Starting to Sink In

This morning I wrote about my indecision regarding whether or not to watch the Inauguration ceremony today. As luck would have it, I didn't have to make the decision. At about 8:30 I left to drive my son to a chess lesson. I didn't get home until almost 1:00, and since I was driving my van rather than my husband's car (the one with the XM radio) I was not able to listen either. After dropping my son off at home I hit the road again, this time heading to the day school for a conference with my younger son's preschool teacher. Then it was home again to work on a proofreading project and do some house chores. (Has anyone noticed that there has been no mention of teaching my children yet today?) By the time I turned on my television set it was 5:30. I was pleasantly surprised to see President Bush speaking live from a welcome home ceremony in Midland, Texas, having departed Washington, D. C. earlier in the day.

Then it hit me: it wasn't President Bush, but rather, as the description at the bottom of the screen made clear, "former President Bush." I've known this was coming for months. And yet I don't think it hit me until that moment. This is for real, and there's no going back. I took a deep breath, called my husband, and settled in to watch the rest of the speech.

There was just one problem. After several minutes, the Fox News Channel cut away from the speech to return to their 5:00 news broadcast and the political analysis of their panel on the day's events. EXCUSE ME? Our former president is saying goodbye, and it's not worth broadcasting?

No matter. There's always C-Span, right?

Wrong. We clicked over, only to discover live coverage of the Obamas watching the Inaugural Parade.

I couldn't find a single station that was carrying President Bush's speech live. I can't describe how sad and ashamed I felt at that moment. This man who has served us with integrity and moral clarity for the past 8 years and has kept us safe and exemplified good humor and kindness does not merit a final listen? What is wrong with this country?

Do you remember this? Eight years ago it was a different story. I recall at that time extensive day-long coverage of President Clinton's departure from Washington, D. C., even as another man, President George W. Bush, was taking his place in the White House.

How soon our ungrateful hearts forget. We're on to the glitz and glamour and fun of the parades and the parties with hardly a thought of the honorable man to whom we owe so much as he fades from view.

I'm sorry, Mr. Bush. I hope some day you can forgive us. May God bless you with much joy and well-earned rest in this new phase of your life.

Mixed Feelings

So today is Inauguration Day. I'm torn.

On the one hand, I appreciate the significance of this day. It feels as though maybe we have put some very bad stuff behind us once and for all. I look at Mr. Obama and am impressed by his ability and intelligence and all that he has achieved. I don't dislike him. I look at the Obamas and I see a beautiful family that I will be praying for and wishing well over the next four years. May they find the time for each other even as Mr. Obama takes on the toughest job in the world. May the Lord protect and keep them safe.

On the other hand, so much of what Mr. Obama campaigned on is in my opinion the opposite of what this country needs. I fear for our country and its safety. I fear for our economic well-being. I fear for free speech and individual freedom. I worry about the continued erosion of Judeo-Christian values. And I fear for all the children yet to be born.

I am also angry. I am angry at the hatred that continues to be shown towards George W. Bush, a good man who gave himself to us for eight years and who may not live to hear his country thank him.

So I don't think I can watch the Inauguration today. Better to busy myself with trying to make a difference here in my own little corner of the world.

Somehow, I don't think I'll be missed.

Santa Bush

A historic gift for Christians in Iraq:

Iraqi Government Declares Christmas an Official Holiday for the First Time Ever

Transition

We got our Christmas card from President George W. and First Lady Laura Bush a few days ago. I told the children to feast their eyes, as it will probably undoubtedly be the last presidential Christmas card we will be receiving for a while.

Ah, well. It was nice while it lasted.

An Encouraging Thought

During his campaign, President-Elect Obama somehow managed to paint himself as a tax-cutter. What he did not share with the American people, however, and what most of the mainstream media also did not point out, is his plan to let the George W. Bush tax cuts expire. This will of course amount to a tax increase, not only an increase in tax rates but the disappearance of the child tax credit that has been such a help to American families.

But here's reason to hope. I believe the Bush tax cuts are set to expire in 2010. That means when we pay our taxes in 2011 we will still be benefiting from them. Assuming President Obama does allow them to expire, that means when we all sit down to pay our 2011 taxes, it will be 2012. Now think about this for a minute, my dear readers . . . what happens in 2012?

Exactly. Election year. So either Obama thinks twice about letting those tax cuts expire, or he goes ahead and lets them expire and the American people feel the hit right before they have to choose a president.

Thank God for democracy.

Whose Fault?

President Bush tried 5 years ago to do something about the financial disaster this country is currently facing. Guess who blocked him? And guess who will now turn around and with the help of the mainstream media blame him for supposedly getting us into this mess?

Here's a post by The Anchoress (who also provided the link above) that includes a lengthy comment by John McCain on this issue. It's worth reading.

How Dare They?

I am speechless. Then again, I guess I'm not, since I'm finding the words to write this. But after coming across this report from the U. S. House of Representatives I am, to say the least, stunned. So that you don't have to click over (unless you really want to), here are the basic facts:

The title of the report is "Wasted Lessons of 9/11: How the Bush Administration Has Ignored the Law and Squandered Its Opportunities to Make Our Country Safer."

It was prepared and published by the Majority (Democrat) Staffs of the House Committees on Homeland Security and Foreign Affairs.

The report reviews the formation of the 9/11 Commission and the enacting of many of the Commission's recommendations in the Intelligence Reform and Terrorism Prevention Act of 2004 and goes on to quote the Commission's lead authors a year later: " . . . are we safe? We are safer--no terrorist attacks have occurred inside the U.S. since 9/11--but we are not as safe as we need to be . . . .[T]here is so much more to be done . . . ."

The report then summarizes the "Implementing the 9/11 Recommendations Act of 2007" signed into law by President Bush in August 2007 and goes on to report on progress made to date on specific measures called for in the report. It is on this point that the writers of the report take President Bush to task--in their opinion, he has not made sufficient progress on the various measures to be implemented. Yet considering that it has been barely a year since the Act was passed and that the deadlines for implementation fall mostly after Bush will have left office, it seems a bit premature to pronounce him as "ignoring" the law and "squandering" his chance to make America safer. In fact, it seems more than premature; it strikes me as disrespectful, inflammatory, and downright dangerous.

I respectfully suggest that the authors of this obviously politically motivated and timed report review the history of the past 7 years and remind themselves that during that time we have had no more terrorist attacks on American soil and that also during that time close to two dozen terrorist plots have been thwarted. This is "squandered opportunity?" This is failure? They must have a different definition of "safe" than I do.

For a summary of the terrorist attacks on Americans that DIDN'T HAPPEN in the last seven years, click here. If you're like me, after reading you will give thanks to God that President Bush was the man in the White House on September 11, 2001.

Sobering Words from the New York Times

On November 4, Remember 9/11 - by Jeffrey Goldberg

An excerpt:

The next president must do one thing, and one thing only, if he is to be judged a success: He must prevent Al Qaeda, or a Qaeda imitator, from gaining control of a nuclear device and detonating it in America. Everything else — Fannie Mae, health care reform, energy independence, the budget shortfall in Wasilla, Alaska — is commentary. The nuclear destruction of Lower Manhattan, or downtown Washington, would cause the deaths of thousands, or hundreds of thousands; a catastrophic depression; the reversal of globalization; a permanent climate of fear in the West; and the comprehensive repudiation of America’s culture of civil liberties.

Many proliferation experts I have spoken to judge the chance of such a detonation to be as high as 50 percent in the next 10 years. I am an optimist, so I put the chance at 10 percent to 20 percent. . . .

I recommend reading the article in full. I don't think Goldberg has either an Obama or a McCain axe to grind. He has his doubts about both of them. But I think his assessment of what should be THE issue of this election is right on. And I personally think John McCain is much more likely to prevent the unthinkable than Barack Obama.

Reading Goldberg's opening sentence, I also couldn't help thinking about our current president. George W. Bush has succeeded in doing that one thing Goldberg says the next president must do--namely, keeping us safe since 9/11. Yet it seems he does not get much credit for that these days, and I think that is a national embarrassment. I hope in time history will remember to thank the 43rd president for his oversight of our security during these dark and dangerous days.

Double Standard

While the mainstream press was careful to keep Americans informed about Barack Obama's recent European trip, they somehow can't find time to tell us about President Bush's arrival in South Korea to a massive pro-Bush and pro-America demonstration. You can read more about it (and see pictures and video) at Gateway Pundit.

More Anagrams

My children and I have had no end of laughs this morning since discovering the anagram site mentioned in the last few posts (thanks again, Susan). My son did a little more exploring of the site and discovered the "Anagram Hall of Fame." Here are just a few of the treasures you will find there:

dormitory = dirty room

Clint Eastwood = Old West action

Madame Curie = Radium came

The Morse Code = Here come dots

Conversation = Voices rant on

Mother-in-law = Woman Hitler

The United States of America = Attaineth its cause, freedom

Statue of Liberty = Built to Stay Free

Eleven plus two = Twelve plus one

William Jefferson Clinton = Jail Mrs Clinton: felon wife
(by Ward Hardman)

George Bush = He bugs Gore
(by Mike Morton)

Ronald Wilson Reagan = No, darlings, no ERA law
(by Mike Morton)

Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Sea = Huge water tale stuns. End had you tense.
(by E.L. Benfer)

To be or not to be: that is the question, whether tis nobler in the mind to suffer the slings and arrows of outrageous fortune. = In one of the Bard's best-thought-of tragedies, our insistent hero, Hamlet, queries on two fronts about how life turns rotten.
(by Cory Calhoun)

Spengler on Obama

A writer for the Asia Times Online who publishes under the pseudonym "Spengler" (there has been much musing about his/her identity, but no one apparently knows the truth) has offered up a frighteningly insightful analysis of what makes Mr. Obama "tick" and why the American public is so enthusiastically embracing him. A fairly lengthy excerpt (and the conclusion to the piece) is quoted below; you can read the entire article here.

Barack Obama is a clever fellow who imbibed hatred of America with his mother's milk, but worked his way up the elite ladder of education and career. He shares the resentment of Muslims against the encroachment of American culture, although not their religion. He has the empathetic skill set of an anthropologist who lives with his subjects, learns their language, and elicits their hopes and fears while remaining at emotional distance. That is, he is the political equivalent of a sociopath. The difference is that he is practicing not on a primitive tribe but on the population of the United States.

There is nothing mysterious about Obama's methods. "A demagogue tries to sound as stupid as his audience so that they will think they are as clever as he is," wrote Karl Krauss. Americans are the world's biggest suckers, and laugh at this weakness in their popular culture. Listening to Obama speak, Sinclair Lewis' cynical tent-revivalist Elmer Gantry comes to mind, or, even better, Tyrone Power's portrayal of a carnival mentalist in the 1947 film noire Nightmare Alley. The latter is available for instant viewing at Netflix, and highly recommended as an antidote to having felt uplifted by an Obama speech.

America has the great misfortune to have encountered Obama at the peak of his powers at its worst moment of vulnerability in a generation. With malice aforethought, he has sought out their sore point.

Since the Ronald Reagan boom began in 1984, the year the American stock market doubled, Americans have enjoyed a quarter-century of rising wealth. Even the collapse of the Internet bubble in 2000 did not interrupt the upward trajectory of household assets, as the housing price boom eclipsed the effect of equity market weakness. America's success made it a magnet for the world's savings, and Americans came to believe that they were riding a boom that would last forever, as I wrote recently [1].

Americans regard upward mobility as a God-given right. America had a double founding, as David Hackett Fischer showed in his 1989 study, Albion's Seed. Two kinds of immigrants founded America: religious dissidents seeking a new Promised Land, and economic opportunists looking to get rich quick. Both elements still are present, but the course of the past quarter-century has made wealth-creation the sine qua non of American life. Now for the first time in a generation Americans have become poorer, and many of them have become much poorer due to the collapse of home prices. Unlike the Reagan years, when cutting the top tax rate from a punitive 70% to a more tolerable 40% was sufficient to start an economic boom, no lever of economic policy is available to fix the problem. Americans have no choice but to work harder, retire later, save more and retrench.

This reversal has provoked a national mood of existential crisis. In Europe, economic downturns do not inspire this kind of soul-searching, for richer are poorer, remain what they always have been. But Americans are what they make of themselves, and the slim makings of 2008 shake their sense of identity. Americans have no institutionalized culture to fall back on. Their national religion has consisted of waves of enthusiasm - "Great Awakenings" – every second generation or so, followed by an interim of apathy. In times of stress they have a baleful susceptibility to hucksters and conmen.

Be afraid - be very afraid. America is at a low point in its fortunes, and feeling sorry for itself. When Barack utters the word "hope", they instead hear, "handout". A cynic might translate the national motto, E pluribus unum, as "something for nothing". Now that the stock market and the housing market have failed to give Americans something for nothing, they want something for nothing from the government. The trouble is that he who gets something for nothing will earn every penny of it, twice over.

The George W Bush administration has squandered a great strategic advantage in a sorry lampoon of nation-building in the Muslim world, and has made enemies out of countries that might have been friendly rivals, notably Russia. Americans question the premise of America's standing as a global superpower, and of the promise of upward mobility and wealth-creation. If elected, Barack Obama will do his utmost to destroy the dual premises of America's standing. It might take the country another generation to recover.

"Evil will oft evil mars", J R R Tolkien wrote. It is conceivable that Barack Obama, if elected, will destroy himself before he destroys the country. Hatred is a toxic diet even for someone with as strong a stomach as Obama. As he recalled in his 1995 autobiography, Dreams From My Father, Obama idealized the Kenyan economist who had married and dumped his mother, and was saddened to learn that Barack Hussein Obama, Sr, was a sullen, drunken polygamist. The elder Obama became a senior official of the government of Kenya after earning a PhD at Harvard. He was an abusive drunk and philanderer whose temper soured his career.

The senior Obama died in a 1982 car crash. Kenyan government officials in those days normally spent their nights drinking themselves stupid at the Pan-Afrique Hotel. Two or three of them would be found with their Mercedes wrapped around a palm tree every morning. During the 1970s I came to know a number of them, mostly British-educated hollow men dying inside of their own hypocrisy and corruption.

Both Obama and the American public should be very careful of what they wish for. As the horrible example of Obama's father shows, there is nothing worse for an embittered outsider manipulating the system from within than to achieve his goals - and nothing can be more terrible for the system. Even those who despise America for its blunders of the past few years should ask themselves whether the world will be a safer place if America retreats into a self-pitying shell.

A Pro-Life President

My title for this post is is stolen from Dr. Gene Edward Veith, who provided a link on his Cranach site to President Bush's remarks on his recent stem cell veto and executive order on future stem cell research. Below is Dr. Veith's post quoted in full:

"I know we conservatives are all running away from President Bush, but here is what a pro-life president looks like, vetoing the embryonic stem cell bill despite taking flak from all sides."

I'm one of those conservatives who has been less than pleased with some aspects of President Bush's administration. But his comments on this issue remind me anew of why it is critical that pro-life conservatives continue to insist on a presidential candidate who takes a strong pro-life stand rather than compromising our principles to get a candidate who we think can win. This will be a defining issue for me as I continue to study the candidates and their views in the year ahead.