The Real Cause of the Arizona Killings

Originally featured on American Thinker.com

One or two commentators got it right, characterizing the shootings in Arizona of a congresswoman, judge, and four other bystanders —  including a 79-year-old woman and a nine-year-old girl, who attended the fateful event due to her interest in government and politics — as an act committed by a deranged gunman.  But the spin is on by the usual MSM suspects that the shootings were due to “hostility” and “polarization” caused by (guess who?) right-wingers who have ratcheted up the rhetoric about health care and immigration.  Even the sheriff on the scene went to great lengths to politicize the tragedy, stating that the killer was a product of the vitriol emanating from talk radio hosts, Sarah Palin, and conservatives opposed to Obama and the Democrats.

But I knew immediately what was going on.  Once again, a mass killing has sickened the nation, a killing perpetrated by a mentally ill trigger-man.  And once again, the nation will carry on without examining what really happened, satisfied with political propaganda over the reality that mass killers are almost always schizophrenics who should be institutionalized to protect them — and us — from random and murderous violence.

Nothing is created out of whole cloth in the affairs of mankind, and mentally ill killers don’t simply pop up and take down their victims randomly.  And as always, public officials and the media ignore the specific facts and precedents that have caused this preposterous and appalling set of circumstances to continue.

Serving as chairman of a downtown advancement committee in the early and  mid-’80s, I assigned a subcommittee to make an inventory of the homeless population that was thwarting our effort to lure people back to the city core after 25 years of white flight and a negative image that seemed permanent.  The homeless were assaulting passersby and congregating wherever they chose — and the police would not act.

The report was startling: Of the 85 homeless in the downtown area, 80 were mental patients.  And the reason the police could not act to control their behavior with arrests was also shocking.  Concomitant with new rules passed in 1978 that released the mentally ill into the streets across America, a nationally linked cadre of activist law professors managed to have vagrancy and loitering laws expunged.

I approached various city and county agencies to ask what they could do to return the streets to taxpaying citizens.  I was offered that look so common amongst the care-taking community,  communicating the attitude that I was being mean-spirited to question the “rights” of the homeless and abusive to take action to curtail their behavior.  And furthermore, the homeless were “fine” as long as they took their medications.

They obviously didn’t take their meds, and we had a problem, as did cities everywhere.  I decided to investigate how this ludicrous state of affairs could have happened, and I ran into nothing less than a conspiracy by the activist community to impose the homeless on America and identify the problem as the failure of the American free-market system.  And they succeeded.  Every day for ten years, the homeless were in the news, associated with the accusation the phenomenon itself of homelessness was caused by the unfeeling crassness of a capitalist society that throws the less fortunate on the street.

But the homeless, for the most part, were not rejects from a cruel capitalist system.  They were mentally ill, creating the irony that the care-giving left conspired to mistreat these unfortunate patients and toss them out of institutions and into the street as sacrificial lambs, as a contorted vanguard elite to undermine American values.  The left-wing lawyers did their bit to protect them, and Americans were made to look cruel and unfeeling in the eyes of the world.

The plot begins with British psychiatrist R.D. Laing, who theorized  that schizophrenics were actually more in touch with the correct view of life than so-called “straight” people.  Laing, a sort of Timothy Leary of psychiatry, experimented with patients acting as doctors, and doctors as patients, to make his point that we “squares” were out of touch, while his patients were at one with nature and  inner spirituality.

It was absurd ’60s pop theory, but it appealed to a Stanford graduate student named Ken Kesey, who wrote a play applying Laing’s theories.  The film made from One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest turned into a huge hit and helped pave the way for major changes in the care of the mentally ill, which resulted in new laws in 1978 that forced institutions to release patients who could theoretically function in society — most notably schizophrenics, since they are known to be smarter than the average bear.  The point was that the mentally ill have “rights” too — the clarion call of the era.

The homeless problem  has receded, even in bad economic times, because it was actually not caused by economic cruelty.  Those who still roam the streets are usually gathered up at day’s end and shipped to overnight quarters — and then transported back into the city to panhandle during the day.  Like most fake social movements, advocates don’t want to give up feeling good about themselves by helping out the unfortunate.

But numbers of schizophrenics are still out and among us due to the deinstitutionalization of the late 1970s.  And ever since, we have experienced sudden and deadly rampages and attribute the cause to the issue du jour — this time to vitriolic politics.  The Arizona killer will claim to be insane and maintain that “voices” told him to act, as is usually the case.

But only a few will dare state the truth: these people need to be institutionalized.

Bernie Reeves is editor and publisher of Raleigh Metro Magazine.

Lucifer Is Loose In The Land

As seen on American Thinker.com:

 

It was the devil himself who said that the “future is not what it used to be.” Lucifer, played by Robert DeNiro, was disguised as Louis Cyphre (get it?) in the edgy and disturbing film Angel Heart, starring Mickey Rourke before he lost his looks. This was 1987, before the election of Barack Obama and the beginning of the end of America as we knew it. Today, the future isn’t just what it used to be; it’s now a menacing and gloomy reality that a new Congress may not be able to alter.

 

CLICK HERE TO READ THE ENTIRE ARTICLE

 

posted by Bernie Reeves, editor and publisher, Raleigh Metro Magazine

We Need Tom Lehrer For Honest Mosque Discussion

Originally published on American Thinker.com

 

National Brotherhood Week was one of those touchy-feely ideas from the 1960s satirized brilliantly by comedian songster Tom Lehrer. And, like almost all of the Ivy League math professor’s oeuvre, the song remains relevant today as the ruling elite avoids the truth about Islam in the Western world. I can still belt out a half-dozen Lehrer ditties, including “Vatican Rag” — commemorating Vatican 2, when the  Roman Catholic Church allowed the vernacular to replace Latin in services; “Who’s Next,” about the proliferation of nuclear weapons; “Werner von Braun,” reminding us that in the rocket programs of the era, “one of the fingers on the button will be German”; “So Long Mom I’m Off To Drop The Bomb”; and “New Math,” perhaps Lehrer’s best known work.

Lehrer preceded Monty Python by a few years, and both never shirked from irreverent confrontations with the absurd, maudlin veneer of political correctness that has now become institutionalized in the West, smothering free expression with laws and regulations and censure. Honesty is now taboo, enforced in the 21^st century with a new and far more menacing dimension: fear of retribution by Islamic mullahs and splinter terrorist groups.

The grand Pooh-Bah of contemporary failure to state the issues clearly is Barack Obama. And the most pressing one he refuses to confront honestly is the plan to build a thirteen-story Islamic center and mosque within shrapnel distance from the hole in the ground that contained the twin towers of the World Trade Center. The attacks on 9-11-2001 by Muslim jihadists represent the most devastating assault on American soil since the Japanese sneak attack on the Pearl Harbor Navy Yard on December 7, 1941. Yet Obama and a chorus of PC equivocators support the establishment of a building by our enemies that humiliates Americans and defiles the memory of the victims of the monstrous events of that fateful day.

If the PC shoe were on the other foot in this debate, with the PC against the mosque, they would trot out the term “inappropriate,” the codeword they wield to vilify behavior that engenders their disapproval. But no one has stated that building the mosque is simply that. Nor has the mainstream media. Only a few in public office have, the rest keeping silent for fear of retaliation by jihadists. In Europe, as we learned, daring to speak against Islam is dangerous, as exemplified by the cartoon riots and the assassination of politician Theo van Gogh in Amsterdam.

Media and politicians are hiding behind the skirts of the kinder, gentler mode of doublespeak so common today, when actually they have been blackmailed by fear of reprisal for speaking out against the mosque. The same goes for every confrontation with Islam: everyone runs for cover rather than face honestly what has become one of the the most serious social conflicts in living memory amongst the peoples of the world. Add in the low self-esteem of Americans (and Europeans) after forty years of multicultural outrage from radical scholars against our own culture for being racist, chauvinist, homophobic, and imperialistic, and it is clear that the ruling elite will not stand up and fight.

One brave citizen is expressing the true feelings of most Americans: Renee Elmers, 2^nd District candidate for Congress in North Carolina. Her campaign ad against the New York City mosque lays it out with no equivocation, which captured the attention of CNN’s Anderson Cooper, the poster boy for elitist opinion. Cooper and Elmers mixed it up on air, producing an odd mixture of left-wing selective history from Cooper and Catholic Christian certitudes from the candidate.

But in this isolated slice of political confrontation, the vastness of the chasm between the government/media/university view of the mosque and the true feelings of American citizens was dramatized clearly.

This gap grows wider as the ephemeral fear of violating sensitivities rules the political and cultural debate — and the real fear of violent retribution actually facilitates the inroads of Islam into Western culture. A change in Congress and state legislatures in November should be a step in the right direction and send some of the Islamic appeasers and politically correct charlatans home. But we really need a new Tom Lehrer to remind us that we are even bigger fools now than we were in his day.

Bernie Reeves is editor and publisher of Raleigh Metro Magazine.

Tea and Arsenic

I lost a run-off for the Republican nomination for Congress to a Tea Party candidate who held two press conferences in three days during the last week of the election claiming the Gulf oil spill was a conspiracy between Obama officials and BP executives.

My first look at a room full of 200 far right zealots gathered in one room brought to mind my mother’s comment in the late 70s when asked if she knew Jimmy Carter: “They are people we wouldn’t know,” she replied.  I realized what she was talking about as I surveyed the motley mob lying in wait to jeer me in my debate with their chosen candidate for the Republican nomination for Congress in the 13^th District of North Carolina.

I’ve lived in Raleigh my entire life,  the centerpiece city of the Research Triangle region –rated as one of the top five tech, bio-tech and medical research enclaves in the world, and a regular winner of every best place to live, work and play list in the US. I am close to the conservative revolution led by Raleigh’s Tom Ellis, the kingmaker behind Jesse Helms and the man responsible for salvaging the presidential run by Ronald Reagan in 1976.

Reagan lost to Ford in the end, but Ellis engineered a win in the North Carolina primary after Reagan’s advisors decamped, billowing wind in Reagan’s sails for 1980. The rest is, well, history. I knew Helms, know Ellis well, and hired his former right hand man Carter Wrenn to run my campaign. Add in 30 years of newspaper and magazine publishing in the region, and my role as the author of a regular conservative column, a rational Republican voter would say I’m their guy. But I wasn’t.

Who They?

I sensed a problem when these fellow citizens I encountered in that crowded room did not register   even compositely. They weren’t faces from towns around the state I am used to seeing. They weren’t just “Yankees” either. Who in the hell are these people, I pondered?

The object of their adoration was a black far-right conservative who moved to town 18 months ago. To label him an opportunist is an understatement: just off the boat, so to speak, and before announcing for Congress, he ran for chairman of the statewide GOP and lost. He is a retired Navy chief petty officer no one knew, except for the dozens of Tea Party devotees he visited personally for over a year, singing from their hymn book and delivering sermons peppered with  one-line sound bites that mimed the tea bag line. Are you kidding me, I asked myself? They can’t be taking this guy seriously. He has no knowledge of the community’s history, culture, commerce or politics.

And who are these Tea Party people anyway? The phenomenon is too broad and disorganized to supply executives, operatives and vetting for candidates. So who runs it is revealing: While the true Tea Party movement is an authentic  grass roots reaction to run-away sending by the  Obama White House  and the Democrat-dominated Congress, the movement is  controlled by far-right anti-abortion religious activists  dedicated to anarchy.

Disguised as normal people you see on TV attending Tea Party rallies, their goal ironically apes the 60s and 70s student agitators occupying the Dean’s office and blowing up the chemistry lab to get attention. They would rather toss Molotov cocktails for the thrill of the conflagration than implement sane policy – or nominate a candidate who could actually win an election against Democrats.

Consequently, religion was inserted in the movement, with abortion leading the way – a dimension never observed in big tent Tea Party rallies. Lurking in the engine room, Libertarians saw their opportunity, too. On the surface, this did not appear toxic, but Libertarians have changed over the years into uber-dogmatic gauleiters who brook no dissension in the ranks – a bizarre twinning with the anti-abortion cadre who likewise approach their beliefs dogmatically. To these two types of ideologues, it’s their way or the highway.

Quo Vadis

Irony evades the anti-abortion zealots. They insist that a personal and moral dilemma should be argued politically, naively thinking their extreme views are rational.  But after inserting the issue into politics, they offer only a religious argument. To them, God created the fetus, so there is no circumstance that allows termination – even if the life of the mother is in danger. Never mind the argument that the life of a full grown female human being has rights, too.

I went so far as to call for the repeal of Wade v. Roe to send the issue back to the states where it belongs – and where it resided before the court decision – for the simple and consistent reason that local standards should decide. (The great debate over pornography in the late 70s was settled by the US Supreme Court without a fuss by adjudicating that “local standards” apply). But my concession to the issue generated derision.

Another religious angle reared its head in my campaign. The large contingent of Catholics moving to our area over the past 30 years was unhappy that I criticized in my magazine column the Church and the Pope for failing to act – or even make a public comment – when the pederasty scandal started to unfold in 2003. I predicted that ignoring it then would only make things worse later. I also wrote that far-right Christian cults (the Branch Davidians and Jim Jones come to mind) and Muslim extremism shared common traits. Catholics and fundamentalist Christians were not amused.

For Libertarians, who used to exude a low-key rationality, all US troops abroad must be recalled; the IRS abolished and the Fair Tax implemented (naively not realizing this bad idea will require another tax collection agency); and repeal of the Patriot Act. You heard me right. National Security is worth sacrificing for the potential that someone’s individual right of privacy may be compromised. I held firm for the Patriot Act to my peril.

Indeed we do have a three-ring circus: The Big Top Tea Party; the religious/abortion passion play; and the Libertarian mise en scene. Together it is the “greatest show on earth” in American politics today. But it will end in tears when Democrats – with polls showing they are tied to the stake and ready for the boiling pot – wiggle free and annihilate Tea Party nominees in November. Ordinary citizens who rightfully hit the streets behind the Tea Party banner will realize they were had by the old hands that stole their movement and made it theirs.

By forcing the nomination of candidates who will lose, Tea Party handlers have assured two more years of a compliant Congress under Obama that will irreparably harm America. The process will transform the land of the free into a European-styled socialist state in which government, previously accountable to the people, will force citizens to be accountable to the state.

Race And Conspiracy Theory

The high-jacking of the Tea Party involves subtler shifts worth noting. I was defeated by a black candidate to the right of Jesse Helms. But so was Strom Thurmond, Jr, in South Carolina, as was another Republican in Mississippi seeking nomination to Congress. What gives here?

From what I glean inside the carnage of my own race, the Tea Party gurus sold conservative Republicans the bogus concept that a black candidate will steal black votes from the Democrat candidate in the general election. My opponent insinuated this and the Tea Baggers lapped it up. This false premise will not work. Blacks in the Democratic Party in the South do not and will not vote for Oreos. But this kind of warped logic permeates the Tea Party on the operational level where the activists call the shots after the true believers go home after a rally.

But my opponent appeared to obviate this advantage by plagiarizing his campaign issues from Scott Brown, who won Teddy Kennedy’s seat in Massachusetts, and his so-called Charter of Principles word for word from the Sharon Statement – written in 1960 by conservative journalist Stanton Evans at the home of William F. Buckley in Sharon, CT. My guy also exaggerated and misrepresented his background, claiming achievements even a mediocre human resources hack would see through. He was handing us the election – or so it seemed.

My adversary called a press conference the week before the run-off election to answer the already proven charges of plagiarism. In a scene suited for the principal’s office, he weaved and bobbed and inserted more layers of mendacity. The press attending stood there stupefied and tried to ask questions until one reporter, giving up on trying to untangle his defense of plagiarism, asked if he stood by his remark in a debate with me that offshore drilling should commence off the North Carolina coast before questions were resolved about the Gulf oil spill.

The candidate said certainly, since in his opinion the spill was a conspiracy between Obama officials and BP executives who caused the “leak” to halt fossil fuel production in order to usher in “green” energy policies. When prodded, he insisted that anyone can see the spill was a plot. The news report went viral, from the Huffington Post to the Washington Post, from Yahoo News to MSNBC and CNN.

I’m thinking he really is unbalanced and we will certainly win the run-off. Then two days later, he called another press conference – but not to back down. He rambled on again about the conspiracy, ensuring that voters would realize this guy is way out there. A major newspaper in the District said he was unfit to hold office. My victory, it seemed, was in the bag, especially after he maintained the morning of the election on a radio program that he had proof that BP executives engaged in insider trading to sell their stock before the accident. I was working on my acceptance speech.

But instead I was trounced. Low turn-out hurt my campaign (only 10% of the voters from all parties showed up for the primary May 4 – and only 4% for the run-off June 22. Low turn-out allows minority zealots to carry elections, but the question begs: If so many people are mad, how come they didn’t turn out to vote?

But there was something else going on at the ballot box. I was hit by the startling realization that my opponent’s rant about the oil conspiracy actually galvanized his base that had grown listless when we uncovered he plagiarized and misrepresented his background during the campaign. I have my faults, but the reality I could not defeat an opponent who relied on a massive conspiracy theory to get out his supporters says more about who we are as a nation than my political demise.

The End Is Near

It’s fair to say we have reached the end of rational political dialogue. Liberals are crazed with the concept of socialism as the answer for the future. And conservatives, as embodied by the Tea Party activists, are angry and willing to self-immolate to change conditions.  In both camps, extremism rules, with each side screaming across a chasm of hate. My experience validates the reality that 40 years of attacks on our heritage by radical scholars have knocked out the foundations of knowledge and rational discourse. In the void, theoretical manifestos on one side and superstition and conspiracy theory on the other rule the political dialogue.

It’s easy to rake back over the debris of an election and note that little things made a difference. But in truth it was one big thing that ensured my defeat. By representing traditional conservative values and beliefs, I was doomed from the beginning. With far-left Democrats holding on in November due to the destructive antics of Tea Party zealots, America is too.

The Gospel Truth and Tea Party Politics

It was a response from a listener to NPR I happened to catch that said a mouthful in attempting to understand just what the Tea Party is all about – even though I thought I had it figured out after losing a run-off for Congress to a tea-bagger who claimed the Gulf oil spill was a conspiracy.

The NPR caller observed that the Christian far-right, most of whom believe in the inerrancy of scripture, are applying the same method to the Constitution. And from my experience I can testify they are. In debates during my campaign, my opponents in the primary – and my one adversary in the run-off – replied to current political questions with one-dimensional sermons just as a fundamentalist responds to issues of religion. The Constitution says so, or the Bible says so, and no further argument is tolerated.

My take is that the big tent Tea Party has been high-jacked by old-line religious right-wingers who pull the political levers after ordinary tea-baggers return home after rallying for economic sanity. You never hear abortion mentioned at a Tea Party rally, but in the end that is the issue deciding who is the Republican nominee. Sure, the newly aggressive Libertarians are part of the mix – with their “our way or the highway” certitudes – but in the end it’s all about abortion at the ballot box.

This inerrancy tactic obviates subtlety and reality and spills over to purely political issues, which are presented in black and white and delivered in simple sound bites the faithful prefer. If my opponent was asked how to cut federal spending, the answer was swift and simple: abolish the departments of government. On the matter of taxation: get rid of the IRS and implement the Fair Tax. On immigration: round up illegals and ship them out.

Abolishing the federal government, to the tea baggers, centers around enforcing the 10th Amendment guaranteeing state sovereignty. But this narrow-minded interpretation (like picking out a verse of scripture that cannot be challenged) does not take into account the 13th through 15th amendments that establish federal suzerainty over the states.  As in the Bible, some explanations are contradicted by others, but to the true believer it’s the verse he picks that represents the Gospel truth. It is with this righteousness the tea baggers plan to implement the Fair Tax, thinking the IRS would be dismantled, but they fail to take into account that another, similar taxing agency would be required to collect revenues. Removing illegal immigrants in sealed trains and convoys of covered trucks is not the sort of action Americans would accept. But it makes no difference to the tea-baggers, who believe there is no compromise to forced removal.

The religious dimension in tea bag strategy is purposefully not made public, but it drives their vote. My opponent and I were asked in a debate what process we would apply to important votes in Congress. I stuck to my traditional conservative values in my answer, but the tea bag guy simply said he would ask God. The audience erupted in applause. On abortion I declared against public funding and for parental consent. My opponent said under no circumstances is abortion acceptable, including cases of incest, rape or the life of the mother. More loud applause ensued.

The critical goal to nominate a candidate that could win in November was obviously not an issue to the tea-baggers. My opponent, who moved to our district 18 months before the run-off vote, blatantly plagiarized his campaign issues and “charter of principles,” tried to cover it up and continued to lie about it to the end; exaggerated his biography to the extent even a mediocre human resources manager would demand clarification; and announced he was sure the Gulf oil spill was a conspiracy between BP executives and Obama officials. We figured he had handed us the win, only to discover his theory galvanized his base support.

There is one more angle. My opponent is black in a Party with only a handful of African-Americans. He convinced the tea-baggers he could draw black votes away from the Democratic nominee because of the color of his skin. True Southerners know this is a preposterous argument. Blacks vote Democratic and they don’t like “Oreos” – black on the outside but white on the inside. Southern tea bagger operatives appear to be newcomers who detest the traditions of their newly found homes. And they certainly don’t understand race relations. But hey, if a black Republican says he can get black votes in the general election, why not believe him?  If we believe in the Gulf oil spill conspiracy, then why not believe that too?

As Aunt Agatha said of her empty-headed nephew Bertie Wooster in the classic Jeeves and Wooster stories by PG Wodehouse: “We who care for the future of the nation despair.” With Obama looking more and more like Lenin, and the Republicans acting like the followers of a loony religious cult, despair is not strong enough. Try fear.

Hell In The Pacific

The following first appeared on American Thinker.com, May 15, 2010

The war in Europe was an unpleasant sideshow to most Americans until Japan launched a sneak attack on the U.S. Pacific fleet harbored at Pearl Harbor on December 7, 1941. The U.S. declared war on Japan — and Hitler, responding to treaty obligations with Japan, declared war on the U.S.

America was suddenly engaged in a global conflict against two fascist empires bent on world domination. President Franklin Roosevelt agreed to rank the war in Europe above retaliation against the Japanese under intense pressure from U.K. Prime Minister Winston Churchill. As England stood alone after Hitler’s conquest of Europe, the situation on the ground and in the skies was grim as London and other British cities were bombarded by the German Luftwaffe in advance of a planned invasion.

The war in Europe may have taken priority in theatre strategy, but the conflict in the Pacific was pursued with vigor against complex obstacles. The Japanese war plan involved the capture of dozens of Pacific islands, requiring complicated U.S. operations and command structures among the Army, Navy, and Marine Corps.

Today in America, the conflict in Europe takes precedent in the public mind for several reasons. There is an organized and effective lobby to remind the world of the Nazi death camps. And veterans and citizens often visit Europe on holiday, where they can take in the grand cemeteries at Normandy and dozens of sites across Europe preserved to commemorate the war.

But very few people visit the Pacific Islands, where savage fighting raged for nearly four years. Yet it was in the tropical, pestilent jungle that U.S. troops engaged in America’s War against the Japanese. Certainly the fighting in Europe was rough going, but the war in the Pacific was a hellish and up-close ordeal against a fanatical enemy. While the Germans were efficient in warfare, the Japanese were efficient and suicidal.

The war in the Pacific is worthy of increased interest as our own unique contribution to free the world of fascism. Thus it was with great anticipation that World War II fans tuned into the ten-part HBO docudrama “The Pacific,” co-produced by Steven Spielberg and Tom Hanks — who brought us the “Band of Brothers” series that followed soldiers in Europe after the D-Day landings.

I could stomach only five of the ten episodes. Excellent production values aside, it fast becomes apparent that the intent is to vilify war and to ignore the justness of America’s cause. Moral ambivalence rears its ugly head, with America’s moral stance equal to the Japanese cause — probably manufactured for the latter’s subsequent suffering at Nagasaki and Hiroshima, as evidenced by the latest take by the radical scholars who see the U.S. as the bad guys for ending the war swiftly and decisively.

The series presents a narrow focus on one Marine unit, which obscures the panorama of the far-flung geography involved and the coordination required to orchestrate Navy and Marine operations. But the big flaw in this granular approach is the omission of the role of the Army. It was infantry that played the key role cleaning up after the Marines moved on, yet their role is obscured and even belittled.

Our protagonists in “The Pacific” weep and whine and emote about the senselessness of war without the writers and producers taking into account the sincere desire for revenge felt by U.S. troops against the empire that attacked their country. Our fighting men were also aware of the atrocities committed by the Japanese against prisoners of war and civilians. The Bataan Death March was well known to our guys. And they held the enemy in contempt based on their own observations of the torture and murder of U.S. soldiers by Japanese units across the battlefields dotting the Pacific.

In the midst of this maudlin and immature melodrama posing as a major contribution to the world’s understanding of one the great events in human history, humor was never introduced to break the tedious moral lesson against war. Each scene reeks of angst, including a break in Australia, where our heroes arrive after days on board ship in battle gear, their faces dirty from combat.

It’s heartening that Spielberg and Hanks are willing to invest in historical productions. But it is depressing to view the result.

Bernie Reeves is editor and publisher of Raleigh Metro Magazine.

Political Inquisition of CIA and Afghanistan War Dangerous to National Sanity

The elephant in the Justice Department hearing room investigating excessive force in the interrogation of terrorist suspects will be the large majority of the American public. They do not care if we water board or inflict pain on people who blow up innocent bystanders – and often themselves – in a maniacal melee for purposes beyond the ability of rational people to comprehend. It’s difficult to get up a head of steam over practices instigated by the deadly attacks of 9-11, the subsequent cowardly and heinous murder of American troops in Iraq and the explosions in public places in Spain, the UK, India and Indonesia.

Since the people don’t care and generally approve of terrorist interrogations, why are we impaneling an inquisition against our own operatives in the war on terror? Because, as usual, a small cadre of anti-war, anti-American activists are getting their way on the force of a self-righteous head of steam. This hard left crowd has been at it since 2003, so none of this is new. They have been calling for war tribunals against the CIA and the Bush White House relentlessly, even after Obama swept into office. I know – I see their bulletins. And right there with them are the ridiculously biased mass media who offer no perspective in their febrile advocacy of what is essentially an undermining of American policy and security.

Obama backed away from tribunals against the CIA and other agencies, but passed the baton to Attorney General Eric Holder. After a decent interval, Holder announced he will indeed investigate his own countrymen for doing their duty. The hard Left says he is not going far enough – they want Bush and Cheney, remember. But the reality is we are risking our national security by staining the men and women on the front lines of the war on terror.

As I understand it – via my contacts from producing the Raleigh Spy Conference since 2003 – intelligence officers are afraid to act for fear of recriminations, leaving us vulnerable to attack and watching in horror war tribunals against the public servants who protect us. But get used to it. Public policy under Obama is in the hands of the chosen few who act as if the wishes of the people don’t count. The administration’s health care plan is embraced by the Washington Democrat elite but disdained by the people in poll after poll; elections are manipulated by unpublicized legislation that allows new voters to register and vote during one visit to the elections board (a change more than any other that ensured Obama’s ascendancy); muddled pronouncements about the need to cut defense spending to please the hard Left that sends a mixed and weak message to our allies and enemies; and economic policies that are not working for the majority of Americans.

But the big one is the war in Afghanistan. I admire our armed forces and feel pride at the deployment of our technically advanced weapons and intelligence-gathering equipment. But I do not approve of this war in a country unconquerable since the time of Alexander the Great. Worse, I think we are there as part of the ongoing campaign against the presidency of George W. Bush.

During the last weeks of the past presidential election, the “surge” in Iraq worked. Yet every Democrat I met said “so what,” it made no difference because Iraq is not our war. I asked what was “our war” and the reply was Afghanistan. Could it be we are there for political reasons to maintain the cover-up of the success of the “surge” in Iraq just to keep on beating up George Bush?

The Taliban is not our enemy. They are certainly bad characters, but then so was Saddam Hussein, whom the Left said wasn’t worth the effort to invade Iraq. Pundits justify the war in Afghanistan saying we are fighting al-Qaeda there, but we beat them in Iraq already. They are in Pakistan, but does that mean we should be in Afghanistan for no rational reason?

But then it’s not rational to haul up the CIA for doing its job – so there is a consistency to the war tribunals and the war in Afghanistan: politics, Obama-style.

Forbes For President?

Steve Forbes

There is a huge demand for health services and health insurance. Whenever demand is high, democratic capitalism stokes into gear and provides product. And customers receive the best bang for the buck as providers compete.

So why are we allowing government control of health care services and insurance when the market plainly calls for competitive capitalism, asked former presidential candidate and magazine editor Steve Forbes in a recent stop to promote his new book: How Capitalism Will Save US, co-written with journalist Elizabeth Ames.

Forbes is more animated today than during his presidential campaign, and well he should be as the economic meltdown under Barack Obama dramatizes his key issue: capitalism is the answer to prosperity, as stated in the subtitle of his new book, “Why Free People and Free Markets Are the Best Answer in Today’s Economy.”

Forbes is astonished that, 20 years after the Reagan Revolution, “neo-socialism” has replaced democratic capitalism as the mantra for the US economy. Forbes forcefully maintains it is time for another Reagan to tear down the wall of Obama’s command economy policies as we did Soviet communism. As an example, Forbes relates that if the huge demand for cell phones had been parked under the provenance of government, we’d be talking on inefficient, bread-box sized contraptions rather than slim and lightweight instruments that can connect even Third World citizens to satellites that instantly direct callers worldwide and to Internet sites and GPS coordinates.

Health care and insurance are certain to remain costly and inefficient under government control. Forbes points out the appalling inefficiencies of Medicare and Medicaid that exemplify government run health programs. He points out that the ridiculous prohibition preventing inter-state commerce in health insurance, stating that annual fees for an average customer in New Jersey are twice as high than in nearby Pennsylvania. There again, government regulation stifles free market competition – and affordable rates.

The new book ranges across all the hot spots of economic activity and reiterates the campaign plank that gave Forbes traction: the Flat Tax. As GDP declines in an atmosphere of gloom with more onerous taxation glowering over the horizon, the timing is right to free Americans from the yoke of tyrannical apparatchiks and nomenclatura that soak citizens to fund their schemes – and their pocketbooks.

The Killers Within

Originally published on AmericanThinker.com, Nov. 21, 2009

 

A time bomb began ticking in the mid-1970s, when the psychiatric and mental health professions went politically correct and identified the mentally ill as “victims” who required advocates. While patients in general do need assistance, the activists turned caring into political action that changed the American cityscape and endangered our well-being.

Announcing in the mid-1970s that confining mental patients violated their civil rights, a cadre set to work to release as many patients as they could, resulting in the huge homeless phenomenon of the 1980s that remains with us now. Suddenly the streets of major cities and small towns hosted a permanent population of vagrants who harassed passersby and businesses. The media spin maintained that these abandoned citizens were the victims of the cruel American capitalist society. In other words, it was our fault that people marginalized by society existed, dramatizing that the public deserved this inconvenience for living selfish lives.

 

Upon examination, it was discovered — but not reported by a compliant mass media — that over 80% of the homeless were actually newly released mental patients, not dispossessed victims of the economic system. If members of a community complained, they were told the street people were fine — as long as they took their meds. With no one in charge to enforce and administer dosages, the problem grew into a national scandal. Other nations saw the phenomenon as the underside of America’s economic system, when actually the homeless were purposefully inflicted on U.S. society by political radicals.

 

Whether coincidentally or in a clever conspiracy, by the time the first waves of homeless hit the streets after their release, activist lawyers assured their “right” to roam at will by having all the vagrancy and loitering laws in the country struck down in various court rulings. Citizens who asked why they weren’t protected from attacks by street vagrants were told by the police that their hands were tied. The entire homeless problem appeared to be a plot to embarrass Americans for being Americans and to send a message that capitalism had failed.

 

You know the rest. Cities now care for the homeless at great cost, in several cases actually busing them into town in the morning and returning them to county or city shelters at night. And even though we may all be homeless soon in the Obama economy, the problem was caused by political radicals.

 

But the homeless problem is not the entire story. Another consequence appeared, one that more seriously endangers our well-being.

 

But first, an explanation of how this happened. It’s actually simple, and most Americans were co-conspirators without knowing it. The radicalization of mental health treatment began with a few kooky psychiatrists in the zany 1960s. The leading proponent was British psychiatrist R.D. Laing, who proffered the ridiculous theory that schizophrenics were actually more in touch with the world than ordinary people. Laing, pointing to the lucidity and intellectual prowess of many schizophrenics, switched places with his patients, allowing them to be the doctor and the doctors the patients.

 

All this would have passed into the smoky cloud of pop nonsense if not for a novel and play written by U.C.-Berkeley professional graduate student Ken Kesey, known for his role in popularizing the use of LSD. But he is better known for penning One Flew Over The Cuckoo’s Nest, influenced by the teachings and theories of R.D. Laing, in 1962. The play became a hugely popular film in 1975, and the world was introduced to the case for freeing the seriously mentally ill.

 

Recall the plotline. R.P. McMurphy (played by Jack Nicholson) is a schizophrenic confined to a mental ward, where we meet the doctors and the cruel and unfeeling Nurse Ratched, the character created by Kesey to represent the medical profession’s contempt for mental patients. Audiences fell for the plotline, adding popular sentiment to the scheme to release schizophrenics with the newly freed homeless.

 

Since then, mass murders by deranged killers have become a commonplace in America. And each incident can be laid at the feet of Laing and Kesey and their co-conspirators in the psychiatric and legal professions who exploited illness to make a political statement.

 

A famous and instructive case occurred in Chapel Hill, NC in 1995. Wendell Williamson, a law student at UNC, went on a rampage with an assault rifle, killing two and wounding thirteen. Williamson made more news by suing his psychiatrist, claiming he should have been confined due to his schizophrenia. He won the first round in court but lost on appeal. He wrote a book about his life titled Nightmare: A Schizophrenia Native that lays out the frightening internal life of patients with the disease.

 

Williamson thought he could read minds, and that others could read his. He heard Bill Clinton, Kurt Cobain, and John Lennon urging him to carry out directives, including the command to kill. The book provides readers with the reality of delusion endured by patients, making it clear they are ordered to kill — the same explanation offered by nearly every mass murderer who lives to make a statement.

 

The 1.4 million other Americans with the same condition are living among us, listening to voices, ready to kill. Their parents or spouses or friends or co-workers have no recourse to intervene. Then it happens.

Monster Devours America

The old saying “I lost my hat, ass and overcoat” is sadly resounding across the economy. But the malicious consequence of the crash is the theft of the future – the force that propels the American system. You buy a house confident it will gain value in the future. You start a business betting on the future. You pay for college hoping a degree will pay off in the future. A business borrows for inventory assuming the goods will be sold in the future.

Even in the Great Depression, or the downturns in 1947 and 1961-62; the oil crisis recession of  the mid-1970s and the  following downturn in the early 1980s; through the crippling 1989-1994 deep recession on the heels of the 1988 stock market crash; and through the dot.com bust of 2001, there was always hope for the future. But not anymore.
Even worse, government and university employees are enjoying the good life with high salaries, retirement benefits and top-shelf health insurance on the backs of taxpayers who watch helplessly as their nest eggs and home values disintegrate. The new class of super-rich, including the crooks that brought down the mighty American economy, is now living la dolce vita and avoiding taxes.

Meanwhile, the consumer and small businesses sectors – constituting 90% of the US economy – continue to decline as the Obama recovery plan ignores their plight. Looking ahead, there is more misery and pain for small businesses in the form of mandatory health insurance coverage for employees in the proposed health care overhaul bill endorsed by the White House. As the alleged recovery continues to founder, the next step will be draconian taxes to feed the bureaucracy — the monster that is devouring America.

The middle class of small business people and their employees who are shouldering the burden are already groaning under outrageous property, state and local taxes and the myriad of fees imposed by their banks and local governments. They now realize the Obama cadre is stealing their quality of life — and the one thing that means the most — the future.