up in November – a sitting governor absolutely flirting with 20-to-life! Lawnmower fumes at work another summer?

Over the weekend, Boy Columnist got mired in his elderberry jam or mowed the lawn (those fumes again) just before heading out to Fancy Farm and wound up saying some good things about Fletcher, all hedged, of course, by the usual. He actually didn’t castigate the governor for believing that marriage should be between only a male and female, probably BC’s favorite cause these days. That was surprising, though the fact that the H-L and Courier-Journal have put out hundreds of damaging accounts regarding the governor since 2003 is not surprising.

The governor has been more seriously beset recently by the leadership in his own party than by anything BC has to say, especially since few folks take the Herald-Leader seriously, in the first place. Lt. Gov. Pence waited until the governor was out of state before administering his sword a few weeks ago, perhaps making sure that he would get the proper attention undiluted by any afforded Fletcher at the same time. An army officer, both active and reserve, he might have been expected to have a greater degree of – if not friendship – respect for Fletcher, or at least for the office.

The statements made recently by Senate President David Williams as to the electability of Fletcher in 2007 were not helpful. Statements by others, such as Jack Richardson IV of Jefferson County, also have not been helpful, nor have the proposed candidacies of Lonnie Napier and Billy Harper and the latest, Secretary of State Trey Grayson. The pardons are the reason, of course, though the governor can’t be faulted for that action…nor could he be faulted for pardoning himself, whether or not the trial amounts to anything. Everyone in this state who has paid attention through the years understands that the “merit mess” activity by the A-G’s office is purely political, and even more so on the basis of A-G Stumbo’s recent announcements that he has no plans to run for the governorship next year. This is another way of saying that he has; otherwise, he would simply have said that he will not run. The “Palimony Chant” at Fancy Farm may have more to do with his decision than anything else, especially since the peccadilloes of Governor Patton are still remarked in the news, sordid enough to remind citizens of Stumbo’s “family” habits, as well as being drunk that time in his pickup.

Governor Fletcher is not the most astute politician…but his policies have been good ones. He can say the wrong things and maybe pick the wrong people sometimes, but he’s been as good a governor, practically speaking, as any in recent memory. His friends early in his administration – even perhaps with some help from him, given the enduring practice repeated in previous administrations – let him down. It might be well for folks to consider all this before next year. The state could do worse.

And so it goes.

Jim Clark

Hiroshima/Nagasaki

It’s that time again…happens every year about this time in the dog-days of August…patriots, peaceniks, propagandists…memorializing the events on the part of the “sanguinary” majority(?)…caterwauling harangues by the “sensitive” few(?)…the never-ending discussion of the two things that set the tone for history post-WWII – Hiroshima and Nagasaki.

Or did they? Or, if so, how? Flash back from August 1945 to a six-week period from December 1937 to February 1938. The place: Nanjing, China. The Japanese Army took the city and within a six-week period without the use of bombs, artillery, or anything much more lethal than bayonets and rifles managed to kill about 300,000 people, mostly civilians and POWs. How does an army stab to death or otherwise polish off 7,200 people per day without even a roadside bomb or a battalion of suicide bombers, while committing 20,000 reported rapes (maybe one reported for every ten unreported?) and getting the bodies out of the way?

It must have been mostly over by 17 January 1938 when then-Japanese Foreign Minister Hirota Koki confirmed in a message to the Japanese embassy in Washington that 300,000 had been killed in Nanjing (National Archives, Washington, D.C. – released September 1994). Koki probably didn’t mention it, but two Japanese officers held a competition to see who could bring about the most beheadings. The two officers were executed in 1947. Apparently, hara-kiri, the honorable way out, was not honorable enough for them, so they stuck around until somebody else did the deed for them.

The euphemism for their wretched status was Comfort Women. These were the 200,000 women/girls, mostly Korean, who were shipped like so many pack mules to the various fronts where Japanese soldiers were fighting in order to allegedly protect the precious “freedom fighters” from STDs, ergo, foreclose their absence from the war, account of VD. The notion that this stopped the rape of whoever just happened to “be there” is too ridiculous to even contemplate. The Japanese were equal opportunity rapists, and their victims – at least in Muslim theology – represented paradise, albeit in the midst of massacres by the boatload.

But what does all this gory stuff have to do with Hiroshima and Nagasaki? For those dumb enough to ask that question, the answer, via other questions, is simple: Would it have been better to bypass Japan in 1945 and thus give that cruel regime the opportunity to continue its bloodthirsty campaigns until it threatened the entire world, including this nation? Is it better to kill the enemy on his soil rather than kill the enemy on one’s own soil? In choosing weaponry, is it better to use the most powerful at a distance…or, is it better to go to the trenches and “fight fair,” eyeball to eyeball…sort of like the English/French/Germans in 1914-18?

To rational people, the answers are simple enough. President Truman knew them in August 1945. Americans had been dying at about the 320-per-day rate (counting all war-induced deaths) for some three-and-a-half years. Why should more of them die just because a cruel regime had decided to conquer and enslave Asia, for starters, and the rest of the world, in time? He decided there was no reason for that and could hardly have faced the relatives of the American dead, or the survivors, tens of thousands of whom had been wounded, if he had failed to take all possible actions to end the conflagration started by the Japanese.

At 8:15 a.m. on 06 August 1945, the first atomic bomb, nicknamed “Little Boy,” was dropped from a B-29 known as the “Enola Gay” and piloted by Army Air Corps Colonel Paul Tibbets. It detonated at 2,000 feet altitude and obliterated 4.7 square miles of the city. Some 70,000 people died or went missing instantly and another 70,000 were injured, with perhaps 140,000 dead altogether by the end of the year. Rational leaders would have seen the handwriting on the wall, but Japan was not blessed on that day with rational leaders…only bloodthirsty and ambitious killers.

President Truman waited for an offer of surrender, being a rational leader himself and thus expecting, in the face of such a threat of eventual utter destruction, that common sense would prevail among the Japanese leaders. Enigmatically, nothing happened; therefore, at 11:02 a.m. on 09 August 1945, a full three days having passed for allowing reasonable leaders to act, the second atomic bomb, nicknamed “Fat Man,” was dropped from another American plane on Nagasaki, destroying one-third of the city, or about 1.8 square miles. Some 40,000 people were killed or went missing and another 40,000 were injured, with perhaps 70,000 dead altogether by the end of the year. This grabbed the attention of Japanese leaders, and the rest is history. Even at that, not as many died in those cities because of a weapon used at a distance as died in Nanjing through the use of the rifle and knife in actual hands-on brutality of a sort too incomprehensible to contemplate.

So…was it better for Hiroshima and Nagasaki to happen than for the expected millions, including Japanese women and children, to die in the unavoidable invasion of Japan necessary to end the war? The answer is obvious. Had the Japanese not been defeated, as well as the Nazi Germans a few months before (after having brought about the deaths of millions), American women today would be in the “Comfort Brigades” shipped all over the world, and there would not be a single Jew still alive. When the “sensitivity” cadres look at things in this light, perhaps they will see the light, although one wonders, in light of the mushy-mindedness of those who rail against this country because they are too dumb to see the connection between Nanjing 1937 and New York/Washington/Pennsylvania 11 September 2001.

President H.S. Truman drew a line in the sand in August 1945. President G.H.W. Bush drew a line in the sand in 1991. President G.W. Bush drew a line in the sand in 2001 and again in 2003. Though the sands constantly shift, one hopes for reasonable leaders who will always draw the line.

And so it goes.

Jim Clark.

DNC Memorandum #18

From the Office of Dr. Howard Dean, Chair DNC

[1] A word of explanation about my recent remark that Katherine Harris is not Stalin and that this is not Russia. Even the mainstream media, unthinkingly, of course, notwithstanding that its members are the DNC’s greatest propaganda agency and as such should be more circumspect, made my statement sound as if I was comparing Ms. Harris to Stalin when, actually, I said she was not Stalin. I was simply referring to her stealing of the Florida election in 2000, when she acted – as Senator Durbin might say – as the keeper of that benighted gulag run by – as Senator Durbin might say – that storm trooper, Jeb Bush, as an outright executioner of the man who invented the Internet and would, if elected, by now have had all the smokestacks in even China shut down for good and cars running on recycled hot air from the Congress. The wag who left a note on my door congratulating me for knowing that this is not Russia will be banished to Iowa. In any case, I didn’t compare Harris to Stalin, and I won’t do it again.

[2] The current conflict between Israel and Hezbollah is turning out to be our “Katrina” for this summer. The media cooperated in showing all those sweaty American citizens caught in Beirut for hours longer than they should have been, and Dan Rather has been contracted to explain how this was a snafu by FEMA of even more significant proportions than that of New Orleans. He may play the race card in reverse, however, according to his explanation of preliminary plans, in which case he will find documentation somewhere showing how quickly this country acted in Beirut, citing most of the vacationers as “white folk,” the inference being clear. It’s too bad that at least a couple of Americans weren’t – if not killed – at least burned in the “lawsuit area” when had hot coffee spilled in their laps as the bombs went off. The TV people haven’t been quite as hyped-up and frenetic (think Geraldo and Shepherd Smith and all the NBC, ABC, CBS folks) as they were in New Orleans, even without any bombs going off, and Rather has made it plain that this means that blacks were treated much worse in New Orleans than whites in Beirut since TV people have that sixth sense clued into sensitivity…or something like that.

[3] Senator Kerry has just proposed in what will be hailed as a landmark speech in Boston a requirement that all Americans have health insurance by 2012, with the federal government guaranteeing that they have the means to afford it. This, of course, is the mark of a compassionate man wrongly judged by the voters in Ohio in 2004. While this is a worthy approach to a real American problem – people inconveniently getting sick, as they have for centuries in their thoughtlessness – it must be handled carefully, depending on where you’re operating. In Massachusetts, go for it – the whole welfare-state bit. In the South, change the subject, especially if some tobacco-chewing redneck smelling of Redman Snuff asks whether or not this might put the nation into bankruptcy. The best move to make is to mention NASCAR or start an argument on who makes the best pickup. If you’re in California, go with the flow, since the people out there are busy being too hot this summer and don’t give a fig about anything else.

[4] ABC-TV ran a juicy bit on its evening news with Charles Gibson on Tuesday that can be turned into a spin goldmine. It had to do with tapes allegedly showing confusion by the Air Force on 9/11, as if the USAF had ever been faced with anything like a bunch of Islamic idiots taking the quick way to Paradise. However, the president can be blamed for the Air Force’s failure to shoot down those four hijacked planes, according to Dan Rather, Michael Moore, and the Right Reverend Honorable Righteous Louis Farrakhan, who claims he has proof as solid as he had about the government blowing the Pontchartrain levee in order to drown black folk when Katrina hit. He says there were at least three African-American Muslims on one of those planes – but the president didn’t know which one – and African Americans in all those buildings. The 9/11 Commission chairman, Thomas Kean, was shown remarking that the only plane that didn’t hit its target was the one the passengers brought down. The obvious conclusion is that the government, meaning Bush, caused the deaths of 3,000 people. Hammer on this everywhere in the country.

[5] There will be money available for transportation and food for anyone wanting to set up camp on Cindy Sheehan’s new spread near the president’s ranch in Crawford and heckle/taunt the president while he’s on vacation soon, as well as burn him in effigy occasionally, and otherwise show the rest of the world how much this country hates its own president. The ladies from NOW will also participate and plan bra-burnings daily to show empathy for German Chancellor Angela Merkel, who was attacked on the shoulders by Bush at the G-8 summit. This showed his chauvinism, disrespect for foreign citizens, callous disregard for couth, and will be part of the impeachment plan now being developed by the democrats on the House Judicial Committee to put into place in January. This points up the need to take back the House in November, so everyone is urged to work harder than ever. Be sure to prepare well for the hot weather in Texas since you will be sleeping out under the stars, cooking over campfires, and otherwise roughing it. Take plenty of digestion aids, since Ms. Sheehan plans to speak 14 times a day and is demanding that everyone who stakes out a claim eat Middle East food five times every day, preferably while facing toward Mecca (east)…so there will be much gas from different directions. All the media people will be on the scene 24/7, so plan demonstrations to be observed around the clock. The Larry King Live show will originate there twice, and it is rumored that he will interview Mel Gibson about his anti-Semitism. It’s rumored that Gibson might be a republican, at least when he’s sober, so use that fact to connect him to the administration.

[6] Senators Kerry, Biden, Hagel, Clinton, Feingold, Obama, and former senator Edwards are all looking toward the 2008 campaign, as well as former vice president Al Gore. It is rumored that Congressman Jefferson may also be interested if he can just return the $90,000 from his freezer and call it even with the FBI. At last report, he was also offering to throw in 100 frozen pizzas and partridges from 10 pear trees. This is a large field, so it may be necessary to settle on an outsider vis-à-vis Washington, as well as someone who is medically aware at this particular time, when Bird Flu is threatening. Do not – REPEAT – do NOT campaign for any candidate. It is far too early for that, and Bird Flu may be just around the corner.

And so it goes.

Jim Clark