Daily U.S. Constitution, Article 1, Section 4

Major Theme: When the Congress Shall Meet

"The Times, Places and Manner of holding Elections for Senators and Representatives, shall be prescribed in each State by the Legislature thereof; but the Congress may at any time by Law make or alter such regulations, except as to the Places of chusing Senators.

The Congress shall assemble at least once in every Year, and such Meeting shall be on the first Monday in December, unless they shall by Law appoint a different Day."

-U.S. Constitution
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ANALYSIS
Paragraph two states that the Congress shall meet at least once in a year. What significance are we to glean from this? The Founders did not intend for Congressmen and Senators to spend a lot of time in the capital. Politics was not supposed to be a full-time occupation. It was a public service, no more than that. Think of how much less mischief our Congress could get into today, if they spent less than half the time they usually spend in Washington.

Patriot Thought

Daily U.S. Constitution, Article 1, Section 3 (Paragraphs 6 and 7)

Major Theme: The Senate's Role In Impeachment Cases

"The Senate shall have the sole Power to try all Impeachments. When sitting for that Purpose, they shall be on Oath or Affirmation. When the President of the United States is tried, the Chief Justice shall preside: And no Person shall be convicted without Concurrence of two thirds of the Members present.

Judgment in Cases of Impeachment shall not extend further than to removal from Office, and disqualification to hold and enjoy any Office of honor, Trust or Profit under the United States: but the Party convicted shall nevertheless be liable and subject to Indictment, Trial, Judgment and Punishment, according to Law."

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-U.S. Constitution

Daily U.S. Constitution, Article 1, Section 3 (Paragraphs 3, 4, and 5)

Major Themes: Qualifications to Become a U.S. Senator; Senate Responsibilities of the Vice President of the United States; How Senate Leadership is Chosen

Paragraph 3:

"No Person shall be a Senator who shall not have attained to the Age of thirty Years, and been nine Years a Citizen of the United States, and who shall not when elected, be an Inhabitant of that State for which he shall be chosen."

Paragraph 4:

"The Vice President of the United States shall be President of the Senate, but shall have no Vote, unless they be equally divided. "

Paragraph 5:

"The Senate shall chuse their other Officers, and also a President pro tempore, in the Absence of the the Vice President, or when he shall exercise the Office of President of the United States."

-U.S. Constitution
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ANALYSIS 

Don't you love the Constitutional qualifications for high political office? Technically, I'm qualified to run for one of the two Georgia U.S. Senate seats just because I'm over thirty, I've always been a citizen, and I live in that state! Easy, right? Wrong. Senate terms (six years) are long. Senators can be elected to unlimited terms. (Think Ted Kennedy, senator from Massachusetts 1962 - 2009). There are only two seats to run for, rarely more than one is up for election at a time. Finally, it takes a lot of friends, money, and advertising just to familiarize your name on the ballot, let alone convince the voters of your state that you are the right candidate for that office. 

Check out paragraph 4, the Senate powers of the vice president of the U.S. The vice president is often overlooked in our political culture. He has almost no decision-making powers. Yet, he presides over the U.S. Senate and casts a tie-breaking vote. Sometimes, the future of a president's favored legislative bill in the Senate hangs on the tie-breaking vote of the vice president. Of course, the vice president is expected to follow the wishes of the president. Still, the opportunity to save a president's endangered agenda in the Senate is a cherished role of the vice presidency.

Patriot Thought 

Daily U.S. Constitution: Article 1, Section 3 (Paragraph 1)

"The Senate of the United States shall be composed of two Senators from each State, chosen by the Legislature thereof, for six Years; and each Senator shall have one Vote."  
-U.S. Constitution
[spelling and capitalization are reproduced from the document]  [underline added]

ANALYSIS
The Founders designed the U.S. Senate for two main reasons. First, it gave the small states protection against the dictates of the larger states, protection they feared they wouldn't have in the population-based House of Representatives because in the Senate, each state gets exactly two senators. Second, by making the selection of senators the prerogative of state legislatures, the Senate served as a check against the whims of the popularly elected House of Representatives. The Founders did not trust democracy and wanted each state to have its interests represented in the national government. 

This arrangement was entirely undone by passage of the Seventeenth Amendment in 1913. Now, U.S. Senators from each state are "elected by the people thereof." Thus, each senator must be all things to all people, just like congressmen, and the states have lost a powerful bargaining tool in protecting its interests in the federal government.


Patriot Thought

Flight of the Obamacare Bringers: Obamacare Exemptions Create a Ruling Class

In the age of the Soviet Union, socialism was for everyone except the party members. While the masses lived in government-issued projects and drove government-issued cars (for those whose applications could prove such a vehicle was a necessity), members of the central committee and politburo lived in Black Sea dachas, enjoyed caviar, and rode in chauffeur-driven limousines. 

Socialism has always been the spirit behind the creation of America's Affordable Care Act. It was the same for Social Security, Medicare, and all other programs created in the name of helping everybody. You can decide for yourself whether these programs are good or bad, but any program that involves re-distributing wealth and issuing benefits across all segments of society is a brand of socialism. But there is something ominously different about the career of the Affordable Care Act, otherwise known as Obamacare. Its bringers are running full-speed away from it!

In 1965, former President Harry Truman enrolled himself in Medicare. If it was good enough for everyone, it was good enough for a president. And yet, since the 2012 re-election of President Obama, two years before the expected full-implementation of Obamacare, those of the very segments of society which made this law a reality are tripping over themselves to get their constituents exempted from it. 

The first grumblings came from Senate Democrats, worried about their re-election chances in 2014. Montana Senator Max Baucus, one of the chief sponsors of Obamacare, began calling the law "a train wreck." Next, it was the turn of the labor unions, most notably Jimmy Hoffa Jr.'s Teamsters, UFCW, and Unite-Here. Together, they issued a damning statement about Obamacare to Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid. Here are its most insightful passages:

"Like millions of other Americans, our members are front-line workers in the American economy. We have been strong supporters of the notion that all Americans should have access to quality, affordable health care. We have also been strong supporters of you. In campaign after campaign we have put boots on the ground, gone door-to-door to get out the vote, run phone banks and raised money to secure this vision. Now this vision has come back to haunt us."

"As you both know first-hand, our persuasive arguments have been disregarded and met with a stone wall by the White House and the pertinent agencies. This is especially stinging because other stakeholders have repeatedly received successful interpretations for their respective grievances. Most disconcerting of course is last week’s huge accommodation for the employer community—extending the statutorily mandated “December 31, 2013” deadline for the employer mandate and penalties."

"Time is running out: Congress wrote this law; we voted for you. We have a problem; you need to fix it." 

The Affordable Care Act will “destroy the foundation of the 40 hour work week that is the backbone of the American middle class.”

This week, in keeping with Obamacare's trend of destroying" the backbone of the middle class", the president just issued an executive order, exempting congressional staffs from receiving the Medicaid-Plus (i.e. Obamacare exchange plan) that was set to replace their existing (and generous) Federal Employees Health Benefits Program (FEHBP) with lower quality coverage. Over the last few weeks, these staffers have groaned that Obamacare will force them to pay thousands of dollars a year in out-of-pocket expenses.

Hearing their cries, the president issued his executive order exempting congressional staffers from Obamacare, breaking his own law. This is not the first time the president has broken the Obamacare law. A matter of weeks ago, he waved the employer mandate (delaying it, conveniently, until after the 2014 midterm elections). Does it seem far fetched that labor unions will get an exemption too? Not at all. 

The president has already shown us that he has no regard for the rule of law, that he conducts himself as being above the law, and that he will save his privileged, ruling elite, from the very laws he signed to make everyone" pay their fair share." The only segment of American society that will not get an Obamacare exemption is the middle class, in other words, those of us who can not afford to send a lobbyist to Washington on our behalf. The Affordable Care Act (with all its exemptions) is set to create a new American ruling class, unless it is repealed.

Patriot Thought



Sources:

WSJ
http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424127887324635904578644202946287548.html

Hoffa quotes from:
http://www.breitbart.com/Big-Government/2013/07/16/James-Hoffa-Flips-on-ObamaCare

Daily U.S. Constitution: Article 1, Section 2 (Paragraph 5)

"The House of Representatives shall chuse their Speaker and other Officers; and shall have the sole Power of Impeachment."  
-U.S. Constitution
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ANALYSIS
Most people today know that the House chooses its own speaker. However, after the last election there were whisperings to consider making New Gingrich speaker of House again, although he is not currently an elected representative. As for the Constitution, the House can simply choose its speaker, according to its own rules.

Patriot Thought

Daily U.S. Constitution: Article 1, Section 2 (Paragraphs 2 and 3)

Major Themes: Qualifications of Congressmen, Apportionment of Representatives and Direct Taxes, and How Slaves will be Assessed for Taxation

Article 1, Section 2 begins by addressing how the House of Representatives shall be composed, and that its members shall be elected every two years. The qualifications to become a congressman are as follows:

"No Person shall be a Representative who shall not have attained to the Age of twenty five Years, and been seven Years a Citizen of the United States, and who shall not, when elected, be an Inhabitant of that State in which he shall be chosen.

Representatives and direct Taxes shall be apportioned among the several States which may be included within this Union, according to their respective Numbers, which shall be determined by adding to the whole Number of free Persons, including those bound to Service for a Term of Years, and excluding Indians not taxed, three fifths of all other Persons."

[spelling and capitalization are reproduced from the document]
-U.S. Constitution

ANALYSIS
Article 1, Section 2 is the U.S. Constitution's first mention of slavery in the United States. You may notice great care was taken to avoid the use of the word slaves in the document. The founders were enlightened thinkers who understood slavery was an immoral practice, at odds with the ideals of the American Revolution, specifically contradicting the "self evident" truth that "all men are created equal" in the Declaration of Independence. 

Apportionment of congressmen and direct taxes refers to the number of congressional seats a state may have in the House of Representatives and the amount of direct taxes owed by each state to the federal government. Both figures are determined by each state's population. 

Paragraph 3 distinguishes between four categories of people for apportionment of Congressmen and direct taxes. It was more of a snapshot of eighteenth century America, rather than today's America. 

We can all guess who the "free Persons" were. Those "bound to Service for a Term of Years" were otherwise known as indentured servants, slaves for a contracted number of years. This practice was already outdated by the era of the Constitution. Indians living within the borders of the U.S. were not taxed because they were regarded as sovereign nations. 

For the last category of persons, apportionment of Congressmen and direct taxes would be determined by "three-fifths of all other persons" - slaves - to call them what they were. This meant that a state could constitutionally count each slave as three-fifths of a person for purposes of apportionment of that state's number of Congressmen and the amount of direct taxes owed.

This was what our school textbooks refer to as the three-fifths compromise. The northern states (which had few slaves) were envious of the southern states (which had many). The North was not envious because they wanted more slaves. What they were afraid of was the ability of southern states to use their slave populations increase their numbers of congressmen, and to therefore dominate the House of Representatives. The South felt fully justified in counting its slave population for apportionment. Therefore, the three-fifths compromise gave both sides some of what they wanted.

The U.S. Constitution was written in the period 1787-88 and slavery was constitutionally protected in the United States until passage of the Thirteenth Amendment in 1865. In the words of Abraham Lincoln, this amendment would be a "king's cure" for the hitherto constitutionally certified evil of slavery.

Patriot Thought

The Tea Party: Five Years Later

An Adapting Movement?

http://www.foxnews.com/politics/2013/08/04/five-years-later-evolving-tea-party-movement-wades-into-2014-elections/

Daily U.S. Constitution: Article 1, Section 1

"All legislative Powers herein granted shall be vested  in a Congress of the United States, which shall consist of a Senate and House of Representatives."

-U.S. Constitution
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ANALYSIS
This means Congress has the power to legislate (or make laws), not the president, the courts, or any other body. 

Patriot Thought

Dick Morris' History Video: Relief But No Recovery

Dick Morris' latest history video untangles the myth of Roosevelt's New Deal. In doing so, his argument offers striking parallels to the failure of big government to bring us economic recovery in the last five years.

http://www.dickmorris.com/the-new-deal-part-i-relief-but-no-recovery-dick-morris-tv-history-video/

Patriot Thought

Thought of the Day: Obama Unveils Plan to Prevent Future Benghazis

Let's guess what the plan is? Return the armed security stripped of the embassies after President Obama came into office? No, guess again. Go after the people who attacked Benghazi in the first place? No, not that. Give up? Here it is, the plan is to shut down more than twenty embassies and consulates across the entire Middle East when we receive a localized threat in the Arabian peninsula. Okay, maybe this saves the lives of the personnel for another day. But what message does this send around the world to those who want to harm us?

Daily U.S. Constitution: The Preamble

"WE THE PEOPLE of the Unites States, in Order to form a more perfect Union, establish Justice, insure domestic Tranquility, provide for the common defence, promote the general Welfare, and secure the Blessings of Liberty to ourselves and our Posterity, do ordain and establish this Constitution for the United States of America." 

[spelling and capitalization are reproduced from the document] -U.S. Constitution

ANALYSIS
There we have it friends, the rationale for establishing our American government. Do you notice the source of sovereign power? It lies not with the federal government or with any of the state governments. We the people are sovereign in America, even if we've forgotten it.

Patriot Thought

Thought of the Day: I'll Have More Flexibility After I'm Re-Elected

Let's see, Mr. Snowden flies to Moscow, pleading for asylum. Mr. Obama asks Mr. Putin to return Mr. Snowden to his homeland to face criminal charges. Mr. Putin says no. Months go by. Mr. Snowden is granted asylum in Russia for one year. Is this the flexibility Mr. Obama referred to last year, when he assured the Russian foreign minister all he needed to do was get re-elected before proceeding with U.S. and Russian relations? Hmm... It seems Mr. Obama was the only one who promised flexibility.

Patriot Thought

Thought of the Day: Phony Scandals

What can we the people do about a re-elected president who calls illegal spying on journalists' communications, IRS persecution of citizens who disagree with him, and four dead protection-denied American embassy workers, phony scandals? 

Patriot Thought

What Makes A President Great?

The Insight of an American Historian, H.W. Brands

Who is your favorite president? Is it one of the Rushmore titans, Washington, Lincoln, and company? Or do you have a soft spot for Jimmy Carter or Nixon? Several months ago, Historian H.W. Brands gave a lecture on this topic at the Hauenstein Center. His criteria for presidential greatness is fascinating, although I disagree with some of it.

Brands' criteria for measuring presidential greatness consists of the following:


*Did the president meet the expectations of the presidency in his contemporary age?
*Did the president have a greater impact on American life and history compared with his recent predecessors and successors? 
*Did the president face a crisis great enough to shake the foundations of American life?
*Many things happen in American life which have nothing to do with the U.S. Constitution. In such cases, did the president find a solution that the Constitution didn't provide for?
*The great presidents were dividers, not uniters. Did the president use divisiveness cleverly enough to get elected and re-elected?


It seems fair to judge a president's leadership against the expectations of his day and age. Technology and global connections are of a far different nature than they were in George Washington's day. On the flip side, there is a danger in a leader always giving in to the demands of the crowd. Presidents are elected because people trust them to have greater wisdom [than themselves] to make the big decisions. A president must keep this in mind when opinion polls swing one way, then the other.

Having a greater (or transformative) impact on American life seems a prerequisite for greatness. After all, biographers and textbook writers need stories to tell. Still, Brands may take this a little further than caution should counsel. Adolf Hitler and Genghis Khan had a transformative impact on world history. Yet, we don't hold them in high esteem (to put it mildly).

Brands is not alone among historians who claim a great, earth shattering crisis is essential to providing a president with sufficient opportunity to bring out his greatness. George Washington, Abraham Lincoln, and FDR are placed at the top of most academic lists of presidential greatness precisely because each of them had to tackle a crisis that put the existence and/or prosperity of America at risk. Brands concurs.

This view deserves to be challenged, and some have made the case for presidents Theodore Roosevelt, Dwight Eisenhower, and Ronald Reagan, who avoided a major war and fostered prosperity during two terms. Drama and crisis need not be a criteria for greatness. There are other means through which a major impact (if quietly) can be made on the world, namely through smart diplomacy, sound economic policies, and the preservation and expansion of human freedom. It was not for nothing that Eisenhower didn't use an atomic bomb on another nation during his presidency, or that bloodshed didn't accompany the fall of the Iron Curtain in Europe during Bush's term.

Historians are impressed by those who are ambitious for power and are successful in gaining it. More than two thousand years after his assassination on the floor of the Roman senate (by those less impressed than historians with people hungry for power) Julius Caesar has had no shortage of doting biographers. Brands falls victim to this spell by asserting presidential greatness depends on a willingness to set aside Constitutional scruples to find solutions to the problems of the day. 

To this point I must reply that the U.S. Constitution was designed to function the way it does precisely in the name of avoiding an American Caesar. The fact that the U.S. Constitution is the oldest (currently functioning) political constitution in the world, and has produced a society with a level of freedom that continues to expand to include ever greater numbers of people (some of them here illegally) is a testament that this document offers solutions to the problems of any day and age. Presidents should not be encouraged to seek solutions outside those permissible under the Constitution.

More troubling is Brands' assertion that the great presidents were dividers rather than uniters, and that a president aspiring to greatness must be divisive. Of the three greatest presidents (in Brands' reckoning), the one he uses most convincingly for this argument is FDR. At the Hauenstein Center, Brands called the audience's attention to President Obama's re-election campaign in 2012. The historian correctly explained that the current president resorted to tactics "we might call class warfare." But Brands believes Obama's demagoguery was tame compared to the class warfare employed by FDR in his successful campaigns in 1932 and 1936. Roosevelt spoke of "moneychangers" and "economic royalists" who were to blame for the Great Depression, and that Roosevelt was determined to rein them all in.

Regardless of how one may compare Obama's class warfare with FDR's, it is hard to accept Brands' claim that divisiveness is a hallmark of presidential greatness. Of anyone who reveres the memory of FDR, I doubt dirty political fighting is one of their reasons for admiring him. 

Harder still, is the case that the other great presidents, Washington and Lincoln, were divisive leaders. Washington was unanimously elected to be the nation's first president precisely because he was the only revolutionary figure all prominent Americans could unite behind. Divisiveness was rampant during the Civil War because it was a civil war. But Lincoln could hardly be blamed for it considering the southern states left the union merely because he was elected president in the first place. Furthermore, as the war drew to a close, Lincoln's reconstruction plans called for lenient treatment of the states being brought back into the union. There would be no treason trials. 

H.W. Brands' criteria for assessing presidential greatness is insightful because it reveals the way historians view human relations. Like others, historians tend to be obsessed with power and are impressed by those who wield it. They call our attention to those who organize and use people. Historians can be of great use in helping us make up our minds about our leaders, clarifying our own views of them, even if those views are contrary to those of the historian.

Patriot Thought  

New Video Link: The REAL Trayvon Martin and the REAL George Zimmerman

The evidence our mainstream media has refused to investigate. Find the link under the "videos" section of this blog page. No theory, just journalism, the way it's supposed to be.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ebu6Yvzs4Ls

Patriot Thought

Dick Morris' History Videos

Have you always wanted to learn more about the history of America but you have no time to read dozens of books? Dick Morris has been posting short video segments in which he discusses the major topics (chronologically) of U.S. history. He's been doing this for about six months and is currently on the Great Depression. Each clip is less than 4 minutes long. He offers many great insights, some of them revisionist. To find a direct link to his history videos, go to the link under "videos" (on this blog page) or click this link:

http://www.dickmorris.com/category/history/


Patriot Thought

How Does One Become A Great Historical Figure?

The Insight of an American Historian, H.W. Brands

Having read the work of many popular historians of American history, I've concluded H.W. Brands stands out among them. Biographers tend to fall in love with their subjects, a condition David McCullough mildly suffers from. In reading his Pulitzer-winning masterpiece John Adams, a critical thinker could not help but notice the author would have us believe politics played no role in President Adams' appointment of a large number of midnight judges, shortly before his adversary (Thomas Jefferson) was inaugurated to take his place as president. 

So what if Adams was politically motivated in stacking the courts with judges of his ideological bent the night (or weeks) before leaving the presidency? As president, he had the right to make those appointments. Yet, McCullough felt the need to defend his biographical subject, even on such a benign issue. A cynic may think the author has become the parent of his subject. Such parental protectiveness is less apparent in Brands' works of history (if it is detectable at all).

H.W. Brands is one of my favorite historians because he tackles both sides of every major controversy without imposing his judgement heavily on one side. His handling of President Andrew Jackson's role in the forced removal of the Indian nations to places west of the Mississippi, what we might today call ethnic cleansing, (without the genocidal purpose which often accompanies it) is fascinating because Brands shows us the dilemmas each of the major participants had, and what their options were. The result was that the tragedy of the Indian removal was conveyed to the reader without a biased or slanted judgement toward one party or another. I happen to believe the state of Georgia behaved shamefully and fraudulently in its instigation of that crisis, but Brands didn't force me to make that conclusion.

Recent history is the litmus test of a historical writer's even-handedness. During a time-killing walk through the history section of a local Barnes and Noble, I perused a copy of Brands' American Dreams: The United States Since 1945. Subjecting it to the ultimate test of fairness, I went straight to the chapters covering 1980 - 2009. I discovered the book is striking for its even-handedness in treating presidents as controversial as Reagan, the Bushes, and Obama. The same can not be said for other historians who have written good work on the same history, Paul Johnson and Sean Wilentz to name a few. 

Although recognizing Reagan never saw a weapons order he didn't like (contradicting his pledge to dramatically reduce the deficit), Brands conveys the Reagan presidency on all its merits, good and bad. By contrast, Paul Johnson's overwhelming praise for Reagan, and his excessive sympathy for Nixon, is matched by his dripping contempt for FDR and JFK. Nevertheless, Johnson's History of the American People is a fantastic (and vital) exploration of American history, aside from its flaws.

Sean Wilentz's Age of Reagan has the same problems, although from a liberal angle. His chapters on Reagan are chock full of stories about government corruption, yet that theme disappears when the reader gets to the Clinton chapters, as if the arrival of a Democrat president suddenly cleanses the sins of a corrupt bureaucracy. For ideological balance, Brands' work stands out from the rest. Brands is the type of writer who would come across as liberal to a conservative reader and conservative to a liberal reader, a quality unique and refreshing in an age of partisan extremes coloring information coming from today's media.

H.W. Brands has written biographies on Benjamin Franklin, Andrew Jackson, Ulysses Grant, Theodore Roosevelt, FDR, and is currently working on one about Reagan. Taken together, these six biographies will represent a view of the entire history of America through the prism of the presidency (excepting Ben Franklin, although he was a dominant political figure of his age).

Brands is a professor of history at the University of Texas. His students are mainly undergraduates. He is a prolific speaker at colleges across the country. Many of his public lectures are available on youtube. From listening to his lectures, one gains remarkable insight into the way a presidential historian assesses leadership qualities. Regardless of one's aspirations in life, Brands helps us understand the qualities that make someone a great historical figure.

Of particular interest is what Brands calls "the half-step rule." Have you ever realized you may be conflicted in your own views of a historical figure? For example, there are some qualities of that person's character you find admirable, and other qualities which contradict, or work against the quality you think is likeable in that character? To be more specific, let's take Thomas Jefferson's lofty words, "We hold these truths to be self-evident that all men are created equal" with his vehement denunciations of slavery in that he "shuddered" to think "God is just" and that there will be a "reckoning" regarding slavery. Now, on the other hand, how do we square Jefferson's words with the reality that he owned well over a hundred slaves, and was dependent on their labor until the day he met the maker he knew would bring the reckoning for it?

Doesn't it seem contradictory that history is moved by some of the very people you would least expect to move it? If so, Brands' answer is the half-step rule. He explains that history moves in half-steps. For a person to become a truly great historical figure, he or she must have one foot planted in the future, while keeping the other foot rooted in the present. If both feet are planted in the future, a person's contemporaries will think he or she is out of touch with reality, or too radical, and therefore impressionable minds will not be impressed. A person who is a full-step ahead of his times will never have the opportunity to become a historical figure, at least not a great one because his impact will not be large enough. 

The key to greatness is to be a half-step ahead of the times, keeping enough common ground with contemporaries to convince them of the change you want them to accept. Future generations will struggle to square what they will see as contradictions in your character, but the fact that they will struggle with it (at all) is a testament to your impact as a great historical figure. 

If Jefferson hadn't owned slaves, he never would have been among the planter class that ruled Colonial Virginia. Therefore, Jefferson would never have been elected to Virginia's House of Burgesses. From there, it follows that he never would have been selected to go to the Continental Congress. Therefore, he never would have been appointed to the committee drafting the Declaration of Independence. Finally, Jefferson would never have set America on the ideological footing of liberty and equality for all (men), putting slavery on the permanent defensive. Other men may have accomplished this, but Jefferson would not have, had he not owned slaves. A great figure is not good in all his attributes, yet without certain (if unpleasant) attributes, he never becomes great.

Patriot Thought

Moral Reflections on the Zimmerman Trial and on the Right to Self Defense

This reflection comes not from a legal expert on Florida laws concerning self defense, but from a thoughtful observer forming impressions of news commentary and reports from the recent trial of George Zimmerman, charged (but ultimately found not guilty) with second degree murder in the killing of Trayvon Martin in Florida.

WSB pundit Erick Erickson explained Florida law concerning self defense like this, "In Florida, if you feel someone is threatening your life, you have the right to kill that person, even if you started the fight." Erikson went on to say, "In this case it looks as though George Zimmerman may have provoked Trayvon Martin." Of course, we'll never know who provoked whom. Does George Zimmerman following Trayvon Martin amount to a provocation? Is it illegal to follow someone? Surely it is not. No one likes being followed, but being followed in of itself does not give us the right to charge after our pursuer and beat him bloody. After all, beating someone up is illegal; our laws call it assault. Certainly, if a person is being assaulted, the thought may cross his or her mind that their life is being threatened. If so, we have legal protection (in Florida) to kill the person threatening our existence. Without having read the law in question, I've noticed no one has challenged this interpretation of it.

Our judicial system is fair. Everyone is innocent until proven guilty. If the prosecution can not prove its case, the defendant must go free. Whether or not the acquitted gets what he or she truly deserves is a separate matter. The question is, Did the defendant get a fair trial?  People may speculate on the composition of the jury and how their backgrounds may have biased the verdict. Yet, the jury needed to decide whether or not Zimmerman was guilty of second degree murder (or at the last minute, manslaughter). For a guilty verdict, the evidence had to show some degree of intent to kill. The jury did not have the evidence or the eyewitness testimony to show that Zimmerman intended to kill Trayvon Martin. Therefore, their verdict of not guilty was the only reasonable outcome based on the conditions of a fair trial.

The evidence, such as it was, supported Zimmerman's testimony of self defense. He was being assaulted. The pictures taken after the event prove his assertion that Zimmerman had a broken nose and lacerations on the back of his head. Those lacerations look as though someone ran a cheese grater down the back of his head. He claimed he'd been knocked down, and that Trayvon had straddled him and was pummeling him from above, smashing Zimmerman's head against the concrete sidewalk. It's difficult to imagine how Zimmerman could have received the cuts and scrapes on the back of his head, if he (rather than Trayvon) had been on top in the fight.

The person on the top or the bottom of a fight is a crucial component in determining who had the opportunity to stop the fight and who had the opportunity to keep it going. The person on top can decide whether to get off and end the fight, whereas the person on bottom can only defend his or herself. For the bottom fighter, there is no retreat. There is nowhere to retreat to. Since the evidence more conclusively showed Zimmerman to be the bottom fighter, and the prosecution could not prove otherwise, we have nothing to contradict his testimony of acting in self defense. Killing in self defense can not convict a defendant of second degree murder or manslaughter in Florida. Therefore, the jury had no legal or ethical choice other than to acquit George Zimmerman.

It is disappointing to see so many people, some of them famous, who want to take away the people's right to proper self defense. Due to the Zimmerman verdict, Stevie Wonder has declared that he will no longer perform in any state that has a "stand your ground" law. In other words, Stevie Wonder is protesting against the American people having the right to defend themselves and their families from harm. Are we to believe Stevie applies that same standard to his own life? Does Stevie have bodyguards? If so, are they not armed and ready to kill to protect him from an assailant?

Are there any celebrities who do not or have not had either full time or part time armed bodyguards on their pay roll? Are celebrities arrogant enough to think they are the only people important enough to require armed security? What world does Stevie Wonder live in?

What kind of world would we live in if our right to self defense was taken away from us? What kind of America would we have? Certainly, we would not have the America we know and love? We would not have an America of fair trials or juries of our peers. If such sentiments ought to be important to us, than our media culture and our president have failed us horribly in the circumstances surrounding the Zimmerman trial, and its aftermath.

The first NBC report of Zimmerman's 9-1-1 call deleted a crucial segment of the conversation he'd had with the dispatcher. As edited, the segment featuring the dispatcher asking Zimmerman about the suspicious person's race disappeared, making it appear that Zimmerman, without prompting, said to the dispatcher, "He looks black." Such malicious tampering with the 9-1-1 conversation shows a major media outlet that is irresponsible, going out of its way to fan the flames of racial turmoil in this country.

All of the media coverage I witnessed about the shooting death of Trayvon Martin, displayed only pictures of Martin as a twelve-year old boy, five years prior to his death! Are we to believe no pictures of Trayvon Martin have been taken in the last five years? To this day, I have not seen a single picture of Trayvon Martin showing him to be anywhere close to what he looked like near the time of his death! Yet, all pictures shown of George Zimmerman have been recently taken. Why have NBC, ABC, CNN, and others not shown us photos of a twelve-year old George Zimmerman? If asked, they would undoubtedly say such photos bear no relevance to this case. However, the photos of the twelve-year old Trayvon Martin bear relevance because the real purpose is to play-up the image of his fragile innocence! There was nothing fragile about the adult-sized figure who used a concrete slab to smash the back of George Zimmerman's head! Such is the detestable, reprehensible bias through which our media culture spins the news before our impressionable minds.

Few Americans are under the spell that our media is unbiased and fair. But in times when our society is rife with divisions, we should be able to look to our president for a message of unity and shared values. Presidents have historically given us what we want from them in times of pain and conflict. Reagan's speech following the explosion of the space ship Challenger, healed the nation in a moment of grief. JFK's address following the Bay of Pigs fiasco showed America it was led by a real man, one willing to accept personal responsibility for his mistakes. Unfortunately, in the days following the verdict of the Zimmerman trial, President Barack Obama botched his opportunity to play the presidential role of nation healer and uniter. Instead, he has come down hard in his sympathy for Trayvon Martin and has expressed disappointment of the jury's verdict of not guilty regarding the second degree murder charge against George Zimmerman.

The president's bias was apparent long before the trial took place. His most memorable statement following the death of Trayvon Martin was, "If I had a son, he'd look like Trayvon." No one would have accused the president of bias if he'd followed up that comment with something like, "and I'd want my son to have a fair trial like the one George Zimmerman deserves as an American citizen." Of course, no such quote regarding Zimmerman came from the president. Mr. Obama's one-sided thinking of the case is undeniable in statements like, "I could have been Trayvon Martin thirty-five years ago."

The president's press commentary in the days since the announcement of the Zimmerman verdict has amounted to an outpouring of sympathy for Trayvon Martin coupled with an accusation that our criminal justice system is biased in favor of whites against blacks. Although the president began last Friday's address by acknowledging that the jury produced the only reasonable verdict under the conditions of our judicial system, he showed his displeasure in every other statement he made about the trial and the circumstances surrounding it.

President Obama's entire address asserted that our judicial system, and by extension the Zimmerman verdict, is racially biased, and that a double standard is applied in favor of whites against blacks. The president summarized, "All that contributes to a sense that if a white male teen was involved in the same kind of scenario, that from both top to bottom, both the outcome and the aftermath might have been different." It is one thing for cultural figures such as Al Sharpton to say something like this. It is a travesty for the president of the United States to say something like this. He is supposed to be above the fray. He is supposed to stand for all Americans, not just one racial or ethnic group. He is not supposed to take sides in a judicial case. He is not supposed to play politics with judicial matters.

What's worse, the president of the United States is wrong even in the things he said about our criminal justice system in that address. How do we the people know that if Zimmerman were black and Trayvon white, the outcome would have been different? NBC and ABC do not report on those kinds of cases! As far as high profile cases go, if our judicial system was racially biased shouldn't O.J. Simpson have been convicted in the murder of his ex-wife? I'm not saying O.J. was guilty or innocent. I'm just pointing out that if the president's logic were true, O.J. should've been convicted in that case. How about Jay Z's alleged role in the stabbing death of someone he had altercation with in a club, some years ago? If our judicial system was biased against African Americans, why was Jay Z not convicted? Or how about Michael Jackson? I happen to believe he received a fair trial in his final go around with the judicial system over accusations of sexual child abuse. He received a fair trial because the prosecution could not prove his guilt. Yet, if President Obama's words are to be true, Michael Jackson's racial identity should have convicted him. Yet, none of this logic is demonstrably true, not in the twenty-first century. 

The inescapable conclusion a fair observer can make is that the president of the United States is racially biased in his own interpretation of the American judicial system and that he is fanning the flames of racial turmoil in this country by backing it with the force of the Oval Office. Moreover, the president's attorney general has pledged himself to the cause of overturning "stand your ground" laws across the states. The Obama administration does not want the American people to have the right to defend themselves and their families, with the necessary means, from those who would do them harm.

In the concluding remarks of Friday's address, the president linked his twin themes of a racially biased judicial system and of his opposition to the American people's right of self defense as follows: 

"I just ask people to consider that if Trayvon Martin was of age and armed, could he have stood his ground on that sidewalk? And do we actually think that he would have been justified in shooting Mr. Zimmerman, who had followed him in a car, because he had felt threatened. And if the answer to that question is at least ambiguous, than it seems to be that we might want to examine those kinds of laws."

In this time of great social anxiety, the American people need to be told the truth by our media institutions. We are not getting it. In this time of great division, the American people need uniting leadership. We are not getting it from the White House. In this time when Americans need confidence that we have the right of self defense from those who would do us harm, the Justice Department of the federal government is against us.Thus is the revealed legacy of the Zimmerman trial and its aftermath.

Patriot Thought

Why Should We Still Care About the JFK Assassination?

 A Book Review of Killing Kennedy: The End of Camelot (Bill O'Reilly and Martin Dugard)

Not a day goes by without news commentary about the president of the United States. In any conversation with a friend about politics, the talk often focuses on the president and what he's doing. Try to imagine what a day of discussion would be like on the day a president is murdered? How about the days after it? How about the weeks, months, and years after it? If it is hard to imagine, it's because we haven't experienced a presidential assassination in fifty years. The fiftieth anniversary of the JFK murder will take place this November 22. O'Reilly and Dugard's Killing Kennedy brings that horrific day and it's immediate aftermath vividly back to life, forcing the reader to experience the horror the country went through on that day, and how the nation tried to make sense of it afterwards.

With the cottage industry of books available on every conceivable scenario surrounding the Kennedy assassination, of who may or may not have been involved in it, is it necessary to read O'Reilly's? After all, he's not a historian by trade. Furthermore, his book doesn't offer any facts that add something new to our understanding of the event.

If the reader is looking for a fun, engaging, fair-minded treatment without conjecture and outlandish or tedious theorizing, Killing Kennedy delivers superbly. It is barely 300 pages in length, and can be finished in a reasonable amount of time. The writers do not claim to have written the last word on the Kennedy assassination -and in fact- they are so fair minded, they admit there is more to the story than what the known facts tells us about the tragedy.

Most impressive is the scope of coverage this short book delivers on John F. Kennedy's whole life, and not just about the events of the assassination. O'Reilly and Dugard give us the story of PT-109, in which Kennedy first demonstrated his bravery during the sinking of his boat in World War II. The book then moves on to his early political career. The bulk of the book focuses on the main events of JFK's presidency, from the Bay of Pigs, to the missile crisis, to Vietnam, to civil rights, and more. The president's sexual affairs with Marilyn Monroe and others receive special coverage, and the impact these affairs had on his marriage is neither ignored nor excused. 

It is tempting to assume that a conservative pundit like Bill O'Reilly would be harsh in his judgement of (the supposedly liberal) John F. Kennedy's legacy, but quite the opposite is true. If we set aside the obvious Irish and Roman Catholic heritage the author shares with the president, the book offers much for conservatives to admire about JFK. Two decades before Reagan, JFK initiated major tax cuts to help the economy. His critics (Historian Paul Johnson among them) argue that Kennedy cut taxes to raise government revenue, but Kennedy was aware that doing so would stave off a recession. He was advised by British officials that high taxes punished job growth and deprived a government of revenue, therefore Kennedy was advised to kill both birds by cutting taxes. Consequently, the early sixties were boom years for the American economy. Imagine that!

For the armchair historians who believe Lee Harvey Oswald acted alone in the killing of JFK, the book offers reasons to support that view, although the authors do not entirely commit themselves to it. For many people who believe a vast conspiracy of very powerful people orchestrated the assassination, the starting point for them is the assumption that someone so insignificant and ordinary as Oswald could not have brought down a towering figure so large as John F. Kennedy. After all, Kennedy and Khrushchev held the world at the edge of nuclear holocaust during the Cuban missile crisis. Furthermore, the president of the United States was protected by the formidable Secret Service (even Lincoln did not have this).

Oswald was a nobody who couldn't hold a job or keep a family together. Yet, the conditions of the Dallas motorcade on November 22, 1963, made it absolutely plausible that a marksman with a decent rifle and scope could kill the president of the United States should that president be riding in an open convertible along a route the assassin was sure would lead the president within the shooting range of his rifle. The motorcade route was published in the local Dallas papers three days in advance, giving Oswald plenty of time to choose his ground. Conveniently, the motorcade came along window-view of Oswald's workplace, the Texas School Book Depository. On his lunch break, Oswald shot the president instead of eating lunch. That is how someone as ordinary as Oswald could have brought down the president of the United States.

The conspiracy theories began with Oswald himself. Soon after his arrest, Oswald told reporters he was merely a patsy. While telling them this, he smiled and proudly displayed his handcuffs. Reading of this, I couldn't help but wonder, if Oswald was really a patsy, why did he smile while telling it? Shouldn't a patsy or a pawn be terrified? On the contrary, Oswald was proud of what he'd done and was putting on a performance to drum-up publicity to make himself all the more significant and famous. What I gather from Killing Kennedy is that the murder of the president was a deed from a pathetic man who had given up on life and was throwing it away, reaping some glory on his way out.

Lee Harvey Oswald may have been the biggest winner from the assassination of John F. Kennedy, but America was the biggest loser. What followed was a gut-wrenching period of mourning for a president (despite his critics) much beloved by many of his countrymen. The Kennedy assassination has a grim distinction among presidential murders. Unlike the assassinations of Lincoln, McKinley, and others, the murder of John F. Kennedy was captured on film, in real time. Anyone can watch the last fleeting moments of President Kennedy's life by going to youtube and finding a clip of the Zapruder film. There, they will watch the smiling, waving president, whose skull is then exploded by the assassin's bullet. They can watch the First Lady's horror as she witnesses the butchering of her husband before her own eyes, his blood and gore spraying her face and clothes.  This country has never recovered from that gruesome day, and for the younger generations who have no first-hand memory of it, Killing Kennedy: The End of Camelot is a terrific starting point to learn of its impact on our great nation.

Patriot Thought

A New Ground Game: A Conservative Road Map for Winning the Culture War and Taking America Back from the Brink of Ruin

Is it possible, or even likely, that conservatives can win elections in the age of Obama? Yes. Does it mean abandoning the Republican party in the hope that it will dissolve or be subsumed by a new party? No. Does it mean all conservatives must become Republicans? No. Does it mean Republicans can win without Independents, Libertarians, and Tea Party activists? No. Can Republicans win if they write off Democrat voters as being beyond the pale?No. The bottom line is, conservatives can win if they think of their activism in terms of education and coalition-building rather than party, identity, or ideological loyalty. 

Across the electoral spectrum, there is a growing awareness among the people that our current leadership in Washington has been, and is continuing, to lead America toward financial, economic, and international ruin. Disgust of the status quo is widespread, and the forecast offers much of the same. Conservative policies are not driving public policy. Therefore, the ruin is not attributable to conservative activism. Moreover, conservative solutions to America's economic problems are the only solutions verifiable with historic results. This state of affairs offers fertile soil for conservative grassroots to flourish. There are several steps conservatives can take if they want to succeed in taking back the soul of the American people from the big spenders and government growers who are threatening our liberty and prosperity.

Step 1: Wage our Cause in the Classrooms and Lecture-Halls 

Through like-minded proxies in the entertainment and academic world, liberals have waged an astonishingly successful war to assimilate the hearts and minds of generations of Americans. Public school teachers and textbooks have trumpeted the achievements of liberal presidents and liberal activists throughout history. Print and televised media outlets from the New York Times to ABC liberalize news coverage before it gets presented to the people.

Conservatives are getting their message out in talk radio, Fox News television channels, and through internet sites. But this is not enough. What is stopping conservative groups from obtaining the necessary permits for speaking engagements at college campuses, and not just at the big, media-attracting arenas like Columbia and Princeton? 

Why not seek out activists across the country, and help them organize rallies and other types of speaking events at local colleges? Would this cost much? It depends on how it is done, but let's consider the billions raised by GOP during the 2012 primaries and in the general election. Now, let's ponder how many of these billions were dumped on television ads, only to be skipped by DVR-equipped viewers wanting to get back to Jersey Shore or Monday night football. Would it have been worth it to have spent some of those billions on funding activist projects at college campuses? At the least, the GOP would have had everyday people shaking hands with everyday people, listening to their concerns, and explaining conservative principles in ways both understandable and attractive. If the GOP and other conservative groups want the people's support, they must invest in the people.

The people, broadly speaking, are in need information about true conservatism. The under-forty's out there have no memory of Reagan or Gingrich-led prosperity. A forty year-old in 2012 was seventeen when Reagan retired from the presidency. How politically aware do you think he or she was in high school, when they were getting their driver's licenses, chasing girls/boys, and preparing for the prom? Today, the under-forty's think conservatism reigned in the Bush II years. All they know is: it failed. 

Plausibly, President Bush handed the country to Obama in much worse shape than he found it in. What the people don't know is, in all the ways Bush failed America, he departed from conservative principles. There was nothing conservative about the Bush-backed mortgage-lending policies that wrecked the economy in 2008. There was nothing conservative about the $4 trillion in new debt Bush saddled the country with. But Republicans are loath to speak frankly about this out of partisan loyalty. In so doing, they are only contributing to the partisan fog that shields the people from learning the truth about what roads we've taken that have led to where we are now. 

In desperation, the people turned to someone from the other party, hoping for a change. That's the spirit that put Obama in power, has kept him there since, and has made 51% of the electorate unwilling to give the party of Bush another chance. If the people are equipped to understand that conservative solutions haven't had a hand in the road-to-ruin we're on, they will give conservative solutions a chance. Why not? They're desperately looking for something different than what they've had the last twelve years. 

Imagine conservative groups investing in education and bringing it to the youth of our country. How can this be done? Like all people throughout the ages, people of means have never relied on public (i.e. government) schools to educate their children. Private tutors and private institutions provide an outlet. In our present age of high unemployment among qualified educators, exploding class-sizes and fewer services due to budget cuts, horrified parents in ever greater numbers have opted to put their children in private schools (if they can afford it), charter schools (if they have the option), or home-school (last resort).

Many of these parents are of the patriotic sort and have no faith in government education. Those who home-school their children are looking for good resources to use. What is stopping conservative groups from partnering with like-minded educators (many recent graduates are looking for work and are willing except employment in a non-traditional educational venture) and forming virtual schools to deliver a quality education for home-schooled children? This would provide an opportunity to teach real history; real civics; the truth about what America is supposed to be about; the truth about the U.S. Constitution. (At same time, these virtual schools can also teach critical-needs subjects as well.) 

What is stopping conservative educators from writing 4th grade language arts stories that do not demonize business people and simultaneously glorify people who are more in tune with "the earth"?  There's nothing wrong with teaching the morals of cleaning-up after ourselves and conserving natural resources, but what's wrong with teaching the practical virtues of getting a job that can support a family instead footing that bill to others in the community who are doing it more self-sufficiently? Is this moral not worth a short story in an elementary school reading lesson? 

Educational outreach can be delivered in a multitude of ways, but 21st century parents and students, many of them possessing cutting-edge digital technology are looking for new options. There is a need to be met and there is nothing barring conservative activists and like-minded educators from engaging in this cultural front. 

The entertainment world is much harder for conservatives to do something about, but we can stand behind celebrities (like Phil Mickelson) who periodically speak out against the crushing taxation their state subjects them to. We don't have to buy movie theater tickets to support the latest Matt Damon film that promotes falsehoods about the fracking industry. 

Academia will change from the bottom-up (through educational outreach to the youth before they get into college) and from empowering college students with the knowledge to challenge the liberal propaganda being fed to them by their professors. What is stopping conservative educators from writing history books telling the truth - or a more balanced approximation - about America through the ages? What is stopping them from promoting these books at speaking engagements at college campuses, and putting these books in the hands of students willing to challenge their professors with this newly acquired knowledge? 

In sum, conservatives have long ago conceded educational forums and media outlets to liberal activists. By throwing their hats into this ring, conservatives can begin changing American culture in the homes and campuses across the nation. 

Patriot Thought

An Elephant in Quicksand: How Republicans Are Willfully Ignoring the Lessons of the Recent Past and Why They Will Continue to Lose Elections Unless They Reverse Course

The cautious stewardship of Eisenhower; of Reagan; that preserved peace and prosperity in the span of two terms... Inheriting a deep recession, the courage of Harding and Coolidge to slash taxes and government expenditures after the reign of a dangerous, government-growing Democrat president... The courage of a House Speaker, Newt Gingrich, to force the hand of a Democrat president to embrace responsible fiscal policies and to have that president conclude, "The era of big government is over..."

These are characters from a by-gone age. An age when character and principle mattered, and men staked their reputations and careers on it. An age foreign to the one we find ourselves in. An age when Republicans lived up to the meaning of their party. When did it go wrong? When did the change occur? How did we come to a point when Republicans would be racing to catch-up to the big spending, government expanding, truth-denying recklessness that the Democrats arrived at with the onset of the Obama Age.

By the time President George W. Bush muttered at a press conference, in the midst of the 2008 economic cataclysm, "I'm abandoning free-market principles in order to save the free market system" the metamorphosis was complete. The most prominent leader of the Republican party, the president of the United States himself, had reached a moment when he no longer understood the principles he represented.

Following the defeat of presidential aspirant Mitt Romney in November 2012, conservative nationally-syndicating radio talk show host Erick Erickson mused that the Republican party had steadily abandoned every one of its economic principles over the span of the Bush and Obama presidencies. The last principle to fall was low tax rates, deceased January 2013, by the leadership of the House speaker, John Boehner.

The fact most Republicans prefer to forget is, the worse fiscal and monetary policies of the Obama administration had precedent in the Bush era. Under George W. Bush, the public became accustomed to speaking of the national debt in terms of trillions. It was Bush who continued Clinton's policy of using the Federal Reserve to force the nation's lenders to make loan requirements too easy for incompetent applicants to qualify for mortgages. Therefore, it was Bush (Obama never tires of reminding us) who set the stage for the economic meltdown the American people have yet to free themselves from.

The Republican party has faced defeat and humiliation in three of the last four election cycles. They lost control of the Congress in 2006 and the presidency in 2008. They regained rule of the House of Representatives in 2010, thanks to the enthusiasm for fiscal conservatism generated by the Tea Party movement. The GOP failed to regain the Senate and the presidency in 2012, and have blamed everyone else but their own party for it: Mitt Romney; Richard Mourdock; Todd Akin; the Tea Party; the meanness of the Obama campaign; the media, and finally, the American people themselves, who have become so selfish, any candidate who doesn't shower them with financial entitlements can no longer be electable. Rush Limbaugh summed up the attitude thus, "It's hard to beat Santa Clause."

In defeat, the GOP's infighting has intensified. Fiscal conservatives were purged from key committees during the last "Fiscal Cliff" battle. Presently, social conservatives feel they are against the wall as Libertarians are painting them with the Mourdock and Akin brush. The latest act of schism has the establishment moving to neutralized the influence of the Tea Party movement.

A new body, the Conservative Victory Project has been launched by prominent Republican party donors and has the backing of such Republican lions as Karl Rove. The group has been created with the expressed purpose of protecting Republican incumbents from primary challenges in 2014. 

The only Republicans to face primary challenges in the last four years have been fixtures of the establishment like six-term Indiana Senator Richard Lugar, who enthusiastically went along with Obama's auto bailouts, among other fiscal blunders. Lugar was defeated by primary challenger Richard Mourdock, whose candidacy was flushed down the drain in October 2012, when he made a comment plausibly twisted into "God intended women to be raped." Meanwhile, another Republican challenger destroyed his bid for a Missouri senate seat with his own pro-life explanation which ended up in "the female body" when raped "has a way of shutting down" to prevent pregnancy.

Since the Republican establishment's primary challenges have lately come from Tea Party-backed candidates (i.e. ones who are serious about fiscal responsibility, constitutionally-limited government, and free markets), the best educated guess is, the Karl Rove-backed group is out to neutralize the influence of the Tea Party in primary challenges of Republican incumbents in the 2014 midterm elections.

To target the Tea Party as the culprit behind the failure of Republicans in 2012 shows a party as unwilling to take responsibility for its own mistakes as the Obama Democrat leadership currently ruling two-thirds of the American Government. Akin and Mourdock had Tea Party backing, but they were Republican-approved candidates.

The truth is, the Republican party performed poorly in the 2012 elections because its leaders and aspirant leaders failed to launch campaigns reflecting 21st century circumstances. Even worse, since the election, Republican House and Senate leaders have shown themselves out of touch with the principles for which they claim to stand, and unwilling to take a stand on solutions they know to be ones the country desperately needs.

On election night 2012, after learning his party would retain control of the House of Representatives, House Speaker Boehner declared there was "no mandate for tax hikes." Less than two months later, Boehner supported a bill that raised income and investment tax rates on every American earning over 200,000 a year, and the Social Security tax of every single American drawing a paycheck.

The 151 House Republicans who voted against the Boehner betrayal were no match for the Boehner House coalition of ALL Democrats and several dozen Republicans. All the same, Boehner was overwhelmingly re-elected by his party to continue representing the American people in the House of Representatives. Senate Republicans such as Georgia's Saxby Chambliss and a host of others followed Boehner's lead and voted for passage of the 2013 tax hikes in the U.S. Senate.

Thus we have come to the point in which the 21st century Republican leadership in both the presidency (under Bush) and in the U.S. Congress has miserably failed the American people in its promise to deliver sound governance. Still, Karl Rove persists in his pretensions of electoral expertise, despite the fact that he has grossly misjudged the public pulse in the elections since 2006. 

Until then, Rove was hailed as "Bush's Brain", a brilliant wizard who knew what it took to win. His reputation was based on helping George W. Bush's success, first in the Texas governorship in the 1990's, and later, in the presidential elections of 2000 and 2004 (assuming we forget Bush lost the popular vote in 2000 and won re-election in 2004 by the slimmest margin of any second term president).

The reason Rove did well for Republican success in the 1990's and early 2000's is because he was the last beneficiary of the Atwater playbook in Republican politics. Lee Atwater was a student of Nixon's campaign strategy and the brain behind George H.W. Bush's win of the presidency in 1988. The Atwater playbook worked well in the late 20th century, when the American electorate was overwhelmingly center-right.

To paraphrase, the Atwater playbook went like this,

Attack your opponent's character and record in all the ways it shows vulnerability. The American people will see your opponent as unfit for the office he seeks. Therefore, you've won.

The Atwater playbook succeeded in destroying the presidential candidacies of Democrats Michael Dukakis (in 1988, with the Willie Horton add, showing the governor as a man who furloughs convicted murderers to roam the streets for prey before returning back to the slammer after committing another atrocity) and of John Kerry (in 2004, with the swiftboat adds, displaying the senator's Vietnam comrades telling Americans of how Kerry disgraced the service with his anti-war rhetoric in the early 70's).

Despite its effectiveness in the 20th century, the Atwater playbook collapsed for Republicans in the midterm elections of 2006, and has failed ever since, in part because the Democrats have stolen the playbook, used it for their own benefit, and have used a sycophantic media as a shield to block Republicans from making effective use of it. In doing so, the Democrats discovered a critical weakness in the Atwater playbook, mainly that it is heavy on offense and poor on defense. 

In 2012, Barack Obama let the media take care of his defense while he smeared Republicans as wanting "dirtier air and dirtier water" and "for kids with Down's syndrome to fend for themselves." Mitt Romney took the blows to his record as an uncaring, vulture capitalist, and put up little defense of his Bain Capital record, which was on the whole a success in business management and job creation.

The bottom line is, the Republican party could afford to win elections by destroying opponents so long as America had a center-right electorate. That meant, from the Nixon era to the early 21st century (excepting the Watergate election of 1976 and the third party split of 1992) the Republicans could count on an electorate largely in agreement with its style of governance. 

With tax breaks for job creators and strong defense policies, Republicans held the confidence of investors and wage earners alike. But beginning with the ruinous fiscal policies of the Bush presidency and ending with the disgraceful tax policies of the Boehner House of Representatives, the Republican party had abandoned its core free market principles, acquiesced in the catastrophic fiscal and tax policies of the Obama administration, and now finds itself looking like a party of hypocrites. This state of affairs looks discouraging for a GOP hoping for an electoral comeback in 2014 and 2016.

Meanwhile, a new generation of voters, with no memory of Reagan's peace and prosperity, or the collapse of Soviet-style big governance in the world, came of age under the shadow of war and joblessness. In their suffering, their hopes and fears were opened to whichever candidate promised something different.That's the reason the American people brought Barack Obama to power. 

Tragically, his rule has done nothing to satisfy their hopes. Their ears are open for a new message from a new messenger, but they haven't heard it from Republicans, and they haven't seen it in the actions of Republican leaders in the highest echelons of power. All they've seen is duplicity, hypocrisy, incompetence, and corruption.  

Voters under the age of forty have no first-hand recollection of Republican-led prosperity, but they've experienced Republican-led failure. An eighteen year-old voter in 2012 was born in 1994, and turned fourteen when Barack Obama became president. Should the GOP assume these voters know and understand the Republican plan for restoring America to its former greatness?

If not, the case for fiscal responsibility, constitutionally-limited government, and free markets, was not made by Republican candidates for the presidency and the congress in 2012. If Mourdock and Akin made the case, they destroyed themselves by stepping into the morass of social issues that has sucked-down conservative reputations for as long as anyone can remember. Rick Santorum made a principled stand on traditional marriage and the supposed social harm of contraception, but he ignored the U.S. Constitution when explaining how he would change Washington.

Mitt Romney campaigned as an economic manager, who would steer the country to safer waters, but he put little effort into explaining

• how and why free markets were the only road to prosperity;
• how the current administration has shredded constitutionally-limited government and why freedom itself demands a return to constitutional principles;
• how the Obama government continues to push the national debt up to catastrophic levels and what Romney would do to defuse this ticking debt bomb. 

Much hindsight attention has focused on Mitt Romney's failure to explain his candidacy to Hispanic voters. The real failure is Romney's lack of explaining his candidacy to ANY voters. Instead, he invited us to consider his portfolio as a job creating C.E.O. The American people do not want to see portfolios. We want leaders who will speak to us.

The 21st century Republican party is an elephant in quicksand, writhing and reacting to the pressures squeezing it from all sides. Each reaction only strengthens the vortex sucking it downward, to oblivion. The only way out for the GOP is to be proactive rather than reactive. 

Instead of waiting for President Obama and Senate Leader Reid to make the first move, and then react to it, the Boehner House could take the bull by the horns and pass bills reflecting the principles Republicans stand for, dare the opposition to veto it, and broadcast their case for reform directly to the American people. In this way, the GOP could set the terms of public debate the way the Gingrich House did in the Clinton era.

The American people are inspired by courage not puny, pathetic whining about how Americans failed to deliver their votes in the last election. The American people are sick to death of the lies, the hypocrisy, the infighting, and the buck passing the GOP has displayed for us in recent years. The American people crave honest government. This means the GOP must clean up its act in a hurry if Republicans want to win in 2014.   


In spite of everything working against it, the Republican party has a treasure-trove of political and economic principles that have been historically verified with success. In all the years America had a vibrant democracy and a booming economy, it was fiscal responsibility, constitutionally-limited government, and free markets that drove the engines of the pursuit of happiness. 

Democrats understood this as well. Long before Reagan, President Kennedy cut tax rates after being advised by a British official that high taxes hurt an economy, and therefore, starve a government of revenue. After Reagan, President Clinton recognized a balanced budget was crucial for a government to live within its means and strengthen its credit in the world economy. All along, this case had already been made by nearly every Republican of prominence in the 20th century. 

21st century circumstances demand a GOP that is willing to return to its core principles in word and deed. This party must enthusiastically explain these principles to an uninitiated American electorate. Only then, will the elephant emerge from the quicksand and restore America to its place as a shining city on a hill.

Patriot Thought