It takes a criminal to know a criminal

Why does the left have such an affinity and affection for criminals? Because deep down they know they are criminals themselves. Lincoln defined slavery as, “you work, I eat.” That is the mantra of the left.

Living off the labor of others is called theft whether the gun is in the hand of a street criminal or an IRS agent.

This is the thesis of Dinesh D’Souza’s book, “Stealing America: What My Experience with Criminal Gangs Taught Me about Obama, Hillary, and the Democratic Party.” D’Souza argues philosophical political discussions with liberals are totally pointless since they have no philosophy other than, we want what you’ve got and they will use the government to get it and whatever con they can think of to justify it.dinesh d'souza cpac

In 1974 I was campaign manager for a Republican running for Attorney General of Idaho.  During the race there was a riot at the Idaho State Penitentiary. My candidate pledged that if he won the race he would have a member of his staff interview every guard and inmate to find out what was going on. He won and I did.

My experience with criminals over 40 years ago was quite different than D’Souza’s recent experience as an inmate after his conviction for campaign finance law violations. Whether that difference in attitudes was because of a change in the culture or it was because I represented law enforcement and D’Souza was a fellow inmate I do not know but I suspect the former.

Most of the inmates I interviewed told me they were in prison through no fault of their own.  Their imprisonment was the result of some mix-up, misunderstanding or circumstances beyond their control. While I did not believe their protestations at the time their answers were a tribute to the morality of the times in that the inmates felt the need to deny culpability.

In D’Souza’s experience he was placed in a detention center with thieves, rapists and murderers. None of them felt compelled to deny their evil deeds. They adopted the defense Bill and Hillary used in the mid to late 1990’s. The, “everybody does it,” defense. As you may recall, everybody lies about sex, everybody is immoral just like the Clintons.  The media and the culture accepted this defense and Clinton’s popularity rose (if you believe the polls) while six-year-old children asked their mothers, “Mommy what’s a BJ?”

Now approximately twenty years later D’Souza’s fellow inmates are telling him the culture is corrupt, and that they are no different that the local politician, business person, or government employee other than the fact they got caught and held to a different standard because the establishment types are part of the ruling class and the convicts are not.

D’Souza believes they have a point. Was Solyndra really an effort to build solar panels or was it a criminal enterprise to rip the taxpayers off for millions of dollars? Did anyone go to jail for that?

How does one explain the many office holders who come to Washington, D.C., the state capitols, county court houses, or city halls with modest means and a few years later leave multi-millionaires?

The public seems to catching up to the perceptions of murders, thieves and rapists.  A recent Gallup Poll reveals that 75 percent the public believes that corruption is widespread in the U.S. Government.

Can America recover from this loss of faith?  One can only hope.

SOURCE

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Trump's Trump Card

By Stephen Green

Josh Kraushaar rethinks a presumption or two:

    "The win­ner-take all rules for many of the more mod­er­ate “blue” states on March 15 and bey­ond should fa­vor a more prag­mat­ic Re­pub­lic­an down the stretch — at least on pa­per.

    But these cal­cu­la­tions are based on a premise that I’m hav­ing a bit more trouble ac­cept­ing these days — that blue-state Re­pub­lic­ans are more likely to sup­port the es­tab­lish­ment can­did­ate than their red-state coun­ter­parts. It’s an es­pe­cially shaky as­sump­tion to make with Trump, giv­en the polit­ic­al ped­i­gree of his strongest sup­port­ers. To put it an­oth­er way, many of Trump’s sup­port­ers are self-de­scribed mod­er­ates and view him as the more cent­rist can­did­ate. (Based on his his­tory of hold­ing lib­er­al po­s­i­tions and past dona­tions to prom­in­ent Demo­crats, they have a point.)

    The or­din­ary rules of the polit­ic­al game haven’t ap­plied to Trump so far, and if he lives up to the hype early on, there’s little reas­on to be­lieve he’ll fade as the race moves in­to more mod­er­ate ter­rit­ory. If Trump wins Iowa—the one state where he hasn’t led in many pub­lic polls—it’s hard to see where his mo­mentum stops."

Ted Cruz currently leads in Iowa, and if he fails to win there it's difficult to see how he picks up momentum against Trump's media machine in the bigger, more moderate states. And if Cruz does win Iowa, keep in mind Iowa's long and storied history of picking losers. In seven contested caucuses since 1976, Iowa has correctly picked the eventual nominee three times (Ford '76, Dole '96, Bush 2k) and only one (Bush) went on to win the general election. Iowa has never been all that it's cracked up to be, and yet it's the basket where Cruz has put most of his eggs.

Harkening back to a report of mine from last week, Kraushaar adds:

    "As The New York Times’s Nate Cohn con­cluded, Trump’s strongest voters are “self-iden­ti­fied Re­pub­lic­ans who non­ethe­less are re­gistered as Demo­crats” and are well-rep­res­en­ted in the in­dus­tri­al North and Ap­palachia. There’s a reas­on why Trump spent time last week in Low­ell, Mas­sachu­setts and Bur­l­ing­ton, Ver­mont—in two New Eng­land states that hold primar­ies on Su­per Tues­day. And polls show Trump’s fa­vor­ab­il­ity stead­ily im­prov­ing among GOP voters, coun­ter­ing the wide­spread be­lief that he’ll flame out when the field nar­rows".

If Trump doesn't flame out -- and there's not much time left for that to happen -- then his victory is gonna be yuge.

SOURCE

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What happens to principle in a dying culture?

Bruce Hanify

What happens to principle in a dying culture? I’ve been asking myself that question almost every day for just about 40 years now.

In "A World of Sergeants" I wrote about what it was like to grow up in an America that still had fathers. Just about every adult male I knew during my formative years had served in one of the Armed Forces between 1941 and 1965. Following World War II, it was pretty much expected that you would sign up for service out of high school. If you left home when you were 17, and Vern or Loren from Missouri or North Dakota was your Drill Instructor in basic training, it took the Momma’s Boy out of you and put “grunt” into you.

A noticeable difference in bearing and judgment ensued. When that boy returned to his hometown to get a job and marry his sweetheart, he had “man” written all over him. I’m telling you, whenever I went to to a friend’s house, the guy sitting in the big easy chair was a man’s man. He stood for something and you knew he stood for something and that meant something because that’s how it was — like sinew in a forearm. He didn’t need tattoos or a pony tail or earrings to prove his substance. His substance was in his bearing and his work and his character — his principles. Those kind of guys weren’t impressed by boys who wanted to look like girls. They were impressed by whether you stood for something worth standing for, not pretending to be something you weren’t. About 1970 that culture passed away.

I think America was a better country before people began pretending as much as we do. If you were to ask me my diagnosis for what ails us, I would tell you no one can tell the difference between character and personality. Personality is androgynous. Character is decidedly masculine or feminine, not something vague. That distinction has been lost. With that basic understanding lost (for the moment), principle went out the door.

Because, you know, we are dying. The reasons are multiple — too many for one blog post. We could start with our globalist friends who don’t like national borders and constitutions. They see labor as completely replaceable from any source and will never prioritize patriotism over control of the labor force. In fact, patriotism impedes their control. Whether your computer tech comes from India or Mexico makes no difference to them except insofar as they can put pressure on the American economy.

Our public representatives who serve the banks that serve the investors grow weary of having to think in terms of the America I grew up in, where families and patriotism were the guiding principles — just ask Paul Ryan. And if some foolish Americans believe their government has a duty to protect and enforce the Bill of Rights against any and all schemes to water them down, the political elites and the media immediately start labeling such persons names, from bigoted and xenophobic to racist and even “terrorist.”

It has come to this in America: people who believe in the principles of private property and free enterprise are more likely to be called “terrorists” instead of industrious citizens. You ought to ask yourself, How long can that last? My guess is it will lead to either a complete collapse, followed by chaos, or an outright explosion. Neither outcome seems good to me, yet what is the cause for this insecurity? It is the wanton sacrifice of the principles of family and national economy to personal greed. For want of principle a great nation has to be divided up among vultures and swindlers — under the guise of political correctness? How nutty is that?

From my social contacts both online and in the physical world, it seems likely to me that 45-50% of my fellow Americans are willing to bow to some form of gun control, regardless of what the Second Amendment stands for. That same group sincerely believes the UN needs to ensure that there is “social justice” and “environmental responsibility” imposed upon the United States.

Notice how they never hold Russia or China or any part of the Islamic world to those standards? Why are they so quick to surrender American sovereignty to an outside jurisdiction that clearly targets the United States as a hostile force? Where is their loyalty? Every one of my liberal friends deems it racist to talk about enforcing our southern border. They can’t conceive of leadership such as Calvin Coolidge provided, which prioritized the American family over foreign interests. They just don’t get that, and their lack of understanding is always coupled with gun control! Rather neat piece of brain washing, don’t you think?

If you make what seems an ordinary pitch for border enforcement and pro-American economic policies (leaving aside the Second Amendment momentarily), somehow that means you would have turned away Jewish refugees during World War II? What does border enforcement have to do with World War II? How does self-protection and national economic growth become something other than principles of patriotism and loyalty?

How sane can a country be when it’s ruling elites continually harass it with relentless assaults on its educational, medical, and criminal justice resources, then punish it with charges of “racism” when people cry out for relief? Every person I know instinctively feels the need for concentrating on our own infrastructure and our own social fabric at this time.

What is behind this maniacal drive to bring in as many immigrants to our country as we can — people whose religion and cultures are often antithetical to our own? Why is it racist to question the wisdom of those policies? What kind of government would intentionally subject its people to chaos and violence then condemn those who ask questions?

Somewhere in the last 40 years, self-aggrandizement has replaced principle. We have a situation where people often confuse virtue with “niceness.” “Niceness” excuses them from having to stand for something. By denying the principles of loyalty and economy and duty at this crucial period, they risk the safety of themselves, their families — and their country. One can only imagine how things will look by the end of this year. When will we awaken to the power of principle in our lives? What steps will be necessary to restore order to chaos? Sanity to madness?

While I cannot predict specific answers to those questions, I can echo Margaret Thatcher’s observation that The Facts of Life are Conservative. Sooner or later all little boys must become men, and women must step up to their roles as women. You can only pretend for so long before Hell demands its due from a crude and foolish people.

SOURCE

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For more blog postings from me, see  TONGUE-TIED, EDUCATION WATCH INTERNATIONAL, GREENIE WATCH,  POLITICAL CORRECTNESS WATCH, AUSTRALIAN POLITICS, and Paralipomena (Occasionally updated) and Coral reef compendium. (Updated as news items come in).  GUN WATCH is now mainly put together by Dean Weingarten. I also put up occasional updates on my Personal blog and each day I gather together my most substantial current writings on A WESTERN HEART.

List of backup or "mirror" sites here or  here -- for when blogspot is "down" or failing to  update.  Email me  here (Hotmail address). My Home Pages are here (Academic) or  here (Pictorial) or  here  (Personal)

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