America is in Trouble, Senator.
Posted in: Government | Comments
The following letter was sent to every Republican and Independent Sentator and Representative on January 20, 2009 by a member of our staff. Since that time, only two responses were received. Congressman Paul Ryan’s response and Senator Joseph Lieberman’s response is linked below.
We reproduce the letter here for your reading.
Congressman Paul Ryan’s Response
Senator Joseph Lieberman’s Response
20 January 2009
Dear Senator:
We would be wise to remember the lessons of our youth, for our history is meant to serve as a guide for our future actions and not meant to simply be reflected upon. And our nation’s history has been warning us for some time now that America is in trouble.
America is in trouble, Senator.
I am a registered Republican. And I have always voted Republican, including by absentee while serving as a Peace Corps Volunteer in the Republic of Kazakhstan. I love my country as I do my family. My parents would tell me in my adolescent years-as I experimented with rejecting aspects of the foundation they worked tirelessly to create in what would become my character-that while they may not always like me, may not always like the choices I make or the company I keep or the opinions I defend, they would always love me. My parents would always love me because I was their son, and there would be nothing I could do that would alter such a parental sentiment. It is with that sentiment that I express my love for my country, the idea of my country, the country I know it has been and could be. It is that sentiment I share with you as I express my affection for the ideals of the Republican Party, its principles of smaller government, low taxes, conservative family values and defense of free market capitalism.
And it is with that sentiment that I painfully admit that while I love my country, love the values the Republican Party has offered my countrymen, I do not like the country America is developing into nor do I like the crisis of character the Republican Party is allowing to manifest across its ranks. And as with any adolescent in any American family, drift too far and for too long from the foundation your creators developed in your life and there will come a moment when you look over your shoulder and fail to recognize the history that follows you, or if it is indeed recognizable it will be of a nature your creators would not be proud of, would not have accepted-would not have liked.
We are on our way to just such a moment-for to personify America, she is creating a history unfaithful to the vision of our Founding Fathers, and may well drift too far for too long to again recognize the beacon of freedom and hope she was raised to offer her citizenry and the world.
And the Republican Party is allowing it to occur.
While I am sure I am not the first American citizen to offer you such words, and the editorial pages of our newspapers since November 4th have not wanted for yet another op-ed on what the Republican Party needs to do in order to retake control of both Congress and the White House, I do have a bold suggestion on how you can reclaim the values of Lincoln, reestablish the vision first conceived by Adams and Jefferson, and defend a nation in the spirit of Washington. But in order for you to accept such a change of approach to governance you will have to find agreement in my following assessment of our current state of affairs.
Our country needs significant restructuring. And any corporate restructuring guru worth his weight will tell you that it takes outside critique to reveal what boards and management are unable to see. Restructuring does not have to equate with a vote of no confidence in the board or management, provided the board and management are willing and skilled to see their organization in a different light, with a different perspective, and with a selfless desire to see their organization prosper. But that is what the American people offered the Republican Party last November 4th. The American people have turned the spotlight on your Party; they are looking in from a new sideline and demanding a political if not ideological restructuring.
Despite the Democratic Party’s new political majority, I will not believe that a majority of the voting population honestly desires President-elect Obama’s socialist agenda, or that they revile President Bush to the extent the media and its polling has suggested. What the American people are is frustrated, lacking direction, and in the absence of responsible leadership are compelled to accept the words of a charismatic unknown. (Sometimes adults are nothing more than the impressionable adolescents of their youth.) React to this year’s defeat in both the White House and Congress as an opportunity to restructure the Republican Party as the standard bearer of the vision of our Founding Fathers and the American people will return to you in far greater numbers. Continue to abandon the Founders’ idea of America and we are all destined for failure-not Democrats, not Republicans, but Americans. The Republican Party has the ability to right this country and restore the idea of America.
On most days of the week, government should step aside and allow the populace and the free markets to dictate the social compact we each have with one another-that governments exist to ensure our basic liberties as determined by Jefferson, and enlightened visionaries such as Locke and Rousseau before him. But every once in a while governments should recognize that the people who elected them to represent their interests have lost their way and require leadership and direction, even if the people don’t yet realize it. Sometimes we need our governing bodies to protect and defend our Founding Principles even if a majority of our population is asking for something contrary. Sometimes the nature of our democracy compels us to drift too far and for too long from what our Founders created, and it is the responsibility of our government-it is their mandate-to bring us back to the values that first gave rise to our great nation.
Now is one of those times.
Patriotic Americans need the Republican Party to assert itself as the Party of our Founding Fathers, as the Party willing to defend the democratic, free market values first codified in our Founding Document-our statement of birth to a watchful global audience. We need the Republican Party to unite around our Founding Principles, articulate them to the American People, and demonstrate their willingness to practice them, even at the short-term cost of lost Congressional seats (that means excoriating individuals in your own party like Ted Stevens of Alaska for his crimes and stripping him of his seat yourselves; one cannot hold the high moral ground if he is himself suspect of immorality). The Republican Party needs to recognize what were the honest factors contributing to its defeat in our most recent election, to ignore the media’s assessment of what went wrong (as its political leanings are largely liberal in nature), and to be steadfast in not discarding what has defined the Party well. The world is indeed watching once again to see how our great nation will choose to define itself at this watershed moment. And it shares the same hope Americans have had for some time now-change.
The President-elect ran a masterful campaign utilizing a theme of change, and articulated it consistently and with seemingly honest poise. His campaign rhetoric reminded me of one of the reasons we honor our Founders. We honor them not only for their vision and their competence, but for their eloquence. Despite all of the polling and commentary on why Barack Obama won the 2008 election, one of the principle reasons for his victory was neither political nor racial-it was grammatical. The President-elect offered the American people-both Democrats and Republicans-something they hadn’t had in eight years: an inspirational voice in a time of turmoil, doubt and fear; a speaker who projects affinity with his audience and not detachment; an orator who spoke to his audience instead of at them. It is what I believe allowed him to sufficiently misdirect his audience away from his socialist agenda in order to capture the election. President Bush has been a leader worthy of our respect, and served the Office of the President with significantly more dignity than his predecessor. However, for eight years he has failed to connect with the majority of the American people on an oratorical level. While both the intent and substance of his presidential voice has been honorable and worthy of an American president, its delivery has been perceived and interpreted (largely by media pundits and satirical late night comedy) as a stuttered over and muddled version of the English language, condescending in posture and arrogant in tone. While it conveyed an honesty I personally agreed with, it often sounded too common for the Office of the President. How tragically unfortunate none of you demanded of our Commander-in-Chief a more committed attention to the art of public speaking, for his legislative record has been more impressive than the media would lead us to believe. (Another of my parents’ adages, though not original, was that it was less important what I said than how I said it. President Bush could have more successfully sold his administrative agenda if the explanatory words were delivered with more eloquence.) He may not have been the leader forty-eight and one half percent of the voting populace wanted in 2000, but how quickly we discovered he was the leader we needed in the wake of September 11, 2001. His leadership in the face of Islamic terrorism, United Nations ineptness and corruption, and a Democratic Party advocacy of a socialist agenda, has been a stellar example of steadfast adherence to conviction and principle. And more often than not, it was an example of our defense of our Founding Principles under circumstances our Founders would have never imagined.
The Republican Party as well as its nominee for President should have stood by him this election cycle instead of sheepishly cowering out of his shadow, intent on distancing themselves from his administration for political reasons. The lessons of our youth again serve as a guide for how we should conduct ourselves as adults. While I quarreled with my siblings all our adolescent years, when the school yard bully stood before my younger brother I did not cower or allow my brother to stand alone or put distance between he and I out of a misplaced sense of self-preservation. I stood with him because it was the right thing to do, because he is my blood and there is nothing that should stand between us even if we stand in opposition to one another-because standing by him was to persevere. Standing by your Party’s two-time nominee for President of the United States was the right thing to do, for even while you may stand in opposition to each other on specific issues (and rightfully so with much of the President’s decisions of the last year), standing by the President of your Party is to persevere instead of allowing the Democrats to be permitted a presence between you. It would have been an expression of character sensible Americans would have appreciated, even if they are currently a minority population. You allowed President-elect Barack Obama’s claims of a third President Bush-term with a McCain victory to be universally construed as a negative. What we now have is a cabinet under President-elect Obama comprised of upwards of 40% of former President Clinton Administration officials, and with more of a socialist bent today than any had in the 1990’s.
But we don’t have the time to dwell much longer on the defeats of the last election. And thus my bold suggestion, for a crisis is a terrible opportunity to waste. For the next two years, ignore all of your lobbyists, PACs, and special interests who you feel beholden to and to whom you believe your reelection depends. Forget about the favors you owe, the money that is expected to change hands because of the decisions others wish for you to make, and serve something larger than all of us. Think far less about maintaining your Congressional seat and far more about maintaining the existence of what is quickly becoming a fading America.
The time has since past for more blame trading sessions, obfuscation of critical issues relevant to both our lives and those of not only our children but all future generations of Americans; the time has since past to delay or to ignore or to deny the long overdue work of rebuilding our country into that beacon of hope about which the poets have written. America is the most unique of the world’s nations both past and present for the single inspiring reason that it represents an idea more than anything else-and an incomplete idea at that. Since the dawn of time, from the moment man exited his cave and acknowledged the heavens above, there has been nothing more powerful, more affective of change, more symbolic of the human experiment than that. And the idea of America transcends all of us. For that reason alone we should beholden ourselves to its continued protection, not to anyone or anything else, even if those are Americans themselves. It is what our Founders practiced by example. Yet it is what too many of our elected leaders have failed to remember or to respect. Therefore, for the next two years I hope that you serve the idea of America-not your lobbyists, not your PACs, not your interest groups, not even your constituents should their desires not be in the interest of the idea of America. Make the idea of America your only constituency. Devote to the idea of America the entire breadth of your attention. For if you do not, if the idea of America is allowed to whither, supplanted with a we’re-no-different-from-any-other-nation mentality, then we condemn to obscurity and malevolence not only all future generations of Americans but generations across the globe who will no longer have an example upon which to cast their hopeful gaze for a life of liberty and promise, where government of the people, by the people and for the people is permitted voice on a piece of this earth. When government has become a system of patronage and favors, and where money is our god and politics our religion and the Church of Greed where we pray, we are too far gone from our mandate to ourselves, our commitment to the furthering of a more perfect union-for in our betrayal lies only commitment to the furtherance of our imperfections, our vice and sin. We owe the legacy and spirit of our Founders better than that, we owe our future generations better than that-we owe ourselves better.
May you remember as this 44th Presidential Administration and 111th Congress asserts itself over a broken nation that you are public servants above all else, that your Party is our last best hope for furthering a nation worthy of our Founders’ admiration, and that the sons and daughters of our great nation are depending on your leadership more today than perhaps at any other time in our brief history.
Allow me to thank you for your service and wish you strength of character and national pride in your forthcoming term, enlightenment in your understanding of what is best for our country, and perseverance in what will be a serious test of character in the face of an opposition government determined to take our nation away from what undoubtedly was our Founders’ vision of a shining city upon a hill.
Respectfully Yours.
cc:
All Republican Members of the United States Senate
All Republican Members of the United States House of Representatives
admin @ April 14, 2009
Blessed Are the Righteous, Mr. President
Posted in: Government, International | Comments
Download a PDF of this Post at blessed-are-the-righteous
[New York, 05 February 2009]
Israel’s future represents humanity’s future; Israel’s conflict is the nadir of our human experiment. History has never wanted Israel to exist, has never considered the Jewish population to be worthy of any form of consideration save that of revulsion and enslavement. No population in human history has fought and struggled for their right to self determination for as long, or has been dismissed, debased and destroyed as consistently across the ages as the Jewish people. The West’s treatment and consideration of blacks for the last 500 years is but a drop of water in the well that is the oppression of populations. Today’s Jewish state-which recently celebrated its 50th anniversary-exists only because Adolph Hitler failed in his perverted scheme to eliminate Jews from the future pages of history. His policy of lebensraum (German for “living space”) was realized as the victors of WWII reinterpreted it-as a permanent home for the Jewish people-not as Hitler had envisioned: the extermination of all peoples not Aryan.
But that reinterpretation of living space was not achieved until after over 15,000 Nazi concentration, work and death camps across 15 European countries and 6 million murdered (35% of the worldwide Jewish population in 1939, which is roughly the size of the worldwide Jewish population currently living in Israel). It is no surprise, then, to witness the United Nations continue the sentiment of Hitler in its denunciation of Israel’s incursion into Gaza. They are merely continuing the same bigoted and hateful rejection of the self determination of a population they would sooner see extinct. Their sentiment should be anathema to that of American’s, for the right of self determination is what our Founders bequeathed to us; and strength through victory in pursuit of that right being recognized by our shared community is the enduring lesson they taught us. Our Founding Fathers would steadfastly defend the action of today’s Israel.
And so must we.
However, to believe that the international community abhors Israel’s Gaza incursion strictly because of its fundamental anti-Semitism would be short-sighted. There has been a pervading culture of fear across Europe since before WWII concluded, has only intensified in the aftermath of the world’s last global conflict, and until recently had avoided residence on our own American shores. I liken it to the same culture of fear that pervades the weaker less-popular primary school child on the playground courtyard. Terrified that the school’s bully is going to harm them without reprieve, they futilely attempt to do good by them in the misguided hope of gaining the bully’s favor and avoiding what their own lacking strength cannot accomplish-avoidance of a beating. But placating one’s enemies is not a path to victory, only a path to delayed defeat. Pleading with your enemies to “make nice” only emboldens them to continue pilfering your inept defenses and complacent acceptance of peace under someone else’s terms. This is the policy of the United Nations. It is not the policy of Israel.
And until last week was not the policy of the Executive Branch of the United States government.
Israel does not seek the world’s favor. And since most of human history is comprised of various populations attempting to either enslave or exterminate the Jewish people, it is hard to blame them for striking their current course. Israel realizes that an enemy intent on their destruction, on ending their way of life, must be dealt with on a level wholly different than purse snatchers, bank thieves, and money launderers. They understand that the rules for dealing with criminals must be different from the rules dealing with terrorists. They understand that it is not crimes being committed by Hamas against Israel, but rather terrorism. When cultural extinction is the ultimate objective of your enemy, civility or adherence to basic investigative procedures are unaffordable luxuries whose pursuit only serves to expedite your enemy’s plans. The Israeli’s understand this. And they are wise to ignore the international community’s condemnation of their acts considering no nation has ever come to their aid over the last several millennia when their existence has been threatened. Israel’s first priority is ensuring the existence, the protection and assured future of its people. Whether the global community appreciates their methods for attaining that priority could not be of lesser value to them.
Not so with the newly elected president of the United States. Less than one week in office and President Obama enabled the terrorists to do catastrophic harm to not only the 46% of the American voting populace who did not cast their ballot for him, but as well to the 53% of Americans who elected him to office. America’s enemy is no different from that of Israel’s in its desire for our way of life to cease immediately and with the most severe and calamitous pain inflicted. The celebrations in the streets of the Middle East on September 11, 2001, the internet broadcasts of decapitated journalists, the ignored distinction between civilians and children from uniformed soldiers, are all testament to the brutality of our enemy; and to the chilling differences between our current enemy and the enemy as defined by the nations involved in WWII.
But America’s newly elected president, in the opening days of his administration, has chosen to adopt the European adherence to the Geneva Convention (written in 1948 when the Allied and Axis powers alike conceived of enemy combatants as uniformed soldiers fighting for recognized nations.) In one fell swoop, President Obama ordered the following:
- The closure of Guantanamo Bay prison
- The staying of all military commissions (with the implied intention to have these prisoners tried in civilian courts where intelligence sources and methods will be requested shared in open court by defense attorneys)
- Adherence to the Geneva Conventions’ definitions of “prisoner of war” for those the Bush Administration labeled enemy combatants
- Requiring of the CIA to conduct interrogations as per the Army Field Manual: no coercive techniques, no threats, no promises, no good cop-bad cop techniques
- Al Qaeda leaders to be protected from “outrages on personal dignity” and “humiliating and degrading treatment”
Let us be perfectly blunt: it was George W. Bush who put the world on notice after 9/11 that the US would treat terrorists and harbingers of terrorists alike, the result being not a single American killed on US soil by terrorism since. And it was Bill Clinton who decided not to take out Osama Bin Laden when he was quite literally in the crosshairs of a US predator drone. It was George W. Bush who toppled Saddam Hussein and enabled a democratically elected government the inalienable right to life and liberty less than three years into his presidency, while Bill Clinton spent all eight of his administration playing cat and mouse with Saddam while the Iraqi dictator pursued chemical, biological and nuclear technology. For all of George W. Bush’s shortcomings and just reasons for criticism, the US was a safer nation under his watch after eight years of Bill Clinton leading us to the horrible effects of 9/11 through the very same approach to national defense now being adopted by President Obama.
And the only plausible explanation for such misguided actions seems to be fear of our enemies-the idea that if we don’t give them a hard time upon capture, our courtesy will both encourage them to share critical intelligence with our law enforcement agencies and perhaps compel them to dissuade their terrorist friends from committing any more acts of violence against our citizens and interests across the world; that our once supportive friends in Europe will come to our defense in times of need having seen our compassion and respect for the personal dignity and civil rights of the killers who wish to take from us what our Founding Fathers called our inalienable right to life, liberty and a pursuit of happiness; that the likelihood of the Republican party conducting a witch-hunt in four years for Democratic lawbreakers will be diminished if our interrogations are “by the book,” in this case, the Army Field Manual. Over 2,700 Americans were murdered in under ninety minutes on September 11, 2001, in part, because the United States government of the 1990s was operating from a position of fear in its (mis)management of terrorist threats against us.
Israel knows this system of conciliatory gestures followed by terrorist responses all too well, i.e. land for peace initiatives. Perhaps President Obama is too young to remember the conciliatory gestures his American predecessors have offered only to be followed by reversals of promises. His own Secretary of State should be able to offer him some stories on North Korea alone, not to mention Iraq and Libya, with respect to US conciliation going unreturned and unappreciated when attempting to persuade nuclear nonproliferation. Europe has its own rich history of appeasement, so much so that if not for the intervention of the United States the official language of France may well have become German. President Obama should remind what appears to be his European constituents of that the next time he is speaking before thousands on the cobbled streets of another foreign city.
And he can start in Tel Aviv, and with a pledge of support for our Israeli friends.
Let us admit that when we gerrymander the globe, the law of unintended consequences will most assuredly play a role. Had the members of the UN Partition Plan in 1947 decided to create a Jewish state in the North Pole, or on a manmade island in the South Pacific, the Israeli conflict would indeed be different. An Israeli state stuck in the middle of the principle Arab region in the world was bound to create biblical unrest. But even separated geographically from the Gentile world, Israel would undoubtedly still suffer from international isolation and condemnation in defense of its right to self determination.
As the UN sits in what should be humiliating silence on Hamas, Hezbollah and Iran-supported acts of terrorism and professed support of genocide in their call for the destruction of the Jewish state, Israel continues its historic fight for life, liberty and the pursuit of suicide bomb-free commutes to and from work and school. To allow Israel to fail in its defense of its right to exist-for the international community to not throw its full support behind Israeli forces in Gaza-is to concede humanity’s right to self determination and accept the inevitable violence, inequity and brutishness of a Hobbesian world
And to offer Israel anything but our unequivocal support is for America to ignore the premise of its own founding at the free world’s peril.
President Obama rightly claims connection with Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. as the eventuality of Dr. King’s work. Dr. King correctly asserted that injustice anywhere is a threat to justice everywhere. While both black and white Americans should revere the life and work of Dr. King because of his strict adherence and belief in victory through nonviolence, Israel and the United States are each faced with a body of adversity that will not succumb to change through nonviolent means, will not be weakened by nonviolent acts of civil disobedience or passive Christian turn-the-other-cheek dogmatism. Our respective aggressors are too ideologically disparate from ourselves for King-like action, all too bent on our respective destruction as the only acceptable vestige of success respected or desired. And the criticism of both Israel’s self defense and of President Bush’s response to terrorism against our country by the usual suspects of the UN is perhaps a greater injustice than either the aggression by Hamas or Islamic fundamentalism. While our own detractors correctly assert that Israel is our only friend in the region, it is worth remembering that there is a reason they are our friend. Terrorist-led states (even if democratically elected) are an injustice threatening justice everywhere. And nations whose very existence is threatened have a like-minded right to defend themselves without the approval of the international community.
For the international community, particularly the United Nations, to continue to give terrorist groups a pass on the world stage while excoriating nations acting in defense of liberty is an act of injustice with widespread consequences across the planet. The message to all free peoples in the world delivered by the international body politic created in the wake of Hitler’s final solution is that justice is not delivered through war but through peace, that freedom is not a birthright but a social condition amendable to the whims of transient governments, and that the right to self determination is neither sovereign nor salient, but subject to popular vote. We cannot afford such a message to be allowed voice any longer. Israel is right to ignore the UN, and the United States and President Obama should be more concerned with protecting Americans than the Geneva Convention-afforded rights of terrorists.
. . .
The last half of the 20th century has seen the greatest expansion of wealth in human history, an explosion of technological advancement that propelled mankind into the stratosphere and beyond and beamed the breadth of the world into credit card-sized devices we carry in our pockets. We have more “stuff” than any generation has ever had before us, and owe more in debt for it than any other previous peacetime generation.
And we are afraid of losing it.
We are so afraid of losing our stuff-home, job, society’s impression of our standing in the community, etc-that we seem to have forgotten that there are in fact non-material things still worth fighting for, that there are indeed principles that require our committed efforts-if not our blood-for sustenance and mere survival. WWII did not rid the world of all that ails it, the Allied powers did not defeat all evil in their victory recorded on paper at Potsdam-endangered principles remained: freedom from tyranny, equality of races and religion, a peaceful nation’s right to self determination. And if the idea of America has come to mean anything, it is an unwavering defense of such principles in both foreign and domestic settings.
Mr. President: maintain the tools that have made the country you now preside over a safer place. Keep the world on notice that its support-both active and passive-of terrorism against the United States will be met with unimaginable force. Save your rhetoric about extending an open hand for the Republicans after you right the economy and bring successful conclusion to the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. Your clenched fist should remain in the face of those who wish us harm.
Anything less, Mr. President, is treasonous.
admin @ February 5, 2009
January 20, 2009: Americans Should Be Proud
Posted in: Government | Comments
[New York, January 20, 2009]
On this day, January 20, 2009, the United States of America has taken one giant step in the fulfillment of the principles of our Founding Fathers first declared to each other and to their world over two centuries ago, that they hold the following truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their creator with certain inalienable rights among which are life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness. A nation they knew to be unfinished at the drafting of the Constitution-understood to be unfinished both for the issues left unresolved at its founding, specifically slavery, and those issues that our Founders had not yet conceived but knew would challenge a nation of free citizens-was brought closer to completion this afternoon.
Our Founding Sons wishes to extend our most sincere and heartfelt congratulations to the 44th President of the United States, Barack Obama. While we have always been proud to call ourselves Americans, there are moments in our lives when the pride brims a little more than usual. And today we struggle to remember a time when we experienced greater pride at the American Experiment than in our witnessing of the first African American taking the Presidential oath of office a mere forty years since the death of Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., and in the capital city of a nation founded under the divisive yolk of slavery. Every patriotic American should be proud of what our nation accomplished at noon EST, January 20, 2009. Our short history of self-proclaimed global declaratives has yet another charge to record: Our Founders meant it when they affirmed in our sacred oath that all men are created equal. And the example first set forth by the father of our nation in his peaceful ceding of power to the next generation of Americans was once again honored on the West Front of the U.S. Capitol. We are a truly fortunate and blessed people to have God continue to shed his grace on thee.
Our country is larger than any government to serve in its hallowed chambers; the Office of the President is of greater import than any man or woman to serve the office-it is that belief that allows for a population divided in its support for political parties and candidates to come together on such days and share in the unifying pride of the quadrennial event of our peaceful transition of the executive seat of government. So while we did not support presidential candidate Barack Obama, nor are we advocates of what we believe to be explicitly socialist remedies for problems facing a free market national economy and way of life as envisioned by our Founders, we pledge our unyielding respect to the Office of President Barack Obama and our very lives in the defense of our system of government as bestowed upon us by our Founding Fathers. We urge our President to continue to honor our Founders’ legacy and preserve our union in the spirit in which it was conceived. Socialist principles applied to the fabric of our unfinished nation would be one giant step backward in an otherwise momentous and forward thinking national moment.
Congratulations, President Obama on your historic personal, professional and patriotic achievement. God bless you, and may God forever bless the United States of America.
…heaven knows we can use some divine intervention right now.
admin @ January 22, 2009
