Wizer OneLiner #4

My right to display the Ten Commandments anywhere I want does not conflict with your right to ignore it.

Vietnam

"Goooooooood morning Vietnam! It's 0600 hours. What does the "O" stand for? O my God, it's early!" -- Adrian Cronauer

"Our power, therefore, is a very vital shield. If we are driven from the field in Viet-Nam, then no nation can ever again have the same confidence in American promise, or in American protection." -- Lyndon B. Johnson

"I saw courage both in the Vietnam War and in the struggle to stop it. I learned that patriotism includes protest, not just military service. " -- John F. Kerry

"Television brought the brutality of war into the comfort of the living room. Vietnam was lost in the living rooms of America - not on the battlefields of Vietnam. " -- Marshall McLuhan

"It's silly talking about how many years we will have to spend in the jungles of Vietnam when we could pave the whole country and put parking stripes on it and still be home by Christmas." -- Ronald Reagan

I've often wondered why I never came to terms with opposition to this war. At that time in my life, I was able to sympathize with both sides of most issues. I never quite understood the arguments of people who thought we should get out of Vietnam. I remember standing around during some poorly organized protests, watching my classmates scream out at the uninterested and merely annoyed. I simply could not buy the anti-war rationale (...that killing bad guys makes you bad). So, I never heard a good argument against the war. Still haven't. Sure, war was hell. It also seemed necessary, given that not all the bad guys had surrendered yet.

Television made a big deal about college campus riots and demonstrations of young people. I surely would not have advocated that political leaders seriously listen to most of my classmates. Heck, these kids had no perspective whatsoever, no wisdom in the matter, and no basis for claiming either. The fact that TV covered it at all seemed odd at the time. The fact that the politicians listened reflects poorly on their own wisdom.

As to how the war was conducted, well that was the real crime. By restraining full scale military operations, we made every one of our boys a sitting duck. By pulling out, we allowed the slaughter of the entire South Vietnamese Army and spawned the Khmer Rouge and it's murder of 1.7 million people.

Thank God we don't do wars like that any more.

Magnet "Ribbons"

"Red is the AIDS ribbon, green is something else, and purple something else. Every color in the spectrum has been taken." -- Rush Limbaugh

Rush has a rant in which he decries the practice of wearing ribbons as a symbol of caring for something. His problem is not the caring itself, but the ribbon. It basically says "look at me. I care about AIDS/Troops/Pope John Paul/Domestic Violence/Hunger" or anything else someone will make a ribbon for "more than you do" . His point is that wearing the ribbon doesn't mean that you care more, and certainly doesn't mean that you do any more for that particular cause.

I have to agree with that, and I will take it a step further. Magnet Ribbons. Magnet Ribbons are ubiquitous now. I've seen a number of vehicles with 3 or more different magnet ribbons, most of which are large enough to be seen, but with text placed and sized so that nobody can see what's written on them. I suppose we are supposed to know the color code, but to me these things say "Look at me. I care about something". So what? I suppose you deserve a medal (or a ribbon...?) for that.

Look at http://www.wholesalecentral.com/accessoriespalace/store.cfm?event=showcatalog&catid=52706. Go ahead. I'll wait.

Betcha didn't know there were that many different ribbons for sale, did you?

I think there's something really pathetic about declaring your commitment to something by using a removeable sign.

Now, since everybody's got a ribbon, the messages are all much weaker. Other drivers don't believe in your cause, and they don't care that you do.

On the Size of Government

President Bush has presided over the largest overall increase in inflation-adjusted federal spending since Lyndon B. Johnson. Even after excluding spending on defense and homeland security, Bush is still the biggest-spending president in 30 years. -- Stephen Slivinski, Cato Policy Analysis #543

Giving money and power to government is like giving whiskey and car keys to teenage boys. --P.J. O'Rourke

There's nothing dumber than a big spending Republican. In fact, I'm starting to think wwould have been better off letting Bill have another 8 years. As a Democrat, he was downright frugal. It's one thing to have a redistributionist government that simply takes your money and gives it to the undeserving. It's quite another to have the government spend your money on dangerous things, like more bureacrats, homeland snoopiness, and alphabet soup (SEC/FCC/FDA/BATF/NSA) busy-bodying.

I'd like to say I gave up on the Republicans in 1975, and then again in 1989. And it seems like I have to give up on them about every 2 years. The only thing worse, I'd tell myself, is Democrats, and I find it increasingly maddening that these are the only two choices we get. My goodness. What is it going to take to get a constitutional government? (Short of colonial minutemen, that is).

And then the other choice is John Kerry? He got 50 odd million votes, not based on his voting record, which was quite possibly the worst possible of any presidential candidate; but because people felt anything was better than this. Maybe they were right.

Sympathy for the Devil

"IN ONE OF THE FOUNDING TEXTS OF SOCIOLOGY, The Rules of Sociological Method (1895), Emile Durkheim set it down that "crime is normal." "It is," he wrote, "completely impossible for any society entirely free of it to exist." By defining what is deviant, we are enabled to know what is not, and hence to live by shared standards. This apercuappears in the chapter entitled "Rules for the Distinction of the Normal from the Pathological."" --Daniel Patrick Moynihan (1993, Defining Deviancy Down)

The third shoe has now dropped on the whole Abu Graib thing for me this week. First, we have Ted Kennedy celebrating the first anniversary of Abu Graib, as if he thought the whole affair were something worth remembering (I wonder if he also visits Mary Jo's grave once a year).

The second shoe was the rubble kicked up intentionally by Isikoff and Newsweek to try and paint a picture of Gitmo guards dumping the Koran down the crapper.

Then, we get a London tabloid tossing out pictures of Saddam in his underwear.

You know what? I've had it. So some Arabs get their burnoose in a bunch over hurt feelings. I really can't muster any sympathy for that. If Muslims were taking care of their own criminals, they wouldn't find themselves and their people exposed to the idiosyncracies of western cultures; albeit primarily pure fabrications. So what if some of their citizens get humiliated, sneered at, and denigrated. That's nothing that hasn't happened in a US prison. Or at a Dixie Chicks concert for that matter.

I have to wonder if the people who have a problem with this form of free expression have the same problem with those who would burn a US flag or spray paint a fur coat.

Defining deviancy up, for the purpose of gaining sympathy for the devil is the work of the devil himself.

Mortality

One of the reasons I write this blog is give a glimpse to my three sons of things that I believe in strongly enough to write about. It's a very selfish reason, and I indulge myself with the knowledge that if and when they read it, they do it of their own volition, and that they absorb whatever they wish from these writings.

It was not my intent to make this blog a treatise on life or philosophies thereof, but there are some things you cannot escape; much as we'd like to compartmentalize things and stash them away for processing at a later time.

Recently, my sons lost their beloved mother. It's a time for reflection for each of us, and to contemplate the rugged aspects of mortality. I hurt for the boys, and I pray that there's a hidden strength that God can grace me with to help them through it.

Suffice to say that I gladly bear the burden, if it will ease theirs. And if sometime in the distant future they have occasion to read this, I can only offer that they made her extremely proud, and they were her only true joy as the years went on. God rest her soul.

Billyism #2

Learning is the key to all your answers.

Wizer OneLiner #3

Proving yet another adage wrong, this morning I sat on the edge of the bed and put my pants on two legs at a time.

Billyism

"When thunder hits your hand, weird things happen"

Wizer OneLiner #2:

I don't need a traffic report that tells me all routes are "normal".