Marquisdejolie On Video: Contact PTSD

Marquisdejolie On Video: Contact PTSD

American Revolution & Founding Era: Myths About the Founding

American Revolution & Founding Era: Myths About the Founding

BLACK IS FOR MOURNING--NOT RACISM

Mourning In America
Mike Gallagher
Friday, November 07, 2008

Just how strange has this week been?

Real strange.

Thursday morning, I appeared on Fox & Friends, the morning talk show on Fox News Channel. I was to “debate” Lanny Davis, the longtime Clinton loyalist.

Obviously, the show wanted a reaction to this week's election from a liberal like Lanny and a conservative like me. I thought I'd have some fun and at the last minute, affixed black duct tape to my right arm.

The way the week turned out for the GOP, I figured wearing a black armband on TV would be pretty appropriate.

Poor Lanny didn't seem to get the joke. “It's pretty silly to be listening to someone give advice to the incoming Obama administration while wearing a black armband”, he sputtered.

Liberals never seem to have much of a sense of humor, even in victory.

Besides, Lanny, I wasn't giving any advice, I was just expressing an opinion. Unless you guys get your wish and the return of the Fairness Doctrine knocks people like me off the airwaves for good, I think I'm still allowed to express some views, aren't I? But things really took a turn when I got to my radio studio office after the TV appearance and found a bunch of angry emails waiting for me.

The nature of the complaints? That I was a racist because I wore a BLACK armband as a way to express my dissatisfaction with the election.

I'm not kidding.

Here's a sample:

“Gallagher, you racist pig. How dare you wear a black armband on Fox? Do you not know what that means to black people? I'm glad your bigertery (sic) is finally on display for the world to see.

Cedric

Houston, TX”

And another: “I'm a little surprised you didn't wear a white hood on TV this morning, Gallager (sic). You are a big, fat, racist m***** *****r who needs to have his butt whipped.

Tonya

Los Angeles”

And one more gem:

“Watching you wear a black armband, which everyone knows insults black people, made me immediately wish for your painful death. I'd like to think that will happen, but it probably won't. I'm a pessimist by nature.

Bill L.

Orlando”

Wow. And I thought Lanny Davis was grumpy.

These angry people even motivated me to try and Google references to black armbands somehow being offensive to Black people.

All I found was precisely what I thought, that it's a symbol of mourning, a sign of grieving or sadness. Nothing at all about race.

Then again, there are people who manage to find racial turmoil everywhere they turn.

The great Shelby Steele of the Hoover Institution wrote a terrific piece after the election about how President-elect Obama managed to tap into the stigma that many White Americans feel about race. He opined that many people have been looking for something -- anything -- to relieve the burden felt by years of being blamed for racism.

What better solution than to elect a Black man president?

Naturally, race played a significant factor in this year's election. Finally, there is an answer to the rhetorical question, “Is America able to elect a Black president?”

And I expect that there is a pretty simple response to those who wonder if we can finally retire the Jesse Jacksons and Al Sharptons of the world and move beyond arguing about race relations incessantly.

Yes we can.

And we should.

Over and over, we were told that a vote for Barack Obama would be a way to “pay the debt” owed to millions of Black people. We would right the wrongs of the past; we would show the world how progressive we are.

I trust the debt has been paid.

Personally, I've always longed for the day when a Black person would be elected president.

Just not this Black person.

But by six percentage points, Americans elected Sen. Obama. Those of us who are the loyal opposition know that now, the battle begins.

We will do everything we can to encourage the Republican Party to rebuild itself. As Sen. Jim Demint (R, SC) told me, we need to find GOP leaders who are willing to adhere to the Reagan-era values that made many of us become Republicans in the first place.

We will challenge every crazy and wrong-headed move the Democrats come up with; we will follow the D.C. leaders closely and be sure to alert our readers, listeners and viewers to every misstep, every blunder, each and every attempt to run this country into the ground.

But for now, we will simply congratulate the other side for their victory. Sure, the mainstream media helped make it happen.

And of course the deck was stacked against Sen. McCain and Gov. Palin. But there's no sense crying in our soup. Come inauguration day, we just need to be prepared to take on the Democrat establishment.

As many parents have taught their children: never start a fight, but be sure to finish it. We shall do our best.

Just how strange has this week been?

Check this out: a listener to my radio show emailed me and claimed that the day after the election, the Illinois Lottery featured a creepy winning number and that I should check it out.

Sure enough, I confirmed the bizarre claim. On the day after the election, in the Evening Pick Three lottery drawing in Obama's home state of Illinois, the winning number was 666.

Don't believe me? See for yourself. www.IllinoisLottery.com Click on the “numbers/ jackpots” tab and look up Nov. 5, 2008.

I'm sure that's just a coincidence. I certainly don't believe those who fear that Obama is the actual anti-Christ.

Then again, what are the odds of the mark of the beast being Illinois' winning lottery number the day after the election?

I think I'll go back to wearing my armband. For a long, long time...

Copyright © 2008 Salem Web Network. All Rights Reserved.

2ND AMENDMENT RIGHTS

Views: What Do Guns Mean to Americans? The NRA vs. the Brady Campaign
Americans revere their Constitution but they can vehemently disagree on how to interpret specific passages. The 2nd Amendment is a prime example of how individual rights, self-defense, violence and American culture can produce such passion and divisiveness. The non-partisan Web site Opposing Views asked the NRA and the Brady Campaign what guns mean to Americans.
FOXNews.com
Wednesday, October 29, 2008
Click here to read more debates on gun rights and gun control.
The Freedom to Protect Yourself, Your Family, and Your Community
By Chris W. Cox, NRA-ILA executive director
America's 80 million gun owners could give 80 million answers to this question. To hunters, guns mean a day with family and friends, enjoying the beauty of the outdoors. To gun collectors, they provide a connection to the inventors, craftsmen, warriors and pioneers of days gone by. To competitive shooters, they provide an opportunity for self-mastery, through the discipline of training and the forge of competition.
Most important, though, is that guns provide an effective means of exercising the God-given, individual right of self-defense. To America's founders, that right was a hallmark of individual freedom in our new nation. Thomas Jefferson -- an avid gun collector and hunter -- said, "No free man shall be debarred the use of arms," and Thomas Paine said, "[A]rms discourage and keep the invader and the plunderer in awe."
While the founders were mainly concerned with "invaders and plunderers" of the political kind, the right is equally important in protecting individuals from the violent "invaders and plunderers" on our streets. In the recent case of District of Columbia v. Heller, the Supreme Court recognized this, declaring that the Second Amendment protects "the individual right to possess and carry weapons in case of confrontation."
Indeed, the most comprehensive study of gun use to date, by award-winning criminologist Gary Kleck and Marc Gertz, found that Americans use guns for self-defense against crime more than two million times per year. Certainly today, with 40 states having adopted laws that allow honest citizens to carry handguns for protection outside the home, guns mean much of what they meant to our founders: the freedom to protect yourself, your family, and your community.
We Must Make it Harder for Dangerous People to Get Dangerous Weapons
By Paul Helmke, president of the Brady Campaign to Prevent Gun Violence
When I was 12, I earned an NRA Marksmanship badge at YMCA Camp. I enjoyed learning how to fire a gun at a target and worked at becoming better with practice. But I also took away a deep respect for how dangerous guns were.
Americans have a long history with guns. We used them to tame the frontier, and many Americans consider them important for hunting wildlife or managing pests. But Americans' views on guns often differ depending on where they live.
If you're in the bayous of Louisiana, or the plains of Montana, a gun can be your defense against predators. When the police are far away, you may feel strongly about needing a gun for self-defense. And if someone says we should restrict guns, you worry.
But in urban areas like Philadelphia or South Central Los Angeles or even my home town in Indiana, guns may be best known for injuring young people as a result of gang violence, or police officers at a traffic stop or domestic quarrel. But when you say "we need to controls the weapons available on the streets," other Americans misinterpret you as wanting to limit their rights.
This is why we've had a passionate debate about guns. Finding common ground may have been aided by the Supreme Court decision in June that Americans have a right to have a firearm in their home but that reasonable restrictions on gun access are also lawful.
Guns are always going to be available to law-abiding citizens. But we can take steps to make it harder for dangerous people to get dangerous weapons.
To read about other issues on Opposing Views, click here

HOW TRUE!

Intellectual Flyover Country
By Doug Patton
October 13, 2008

Columnist David Brooks is the sort of writer who passes for a conservative at The New York Times. In reality, he is an urbane, pseudo-erudite hack, as evidenced by his latest column.

Brooks contends that the reason conservatives are no longer winning elections is because we have eschewed intellectualism and promoted social class warfare, thereby "driving away people who live in cities, in highly educated regions and on the coasts." In the last two decades, according to Brooks, conservative politicians and "talk-radio jocks" have "divided the nation between the wholesome Joe Sixpacks in the heartland and the oversophisticated, overeducated, oversecularized denizens of the coasts."

Brooks also asserts that "George W. Bush restrained some of the populist excesses of his party." That argument is absurd. It is precisely because of Bush's excesses, not the GOP's, that he has a 29 percent approval rating: excesses in spending, a nearly trillion-dollar bailout bill, and lax border security. Bush deserves credit for three accomplishments in eight years: modest tax relief, a pair of solid Supreme Court appointments and especially for seven years of terror-free life for the American people. After that, the list of his accomplishments goes downhill quickly.

Yet Brooks lists "anti-immigration fervor" and "isolationism" as the "excesses" from which Bush supposedly saved his party. Question: In what world does David Brooks live that he believes such things? Answer: The solipsistic echo-chamber of New York City.

Brooks criticizes John McCain for choosing Sarah Palin as his running mate, as if that is the source of McCain's current problems. He seems to believe that Palin adds to the GOP's exclusion of the groups he thinks have been driven from the party. "Nobody," Brooks writes, "so relentlessly divides the world between the 'normal Joe Sixpack American' and the coastal elite."

But the most astounding part of Brooks' analysis is his statement that Republicans are guilty of alienating whole professions - lawyers, doctors, tech executives, even bankers - all of whom now donate overwhelmingly to Democrats.

As a lifelong resident of flyover country, I hardly know where to begin to refute Brooks' snobbery. So let's stop dancing around the subject. The reason these groups feel alienated from the Republican Party is that they are embarrassed by those of us who want to defend innocent human life and traditional marriage. They simply cannot believe that these issues are more important to us than a temporary drop in the Dow Jones Industrial Average.

But their embarrassment goes much deeper than that. The gulf is primarily a spiritual one. Those of us who believe in fighting for the defense of life and - dare I say it? - for the preservation of normal, traditional, monogamous human sexual relationships do so out of a belief that someone much greater and wiser than we are, namely the Creator of the Universe, has said this is how we should live. This is not an arbitrary position we have taken in order to deny "reproductive rights" to women or "equal rights" to homosexuals. These are strongly held views given to believers by God, universal truths, if you will. No religious tradition in the world believes in killing babies or in homosexual marriage.

So let's be totally honest. George W. Bush has failed the Republican Party and, more importantly, the American people, in almost every regard. He has spent our money in a manner that would make a drunken sailor ashamed, grown the federal government at a faster rate than any president since FDR, colluded with Ted Kennedy and his ilk on education policy, and given us stimulus checks with the caveat to spend them on plasma TVs and IPhones, rather than existing debt (or the terrorists win). And he has spent eight years asleep at the wheel on illegal immigration.

The Republican Party has not rejected intellectualism. The definition of the word has been hijacked by the William Ayer' and the Ward Churchill's of the world, with their pithy rejoinders that 9/11 victims were "little Eichmanns." One need only read Jonah Goldberg, Mark Steyn or Christopher Buckley to know that conservative intellectualism is alive and well.

What sets conservatives, and by extension the GOP, apart is that we have always encouraged vigorous debate and the civil discourse necessary for the continuation of this American experiment. It is the foundation of our republic and the catalyst to our best ideas. But we succeed in our intellectual pursuits only because they stand firmly on the solid rock of our morality, our spirituality and our admission of and submission to the God that grants our souls the right to breathe. The sinking sand of liberal dogma will never be a suitable substitute.

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Doug Patton is a freelance columnist who has served as a political speechwriter and public policy advisor. His weekly columns are published in newspapers across the country and on selected Internet web sites, including Human Events Online, TheConservativeVoice.com and GOPUSA.com, where he is a senior writer and state editor. Readers may e-mail him at dougpatton@cox.net.

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Note -- The opinions expressed in this column are those of the author and do not necessarily reflect the opinions, views, and/or philosophy of GOPUSA.

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