Tag Archives: McAuliffe

Current Events, Recent Posts

Letter to VA Governor

9 Comments

An Open Letter to Virginia Governor Terry McAuliffe

From Sherwan W. Dillar

Democratic gubernatorial candidate, Terry McAuliffe speaks during a debate at Virginia Tech in Blacksburg, Va., Thursday, Oct. 24, 2013. (AP Photo/Steve Helber)

 

 

 

 

 

 

I was born in Los Angeles, California and raised in Ohio. I have taught Political Science at the collegiate level in Cincinnati, been published in The Wall Street Journal and am in my 12th year of research for a forthcoming book on Columbine.  For the past seven years I have made Rockbridge County, Virginia, my home.  The one and only reason I live in Lexington, Virginia is, because it is the final resting place of Robert E. Lee and Thomas J. Jackson. Their lives, character, faith, integrity, honor and testimony shone so brightly a century and a half after their decease, that there is no other place on the Earth I want to be, but where they lived and served.

There is something deeply and morally wrong with anyone, who objects to these two great Virginians—great Americans being honored by the native State, for which they gave their lives, limbs and blood in selfless patriotic service.  President Dwight D. Eisenhower kept Lee’s portrait in his executive office, while president. Churchill extolled him as the greatest American. Ulysses S. Grant threatened to resign from the U.S. Army, if Lee were tried for treason. The statue that marks the grave of “Stonewall” Jackson was paid for not only by the veterans, who served under him, but by financial contributions from former slaves, whom he had taught to read in violation of Virginia law.

When a Lexington local assailed Jackson for breaking the law to “teach those people”, Jackson uncharacteristically lost his temper and shouted, “If you were a Christian you would not say so!”After the war, it was Lee who broke social convention at St. Paul’s Episcopal Church, by kneeling beside a former slave, who had mortified the White congregation by kneeling at the altar. Asked afterward by a bigot why a man like himself would kneel beside a former slave, Lee simply chastised him, “The ground is always level at the foot of the cross.”

The anniversary of the deaths of Lee and of Jackson were long commemorated in this Commonwealth by veterans of the North, who were often the honored keynote speakers invited to praise the virtues of their once-foes.  Every monument to a Confederate Virginian is a war memorial to an American veteran.  It has been the mark of manhood and civility and longstanding American tradition to leave politics out of the way we honor our veterans. They fought the battles; we did not. They shed the blood; we did not. They reconciled with their enemies; we did not. End of subject. It is not for children born a hundred and fifty years later to re-adjudicate the past and expose to double jeopardy men their own contemporaries exonerated.

It is the height of arrogance to suppose that you know more about these men and their times than their even contemporaries. The command of God remains, “Remove not the ancient landmark, which thy fathers have set.” It is to God you will assuredly answer for its violation. If you find it impossible to respect your elders, attempt at least to revere your betters.  The destruction of Virginia’s monuments to her war dead is sacrilege and those, who urge and execute it, are nothing more than cemetery vandals. There is no honor in this course of wanton destruction and, morally, you equate yourself with ISIS, which shares your contempt for actual culture, something you both so manifestly lack. It is more than history, more than art. 

No matter. No one will remember you in any 150 years. Nothing you do can make anything like the mark these great Virginians made on history’s ledger. Just being you another day is your own punishment and yet you still face God for what you propose to do as well. Something is deeply, horribly wrong with your soul, Sir. And you know it. So does all Virginia. I have strived to be civil, but you do not make it easy. Smearing reputations, slandering saints and tearing down what better men raised has zero to do with love, unity, tolerance, acceptance, diversity and coexistence. It’s just the usual political spoils game, playing one race/class/group against another to score a win at any cost. The mean, petty loathing of Virginia’s first string heroes outs you as a raging hypocrite just as you were trying to pass for intelligent. What a piece of work.  Just leave the statues, graves, monuments and memorials right where the grown-ups put them, Terry. Just fool around doing nothing, you know, like back at Georgetown. Easy.

That’s all I ask. And about the most anybody expects of you. Aren’t you tired yet of just being the same old failure and lurching from bungled debacle to bungled debacle? Why not shock the world: open a book, educate yourself and do something less horrible than usual. Resign, even, and leave Virginians to govern Virginia. What a concept.

With all due respect,
Sherwin W. Dillar

Originally posted 2017-09-07 17:01:59.

Recent Posts

Parents Beware!

5 Comments

From one of the few newspapers that tell it like it is — the Wall Street Journal. Make no mistake about it parents and grandparents, your children are at risk

Merrick Garland Has a List, and You’re Probably on It

By Gerard Baker

Merrick Garland’s got a little list.

The attorney general is compiling a steadily lengthening register of “society offenders who might well be underground and who never would be missed,” as Ko-Ko, the hypervigilant lord high executioner, sings in Gilbert and Sullivan’s “The Mikado.”

Mr. Garland’s list of society offenders is compendious. At the top are right-wing extremists who’ve been officially designated the greatest domestic threat to U.S. security, but whose ranks seem, in the eyes of the nation’s top lawyer, to include some less obviously malevolent characters, including perhaps anyone who protested the results of the 2020 election. Then there are police departments not compliant with Biden administration law-enforcement dicta, Republican-run states seeking to regularize their voting laws after last year’s pandemic-palooza of an electoral process, and state legislatures that pass strict pro-life legislation.

They’d none of them be missed.

Oddly, the list doesn’t seem to extend to the hundreds of thousands of people who have crossed the southern border so far this year and are now presumably at large somewhere in the U.S. without a legal right to be in the country. Nor to those benevolent folk who have reduced several of the nation’s urban centers to crime-infested wastelands.

Which is presumably why the latest names on his roll are those parents who have had the temerity to challenge local school boards about the mandates they are imposing on their pandemic-ready classes and what the children are learning.

That wasn’t how the attorney general presented it when he announced the news. Citing a “disturbing trend” in harassment, intimidation and threats of violence against school-board members, teachers and other school employees, he declared that he was directing the Federal Bureau of Investigation to work with local and state law enforcement to develop “strategies” for dealing with the problem.

The announcement looked as though it had been carefully coordinated with the National School Boards Association (NSBA), which had asked the Biden administration to do exactly this.

Decent people everywhere acknowledge that violence is intolerable—whether perpetrated by Black Lives Matter agitators torching buildings, Trump supporters smashing federal property, or parents who throw projectiles at school board members.

But the letter from the NSBA contained barely any evidence of actual violence. It cited mostly antisocial behavior and threats, and some of the offenses referenced—such as a parent making a mock Nazi salute to a school board—are, however offensive, constitutionally protected speech.

And, as has been widely noted, when acts of violence occur, they can and have been dealt with by local or state law enforcement. There is no federal interest in any of these infractions.

All this merely underscores what the real objective of the attorney general’s action was—and we don’t need to engage in speculation because it was recently spelled out to us by another leading member of President Biden’s party, Terry McAuliffe, the Democratic candidate for governor of Virginia.

In a rare moment of honesty from a politician, Mr. McAuliffe made clear, in a television debate with Republican Glenn Youngkin, the Democrats’ conception of the role that parents should have in their children’s education: none whatever.

“I don’t think parents should be telling schools what they should teach.”

Aside from the jaw-dropping disdain for families, Mr. McAuliffe’s prescription is at odds with Article 26.3 of the United Nations’ Universal Declaration of Human Rights, the sort of grand multilateral pronouncement the Democrats usually fetishize, which states: “Parents have a prior right to choose the kind of education that shall be given to their children.”

This flagrant attempt to intimidate parents into handing their children over to the mercies of the state is as sinister as anything the modern progressives who now control the Democratic Party have done.

The message is clear, and it has been the character of education in totalitarianism systems through history: These are not your children; they are wards of the state, and the state (in this case through the teachers unions that fund the Democratic Party) will determine what they learn and how.

Democrats like Mr. McAuliffe insist that pernicious racial doctrines teaching the ubiquity of white supremacism and the inherent racism of American society and encourage racial segregation aren’t actually taught in schools. But this is laughable. The same Democrats have spent the last year insisting on racial “equity” as the defining objective of their social program. Why would they leave it out of the schools they mostly control?

Mr. Garland’s brazen attempt to intimidate will likely backfire as more parents—including many who aren’t especially conservative—become alarmed by what they see and hear in their children’s schools. By placing them on his little list, he may have done us all a favor.