33 Minutes

As I am sure you are aware if you have been listening to Limbaugh or any of your favorite conservative talk shows, yesterday President Obama made a decision which may well have compromised the security of our nation for the foreseeable future.

In one of the most stunning betrayals of modern diplomacy, Barack Obama announced yesterday that the United States is abandoning Poland and the Czech Republic. They are on their own against Russia.

And in what could not have been a coincidence, he did it on the 70th anniversary of the Russian invasion of Poland. An invasion that led to two generations of Polish slavery and the widespread slaughter of Polish citizens.

Ronald Reagan won the Cold War. Barack Obama lost it. The first bricks of the new Berlin Wall have been laid.

Here’s the background.

As the countries of central and eastern Europe emerged from a half-century’s domination by the Soviet Union, many of them sought to ally themselves with the United States. Why? Because they believed in freedom, because they believed that the United States stood for liberty.

And because centuries of history and culture have taught them that Russia is their enemy. In that part of the world, history has always been about one group conquering another group, and the aggressor has almost always been Russia. That giant nation has made a centuries-long habit of smashing smaller nations.

Like Poland and the Czech Republic. So we promised to protect them.

Specifically, we promised to give them the technology to defend themselves against the Russian nuclear missiles that even now are aimed at them. The purpose of the missile shield was to protect the Poles and the Czechs from Russian missiles.

Yesterday, the president and vice president said that the purpose of the missile shield was to protect those two nations from Iranian nukes. But Iran has never shown the slightest ill will toward either the Poles or the Czechs. Russia, on the other hand, has devastated them both more than once.

The George W. Bush commitment to put a missile shield over Poland and the Czech Republic was a warning to Russia that it should stay on its side of the fence. By taking away the threat of Russian nuclear missiles, the shield bought some breathing room for the Poles and Czechs.

And why would we want to do that? Because of freedom.

In 1968, something called the Prague Spring took place, when Czechoslovakia – a Soviet subordinate since the end of World War 2 – tried to give its citizens some measure of freedom. Some bans on the free press were eased, some rights to personal free speech were granted, some ability to travel to different parts of the country to visit relatives was allowed.

The Russians sent in tanks and the tiny country was crushed.

Poland was the champion of liberty and took the steps that began the toppling of the dominoes of Russian domination of Eastern Europe. It was Poland which allowed the formation of the first non-communist group in the Soviet bloc – the Solidarity trade union. It was Poland that allowed people to, quietly and on the sly, attend church.

When Russia threatened the Poles and demanded they crack down, the Poles refused. There was a dangerous, frightening standoff, but in the end, it was courageous Polish love of freedom that allowed that nation to shake off Russian domination.

Shortly thereafter, the rest of Russia’s empire withered, and places like Latvia, Lithuania, Estonia, Georgia and Ukraine were free. Tens of millions of people were liberated from Russia’s almost-genocidal oppression.

It was one of the greatest events of the second half of the 20th Century. And it was cheered by the American people. The Cold War, with its face-to-face stare-down between communism and capitalism was over, and the freedom of capitalism had won.

Maybe that’s what ticked off Obama because now he has distanced the United States from Poland, and capitulated to Russian demands that Poland and the Czech Republic be left unprotected from its missiles.

Tens of millions of people became less secure yesterday, and the cause of freedom in central and eastern Europe was weakened. The only winner was Russia and its dreams of empire.

In the face of an angry and belligerent Vladimir Putin, Barack Obama blinked. Ronald Reagan demanded, “Tear down the wall!” Barack Obama whimpered, “Don’t let me get in your way.” We once directly challenged Russian dreams of domination, now we have – more than anything since the partition after World War 2 – facilitated that domination.

We asked the Czechs and the Poles to be our friends, and pledged our support to them, and then we reneged and threw them under the bus.

They have followed us to our wars in Iraq and Afghanistan – Poland fields the second-largest number of troops fighting the war on terror – and they have fought and bled by our side.

And yesterday Barack Obama told them to screw off.

The Heritage Foundation has produced a film titled "33 Minutes" which clearly lays out the facts about national defense which we now can no longer ignore, and which the current administration has compromised.

Please take a look at this trailer and consider where we are now and where this administration is taking us.

A Nation of Pansies

I have a few words to say about this insidious attitude which seems to be turning this country into a nation of pansies.

Stop whining, stop licking your wounds, stop feeling sorry for yourself.

Don’t be a pansy.

Toughen up. Don’t be a cry baby, don’t play the victim, don’t expect people to feel sorry for you.

We’ve had too much Oprah, too many grief counselors, too much talking about our “pain.” We’ve turned into sniveling narcissists engaged in one giant, nationwide pity party.

How embarrassing.

What makes me think of it is the report that the Army has started a service wide training program on mental-health awareness. Now, I’m all for mental health. I’m all for being understanding and for getting help when you need it. But I notice that mental illness is catching. The more you talk about it, the more people get it.

It’s like one giant placebo effect, a power-of-suggestion phenomenon of self-fulfilling prophecy. If I give a class on the signs of mental stress, people who thought they were perfectly fine suddenly start showing symptoms of mental stress. After a while, you’re going to have a pack of touchy-feely pansies intent on having the world kiss their boo-boo and feel sorry for them. That’s the last thing that the Army needs.

I’m not sure when it started, but in recent years, American society has been emotionally castrated. We’ve become so comfortable with being “in touch with our feminine side” that we act as if it’s the only side. The traditional male approach to emotional stress – to be tough and shake it off – is ridiculed and rejected. Few things seem more personal than our emotions and how we handle them, yet there is widespread intolerance for how many people do that.

We have chosen an affected emotionality that induces and rewards weakness and breakdown. Like a child whose mother comes running when it falls down and skins its knee, contemporary Americans unconsciously see sorrow and emotional upset as ways to become the center of attention and earn sympathy and even celebrity.

In short, you’re nobody until you cry.

Our culture once admired and rewarded toughness. Americans were strong and stoic. They crossed plains and climbed mountains and fought Indians. They won the wars, endured the depressions, survived the diseases. Now they just cry.

The media feeds into it. If there is a storm or a fire or an earthquake, the camera gets stuck in the face of whoever blubbers the loudest. The steady folks who simply set about picking up and going forward don’t make the evening news.

If there is a bad wreck or a fatal fire or some terrible murder, they put the cops and firefighters on TV talking about how emotionally hard it was for them. Which is confusing, because I thought the dead people were the victims.

With the economic downturn, the nightly news is a never-ending parade of whiners and crybabies, each trying to outdo the other in describing how devastated they are by the downturn. We have become so fond of weakness and victimhood that we embrace it and crave it.

“How do you feel?” has become our national obsession.

And now every soldier in Basic Training is going to get schooled on his feelings. I wonder which real soldier skill they would have taught in the time that is now being devoted to group-therapy claptrap. Instead of equipping soldiers better for the rigors of their duty, it weakens them and opens them to difficulties they likely wouldn’t otherwise have had. So-called “experts” should be honest enough to recognize that their prevention of mental stress actually plants the seeds of mental stress.

Humans are creatures who learn. We are pretty much monkey see, monkey do. And when you tell people that they are apt to have emotional pain and disability, they unconsciously rise to the expectation. Having been taught that emotional disability is an expected result of military stress, they respond to military stress with emotional disability.

If on the other hand, a culture or a class teaches people that they are tough, that they can endure difficulty and stress, surprisingly, they are tough and they endure difficulty and stress.

It is vogue today to mock the old ethic of “suck it up and march on.” It is ridiculed as some sort of unevolved, Neanderthal attitude. It actually was a very useful and very kind ethic. It strengthened people for the challenges of their duty.

Why do you suppose our Army has record-high suicide rates today?

It can’t be because of the stress of their duty. While hugely difficult, it is not unusually so. Compared with the warriors of Vietnam, Korea and the Second World War, even multiply deployed soldiers today are not facing anything their predecessors didn’t face. In some ways, the duty of today is less rigorous than that of earlier generations.

Yet those generations had far-lower suicide rates? Why is that? What has changed? Have the soldiers changed? Are they genetically different? Is there some difference in the chemical make up of their brains?

No. Soldiers are soldiers. They haven’t changed. But their culture has. Whereas their fathers and grandfathers went into the service having been raised in a culture that encouraged and admired toughness, the soldiers of today grew up in a world “in touch with its feelings.” It is not the absence of emotional awareness that contributes to these suicides, it is the abundance of it.

When you raise people in a bath of crying Oprah guests and weeping faces on the evening news, when you warn them that they are going to be emotionally brittle, you cannot be surprised if, in fact, they turn out emotionally brittle.

The touchy-feely psychobabble attitude is not the cure, it is the cause. It’s too bad the Army doesn’t realize that, because it is going to do more harm than good.

Society should realize that. Parents should realize that. We are mollycoddling ourselves and turning into a nation of pansies.

Were You Asking Me a Question, Mr. President?

The answer is NO!

We don't want you to save us, we don't believe in your plan, we don't trust you to do it for us.

We'd rather be free.

That's what they don't discuss on the evening news. Amidst all the sob stories about expensive pills and death panels, completely overlooked is the principle involved -- and that is that government should not compete with or replace private enterprise. Nowhere in the Constitution or in our history is the federal government authorized to take over or run health care. It is not an enumerated power and it is not an inferred power, it is an assumed power.

And we all know what happens when we assume. (TJ - that's ASS U ME).

The problem with a runaway federal government -- the sort of government we've known over recent years and months -- is that it violates the principles upon which our Republic was founded. It's funny, but the most complex problems are often solved by the application of the simplest of principles. When you get the basics right, everything else takes care of itself. If you untangle and encourage the appropriate function of government and society -- if you turn loose individual liberty and the free market -- problems fix themselves and success comes to both individuals and society.

But that's not how things work today, and that's not what the president is thinking.

Instead of limited government and maximized liberty, what the president suggested last night was empowered government and diminished liberty. And it doesn't really matter how many stories he tells to make us feel sympathetic, or how much money he offers us, or how many songs he sings about justice and equality and compassion, the fact is that the government is not an insurance company and it is not a hospital, and it shouldn't pretend it is. To the extent that it does, it will fail and it will take us down with it.

What the president and many in his party fail to realize is that the purpose of the American government is to safeguard freedom. Our Republic is formed around the premise that liberty is our first priority. It is not meant to protect us from every ill, or take away the possibility of failure, or insulate us from our misfortunes and poor choices. It is meant to protect our liberties. Anything that takes away our liberties must not be embrased even if it is done in the name of "compassion" or "justice."

You can't do the right thing the wrong way. You do not liberate one man by enslaving another. To feed one citizen another citizen's bread, you must first steal it from that citizen. Crime in the name of compassion is still crime.

Each enterprise the federal government puts its hands on turns bitter and failed. Bureaucracy, political correctness and ineptitude breed inefficiency and waste. But the greatest waste is freedom -- the freedom to live the way we choose and do our business the way we choose. Health care is fundamentally a private concern. It is not a right, no more than a haircut is a right. Yes, private charity may provide health care -- as it has from the beginning of our nation -- but public compulsion sacrifices a right for a want and must never be tolerated.

The president thought his TelePrompt-tured eloquence could sway the public, that his magic words would sweep away the will of thousands shouted at town-hall meetings. He thought that his glorified touch would make everything right. But he was wrong.

You can't pick up a turd by the clean end, and you can't do nanny government the right way. He is grabbing power for himself and invoking servitude for us.

Government is not to compete with or replace private enterprise -- that includes insurance companies and hospitals.

It is a first principle of our Republic, explained and exemplified by the Founding Fathers and followed by wise leaders since.

It's not about sob stories, it's about freedom. And, simply put, Mr. President, we don't want what you're selling.

Stay the Hell Away from our Kids

I, for one, am pulling my kids out today during the school's mandatory Obama brainwashing of America's kids. Like so many others, we don't want Obama talking to our kids.

Why don't we want him talking to our kids? I mean, Reagan did it in 1988. He addressed Junior High School students and they got to ask the President of the United States questions that ranged from what are the so-called "Reaganomics" to how did he feel about gun bans.

So what's the big deal? Why are things so different now?

It’s fairly simple, really.

Tens of millions of American parents don’t trust the president. The upset over this morning’s presidential address to schoolchildren isn’t about the partisan divide, it’s about the president’s arrogance.

After seven months of crammed-down-your-throat Obama agenda, half the country has had a bellyful. After seven months of being told that they don’t matter, half the country is returning the sentiment.

They don’t trust him with their children not because they’re paranoid, but because he’s not trustworthy. He has shown himself to be an enemy to their values and beliefs – to be hostile to their families and their country – and they are merely saying, “Stay the hell away from our kids.”

This isn’t about Republicans, this is about Barack Obama. Specifically, it is about a president who steamrolled and marginalized those who didn’t vote for him and who now is astounded that they won’t kiss his royal backside. He wants to be a rock star but nobody’s buying tickets.

Here’s the background.

The Department of Education sent out talking points for teachers, outlines of lesson plans intended to precede and follow a then-unannounced speech by the president to elementary school students. Troublesome in the wording was a suggested assignment that pupils be asked to write down a plan for how they could help President Obama.

That ticked people off, but that was only part of it. Not only didn’t parents want their kids being drafted into the Obama army, they didn’t want this particular socialist politicizing the classroom.

When you’ve got a classroom being run by an NEA member and you’re piping in Barack Hussein Orwell, all of a sudden the home-school people don’t seem so kooky. All of a sudden it seems like an unnecessary lecture intended primarily to indoctrinate the impressionable into the cult of Big Brother.

Parents don’t so much mind the president talking to their children, but seven months have taught the country to expect propaganda, not talk.

Further, about half the country simply doesn’t trust his basic philosophy. Like the notion that America’s children need a lecture on doing their homework from the head of the federal government. See, the federal government isn’t in charge of my children’s education – I am. And American children don’t need the president to tell them that education is important – that’s what parents are for.

Every child in every classroom has a parent or guardian who can talk to them about doing their homework and paying attention in school. Every student in every classroom has a teacher or two who can talk to them about working hard and setting goals.

For crying out loud, even Bill Cosby is telling children about the importance of education.

We don’t need the Marxist-in-Chief to think that the nanny government has to get in the act. And, no offense intended, but there are a bunch of us who think that “community organizer” is not exactly the role model we want our children following. For a certain portion of America, squealing for a bigger cut of other people’s tax money isn’t particularly noble and it’s not what we want our kids to grow up to do.

Further, we prefer that people who used illegal drugs not hold themselves out as teachers of the young. We are not impressed by the irony that the guy in charge of the military would be barred – by virtue of his teen-aged drug use – from enlisting in the military.

But the bottom line isn’t politics or philosophy – it’s the way he’s treated us. He has treated half the electorate like dirt and has done nothing, through the first eighth of his term, to make friends or earn himself the benefit of the doubt.

Typically, when someone wins an election, he sets out to reassure and woo the folks who didn’t vote for him. Typically, basic decency makes a politician want to show he’s serving all the people.

The Obama Administration and the Democrats who control Congress have had no such disposition. It has been an arrogance unmatched for decades as divergent views have been dismissed and mocked. Half the country feels that the president and the Congress are condescendingly dismissive of them.

He has had seven months to extend an olive branch. He has chosen not to. He has chosen instead to attack people and philosophies different from his. He has chosen to play fast and loose with American tradition and principle. He has practiced scorched-earth politics against the people whose taxes support his grand dreams. He has dismissed anyone who doesn’t agree with him.

And tens of millions of Americans don’t want a person like that talking to their children.

And I’m one of them.