It's Making Heads and Tails of the Week Thing

Dear America,

might I recommend the colonoscopy...

oh the things we have to do as we get older

granted, this girl was running a wee bit late on her first time, butt better late than never, butt dump bum

in hindsight, there was really nothing to be afraid of...it was much ta-do about nothing, really.

As a matter of fact, it was almost as good as any spa day....arrived at the hospital, all cleansed out -- so much so, and without having a meal for 24 hours, almost lightheaded, like near hallucination stage, like I was on something really good (not that I've done that kinda thing before)  and then, I was quickly changed into a hospital gown and swaddled in a warm blankie.  And all I could do was sit back and take it.  

No more phone

No more email

No more a-dozen things to get done before noon

it was like sudden bliss

my life had to stop

next thing I know, a big burly technician with tats up and down his arm is asking me how I am and tending to my right side, two lovely nurses are on my other side getting me hooked up and tending to my left, and then my sweet doctor, with a beautiful accent, is asking me questions, confirming my name, rank and serial number and if I consent to this rather intimate intrusion up into the far reaches of my insides....

yes. 

please.

just put me under already...

next thing I know, I'm home in bed, having not remembered anything from the moment the lights in the room went dim...nite nite

So here we go with the metaphor portion of today's Day in the Life of an American Girl-- 

wish America could have herself a certain cleansing, from the inside out....and then, with a special scope, venture through the muck...bending and stretching and probing into every recess and excess, every ingress and egress, every individual transgress, federal largesse, large and small.

And in the end, when every twist and turn's been done, and with every polyp and rock upturned and fully examined, she, America, somehow returns to sanity, and begins anew, as if nothing ever happened. 

How can it be even be acceptable, for someone -- who almost became president, no less -- say something like this....‘You cannot be civil with a political party that wants to destroy what you stand for, what you care about."  As an American, there are not words to describe how off-putting, distasteful, even offensive this is. 

this might be the perfect time to use this wit, plastered across the front of one of my favorite canvasses, a t-shirt:  "wipe your mouth, there is still a tiny bit of bullshit around your lips."  teehee

Is she basically calling for another civil war?  

Are we back to the olden days of duels and kicks in the ass, in order to get our way, politically?

Leave it to the party of free radicals under the influence of Saul Alinsky to double down on tactics of harassment, making threats against life and limb, and using inflammatory rhetoric to incite violence against persons who simply believe in another approach in the care of the American people.

When did we cross the red line, leading us into a new wave of assault?  

When is this kind of nonsense okay?

When did the meeting of the minds cross red and blue lines, and arrive at the clear and present danger of creating battle lines? 

I just don't get it.

If Trump had said we can no longer be civil with the democrats, all hell would break loose.

If Trump had answered the opposition going low with a call to kick back, his ass is grass.

....reminds me of the time a presidential candidate said this:

“If they bring a knife to the fight, we bring a gun," 

“Because from what I understand, folks in Philly like a good brawl. I’ve seen Eagles fans.”

thank you, Barack; thank you for the precedence.

So this sh&*$  is nothing new...

and it best better not stick around very long.

This is no way to co-exist, and get along as one body republic.

If Hillary was president, and republicans acted like this -- the media would be unhinged with indignation.

The thing is -- with all the disappointment of Barack Obama being elected, Supreme Court justices Sotomayor and Kagan being placed on the highest court in the land, the usurping of the Rule of Law with the passage of the "Affordable Care Act" -- the republicans maintained, at large, a great amount of civility throughout all of it.  No republican worth their salt clawed at the doors of the Supreme Court, or penetrated the halls of Congress with crazy protests, shouting down the free speech of our elected officials.

No.  Republicans protested through channels of civility -- wrote their congressman/woman, held Tea Party rallies (rallies that, at the end of the day, left the park picked up and cleaner than in it's original condition), and used the power of their vote to create change, leading to one of the greatest congressional turnovers to date, and later, into the 2016 presidential surprise of a lifetime.

But this nonsense -- what is happening to America these days, from sea to shining sea, is just atrocious.  So much for a peaceful transference of power.

Talk about an embarrassment.

The democrats are turning into Third World activists...and all the while, the rest of us are just supposed to sit back and take it?

No.  Just say no.

Not today, not tomorrow, not ever -- is this disturbing behavior of the entire Left bearable, tolerable, justifiable, or sustainable.  Something's gotta give, or something really really bad will happen.

 

This is an assault against America...  #metooAmerica, taking things up the butt like nobody's business.  I don't know how she does it.

But I believe America is greater than all of it's parts, especially the parts that need cleaned out before the little polyps become metastasized and become a much bigger problem, like, as of, yesterday. Realistically, if we continue down this windy path, the prognosis is not good, people.

Here's one more T time for the road; this t-shirt reads:

  

"when I was a kid, 

I wanted to be older...

but this crap

 is not what I expected."  ;)

the end.

really it is; and then again, it very well could be, showing us signs, that this quite possibly, could be, the very very end, of everything.  

We can always hope. 

  

But let's not put the fear of God out there, right.  This could be nothing more than a procedural stopping point....something we just have to do, and get it over with, like a bad dream after a really fine colonoscopy....one afternoon we will all wake up and go what???  

Until then, no matter how it all comes out in the end, always...

Make it a Good Day, G

It's America Needs a Few Good Wing-men Thing

Dear America,

When in Hell, 

Keep Going.

Winston Churchill

sure, this was from a bit ago -- and considering how quickly things, faces, and times change these days, it's probably plum close to irrelevant by now... but no bother, no matter...

Fire one:

"I’m still enjoying what I’m doing, there’s still work to be done.  I’m still the President’s wing-man, so I’m there with my boy.  So we’ll see," Holder said in an interview on the Tom Joyner radio show. [circa 2013, plucked from Politico]

It's incredible the level of corruption; for it's the Department of Justice, not to mention what's going on in another entire branch of government in the Supreme Court, that should be -- of all places, and in all circumstances -- clinging to the virtues and duty of the Rule of Law, not to every whim and fancy and ideology according to the rule of man, even if appointed by several, even if that often looks like an entire body of congress.  

Just where is America's WING-MAN right now?

Here's a serious rebuttal to Holder's wing-man philosophy of justice well served, and it comes from another former U.S. Attorney General -- Michael B. Mukasey:   Justice and the Obama Justice Department, as adapted from a speech in the September edition of Imprimis, a publication of Hillsdale College.

Mukasey sums it up for us like so -- "our country has grown less honest, less fair, and less safe than it ought to be" largely because of the [Justice] department's work.  And then begins, in torpedo fashion, rattling off examples behind enemy lines like a prosecutor who not only knows the law, but respects it above all else.

In the end, Mukasey gives us a warning:

The problems in the DOJ won’t be solved simply by electing a less ideological president in 2016. Many of the political appointees of the past seven years will resign and take up career positions within the department, and once such people receive civil service status, it is virtually impossible to fire them. In other words, the next attorney general will be confronted with a department that’s prepared to resist policy changes. This will require great patience and dedication by the new political appointees in their efforts to return the department to its true mandate—not doing justice according to your own lights, or even according to the lights of the president who appoints you, but defending law and having enough faith in law to believe that the result, more often than not, will be justice.

The thing is, all of this talk about justice isn't really where this American girl wants to hunker down in a bunker on the day.

It's really more about the overall climate we are in -- as a nation.

For we are becoming a nation quite amenable, newly accustomed really,  to the rule of law being changed on the fly.  

And for that reason alone we should stop --  dead in our tracks --  and check the compass.

Fire Two:

To the issue of Paul Ryan becoming Speaker.  Let's regroup and look at the actual navigational charts available, and review where Ryan has been and where Ryan wants to go, shall we [or do we not have your permission to ask such a thing, Mr. Full Consensus Only or Nothing?]

Sounding less like a condition and more like a threat, what would a Ryan speaker-ship do to America?

Can you say OPEN BORDER.   

Talk about a section of the rule of law a Speaker Ryan would aim to have his power change....

For a full, exclusive, report go to BREITBART, rest his soul.

“There’s nobody in the Republican Party who could be worse than Paul Ryan,” Beck implored. “He has spent his entire adulthood ideologically connected to the open borders crowd. Open Borders is in his ideological DNA. That’s the terrifying thing. He’s an ideologue and his spent his whole life working for ideologues. Open borders seeps out of every pore of his being. This isn’t personal, it’s just who he is.”

This scathing report, lines up all the dots over twenty years, and blows Ryan's all-American boyhood, natural, darned right devilish good charm right out of the water.

The flow of illegal immigration is pure lawlessness, at a real cost of trillions of dollars to our economy, not to mention adding to the multi-cultural weakening of a nation dependent upon a common allegiance to the whole and it's well being, while individually carrying our own packs filled with the fundamentals of self-reliance and rugged independence and courage, alongside the Rule of Law as the real, bona fide, commander in chief (kinda like how a nation of 300 million wing-men and women might look).  

All the while, a possible Speaker Ryan has made his demands clear and his intentions known and will continue to align himself against the sovereign border every time.  

......And just as America elected a President Obama under the guise of hope and change --  America denied looking at the whole truth, and nothing but the truth, so help me God.  

......And IF we are not careful -- we will do the same IF this House of Representatives appoints Paul Ryan as speaker.  Boom!

"Socialism 

is a philosophy of failure 

with the creed of ignorance, 

and the gospel of envy.  

It's inherent virtue 

is the equal sharing 

of misery." 

Winston Churchill

Conservatives need to band together and fight like hell.

We may have won the battle in getting John Boehner to step aside -- but let's not lose the war in letting the position go to Paul Ryan.  It's a position that puts America at risk, for the threat is real; if we fall back asleep, the enemy might not even need to use a gun, but just walk right on in, in the cover of darkness, and have us surrounded before we know any better.  We have struggled to get this far...we must keep going.   Everybody take a wing.

Make it a Good Day, G

It's Just G Quibbling Over Details -- it's What I Do -- Thing

Dear America,

happy lunar new year.

it's the Year of the Sheep...or is it more correct to call it 'the goat'....or my personal favorite, 'the ram'...ah, but this quibbling over terminology is pointless, just an obsession of Fox News,  right Eric Holder? He says it doesn't change how we deal with it...Radical Islam.

While true, due to constraints of the English language, the Mandarin takes on multiple personalities in translation here in America, and in the West.   And yet, all the while, the Far East has absolutely no issue understanding and recognizing the whole of the character, and more than that, celebrating it.    

From the New York Times just yesterday:

Zhao Shu, a folklore expert at the Beijing Institute of Culture and History, said in a telephone interview that the debate was silly. The creature in question arose as a general symbol of plenitude and good fortune, partly because the Chinese character yang shares roots with the one for auspiciousness, he said. 

“This is ridiculous,” he said. “Goat and sheep are different in French and English, but what’s that got to do with Chinese traditional culture? 

He also drew a lesson about the virtues of Chinese tradition. “In Western culture, things are subdivided into more and more detailed categories, and that’s why Europe has still not been unified after so many years,” he continued. “If you want to say whether it’s goat or sheep, then why not also ask whether it’s a ewe or a ram? But Chinese culture has an inclusive spirit and stresses harmony.”

And how.  I love that part when Zhao Shu notes how "[I]n Western culture, things are subdivided into more and more detailed categories..."   [We didn't start out this way...creating a land of subdivision; our birthright and origins were intended to assimilate into one culture, all of us being called the same thing... AMERICANS]

 Well, back to the Year of the Sheep-Goat-Ram-Ewe --  no sense quibbling over what a thousand year culture calls it, right; getting back to this day -- 

"Confucius always say, 

befuddlement make good party 

but bad foreign policy."

exactly.

From Fox News, Sean Hannity Show:

"The first thing you must do when confronting an enemy is to label it and call it for what it is.  That is the foundation for your understanding of its motivations and therefore the basis for your reaction to it."

And yet -- this is our Commander-In-Chief, making a few remarks at the  "Shovel Ready Jobs For Violent Extremists Summit" yesterday:

By “violent extremism,” we don’t just mean the terrorists who are killing innocent people.  We also mean the ideologies, the infrastructure of extremists --the propagandists, the recruiters, the funders who radicalize and recruit or incite people to violence.  We all know there is no one profile of a violent extremist or terrorist, so there’s no way to predict who will become radicalized.  Around the world, and here in the United States, inexcusable acts of violence have been committed against people of different faiths, by people of different faiths -- which is, of course, a betrayal of all our faiths.  It's not unique to one group, or to one geography, or one period of time. 

go on...

First, we have to confront squarely and honestly the twisted ideologies that these terrorist groups use to incite people to violence.  Leading up to this summit, there’s been a fair amount of debate in the press and among pundits about the words we use to describe and frame this challenge.  So I want to be very clear about how I see it. 

and yet painstakingly, and purposefully, idealistically ambivalent you remain to claim.

Al Qaeda and ISIL and groups like it are desperate for legitimacy.  They try to portray themselves as religious leaders -- holy warriors in defense of Islam.  That’s why ISIL presumes to declare itself the “Islamic State.”  And they propagate the notion that America -- and the West, generally -- is at war with Islam.  That’s how they recruit.  That’s how they try to radicalize young people.  We must never accept the premise that they put forward, because it is a lie.  Nor should we grant these terrorists the religious legitimacy that they seek.  They are not religious leaders -- they’re terrorists.  (Applause.)  And we are not at war with Islam.  We are at war with people who have perverted Islam.  (Applause.) 

and yet, here we are -- up against an army of  wealthy, determined, righteous, unafraid, ISLAMIC Extremists who tell us THEY ARE AT WAR WITH US, the infidels, those who choose not to follow Allah and the Quran.

And going even further, our president gives consideration to the understandable grievances within the Muslim community --

The reality -- which, again, many Muslim leaders have spoken to -- is that there’s a strain of thought that doesn’t embrace ISIL’s tactics, doesn’t embrace violence, but does buy into the notion that the Muslim world has suffered historical grievances  -- sometimes that's accurate -- does buy into the belief that so many of the ills in the Middle East flow from a history of colonialism or conspiracy; does buy into the idea that Islam is incompatible with modernity or tolerance, or that it's been polluted by Western values.

oh, okay.

So those beliefs exist.  In some communities around the world they are widespread.  And so it makes individuals -- especially young people who already may be disaffected or alienated -- more ripe for radicalization.  And so we've got to be able to talk honestly about those issues.  We've got to be much more clear about how we're rejecting certain ideas.

Which, in turn, is why he supports the comments coming from his very own State Department -- Marie Harf -- having, most likely, put the words in her mouth to begin with...

In an interview with Chris Matthews, Harf says:

We're killing a lot of them, and we're going to keep killing more of them. ... But we cannot win this war by killing them," department spokeswoman Marie Harf said on MSNBC's "Hardball." "We need ... to go after the root causes that leads people to join these groups, whether it's lack of opportunity for jobs, whether --

... "If we can help countries work at the root causes of this -- what makes these 17-year-old kids pick up an AK-47 instead of trying to start a business?" 

The "ROOT CAUSES" ... Marie, and with all due respect,  Mr. President,... was written into the Quran.  And it is quite clear.

While putting it another way...

Rob O'Neill, the former Navy Seal Team 6 who actually shot Osama Bin Laden, responded to the jobs idea with this:  "They get paid to cut off heads -- to crucify children, to sell slaves and to cut off heads and I don't think that a change in career path is what's going to stop them," he said.

Of course,  maybe this "jobs-for-extremists" idea is just way too nuanced for this girl to comprehend.

NOT.  [Feel free to read translations of  the Quran, here]

Let's go back to the president's remarks, doubling down on bringing a better opportunity to the poor, disenfranchised youth of the Middle East:

Conversely, there are terrorists who’ve come from extraordinarily wealthy backgrounds, like Osama bin Laden.  What’s true, though, is that when millions of people -- especially youth -- are impoverished and have no hope for the future, when corruption inflicts daily humiliations on people, when there are no outlets by which people can express their concerns, resentments fester.  The risk of instability and extremism grow.  Where young people have no education, they are more vulnerable to conspiracy theories and radical ideas, because it's not tested against anything else, they’ve got nothing to weigh.  And we've seen this across the Middle East and North Africa. 

And terrorist groups are all too happy to step into a void. They offer salaries to their foot soldiers so they can support their families.  Sometimes they offer social services -- schools, health clinics -- to do what local governments cannot or will not do.  They try to justify their violence in the name of fighting the injustice of corruption that steals from the people -- even while those terrorist groups end up committing even worse abuses, like kidnapping and human trafficking.  

So if we’re going to prevent people from being susceptible to the false promises of extremism, then the international community has to offer something better.  And the United States intends to do its part...

And so I guess, to that end,  starting today, we will be accepting applications from Syrian Refugees of all backgrounds, indiscriminate... simply trusting all who beg to come to America's shores for a better life, and especially to find better jobs,  "The United States intends to do its part..."


The idea isn't really all that new.

It would only be fair to observe that  "The United States has admitted 524 Syrians since 2011. We’re likely to admit 1,000 to 2,000 Syrian refugees for permanent resettlement in Fiscal Year 2015 and a somewhat higher number, though still in the low thousands, in Fiscal Year 2016," spokeswoman Jen Psaki [of the State Department] told reporters on Friday.

September 2014.

December 2014.

From Anne Richards, in a Department of State press release, December 2014:

But war’s true cost is measured in human suffering. Resettlement can help – one person at a time – to bring that suffering to an end. 

We applaud the 25 countries that have agreed to resettle Syrian refugees, including some who will be accepting UNHCR refugee referrals for the first time. The United States accepts the majority of all UNHCR referrals from around the world. Last year, we reached our goal of resettling nearly 70,000 refugees from nearly 70 countries. And we plan to lead in resettling Syrians as well. We are reviewing some 9,000 recent UNHCR referrals from Syria. We are receiving roughly a thousand new ones each month, and we expect admissions from Syria to surge in 2015 and beyond. 

Like most other refugees resettled in the United States, they will get help from the International Organization for Migration with medical exams and transportation to the United States. Once they arrive, networks of resettlement agencies, charities, churches, civic organizations and local volunteers will welcome them. These groups work in 180 communities across the country and make sure refugees have homes, furniture, clothes, English classes, job training, health care and help enrolling their children in school. They are now preparing key contacts in American communities to welcome Syrians.

This should all work out just fine; just as long as you all let the ladies of the Welcome Wagon know ahead of time so that they can meet the demands and be better prepared to make every refugee's transition easy breezy...

And while we're getting all characters united now, let's wrap things up with a story from the president,  In his winding down of his remarks, he shares this little beauty:

I’m thinking of a little girl named Sabrina who last month sent me a Valentine’s Day card in the shape of a heart.  It was the first Valentine I got.  (Laughter.)  I got it from Sabrina before Malia and Sasha and Michelle gave me one.  (Laughter.)  So she’s 11 years old.  She’s in the 5th grade.  She’s a young Muslim American.  And she said in her Valentine, “I enjoy being an American.”  And when she grows up, she wants to be an engineer -- or a basketball player.  (Laughter.)  Which are good choices. (Laughter.)  But she wrote, “I am worried about people hating Muslims…If some Muslims do bad things, that doesn’t mean all of them do.”  And she asked, “Please tell everyone that we are good people and we’re just like everyone else.”  (Applause.)  Now, those are the words -- and the wisdom -- of a little girl growing up here in America, just like my daughters are growing up here in America.  “We’re just like everybody else.”  And everybody needs to remember that during the course of this debate. 

And there it is.
The character of mass confusion explained; and by a 5th grader, no less.

 "If some Muslims do bad things, that doesn’t mean all of them do," she said.

Exactly.  Sabrina is not afraid.
Even a 5th grader calls a Muslim a Muslim.   She links her religion, Islam, to the violent acts ( the "bad things") without a second thought, even with the knowing that some, most, Muslims are, in fact, "good people."    How brave is she?  [I would just love to know her thoughts on the Year of the Sheep...but I digress.]

But allow me to respond, Sabrina -- we know.

The Good Muslims are NOT of issue at this time.

What is of issue is understanding how to beat "these big bad Muslims" so that the Middle East, if not the entire world, might make more love, not war.  It's kinda like beating back the big bad wolf in Red Riding Hood [of course, no denying the small, annoying detail of the original story...the wolf actually eats the little girl up and takes a nap!...oh snap!]

What is of issue is calling it by name and knowing our enemy.  Our president seems to be vewy, vewy afraid of calling it what it is.

What is of issue  -- as grating and extreme as it may sound -- is combating the violent, discriminating hatred resulting in death to the infidels at the hands of the Islamic Extremists who are acting upon Islamic doctrine at its very roots, with its goal creating the Caliphate by Jihad in order to support the true law of the land, Sharia,  as spoken through Mohammed and as written in the Quran.

And no, Sabrina, it's not all Muslims doing bad things.

ISIS, ISIL, potayto, potahto, al-Queda, Hamas, Hezbollah --

They are not a sheep.

They are not a goat.

They are not Christian.

They are not Jewish.

They are not Buddhist.

They are not a butterfly.

They are not a flea.

And they are neither  the JV team, nor in retreat.

[But they might just be related to the ewe...just sayin']

But just look who's quibbling over nonsense now.

They are what they are.   
And it is not good.


Make it a Good Day, G