The Price of Freedom

The freedom we have is not free.  It is paid for by the lives of those who unselfishly serve this great Country.

Memorial Day is the a day for honoring those who died in the service to our country and the best way I know to do this is to also honor and say thanks to our veterans and active duty military.  Always remember that that every service member, whether active duty or reservist, when they enlisted in essence signed a blank check, payable to the Citizens of the Untied States of America for an amount up to and including his or her life.

Memorial Day is a day for honoring those who died in the service to our country. One such young man that I had the honor of personally knowing, is Michael Weger, the son of Greg and Tricia Weger.   Michael gave all that he had to give for America on October 12, 2004 when he and several members of his platoon were killed in action in Iraq.  Greg and Tricia we can never heal your hurt but please know that Michael and you two are in our hearts and prayers and that we are thinking of you always, but especially today.

This tribute to the American soldier by Lt. Col. Oliver North was done on Veteran's Day, but it is the best expression of honor for our troops I have ever seen or heard.

God Bless the United States of America and the men and women who keep our country free!

The Fox is Guarding the Hen House!

Bill Neinast

IN PERSPECTIVE

This is a hard decision.  What is the best opening cliche for today?

“The buck does not stop here; heck!, it does not even get here,” fit last week’s news perfectly.  This week is different.  There are just too many pithy descriptions of what is going on. 

Hear no evil, see no evil, speak no evil might describe some of the displays at news conferences and in Congressional hearings.  All this questionable activity at the State and Justice Departments and the IRS came as a complete surprise to the upper echelons of the government.

Who?  Me? Could also apply.  None of these things were important enough to be brought to the attention of the White House.  The disaster at Benghazi just was not a photo op for the President to be seen in serious contemplation of whether to send help.

President Bill Clinton’s “it depends on what the meaning of “is” is” also comes to mind.  How about the meaning of “if” as in the statements of President Obama and other administration spokespersons that “if” the acknowledged facts in a number of fire storms are established as facts, the situation could be serious. 

What about the most transparent administration in history promised by Barack Obama in his first run for the White House?  Last week was consumed by reporters, investigators, and Congress trying to peel back the dark shades shielding the Justice, Treasury, and State Departments, among others.

The worm turns could certainly apply to the press finally beginning to hold Obama under the spot light.

The worm turned, in part, because the Obama administration bit the hand that feeds it.   A compliant press had been feeding the administration all the fawning praise it could wish for.  Then it was disclosed that the Justice Department secretly monitored the Associated Press’ phone logs and those of about 20 reporters.  That was too much for most of the press, and the hand with the food was jerked back.

Two old timers, however, are at the top of the list today.  That would be the Nixon years and “What did he know, and when did he know it?”  Right behind that is Schultz, who just might provide the best cliche.

Remember Sergeant Schultz in the TV series “Hogan’s Heroes” in the 60s mad 70s?  One of his most often repeated lines was, “I see nothing, nothing.”

The sergeant’s fat jowls came to mind every time Attorney General Holder and Acting IRS Commissioner Steve Miller are shown testifying before a Congressional committee.

They have answered “I don’t know” so many times that next time around they might automatically mouth that response when asked to identify themselves. 

Miller actually said “I don’t know” when asked to identify the person he said he had talked with about a certain matter.  After being pressed with two more questions about that person’s identity, he finally did identify her.

Likewise, Holder played dumb repeatedly on questions about the things he had been summoned to testify about.  Watching his evasive “I don’t knows” to questions on subjects that he should have inquired about before going to the hill stretched my credulity. 

If Hillary Clinton is subpoenaed to testify again about Benghazi, “I don’t know.  I saw nothing, nothing” should be anticipated as the prevailing answer.  That, however, would not be an appropriate response to questions about her derisive earlier tirade of “What does it matter now?”

A good bet might be that, if she deviates from “I don’t know,” her responses will include, “It’s the Republicans fault.  They cut the budget and we did not have the money to beef up security.”  

Although that response would fly in the face of the sworn testimony of the State Department Official who made the decisions on security that money constraints were not the reason for denying the requests for more security.

Topping off the hear no evil, see no evil, speak no evil cabal has to be President Obama.  It took real chutzpah for him to maintain a straight face like Sergeant Schultz when he told the American public that, “I saw [knew] nothing, nothing” of an IRS Inspector General investigation of his IRS playing politics until he read it in the news.

So here’s the perspective.

Two occurrences last week indicate clearly that none of the above should be cause for concern.

First, Sarah Hall Ingram, the so called low level IRS supervisor in charge of the section harassing conservative groups seeking tax exempt status, was given a bonus and promoted to be in charge of the section that will monitor compliance with Obamacare insurance mandates. Certainly a person of that character would not condone auditing a business that claims exemption from insuring its employees.

Next, Attorney General Holder recused himself from participating in the investigation by his subordinates of why the phone lines of the AP and its reporters were monitored.

Those two events made this search for the right cliche a lot easier.  Nothing could be more appropriate than closing with the oldie about the fox guarding the hen house door.

World Leaders

Pin the fail on the donkey

The IRS, AP and Benghazi scandals were all about making Obama look better. Now they’ll drag down the Democrats for years to come

• By JOHN PODHORETZ
• Last Updated: 11:24 PM, May 18, 2013
• Posted: 10:25 PM, May 18, 2013

John Podhoretz

The Obama administration’s sudden plunge into scandal territory has two aspects — the actual and the political.

The first, and most important, has to do with what actually happened. Why did the administration promulgate a false account of the terror attack on Benghazi? Why did the Internal Revenue Service target conservative groups for special scrutiny? Why did the Justice Department act in an unprecedented fashion toward The Associated Press for publishing details of a foiled terror plot the White House was planning to discuss openly the next day?

Read more

THE BUCK DOES NOT STOP HERE

Bill Neinast


IN PERSPECTIVE

THE BUCK DOES NOT STOP HERE

What a contrast.  Compare “The buck stops here” with “The buck never gets here.”

Harry Truman will never be forgotten.  This failed haberdasher from Missouri rose to be the most powerful man in the world.  Most thought he was not man enough for the job.  But he wowed them.

Shortly after taking the reigns of government on the death of FDR, he made the momentous decision to unleash the atomic bomb on hundreds of thousands of civilians in Japan.

Just a few months later, he refused to dance with the love of the Democrat Party, the unions.  On May 24, 1946, after coal miners and railroad workers staged nationwide strikes, he personally announced, “As I stated last night, unless the railroads are manned by returning strikers I shall immediately undertake to run them by the Army of the United States.

“I assure you that I do not take this action lightly. But there is no alternative. This is no longer a dispute between labor and management. It has now become a strike against the Government of the United States itself.”

Then a few years later after winning the race against Tom Dewey that all the pundits were predicting he would lose, he publicly fired the most admired man in the country at the time, General Douglas MacArthur.

Truman was not only a President, he was a leader.  He did not waffle.  He called the shots as he saw them and unflinchingly took the blame or the credit for the actions of his administration.  The buck did stop in his office, and he was proud to take responsibility for stopping it there.

Compare that with the White House today.  Unless the press can show a solemn Obama surrounded with advisors making the easy decision to kill Osama bin Laden, a vicious killer of Americans, he is curiously absent when hard decisions that go awry are exposed.

Where was he, for example, on Sep 11, 2012, when American property and lives were under attack by Muslim terrorists in Benghazi, Libya?  Instead of answering  for his administration’s actions or inactions on that night, he requires Jay Carney to explain his absence and take the heat from the press.

Watching Carney dance around the Benghazi questions in the White House press conference Friday brought to mind the scene of the Texas Governor singing and dancing on the mezzanine of the state capitol rotunda in the movie, The Best Little Whorehouse in Texas.  Remember that second verse of,

“Ooh I love to dance a little sidestep, now they see me now they don't-
I've come and gone and, ooh I love to sweep around the wide step,
cut a little swathe and lead the people on.”

Carney was ducking and weaving so much at that press conference that even Dick Cheney would have had a hard time hitting him with bird shot on a quail hunt.

The State Department whistle blowers who appeared before the House Oversight and Government Reform Committee last week rekindled a number of unanswered questions about the Benghazi fiasco.  There are now serious questions about whether that tragedy was mishandled before the occurrence and covered up afterward.

Until Obama, former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, former Secretary of Defense Leon Panther, and other high ranking officials are willing to step forward  in the shoes of last week’s whistleblowers for an honest discussion, this cloud will continue to shadow the Obama legacy.

Members of the Obama Administration will also have to learn some new moves for the Texas sidestep.  As Carney was doing his version of that dance last week,  another tune was heard in the background.

Refusing an offer to dance to that tune, Lois Lerner, the IRS director of exempt organizations, went on TV to preempt a report of the Treasury Inspector General for Tax Administration that conservative organizations applying for tax exempt status were targeted for harassment.

Lerner admitted that such targeting and harassment did occur, but blamed in on low level, non political appointees. This went a little further than IRS Commission Douglas Schulman’s testimony before the House Ways and Means subcommittee in March of last year.

At that hearing, he gave explicit assurances that the IRS was not targeting Tea Party groups. "What's been happening has been the normal back-and-forth that happens with the IRS," he said. "And so, there's absolutely no targeting."

It is clear now, however, that the harassment was known quite high in the organization, maybe even by the Chairman of the agency.

In this case, at least, Obama has expressed some concern.  He says such targeting is unacceptable.  He has not, however, said that he will take responsibility and see that some heads must and will roll.

So here’s the perspective.

President Obama could spare himself pain and embarrassment by walking in the shoes of Harry Truman.  He would look like a much better man if he would just take responsibility for both the good and the bad of his administration.

As for Hillary Clinton, is she wants to be the next President, she may have to go before Congress, acknowledge that what happened at Benghazi does matter, and take responsibility for her part in the disaster and cover up.

Where are those Iraqi Weapons of Mass Destruction? Syria Maybe?

Bill Neinast


IN PERSPECTIVE
MISSION ACCOMPLISHED.  Those words first appeared on a banner on the aircraft carrier USS Abraham Lincoln where President George W. Bush was landing on May 1, 2003, to announce the “end of major combat operations” in Iraq.

What Bush said that day was completely accurate.  The assigned mission was to dethrone Saddam Hussein and destroy his army and weapons of mass destruction.  Without question, Hussein was gone and the old Iraqi military was in complete disarray. 

Unfortunately, in that operation, the U.S. ignored surprise, one of the fundamental principles of conducting successful warfare.  Saddam had been warned for six months that we were coming to destroy his weapons of mass destruction.  That was more than enough time for him to move the chemical weapons, of the type he had used against Iran and his own people, into neighboring Syria. 

Currently, chemical weapons constitute the “red line” that Obama has warned Assad not to use in Syria or allow them to be transferred to Iran or Hezbollah in Lebanon.  Oddly, no one has questioned Obama about the source of those weapons.

In the six years between Bush’s landing on the carrier and his leaving the presidency on January 20, 2009, journalists never let him forget “Mission Accomplished.”  Anytime an American soldier was killed in Iraq and just about anytime Bush gave a speech or held a press conference, he was ridiculed for misleading the public with his mission accomplished swagger.

Now jump ahead eight years plus one day to May 2, 2011.  On that day, President Obama smiling announced to the world that “he” had killed Osama bin Laden.  In his words, "And today, Al Qaeda is on the run and Osama bin Laden is dead."

Almost daily, however, evidence is mounting that Al Qaeda is alive and running, with much of the running being toward the U.S.  Two years after Obama announced that Al Qaeda “is on the run,” an intelligence estimate is that there are 30 groups world wide that embrace the al Qaeda ideology and methodology.

Unlike the harassment of Bush about mission accomplished, the great American press seems to have forgotten all about al Qaeda being on the run.  If Obama is ever asked why al Qaeda is still around, it never appears in any media other than Fox News.

Particularly galling is the Benghazi tragedy.  The murder of four Americans in this incident occurred during the heated presidential contest last year.  Acknowledging that al Qaeda was involved would not have been good for the Obama campaign.  So the official version perpetuated by the media was that the riots were spontaneous reactions to a perceived insult to Islam.

The CIA’s original talking points on Benghazi have just surfaced.  The statement in that paper that al Qaeda operatives were among the rioters was lined out by some Obama hireling before Susan Rice, the U.S. Ambassador to the U.N., made her rounds on the TV talks shows to blame those attacks on Islam for the “spontaneous” uprisings.

As most of the press seems to be in sync with Chris Matthews, who has cried over an Obama speech, compared him to Jesus, and “felt this thrill going up my leg,” the Rice assertion that we were dealing with a leaderless mob went unchallenged.

More recently, the press is docilely agreeing with Obama’s assertion that the Boston bombings were the acts of local individual radicalization.  The only ones with questions about the real motivators seem to be Republican members of Congress.

No member of the press, other than FOX News representatives, asks the President what Tamerlan Tsarnaev was doing back in the country from which he hadbeen granted political asylum for his own safety. 

Did he go home to learn bomb making from his radical mother?  Or is it possible that he went home for terrorist training in Chechnya? 

Following that train of thought would be too sensitive for Obama.  He has stated that al Qaeda is on the run, so any indication of an al Qaeda presence in a Russian Province is an anathema to both the President and the press.

So here’s the perspective.

Chris Matthews is not the only member of the press corps to put President Obama on a pedestal. Most of that group seems to hold him in adulation.

So long as they approach him as a virtual deity who hears no evil and sees no evil, the truth will be hard to find. 

The search for truth in this administration is made even harder by the President’s and press belief that the buck never got here, so how could it be stopped here?

Gong to Hell in a Hand Basket!

I grew up in the 50’s & 60”s, a child of the Greatest Generation.  I remember my parents telling me how much the world had changed since they were my age.   Things just weren’t the same as when they grew up. . . more crime, the government out of control, too many regulations, the economy was bad, no work for anyone, wars and more wars.    I vividly remember one very hot summer day when I heard the local service station owner saying, “Man it so hot, look at that sun, it just keeps getting closer and closer to the earth, in 20 years the world will be on fire and we will all burn up!” (I do not believe he was related to Al Gore, but I don’t know for certain!)

In the 50’s & 60’s in Somerville, Texas where I grew up, the adults subscribed to the local weekly paper, the Somerville Tribune and some folks had one of the Houston papers delivered by someone in town who had a “paper route”.  If you didn’t subscribe to any of the papers you would pick up a copy every now and then for 5 or 10 cents at the drug store or City Café.  If you didn’t have the money for a paper or you just wanted to get the “real” inside scoop on anything you would go down to Harvey Neutzler’s barber shop and catch up on what you had been missing.  Often you only did that when you went in to get that exorbitantly priced $0.50 haircut.

Folks listened to the AM radio station, the closest station was KWHI in Brenham, which mostly played music and did the farm report but would also have news usually at 8 am, noon and 5 pm, usually a 15 minute or less program that focused on really big world issues, none of which I can remember, and the local news.  

Then in the 1950’s television came on the screen.  The closest TV stations were in Houston and Temple.  Folks installed very tall antennas and pointed them toward the station they wanted to watch.  If you changed the channel you went out and literally twisted the antenna mast to point the antenna toward the City where the station was located that you were trying to watch. 

The Evening News was a 30 minute program at 5:00 PM every night.  You got some local news (Houston or Temple) and national news.  Walter Cronkite is the first person I actually remember as newsman.   There were two networks NBC and CBS, ABC came later.   

So if you were keeping up with all that math the media outlets had less than a hour a day (after commercials) for their news.  They had to pack into that time what they thought were the biggest and most important issues of the day.  And at the time you could not DVR anything to watch later, hell you were lucky if you could watch it when it was on, especially if you lived in Somerville where TV signals were not reliable.

Newspapers were printed once a day or once a week, and magazines were printed once a month.  Their editors had an even bigger job trying to select what they thought were the “really important” stories for you to know about. 

To say a limited amount of data was available from around the world was an understatement!

If you heard about anything happening in the Middle East, Europe, Africa, Iraq, Iran, Afghanistan, the Caribbean, the South Pacific or even California or New York, it was likely history, by at least a day, week or month before you were able to consume or process the data.

Yet even with this limited access to the national and world news all I heard growing up was how the world was “going to hell in a hand basket”. The sun was going to crash into the earth, crime was rampant, life was complicated and the government was out of control. 

And guess what their parents who lived through WWI told my parents the same thing.  And their parents who grew up when Lincoln was assassinated told them the same thing.  

Thanks, in some part, to the business that has been my fascination and business for the last 40 years, electronic communications, the world continues to shrink.  Now we know almost instantly when something happens anywhere is the world.

If you Google (and none of our parents ever heard of Google and only few of us really have clue about how it works) “how many news outlets in the world” Wikipedia will return what they admit is an incomplete list of over 225 news outlets most of which operate 24 X 7 either on the air, the radio, or on electronic blogs and in some cases on all media simultaneously.  Add to that anyone with an opinion and computer and enough skills to set up a blog also provides you with all the news you care to consume.  But let’s just do some math on the 225 + that showed up in Wikipedia’s incomplete list. 

Assuming each of them have 24 hour news shows, that increases the available news time to fill from 1 hour a day in the 1960’s to over 5000 hours a day today.  And when you consider that this 5000 hours has to be filled every day of the week, you soon realize that now anything that happens in the world has a chance of being brought to you, live and in living color, within minutes or live in living color in your living room, on your computer or on your Smartphone while driving.  Combined with the massive number of hours to fill each day, there is a “rush” to beat the competition to the airways.  So you get to hear and see any news, many times within seconds of it happening.  But you can be sure it has not been vetted, checked or verified and often it is gathered and reported on by young reports who have limited life experience and who get rewarded for their “scoops” but not necessarily for their accuracy.  My view and experience is that in the competitive world of news today, breaking the news story is immanently more important to most outlets than accurately reporting the facts of the story.  

So, while we are much more aware of what is going on around the world, we are not necessarily better informed.  In fact Mark Twain once wrote,

“If you don't read the newspaper you are uninformed, if you do read the newspaper you are misinformed.”

If that was the feeling in the 1850’s imagine what Mark Twain would say today.

My point in all this is that I personally think the world is a much better place than it was in the 1850’s, the 1950’s, and even at the turn of the Century way back in 2000.  The fact that we are more informed makes the world a less dangerous place, regardless of what you might see in the media. 

But, if you want to maintain some degree of your sanity, you simply cannot get caught up in the minutia of every event. If you do you will go from being informed to being misinformed and extremely frustrated very quickly.   Keep in mind that not everything being reported is accurate!

My experience has been the news outlets usually get the big things right, America was attacked by Islamic fundamentalist nut cases in 2001; the Texas Aggies had a phenomenal season of football in 2012; there was a horrible mass murder in Newton, Connecticut; there is a huge controversy over gun control going on in Washington; Barack Obama won re-election in November of 2012; the American consulate in Benghazi was attacked on September 11, 2012; there is a major uprising in Syria and some nut case wacko's set off bombs in Boston during the Boston marathon.  But if you take any one of those issues, follow ever story, every opinion, and every blog post or Twitter post about it, you will soon be on the verge of thinking, “My God, the world is going to hell in hand basket!” and the cycle for your kids will continue. 

Break the chain, absorb the news with a degree of skepticism and apply common sense to what the “worldly” reporters (sometimes are simplysome kid with a camera phone) feed to the media outlets! 

The Aggies Unveil the NEW "Kyle Field"

It is awesome!