June 30, 2008
Pop Goes The Weasel
It was only a matter of time and, in retrospect, I'm surprised it took this long: the Left has begun attacking Sen. McCain's military record. Love him or hate him, John McCain's time as a naval aviator and prisoner of war in North Vietnam is as unassailable as personal histories can ever be. He endured pain and privations that would have killed or broken most of us and when offered an early release (because of his father's position as an admiral), he turned it down because other men had been in captivity longer. Even Sen. Obama has called McCain a hero, and I believe he really means it. God knows he certainly should.
The upcoming attacks on McCain's military record will, of course, be outside of the Obama campaign. He will condemn them, but they will continue. The opening shot was fired by retired General Wesley Clark, a man with nearly forty years of military service under his belt when he retired in 2000. I won't besmirch Clark's military record in the same way he has besmirched McCain's, but suffice it to say that Clark's history with the Army is one of an academic with almost no combat experience who clearly had the political savvy to rise to a four star rank. Clark criticizing McCain is a little like a casual yachtsman giving his opinion on the tactical genius of Admiral Nelson at Trafalgar: sound and fury signifying nothing.
Now that the floodgates are open, we will soon see columnists, bloggers and other assorted fellow-traveling nitwits jump on McCain. Most of the these cowards would urinate on themselves in the face of danger, but yet their "noble" positions will be held up as relevant and worthy of discussion. Through it all, John McCain will be what he has always been: a man of honor, better than the sniveling, limp-wristed shrews who inhabit most of the media's dirty halls.
We are still five months from the general election and I'm already disgusted. I wonder what I'll be like in October.
June 24, 2008
Waiting for Colonel X
Am I the only one thinking that this was indeed an assassination attempt that is being covered up by the Western media? After all, papers like the New York Times never portray terrorists as attackers; it's all referred to as the "cycle of violence", as if Israelis defending themselves is on the same moral level as men who indiscriminately kill civilians for Allah.
Someone in Israel will leak the truth. Watch the blogs, because it will never be on the nightly news.
June 21, 2008
Sulu
I heard an interview a few days ago with George Takei, the actor best known for his portrayal of Lieutenant (later Captain) Hikaru Sulu in the original 'Star Trek' series and movies. He was born in Los Angeles in the 1930's and as an American of Japanese descent (he was born here---his father came from Japan), he was one of tens of thousands of US citizens sent to live in detention camps for the duration of the war.
Stop and think about that: the US government sent Americans to camps based on nothing more than the fact they looked like the people who bombed Pearl Harbor. Today, we fight over the rights of terrorists. But those 1st and 2nd generation Americans went to the camps, almost without incident. No lawyers, no riots---just compliance. And it wasn't pretty; anyone with a private business lost it unless he could turn it over to someone trustworthy. When I think about this, I remember a picture I saw of a bare storefront with one sentence painted on the glass: I AM AN AMERICAN.
Takei gave me something else to remember. He was five when his family went to a camp in Arkansas and lost everything. When he began his education, he went to a tar paper shack that served as the camp's only school. Every morning, he and his classmates recited the Pledge of Allegiance to a flag mounted on a wall. Next to the flag was a window through which could be seen the high fence and a manned guard tower. Takei said that he used to stare out the window as the pledge was recited and think, "...with liberty and justice for all."
June 18, 2008
Haditha
As you probably heard or read yesterday, charges have been dropped against Marine Lt. Col. Jeffrey Chessani, the senior officer charged in the alleged murder of civilians in Haditha in 2006. Chessani can be charged again since the case was dismissed due to conflict of interest reasons. Even if found not guilty, his career is over. In all branches of the military, a public incident of this magnitude stays with an officer and makes him "undesirable" in the eyes of the service. It's as much a PR thing as anything else. The colonel is 44, which means he has given at least 20 years of his life to the service of this nation. To quote a friend, we really need men of his caliber now.
If you're a lawyer or want to become one, you may want to stop reading now. There seems to be a certain prosecutorial zeal amongst military lawyers, namely those in the Navy (as Marines, the men charged with crimes at Haditha were prosecuted by the Navy legal system). I don't know if this zeal exists because these future civilian bloodsuckers want to make a name for themselves, or if they simply do the job and see it as some sort of justice. In reality, the charges in the Haditha case are bogus, so much so that seven of the eight men charged thus far have been exonerated. The Navy took the eyewitness accounts of Iraqi civilians (whose tall tales are legendary, believe me) and used them to accuse a group of Marines with one of the worst crimes that can be committed in a war zone.
This case is a victory for men like Congressman John Murtha, himself a former Marine, who found the men guilty of murder before the first testimony had been heard. To think that he used the incident as a political tool is disgusting, but nothing coming from the Democrats surprises me anymore. What I find more disgusting are the lawyers who wear this nation's naval uniform. Yes, they have a job to do and sometimes that job is difficult. But it seems that no one took into account the fact that the eyewitness accounts were questionable at best. Did they miss the part of law school where they were actually supposed to learn about the law?
June 17, 2008
June 15, 2008
And Yet, A Fishing License
All mammals have a biological imperative that points them towards reproduction. As humans, we are not immune from this drive, although it normally expresses itself as the urge to...well...mate. Be that as it may, it has come time to recognize the fact that many Americans should not be allowed to have children. I've only jokingly talked about this topic with people because to talk about it seriously brings accusations of a denial of basic human rights.
Well, too damn bad.
You know people who should not be parents, and yet, they are raising one or more small humans who are going to become wards of the state, strippers/prostitutes, bank robbers, murderers and rapists. Despite a disastrous upbringing, many children become responsible, productive adults who go on to raise responsible, productive children. Sadly, I do not believe these people represent the majority of those raised in a home that should not contain a child.
I'm not one of those people who believes all adult problems stem from an improper upbringing. But it is undeniable that our parents make a strong impression on us when we are the most impressionable. Our beliefs, biases, and many other characteristics are strongly influenced because of, or in spite of, our mothers and fathers. Almost every person found guilty of child abuse was abused as a child. We all know the sullen, low-talking, teenage boy who is a pain to be around, right? Go look at his dad----there's something wrong there.
If we can require people to pass a test in order to drive a car, we can certainly come up with a system that would show who amongst us would make at least adequate parents. I'm only half joking here. I'm not for banning Americans from having children without a license; instead, I propose that only those with a child license be given the right to receive a child deduction on their taxes. If you want to run out and make a baby, that's fine----it's just going to cost more in the long run. Why is this fair? Simply, if you are not qualified to be a parent, your children are more likely to cost the taxpayers extra money in terms of housing, welfare and care-taking in the prison system.
Of course, the qualifications to become a licensed parent would never be agreed upon by any legislative body, so it's never going to happen in this country. But wouldn't it be great if you could look at that yelling harpy pulling her kids around in Wal-Mart at midnight on a Saturday and know that she's paying more on April 15th than you?
June 11, 2008
I'll Remember You
My Aunt Norma died this past Saturday. Even though her body failed on that day, she left us some time ago; age can do incredibly cruel things to the mind. Even her husband, my Uncle Jimmy, told my dad that it was a merciful thing that she went when she did. They were married 56 years.
Jimmy and Norma are members of what Tom Brokaw term the Greatest Generation. Jimmy was in the Navy during the Second World War. He came home, got a job and a few years later married his girlfriend. He worked for General Electric for 37 years as a machinist. It was a different time, an age where a man expected his job to be there for the rest of his working days.
All my aunts and uncles, with one exception, are in their 70's or 80's now. Statistically speaking, I will lose all of them in the next 10 or so years, including my parents. I don't know when or how they got old. When I was a kid, they were permanent, non-aging, and smart to boot. Frailty has set in now; it seems as if it happened overnight. My dad sometimes forgets things he used to know cold. He can't work out in the yard for 14 hours anymore, something that I can't do now at 37.
Through it all, my parents and aunts and uncles maintain a proper bearing, as if they are ready to meet their maker with dignity and faith. I know they are not preoccupied with death, but it must linger in their minds. I just hope my generation is as dignified as they are when we have more years behind us than ahead.
June 06, 2008
The Foothold
Most of you reading this know at least something about D-Day, which took place today in 1944. It wasn’t really the first foothold for the Allies in Europe because troops were already fighting up the boot of Italy and the Soviets were pushing through from the east. Soviet historians barely paid attention to the invasion of Normandy because, to their way of thinking, it was a sideshow compared to their operations to liberate the Fatherland. But to the western Allies, D-Day was an enormous operation and marked the beginning of the end for Nazi control of Europe.
Sixty-four years have gone by since that “rendezvous with destiny” (General Eisenhower’s words) took place. A man who was 18 and getting shot at by Germans (or an 18 year old shooting at Allied troops) would be 82 now, a few years beyond the life expectancy of males in the US and western Europe. These men are dying at the rate of one thousand a day. Put simply, most of us will live to see the day when everyone who fought in the Second World War will be dead.
This saddens me tremendously. It’s not just the loss of a great generation that bothers me; rather, it is the loss of living history and the fact that it will assign yet another formative event to the paper of history texts. When The Lovely Kelli was student teaching earlier this year, she quickly learned that most of the kids she taught (sophomores and juniors) have no relation to the events of the past 230 years. Basically, anything that happened before 1991 is irrelevant.
Some of these kids will develop a love of history as adults but, sadly, many will never take the time to learn about the sacrifices made by previous generations of Americans. I believe it is always dangerous when a people forget their past as a society. Our people-elected government and our rights did not just happen. If we ever forget that, we will truly become a nation in decline.
June 04, 2008
June 03, 2008
Grumpy Old Man
In November, 2001, the company for which I work moved to our current location. I was setting up some PCs in the Executive Wing on Saturday night of that weekend when one of the owners passed me and asked if I wanted to go to dinner with him, the other owners and my manager. As we sat at a local Mexican dive, the conversation turned to 9/11, still an overriding thought for all of us just barely two months after the terrible events of that Tuesday. I made an observation about Don Rumsfeld, the Secretary of Defense: "He always looks like he's constipated." One of the owners turned to me and said, "Good. I like a Secretary of Defense who looks like he could blow your head off at a moment's notice if you pissed him off."
Seven years later, we once again are faced with someone who looks angry: Senator John McCain. I don't believe the Senator has a real chance of becoming President (despite my hopes), but it is interesting nonetheless to watch and listen to the media's portrayal of him. He's either too old or, and this is my favorite, too angry. They use phrases like "anger management issues" to disguise their true intention, which is to make the Senator from Arizona look like your retired hothead neighbor who sits on his porch all day yelling at kids to stay out of his yard.
Senator McCain gets angry---we've all seen the clips of him losing his cool. And that's a good thing. I'm tired of the people who say that anger is something we must constantly control, along with sadness, jealously, bitterness and the like. Some of my friends who have "mastered" the art of complete emotional control seem to feel nothing deep down, at least not from outside observation. But let's stick with the Senator. There are American troops in combat right now; there are Muslim radicals intent on killing Americans anywhere they can found by whatever means available; federal spending is out of control; the price of oil is ridiculous and it hurting our economy. It's time for someone who knows how to yell and who has a low tolerance for bullshit.
Barack Obama has mentioned his willingness to sit down with President Amagonnathrowabomb of Iran and negotiate an end to their nuclear weapons program. When the President recently made another threat against Israel during a fiery speech, what was John McCain's response?
When we join in saying never again (a holocaust), that is not a wish, a request or a plea to the enemies of Israel, but a promise that the United States and Israel will honor against any enemy
Put simply, the United States under a McCain administration will defend Israel. Period. No hand-holding with state sponsors of terrorism or pie-in-the-sky hopes for peace with people who hate Jews and Americans. The Senator offers the same warning President Reagan offered the Soviets: act against us and we will do what we need to do. And yes, Reagan did sit down with Gorbachev and did negotiate. But it was from a position of strength, not a position of "equals". We have no equals.
And that's a good thing.
June 02, 2008
Martyr of Charity
For those of you who are Catholic (or who are interested in Catholicism), take a moment and read this (original article here at Catholic Exchange):
Prior to Maximilian Kolbe’s canonization in 1982, there was considerable debate in higher Church circles about whether this Polish Franciscan, who had sacrificed his life in the starvation bunker at Auschwitz to save the condemned father of a family, should be canonized as a martyr. John Paul the Great, agreeing with the many Poles and Germans who wanted Kolbe honored this way, overrode the decision of two specially appointed judges and proclaimed, in his canonization Mass homily, that “Maximilian Mary Kolbe, who following his beatification was venerated as a confessor, will henceforth be venerated also as a martyr!”
During the pre-canonization debate, some theologians and canonists suggested that a new category-”martyr of charity”-be created to cover situations like Kolbe’s. The Franciscan priest had not, after all, been killed “in hatred of the faith” [odium fidei], at least according to the traditional understanding of that ancient criterion for martyrdom. The Nazi officer who agreed to Kolbe’s voluntary substitution of himself for the condemned prisoner had evinced no interest in the fact that Kolbe was a Catholic, a Christian, or a priest; Kolbe was just another Pole to be starved to death. So why not split the difference and call Kolbe a “martyr of charity”?
In Witness to Hope, I suggested that John Paul II was making an important theological point in declaring St. Maximilian Kolbe a martyr, period: systematic hatred of the human person (as in Nazism and other totalitarian systems) was a contemporary version of odium fidei, for the faith taught the inalienable dignity of the human person and those who hated the person implicitly hated the faith. In any event, the argument continues over what constitutes “martyrdom” continues (most recently, at a plenary session of the Congregation for the Causes of Saints), and will likely continue long into the future.
The idea of a “martyr of charity” continued to intrigue me, though, most recently in the case of Petty Officer Second Class (SEAL) Michael Anthony Monsoor, who died in Ar Ramadi, Iraq, on 29 September 2006. Michael Monsoor was a devout Catholic of Arab Christian descent, who had grown up in Garden Grove, California. Two years after his high school graduation, he enlisted in the Navy, where this superb athlete was soon attracted to the toughest of the tough, the Navy SEALS. A year after completing SEAL training, Monsoor deployed to Iraq. A month into his deployment, he rescued a fellow SEAL under fire, winning the Silver Star.
His chaplain remembers Michael Monsoor requesting the sacrament of penance at their first meeting; he was also a regular Mass-goer. Sacramentally, he was prepared for 29 September 2006, when his SEAL team was ordered to work with an Iraqi Army unit to set up an anti-sniper overwatch position. An insurgent threw a fragmentation grenade, which bounced off Monsoor’s chest and fell to the ground. Crouching next to the only exit from the overwatch position, Michael Monsoor could have escaped. Instead, he threw himself onto the grenade to shield his comrades from the impending explosion. Thirty minutes later, Michael Monsoor was dead, but his teammates and their Iraqi allies were alive.
On April 8, at the White House, and in the presence of the young SEAL’s parents, President Bush posthumously awarded Michael Monsoor the Congressional Medal of Honor, America’s highest award for military valor. A video of the ceremony is available at www.navy.mil/moh/monsoor. It’s hard to watch without tearing up, as the President did in speaking of an extraordinary act of self-sacrificing heroism.
No one knows whether, in the split-second of his decision, Michael Monsoor thought himself called to the martyrdom of charity; like most Catholics, he’d probably never heard the term. But everything we know about this remarkable young SEAL suggests that his instantaneous decision to give his life for the sake of his teammates and allies was rooted in his Catholic faith and his understanding of its demands.
And that’s why it’s worth considering the possibility that Michael Anthony Monsoor died as a “martyr of charity.”
I'm reminded of John 15:13: "Greater love hath no man than this, that a man lay down his life for his friends."
June 01, 2008
Computer As Blunt Object
The Lovely Kelli and I had an interesting conversation with my mom and dad earlier tonight. Dad's opinion is that the availability of computers to children is beginning to actually "dumb down" our society. I added an addendum to this: the easy availability of computers connected to the internet is making for "dumbed down" kids.
Kelli agreed to this with a caveat---strictly regulated internet access can be a great aid to education; it is the unregulated access so many children (especially teens) have at home that does the damage. She gave as her example her time as a student teacher earlier this year. Many of her students did not understand why they couldn't use websites as their primary sources for information. Most of them referred specifically to Wikipedia, an 'open source' encyclopedia which allows users to edit content on the assumption that large masses of people will result in self-corrected articles. Kelli does not allow the site to be used at all in her classroom. My dad's response to this was, "If they know the rules, why don't the just accept it and move on? Those are the rules...they should follow them." Dad is 75 and, as you can guess, hasn't stepped into a classroom in a long time. When he was in high school, the nuns and brothers could still hit a misbehaving student with no fear of lawsuits or screaming parents.
My contention is that teenagers, if left alone with a broadband connection, will do one of two things: contact their friends incessantly via instant messaging, MySpace, Facebook, etc. or look for pRon (the boys, mostly). But maybe I'm wrong. After all, my nieces and nephews seem to be very good netizens, but both of my sisters (my brothers' children are too young to be online alone) are strict disciplinarians. If left on their own, I don't know what they would do. I would like to think they would behave as they do now, but I think we all know the nature of young men and women.
What are your thoughts? Some of you reading this are raising teens, or have raised teens, or have children who will soon be teenagers. What are your rules concerning the internet in your home? Is the internet an educational tool necessary in today's world, or is it a hindrance to real learning?