Return From The Dead

While the liberals rant, rave, seek safe places, whine, cry,  bitch about everything under the sun, here’s a story we, conservatives, can appreciate. I know one of the participants in the story. Ken Pipes was a Major in 1973 and one of my instructors at Amphibious Warfare School. He was a quiet, unassuming, and a great instructor. I never knew of this incident; like most of us who had been there, it was something we didn’t share with each other, even at Happy Hour. Believe me it’s worth the read!

Retired Marine Ronald L. Ridgeway was 18 years old in 1968 when his patrol was attacked in Vietnam. He was captured and held prisoner for five years before being released, a time during which he was believed dead. (Matthew Busch for The Washington Post)

https://www.washingtonpost.com/local/killed-in-vietnam-and-buried-with-comrades-one-marine-returned-from-the-dead/2017/07/07/5de3a9e8-503e-11e7-be25-3a519335381c_story.html?utm_term=.4725c9bdd465

Originally posted 2017-07-08 17:19:48.

Intelligent Dems are Waking up

It’s a safe bet every wild-eyed liberal devotee of the New York Times reads Maureen Dowd’s column several times, reproduces it in large print, frames it, and mounts it on their bedroom ceiling so it’s the first thing they read every day. 

The following is the best post-election therapy I’ve read. Intelligent Democrats are tired of this nonsense and realize it does nothing to help their cause, having witnessed the recent Sixth District Election results here in Georgia.

Read on…

Election Therapy From My Basket of Deplorables
By Maureen Dowd

The election was a complete repudiation of Barack Obama: his fantasy world of political correctness, the politicization of the Justice Department and the I.R.S., an out-of-control E.P.A., his neutering of the military, his nonsupport of the police and his fixation on things like transgender bathrooms. Since he became president, his party has lost 63 House seats, 10 Senate seats and 14 governorships.

The country had signaled strongly in the last two midterms that they were not happy. The Dems’ answer was to give them more of the same from a person they did not like or trust.

Preaching — and pandering — with a message of inclusion, the Democrats have instead become a party where incivility and bad manners are taken for granted, rudeness is routine, religion is mocked and there is absolutely no respect for a differing opinion. This did not go down well in the Midwest, where Trump flipped three blue states and 44 Electoral votes.

The rudeness reached its peak when Vice President-elect Mike Pence was booed by attendees of “Hamilton” and then pompously lectured by the cast. This may play well with the New York theater crowd but is considered boorish and unacceptable by those of us taught to respect the office of the president and vice president, if not the occupants.

Here is a short primer for the young protesters. If your preferred candidate loses, there is no need for mass hysteria, canceled midterms, safe spaces, crying rooms or group primal screams. You might understand this better if you had not received participation trophies, undeserved grades to protect your feelings or even if you had a proper understanding of civics. The Democrats are now crying that Hillary had more popular votes. That can be her participation trophy.

If any of my sons had told me they were too distraught over a national election to take an exam, I would have brought them home the next day, fearful of the instruction they were receiving.  Not one of the top 50 colleges mandate one semester of Western Civilization.

Maybe they should rethink that.

Mr. Trump received over 62 million votes, not all of them cast by Homophobes, Islamaphobes, racists, sexists, misogynists or any other “ists.” I would caution Trump deniers that all of the crying and whining is not good preparation for the coming storm. The liberal media, both print and electronic, has lost all credibility. I am reasonably sure that none of the mainstream print media had stories prepared for a Trump victory. I watched the networks and cable stations in their midnight  meltdown — embodied by Rachel Maddow explaining to viewers that they were not having a “terrible, terrible dream” and that they had not died and “gone to hell.”

The media’s criticism of Trump’s high-level picks as “not diverse enough” or “too white and male” — a day before he named two women and offered a cabinet position to an African-American — magnified this fact.

Here is a final word to my Democratic friends. The election is over. There will not be a do-over. So let me bid farewell to Al Sharpton, Ben Rhodes and the Clintons. Note to Cher, Barbra, Amy Schumer and Lena Dunham: Your plane is waiting. And to Jon Stewart, who talked about moving to another planet: Your spaceship is waiting. To Bruce Springsteen, Jay Z, Beyoncé and Katy Perry, thanks for the free concerts. And finally, to all the foreign countries that contributed to the Clinton Foundation, there will not be a payoff or a rebate.

As Eddie Murphy so eloquently stated in the movie “48 Hrs.”: “There’s a new sheriff in town.” And he is going to be here for 1,461 days.

Originally posted 2017-07-07 14:11:50.

Gettysburg then and now

I wish I could be at Gettysburg this coming week and catch one of those &%#(^&% urinating on a soldier’s grave, it might be the last time he’d be able to pee while standing upright. OMG! What kind of deranged animal would even consider doing something like that? The Governor of PA should activate the National Guard and have them ready for another Battle of Gettysburg! My country?

During the first days of July, 154 years ago, a great battle was fought in and around Gettysburg, Pennsylvania, during our Civil War.

Today, as the anniversary approaches, members of the so-called “Antifa” movement are promising to “desecrate” the graves of those who fell in that fight and to mount protests as Americans gather to memorialize the battle.

Gettysburg has become a great attraction for Americans, many of whom troop there annually to celebrate the anniversary of the Battle of Gettysburg, a conflagration that is often termed the “high tide” of the civil war for turning the war in favor of the federal armies vying to end slavery and save the union.

But as the 154th-anniversary celebration gears up for the coming month, leftists are making plans for a battle of their own. Only they plan to fight against the country, to “desecrate” history, and to disrupt the thousands of Americans and foreign visitors who intend to honor our past.

Gettysburg town officials, as well as the federal battlefield park officials, have acknowledged warnings that several protest groups are targeting the annual celebration this year, according to Philly.com.

Several legitimate and long-existing groups have attained permits to gather, including the Sons of Confederate Veterans. But others are planning protests without attaining permits, the paper reports.

According to Harrisbirg 100, at least one “Antifa” group began informing supporters that they intended to burn Confederate and American flags in the town. The site cited an EventBu page advertising the protest. The event listing, though, was soon deleted.

A civil war enthusiast page also found two Facebook pages advertising protests to be held at Gettysburg. After being discovered, though, those pages were also quickly deleted.

One of the warnings read:

There is an event set up on Facebook that calls for the desecration of Confederate cemeteries on Confederate Memorial Day. Specifically, on Saturday, May 13, 3-6 PM, this group intends to target Old Marietta Confederate Cemetery. They intend to burn CBFs and/or urinate on graves. They also have an event scheduled for July 1, 3-6 PM, at Gettysburg National Memorial Park Cemetery… The group urges their followers to “find their local Confederate graves” to desecrate.

Park officials say that while they are all for our First Amendment rights, they are prepared for disruptions.

“Our goal is to ensure that public safety and visitor safety is number one and that park resources are preserved,” said Katie Lawhon, a spokeswoman for Gettysburg National Military Park.

Gettysburg remains the largest battle ever held on American soil with more than 160,000 troops fighting over a three-day period that resulted in up to 51,000 casualties. It is also one of America’s first battlefield parks and contains some 1,328 monuments, markers, and memorials in both the cemetery and on the battlefield to commemorate the Union and Confederate troops who fought and died there.

Gettysburg is also being targeted by liberal groups that have been on a crusade to eliminate any vestige of the Confederacy from American history. Liberals have already successfully whitewashed history by removing Confederate memorials in New Orleans, and St. Louis, and they are beginning the same process in Charlottesville, Virginia.

Should members of the “Antifa” movement carry out their plan to desecrate the graves of soldiers who fell at Gettysburg, they will join the Taliban, ISIS, and Turkish Islamists who have launched a campaign to destroy historic sites and desecrate graves of their enemies.

Islamists have desecrated graves in Pakistan, damaged the Tomb of Joseph in Palestinian controlled Nablus, destroyed a monument to the sacrifices made by troops of the Australian and New Zealand Army Corps at Gallipoli, Turkey during the First World War, dynamited the Bymian statues in Afghanistan, and laid waste to the ancient cities of Hatra and Nimrud in Iraq.

Follow Warner Todd Huston on Twitter @warnerthuston or email the author at igcolonel@hotmail.com.

Originally posted 2017-06-28 09:19:39.

John is My Heart

I have received this many times over the past several months, and each time I stop what I am doing and read it again. Wonder why that is? Any thoughts on that?

A well-written article about a father who put several of his kids through expensive colleges but one son wanted to be a Marine. Interesting observation by this dad.  See below.  A very interesting commentary that says a lot about our failing and fallen society

John Is My Heart

By Frank Schaeffer of the Washington Post

“Before my son became a Marine, I never thought much about who was defending me.  Now when I read of the war on terrorism or the coming conflict in Iraq, it cuts to my heart. When I see a picture of a member of our military who has been killed, I read his or her name very carefully. Sometimes I cry.

In 1999, when the barrel-chested Marine recruiter showed up in dress blues and bedazzled my son John, I did not stand in the way.  John was headstrong, and he seemed to understand these stern, clean men with straight backs and flawless uniforms.  I did not.  I live in the Volvo-driving, higher education-worshiping North Shore of Boston I write novels for a living. I have never served in the military.

It had been hard enough sending my two older children off to Georgetown and New York University. John’s enlisting was unexpected, so deeply unsettling.  I did not relish the prospect of answering the question, “So where is John going to college?” from the parents who were itching to tell me all about how their son or daughter was going to Harvard.  At the private high school John attended, no other students were going into the military.

“But aren’t the Marines terribly Southern?” (Says a lot about open-mindedness in the Northeast) asked one perplexed mother while standing next to me at the brunch following graduation.  “What a waste, he was such a good student,” said another parent.  One parent (a professor at a nearby and rather famous university) spoke up at a school meeting and suggested that the school should “carefully evaluate what went wrong.”

When John graduated from three months of boot camp on Parris Island, 3000 parents and friends were on the parade deck stands.  We parents and our Marines not only were of many races but also were representative of many economic classes. Many were poor. Some arrived crammed in the backs of pickups, others by bus.  John told me that a lot of parents could not afford the trip.

We in the audience were white and Native American.  We were Hispanic, Arab, and African-American, and Asian. We were former Marines wearing the scars of battle, or at least baseball caps emblazoned with battles’ names.  We were Southern whites from Nashville and skinheads from New Jersey, black kids from Cleveland wearing ghetto rags and white ex-cons with ham-hock forearms defaced by jailhouse tattoos.  We would not have been mistaken for the educated and well-heeled parents gathered on the lawns of John’s private school a half-year before.

After graduation one new Marine told John, “Before I was a Marine, if I had ever seen you on my block I would’ve probably killed you just because you were standing there.” This was a serious statement from one of John’s good friends, a black ex-gang member from Detroit who, as John said, “would die for me now, just like I’d die for him.”

My son has connected me to my country in a way that I was too selfish and insular to experience before.  I feel closer to the waitress at our local diner than to some of my oldest friends.  She has two sons in the Corps.  They are facing the same dangers as my boy.  When the guy who fixes my car asks me how John is doing, I know he means it.  His younger brother is in the Navy.

Why were I and the other parents at my son’s private school so surprised by his choice?  During World War II, the sons and daughters of the most powerful and educated families did their bit.  If the idea of the immorality of the Vietnam War was the only reason those lucky enough to go to college dodged the draft, why did we not encourage our children to volunteer for military service once that war was done?

Have we wealthy and educated Americans all become pacifists?  Is the world a safe place?  Or have we just gotten used to having somebody else defend us?  What is the future of our democracy when the sons and daughters of the janitors at our elite universities are far more likely to be put in harm’s way than are any of the students whose dorms their parents clean?

I feel shame because it took my son’s joining the Marine Corps to make me take notice of who is defending me.  I feel hope because perhaps my son is part of a future “greatest generation.”  As the storm clouds of war gather, at least I know that I can look the men and women in uniform in the eye.  My son is one of them.  He is the best I have to offer.  John is my heart.

Faith is not about everything turning out OK;  Faith is about being OK no matter how things turn out.”

Oh, how I wish so many of our younger generations could read this article.  It makes me so sad to hear the way they talk with no respect for what their fathers, grandfathers and great grandfathers experienced so they can live in freedom.   Freedom has been replaced with Free-Dumb.

 

 

 

Originally posted 2017-06-21 11:28:09.