Last year I hit the half century mark, and I know I’m not the only conservative who’s done so and taken the time, from time to time, to compare the way things were when I was growing up and the way they are now.

Of course we’ve advanced technologically, more so in the quarter century since Armstrong took that small step for mankind than we did in all the centuries that came before, but socially and politically we in America seem to have regressed in many ways, the changes engendered willingly by Americans – despite the fact that allowing this regression has damaged and continues increasingly to damage our country.

The regression I’m talking about is the decline of patriotism and love of country, the gradual abolishment of our morality, values and the relationship with God our founding fathers incorporated into the documents that have defined our great nation since its inception.

The source of the problem lies to the left of our political center, emanating from the once credible Democratic Party that has since allowed itself to be hijacked by liberals whose only goal seems to be to replace our capitalist republic, synonymous with the awesome success that has made us the richest and most powerful country on earth, with socialism, which has proven time and time again to fail its constituents through astronomic taxation and the removal of personal responsibility from individual citizens by forcing all citizens to carry the weight of a non-achieving and/or unambitious/unmotivated few while shouldering the blame for the failures, transgressions, laziness, stupidity, negligence and other shortcomings of the few.

When I was a kid back in the 1950s and 1960s, a Democrat (all the way up until Jimmy Carter’s presidency taught me the error of my ways) in a Democrat family, nobody in my household ever spoke as disrespectfully and derogatorily of a sitting President as Democrats do today. Comparing a President with Adolf Hitler would have been unthinkable to anyone with a patriotic bone in his body and pushing leftist politics on school children would have been the formula for both parental and administrative outrage leading to the dismissal of an offending teacher. Even with the outpouring of rage and hatred toward the government by the hippie movement over Vietnam and the draft and the support of same by the liberal media and a bunch of ambitious and feckless politicians, there was little if any invective of today’s magnitude advanced by said politicians or newsies. The pols and scribes won their battle – General Giap admitted after we pulled out of Vietnam that we were winning, and had it not been for this loud dissent from those politicians and the media, the North Vietnamese would have surrendered long before our withdrawal.

Certainly, public school faculties maintained the discipline not to preach personal politics to pupils who were there because they had to be, nor to echo the anti-war rhetoric of the left.

Now, thanks to the slow creep of liberal judicial and political influence, teachers’ unions and Marxist organizations like the ACLU being as powerful as they are, teachers like that Jay Bennish asshat are free to rain their farfetched, anti-American diatribes, unchecked, upon their students without restraint and still keep their jobs. Any parental outrage that occurs is all but swept under a rug as the liberal educational system gradually pushes parents’ say in their children’s educations out the door.

In school, we were also given the option of taking a moment for silent prayer every morning. No particular religion was endorsed and we were under no obligation to pray. Nothing was being forced on anyone, nobody was being exposed to anyone else’s beliefs.

Now, thanks to left wing judges, sleazy opportunistic leftist lawyers and again, the ACLU (also sleazy, opportunistic leftist lawyers), such prayers are illegal as they have been falsely branded as a “church and state” issue. It’s come to the point where the ACLU can successfully sue any public institution that sports the Ten Commandments or a Christmas message.

And of course, there’s the Global War On Terror: Muslim extremists have been waging war on our country in one way and another for twenty five years, give or take. They became emboldened during the Clinton Administration, when that President allowed them to commit terrorist attacks on U.S. embassies and one of our naval vessels with virtual impunity, and early into the Bush Administration they brought us 9/11. Unlike his predecessor, George W. Bush responded decisively, first by taking Afghanistan away from the Taliban and helping promote a democracy in its place, then by doing the same in Iraq. He has strengthened our homeland security venues so that no further acts of Islamic terror have occurred, though there have been foiled attempts.

What say the Democrats?

Angry that Bush defeated straw man Al Gore in the 2000 elections and then went on to win a second term, beating John Kerry, the Democrats under their liberal masters have joined the “angry left” in placing anti-Bush politics over the well being of America and her citizens.

Knowing full well that Islamofascism poses what is probably the greatest threat to the safety of U.S. citizens in our nation’s history, they impede Bush’s defensive efforts on that quarter purely in the interests of attempting to make him fail. Democrat politicians rail against the Administration with irresponsible slurs and slanders, they make pronouncements that demoralize our troops in harm’s way and encourage our enemies to fight harder and terrorize more, they support the media when they print or broadcast secret defense data.

We can’t speak plainly and accurately without being censured for political incorrectness or accused of bigotry. A bunch of Muslims can blow people up, slice up a citizen for disagreeing with their views, burn hundreds of cars, vandalize, set embassies on fire in the name of Islam… And the media will bend over backwards to omit the fact that these crimes and terrorist acts were done in Allah’s name, by followers of Islam. At airports and other transportation venues, searching a dark-skinned Arab male who fits the profile of every terrorist in recent history is “racial profiling”, just to appease a few peoples’ sensibilities we have to ignore the natural suspects and search the more unlikely passengers, such as little old Caucasian grandmas and old men in wheelchairs, or preadolescent girls with Barbie dolls.

Had this country been under attack by a huge, well financed, globally based terrorist organization when I was a kid, had an attack the equivalent of 9/11 happened on our soil, the order of the day would have been “rally ‘round the President,” not “Kennedy/Johnson/Nixon/Ford lied, people died.” Our politicians, the media and most Democrats would have acknowledged that we were defending ourselves, that failure to support the administration’s efforts would result in Americans being murdered on our very streets.

Today, things are just the opposite.

The fact that Republicans have been the majority on the Hill since the early 1990s and have been gaining more power ever since renders the underlying victories of the liberals a paradox of sorts. They have woven atheism, socialism and PC into the fabric of our society and even now are twisting the Constitution around to interpretations that have little relationship to the original text. They have found the means to represent child molesters as regular Joes and made same sex marriage a front burner issue, just about turned our schools into anti-American, leftist propaganda institutions and vilified our primary religions while approving that religion which is practiced by people who want to kill us because we are “infidels.” They’ve obstructed the President’s national security policies in times of a serious threat to our country and enabled frivolous lawsuits to become as commonplace as a trip to the grocery store.

And the level of outrage we would have seen during my childhood years had such things even been dreamed of is simply not there, except among those of us who are informed and active on the conservative side.

Did I mention that there was some regression afoot?

Diana West has a spot-on commentary about the way the New York Times, once again, manages to go the PC route and ignore pertinent facts in order to whitewash the violence and the suppressed status of women that are both fundamentals of Islam.

Her commentary covers a three part interview with a New York Imam that just concluded in the New York Times.

Such journalistic jaw-droppers abound: not only gaping holes, like the one above, but also dead ends that leave countless questions that the female reporter, it seems, never thought to ask. For example, she notes, over six months of interviews, the Egyptian-born imam refused to shake her hand. “He offers women only a nod,” she writes. Why is shaking hands with a woman “improper”? What does the imam think about sexual equality? She doesn’t tell us. In Belgium last year, she doesn’t mention, the female president of the parliament made headlines for canceling a meeting with an Iranian delegation over this same refusal to shake a woman’s hand (the parliamentarian’s own); while in Holland, the English-language blog Zacht Ei reported, a Muslim man lost a month’s worth of welfare benefits for not only refusing to shake hands with female municipal employees, but also refusing to acknowledge their presence. This is supposed to be “the story of Mr. Shata’s journey west,” but the story bypasses such landmark issues.

Instead, we get a load of happy talk: “Married life in Islam is an act of worship,” Mr. Shata says. So impressed were the editors of The New York Times by this load that they ran the quotation, not just above the fold, but across the very top of the front page over a gold-bathed family photo four columns wide. Does Miss Reporter ask the imam to reconcile this ecstatic notion with the Islamic custom of arranged and forced marriages, the spate of spousal abuse and “honor killings” within European Muslim communities…

The entire article is here.

Due to a weekend of almost homogenious IRL activities, I’m still a little behind in my blog reading, but catching up.

If you haven’t already, you simply have to go see my blog buddy Kender for some audio from this past Thursday — the Newwwwww… ACLU Anthem!

It just doesn’t stop, whether it’s the Arabs, antisemitic liberals in the west or members of the U.N.

This time, it’s a South African attorney who is an envoy to the useless, feckless, soulless, spineless, corrupt, pro-terrorist, anti-American, pro-marxism bunch of diplofux at Turtle Bay, one John Dugard.

From an article emailed me today by Ryan Jones, Co-Editor and Website Manager at Jerusalem Newswire,

Almost completely disregarding Palestinian Arab aggression against Israel’s Jews, a United Nations envoy has sought to lay the blame for regional conflict at the doorstep of the Jewish state by misrepresenting and exaggerating Israel’s defensive measures and isolated acts of frustration.

In a special report prepared for next week’s annual meeting of the UN Human Rights Commission, South African lawyer John Dugard charged:

“It seems that settlers are able to terrorize Palestinians and destroy their trees and crops with impunity.”
What he failed to mention, however, are the innumerable stoning, shooting and bombing attacks carried out against the Jewish settlers by the hostile Arab population surrounding them. Often those attacks are launched from the cover of olive groves and fruit orchards, prompting frustrated and threatened Israelis to take matters into their own hands.

Dugard also criticized official Israeli defensive measures both in Gaza and the “West Bank.”

So he’s saying that the Palestinians are blameless, and the Jews are attacking them on a regular basis for no reason, right?

Left out of the equation were the hundreds of rockets and mortar shells that have been fired from Gaza at nearby Negev towns and villages since Israel withdrew from the Strip last summer. Nearly 500 Kassam rockets have been fired since the beginning of this year alone.

Dugard evidently carries with him the same attitude that all Islamist terrorists do: Whatever atrocities we subject you to are perfectly acceptable and not subject to recriminations, because Allah’s on our side and therefore anything we do is right. Anything you do to defend yourselves against our terror attacks is tantamount to oppression, genocide, unreasonable violence and acts against God.

The entire article is here.

I have been kindasorta out of things the last several days as I finally did something about the disappointment of DirecWay satellite broadband:

Despite their self description as “high speed Internet”, they are barely any faster than dial-up and infinitely slower than DSL, yet more than twice as expensive as the latter. They are not as Windows friendly as one might hope, and I observed that the first time I ever ran into any identity theft programs, in this case some asshat in Miami using my card info to make and attempt to make online purchases, was after I began using DirecWay — so much for any kind of ISP security, and the security system I employ on my computer is among the best.

So I’ve just divested myself of DirecWay(unfortunately, I had to purchase the satellite dish and modem when I signed up), but when I cut off the service I informed them that I will not pay them the early cancellation fee, even if I have to spend 10 times the amount fighting them in court. Since I had to close out the card I was using in order to curtail future fraud on my account and it was the same one I was using for Direcway, they’ll have to go after the fee the hard way if they want to try and collect it.

I now have Road Runner, and it’s awesome, even faster than DSL.

That said, I’ve been catching up on my reading in the Blogosphere, and simply must point you to a purrrrfect commentary on the impact of illegal criminal immigration on America, posted on 28 February by my blog sister RomeoCat over at Cathouse Chat.

Well, the Dems are still banging away at the NSA’s monitoring of outbound telephone conversations by suspected terrorist associates here in the United States, still obstructing Bush Administration efforts to keep Americans safe from terrorism.

Stifling partisanship is preventing the Senate Intelligence Committee from overseeing the nation’s spy agencies, the Senate’s Republican leadership says.

But the top Senate Democrat says the Republican-controlled panel is falling down on its responsibility to hold the Bush administration accountable.

…to hold the Bush administration accountable is the operative concept here, of course.

Not that of giving the proverbial rat’s rectum about the safety of Americans, nor of anything else except the usual partisan political agenda of discrediting the President.

Luckily, the majority of Americans, since immediately after the treasonous lefty scum at the New York Times aided and abetted terrorism via reporting U.S. defense secrets when they broke the story, listened or read about it with mild to middling interest, thanked Bush and the NSA for doing what they have to do to protect us and went about their respective business.

So what are lefties like Reid, Rockefeller and Feinstein doing besides flogging what amounts to a dead horse? Why, they’re trudging desperately down a veritable road to nowhere because a)they have no other ammo in their political armory at the moment, and b) if they push the issue hard enough and get it back to kerfuffle level, they can waste Congress’, and therefore the taxpayers’(you and me, folks) time while preventing the timely addressing of other, more vital issues.

“Now why would they want to do that?” You ask.

Because the more obstacles the Democrats put in the way of Bush’s prosecution of the Global War On Terror and the enforcement of Homeland Security policies, the more likely another 9/11 style incident could have of occuring in a U.S. city, and that would reflect as a grand failure on Dubya’s part that could conceivably give the left, albeit at great and mortal cost to thousands of American citizens, a shot at getting back both the White House and a majority on the Hill(that’s a pretty brazen thing for me to write, perhaps, but in view of the Democrats’ treacherous collective behavior almost from the outset of the GWOT, I see no other possible explanation. Their ruthlessly single-minded concern is to score political victories. When they demonstrate otherwise, maybe I’ll find my point of view modified).

And,

Because the less that gets accomplished during this President’s watch and therefore the more this lack of results hurts the American people, the more opportunity the Democrats have to cite supposed inadequacy on the part of the administration and the GOP during this year’s and 2008’s election campaigns.

Sounds a lot to me like sabotage, friends, and not even a little to me like any kind of patriotism, love of country or concern for what happens to the people these politicians were elected to serve.

Liberals, so-called tolerant intellectual types, are forever saying they are open to debate, yet in my experience on the web, their debating style seems to be constant repetition of the same bumper sticker dreck. A prime example of this would be a lengthy debate I had here in my comments section a few months ago with a pacifist who claimed we could have removed Saddam Hussein from power through peaceful means, yet throughout our discourse over a period of several days, he never once provided a “how” to his statement. Why? Because there was no “how”.

To him, there had to be, though he apparently had no clue as to what it was, because he lived(and probably still does) in the Utopian land of the liberal, where “in a perfect world” ideals trump reality.

When you get into face-to-face arguments with liberals, you learn where their real debating skills come into play. Their technique is almost uniform: They shout you down or, if they are more civilized, simply interrupt you three words into every sentence so they don’t have to hear your point of view. This is because they actually don’t have any real world ammunition to fuel their sides of the respective debates, only the usual repetitive diatribes and anti-Bush/anti-God/anti-America/anti-conservative rhetoric. Naturally, despite all the verbal evidence to the contrary, they’ll be the first to deny that they’re anything other than sterling, Constitution-respecting, believing-in-God American patriots of the highest order.

Right. Sure. Yeah.

I got to watch a good sampling when I tried getting through Bill Maher’s show a little while ago, the first time I’d watched him since his Politically Incorrect days and probably the last.

The guests were liberal wingnut columnist Helen Thomas, liberal actor/comedian(not necessarily in that order) Eddie Griffin and former Bush Administration spokesman Daniel Senor.

The topic of discussion was, of course, the eighteen hours that elapsed between Cheney’s accidental shooting of Whittington and his making a statement about it to the media.

Senor tried several times to point out that the MSM, during a press conference, had asked nearly two hundred questions about the incident and only four in reference to the ongoing and profoundly more momentous issues of Iran’s enriched uranium/ nuclear weapons program and Bush’s meeting with Annan on Dharfur; and while Senor listened respectfully to the liberal participants when they registered their opinions, his responses were continuously stomped on by the lefties with statements to the effect that the priority issue was that the Vice President had shot someone, as though he had done so maliciously, with the intent to commit murder.

Griffin actually said that he believed Iran should have nuclear weapons, his stated opinion being that a country needs to have “the bomb” in order to participate with any credibility in global commerce. Helen Thomas agreed with him wholeheartedly, commenting on his “great” logic.

This kind of hogwash is what dominates the entire liberal-dominated Democratic Party political spectrum. They are so far “out there” that this is the best they have to offer America, and this in lieu of any realistic contributions to the governing of the United States or to U.S. foreign policy.

The fact that there are Americans, or facsimiles thereof who have access to our polling places who actually take the far out blatherings of the left seriously leads me to only one possible recommendation:

Let us pray…

Marianne Jennings has an accurately definitive column up on today’s MSM.

To exerpt,

The problem with the mainstream media is that they lack the collective wisdom of the red states. Those in the red states know the difference between stupidity and rights. They know that fault cannot always be assigned. They look at the weeping, wailing, and gnashing of media teeth on how Mr. Bush’s ties to Halliburton caused Hurricane Katrina and realize that the press may not be parring the hole on insight, intelligence, or analysis.

The indignation over the release of information on the Veep’s quail hunting accident is something beyond the usual and well documented media bias. The mainstream media have become unhinged. So great is their dislike of Mr. Bush and so strong their desire to have a Watergate office-removal scandal that they cannot distinguish between relevant and irrelevant, material and immaterial. Blinding rage is destructive.

Talk about a well hammered nail!

The last several days I’ve been fighting a highly aggressive edition of influenza that did, indeed, influence things — I found it pretty impossible to stay focused enough to finish any posts or get some other needed work done at this website, but did get in some reading, finishing another book I definitely recommend for anyone who would like to learn of the vast difference between the infinitely more civilized way we conservatives conduct the business of politics and the often violent, vandalous and aggressively slanderous methods employed by the left.

The book is Unhinged: Exposing Liberals Gone Wild, by conservative columnist and superblogger Michelle Malkin.

Get it. Read it. By myriad references and examples, learn how totally intolerant, insanely extremist and profoundly out-of-touch with reality liberals really are.

Yet another example of how the so-called intellectual, obfuscating, Marxist, propagandizing, anti-American, lying, Machiavellan, treasonous, shit eating liberals’ domination of the American educational system has transformed many of today’s college students into history challenged, left leaning stooges for this country’s enemies within is well told by John Fund(scrolling down the page)here.

‘Pappy’ Shot Down by Campus Ignoramuses

It’s well known that college students today aren’t as educated in our nation’s history as they should be, but it’s still hard to grasp the mind-bending political correctness just displayed by the University of Washington’s student senate at its campus in Seattle.

The issue before the Senate this month was a proposed memorial to World War II combat pilot Gregory “Pappy” Boyington, a 1933 engineering graduate of the university, who was awarded the Congressional Medal of Honor for his service commanding the famed “Black Sheep” squadron in the Pacific. The student senate rejected the memorial because “a Marine” is not “an example of the sort of person UW wants to produce.”

Digging themselves in deeper, the student opponents of the memorial indicated: “We don’t need to honor any more rich white males.” Other opponents compared Boyington’s actions during World War II with murder.

“I am absolutely bewildered that the Student Senate voted down the resolution,” Brent Ludeman, the president of the UW College Republicans, told me. He noted that despite the deficiencies of the UW History Department, the complete ignorance of Boyington’s history and reputation by the student body was hard to fathom. After all, “Black Sheep Squadron,” a 1970s television show portraying Colonel Boyington’s heroism as a pilot and Japanese prisoner of war, still airs frequently on the History Channel. Apparently, though, it’s an unusual UW student who’d be willing to learn any U.S. history even if it’s spoonfed to him by TV.

As for the sin of honoring a rich white male, Mr. Ludeman points out that Boyington (who died in 1988) was neither rich nor white. He happened to be a Sioux Indian, who wound up raising his three children as a single parent. “Colonel Boyington is luckily not around to see how ignorant students at his alma mater can be today,” says Kirby Wilbur, a morning talk show host at Seattle’s KVI Radio. Perhaps the trustees and alumni of the school will now help educate them.

Coincidentally, I’m about done reading a highly enlightening book that I can already assure you is a must-read for today’s students on every educational level if they are of a mind to discern the difference between what the liberals want them to “learn” and what actually transpired in American History.

The book, authored by Thomas E. Woods, Jr., PhD, is The Politically Incorrect Guide To American History.

One of the first things Stalin, Hitler, Mao and other totalitarians did was rewrite the histories of their nations, remaking the past to foster their control of the present. The American Left has done the same thing in our country: most American history books — both for students and adults — are riddled with PC nonsense that makes the Founding Fathers over into racist slaveholders, the settlers of the West into genocidal land-stealers, and the welfare state into as the harbinger of the ultimate triumph of liberalism.

But now at last conservatives and patriotic Americans have an antidote: The Politically Incorrect Guide to American History is a handy one-volume guide to our nation’s glorious past that has one key advantage over today’s dozens of dreary PC history books: this one tells you what really happened — not what liberals wish had happened.

Not only does Thomas Woods tell readers the truth, he also provides references to books that the “intellectual” liberals do not want today’s students(or anyone else, for that matter) to read as they, too, reveal the truth.

From my reading thus far, I highly recommend this book for anyone who prefers to know the truth rather than absorbing the PC revisionist malarkey being pushed on our youth for leftist political reasons.