The 2010 mid-term elections have come and gone, and the Republican Party, the amorphous Tea Party, and the American people have emerged triumphant. As the election returns came in and the Republican victories accumulated, I remembered a prediction I made back in March of 2009:
As I write this blog post, a quarter past midnight Central Daylight Time on March 28, 2009, I will venture to make two political predictions: Rick Perry will be re-elected Governor of Texas in 2010 and Barack Obama will not be re-elected President of the United States in 2012.
The first part of my prediction has come to pass. And so will the second. But two years is an eternity in politics and there is much work to be done. Fortunately, with this past election, the ranks of Congress and numerous state governments have been filled with an impressive line-up of new public servants dedicated to correcting the depredations of Obama and his gang of elitist democratic socialists.
Two years ago, we conservatives were told by our putative betters that we had no hope. The Republican Party was said to be suffering from near-irreparable "brand damage", conservatism was allegedly discredited, we ourselves were said to be mere ignoramuses, wistfully clinging to our guns and religion. Obama and the Democrats were said to have compiled an enduring 40-year Democratic majority. To add insult to injury, there were those supposedly on our side - David Frum, David Brooks, Ross Douthat, amongst a gaggle of others - who said the Republican Party needed to abandon the principles of conservatism and adopt a more "pragmatic" approach.
But some, like the redoubtable Rush Limbaugh, would have none of it. Early in 2009, Limbaugh spoke four words that drew a virtual line in the sand against the statists and pragmatists: "I hope he fails."
Another great American - Andrew Jackson - once said: "One man with courage makes a majority."
But Rush Limbaugh was not just one man. He was one of many.
Marco Rubio, the senator-elect from Florida: one man. Brian Sandoval, Nevada's new governor-elect: one man. Susana Martinez, New Mexico's new governor-elect: one woman. Bill Flores, a ninth-generation Texan just like me, and the new representative of the 17th congressional district of Texas: one man. Francisco "Quico" Canseco - a native Laredoan whose late father, the prominent physician Dr. Pancho Canseco, delivered my mother and four of her five brothers - and who is himself now the newly-elected congressman from the 23rd congressional district of Texas, having defeated the detestable Ciro "Zero" Rodriguez: one man. Blake Farenthold, newly elected representative of the 27th congressional district of Texas, and grandson of the legendary Sissy Farenthold: one man. And Sarah Palin, who has endured the most brutal of personal attacks against herself and her family, but whose determination and true grit defeats her hateful detractors at every turn: one woman.
And, most importantly of all, those of us who individually made it all happen: each of us one man, one woman - but together, an army of one.
The war, however, is far from over. There will be setbacks, and the struggle will seem thankless and unforgiving at times, but should we stand strong, adhere to the principles of conservatism and classical liberalism, and ensure our nation's continuing exceptionalism, victory will be ours once more.
It seems fitting that I close with a video I first posted a year-and-a-half ago, a video of Ted Nugent performing to an enthusiastic audience - of which I was a part - back on April 15, 2009 at the San Antonio Tea Party:
During an e-mail conversation I was recently having with a friend of mine, the discussion turned to how neither of us would care to live in places whose governments would deny us the right to bear arms to protect ourselves or our loved ones. The places specifically mentioned were California, the United Kingdom, and Japan. I've been to California and the United Kingdom, and have lived in Japan, and I think each of those places have positive attributes. Nevertheless, denying me the right to protect myself is something I consider to be a serious breach not just of my constitutional rights as an American, but on a broader scale, my natural rights as a human being. As far as I'm concerned, my moral right to defend my life, loved ones, and property is inviolable and absolute, and any government that would presume to deny me that natural right is not only illegitimate, but evil.
Now in the case of Japan, there are cultural issues and historical traditions to consider when it comes to analyzing their anti-firearms policies. To a certain extent, the same is true with the United Kingdom, though as recently as the late 1800s, personal handgun ownership was perfectly legal and largely unrestricted in that country. Presently, in the aftermath of severe firearms restrictions enacted during the prime ministership of Tony Blair, Britain's crime rate has skyrocketed and there seems little hope of improvement in the near future. But as I live in neither of those countries, and their internal domestic policies have little if any effect on those of this country, I'll drop the matter for now.
California, though, is different. As a state of the Union, California's restrictions on the carrying of concealed weapons (in addition to other ill-considered public policies) have resonated beyond its borders, most visibly in the steady emigration, during the past quarter-century, of many Californians to other states - such as the state of Washington.
Although I'm not old by any reasonable standard, I am old enough to remember when western Washington (i.e. Seattle) was a relatively normal place, not overrun with brainless utopian liberals. As I have family that live there and in other parts of the state, I visit with some frequency. For example, I was there just this past June to attend my niece's high school graduation in Yakima. But during visits to Seattle and the surrounding areas during the early 1990s, I began to notice a disturbing trend - many parts of the area began to take on a run-down appearance and extreme leftism was becoming more common. Was it just my imagination? I don't think so.
At the time - and still today - many of my relatives blamed the changes on an influx of transplanted Californians, who after reaping the whirlwind of their poisonous liberalism in the Golden State, decided to bring themselves and their loony leftism to the not-yet-despoiled Pacific Northwest. Fortunately for Washington, in 1986 when the state government had yet to be taken over by the loony left, the state passed one of the first comprehensive shall-issue concealed carry laws in the country. Such a measure would be impossible to pass there now, with the governorship being held by the terminally stupid Christine Gregoire and the legislature being firmly controlled by liberal Democrats.
Where will the lefty locusts migrate to once they are through with the coastal Pacific Northwest? I'm lucky enough to be far removed from their spreading plague, presently living in a conservative West Texas city where firearm ownership is common and crime low. The closest thing Texas has to the rotting liberal burgs of the east and west coasts is Austin - but Austin has long been an odd, leftist-infested place. The surrounding areas remain politically and socially sane.
The liberals can keep their god-damn freakshow of statist politicians, recidivist criminals, bums, and junkies. I'll keep my guns and my freedom. Don't tread on me.
The title of this entry comes from an old song of the same name by John Conlee, a country singer little remembered these days but who dominated the charts during the Urban Cowboy era of the late '70s and early '80s.
While I was away for the past couple of weeks, getting moved up to Lubbock and trying to get settled in, there were quite a few developments in the blogosphere and the political world, ranging from the antics of Palin-hating lowlifes to the pathetic bleatings of criminal-cuddling nitwits to Barack Obama's faltering drive to Bolshevize America's health care system.
Robert Stacy McCain and Dan Reihl provided great entertainment, and a valuable public service, by exposing the creepy background of an Alaskan blogger named Jesse Griffin, who made national headlines by falsely claiming that Sarah Palin and her husband Todd were on the verge of filing for divorce. This came only days after Palin herself had criticized the media for their pathological zeal in "making stuff up" about her family.
As often as I've written and mused on this blog about the matter of the left's boundless hatred of Sarah Palin, I still can't understand just what it is about her that drives the nancy-boys and envious harridans of the left to such peaks of insanity. There have been plenty of politicians I've disliked - Bill Clinton and Chuck Schumer to name a couple - but never to the point that I felt the need to fabricate stuff about their personal lives out of thin air.
Palin-hatred, of course, is rooted in issues pertaining to social class more than anything else. Palin worked her way to political success outside the circles of the Washington-New York-Hollywood elite, and did so while remaining true to her core values. In the warped minds of those who inhabit that world, she shouldn't have been able to do any of that. To make it in their world, backbiting, hypocrisy, and dishonesty are essential, and anyone who doesn't accept that one must compromise their principles to achieve success must be a dangerous, naive fool.
That Palin has proved them wrong, and continues to do so, is an affront to their worldview that cannot be tolerated. Thus, the constant scandal-mongering, the attacks on her appearance and fashion-sense, and the endless criticisms of her accent. And just what the hell is wrong with her accent? I find it charming, and it is not unlike the type of accent one will encounter traveling through the rural areas of such Canadian provinces as Alberta and British Columbia. No, Palin does not need to lose her accent. The elitist liberals and pseudo-conservatives who say so should instead lose their self-righteousness. Fat chance of that happening, I know.
Self-righteousness is, of course, a characteristic that can be quite dangerous in certain contexts - law enforcement, for instance. Consider the case of Lily Burk, a 17-year-old girl living in Los Angeles who was murdered by a recidivistic dirtbag who should have been permanently removed from the human race long ago. Nancy Rommelmann, a favorite blogger of mine and friend of the Burk family, writes:
Lily had spent several hours with the killer; she had called her parents twice asking how to get cash from an ATM machine with her credit card, and when they asked her why, she said she wanted to buy shoes. They told her the card wasn’t set up that way, and to come home. Videos taken at the ATM machine show her nonetheless trying to get money, the killer beside her, and other customers coming or going. Lily does not shout. She does not grab a bystander’s arm. She does not say, “Help me.” There was speculation online that the reason she did not do these things is because her mother is an attorney who’s done work on behalf of the homeless. That Lily, a National Merit scholar, a thespian, a writer, was herself to work this summer with the homeless, and that she was not scared of the things, the situation, the person many of us would be scared of.
She met this man near the campus of the law school where her mother is a professor; her mother had asked her to pick up some papers she needed. Lily picked them up, and while leaving, was approached by the man, at around two in the afternoon. By five, we learned, he’d driven her car, with her in the passenger seat, to a downtown LA parking lot. By 5:30, the police picked up Charlie Samuel several blocks away, for drinking a beer in public and having on his person a crack pipe. He also had the keys to Lily’s Volvo, and her cell-phone. Lily was found the following morning in the car. Her throat had been slit.
This is when I started to think of vengeance. I lay in bed for two nights, not sleeping very easily, trying to come up with what I would do with Charlie Samuel. I came up with taking him up in a small plane, flying him over the ocean, twenty or thirty miles offshore. And then opening the door and pushing him out; I accounted for his trying to take with him the person doing the pushing by harnessing the person to the inside of the plane. Samuel would not survive the fall, but if by some miracle he did, it would be pleasant to think of his terror in knowing, he had no chance to get back to shore. He was there alone. Maybe he would cry. And shortly, he would drown, or be eaten; in any event, he would eventually be eaten, and I surmised that in this way, Samuel, who’d been arrested ten times and had recently been released from prison, would be doing something beneficial. He would be feeding the fish.
Predictably, someone showed up in the comments to Nancy's post claiming that monsters like Samuel needed to be understood, and that notions of permanently removing low-lifes like Samuel from the land of the living were a stupid and simplistic approach to criminal justice. It's all about the nuance, you see.
Fortunately, such asininity has largely been removed from the criminal-justice system - at least in areas of the country where common sense prevails - during the past two decades, resulting in a widespread decline in crime rates. But in some places, where the carrying of concealed weapons is still prohibited and liberal utopianism still predominates, monsters like Samuel are still free to victimize the innocent. That anyone would even think of showing compassion to a piece of human filth like that is just inconceivable to me. To quote Toby Keith, "it's time the long arm of the law put a few more in the ground." And if the law won't do so, then responsible gun-owning Americans should.
During the past couple of weeks, many responsible Americans around the country have been making their voices heard at numerous town-hall meetings with congressmen, insisting that the federal government refrain from taking over large sectors of America's health care industry. After the election in November of 2008, I got the queasy feeling that most Americans just might succumb to the socialist juggernaut of Obama and the Democratic Party in their drive to create a permanent transnational progressive political overclass in America.
Perhaps that feeling was unfounded. Despite the predictable demonization by the media of the townhall protesters as racist rednecks in the hip-pocket of the insurance industry, the protesters have held their ground and Obama's dream of socialized medicine has started to unravel as his own approval rating and those of many Democratic senators and representatives have sharply declined. In this scenario, Barack Obama finds himself playing Archduke Maximilian to Sarah Palin's Benito Juarez. Those who are historically literate are well aware of how that turned out. However, historical literacy ain't Obama's strong suit, to put it charitably.
From the "things that make you go hmm..." file, I've long had Cormac McCarthy's No Country for Old Men on my mind because of a curious similarity I noticed between one of the main characters in his novel and someone from the real world. The character I have in mind is Anton Chigurh, the murderous psychopath who, in McCarthy's story, pursues the Vietnam veteran Llewelyn Moss across West Texas to recover drug money that has come into Moss's possession.
I couldn't help but notice the similarity between Chigurh's surname and that of the real-world criminal Jamiel "Jimmy" Chagra. If you were living in Texas - El Paso or San Antonio specifically - during the late 1970s and early 1980s (and oddly enough, McCarthy's novel is set in 1980), Chagra is a name you will remember. In 1978, Jimmy Chagra was arrested on charges of trafficking in marijuana and was brought before Judge John H. Wood, Jr. of the United States District Court for the Western District of Texas, located here in San Antonio. If you were involved in drug trafficking, Judge Wood was the last federal judge you wanted to deal with, for he had a reputation for handing down maximum sentences in drug cases, earning him the nickname "Maximum John".
Facing this dilemma, Chagra hired a hitman named Charles Harrelson, paying him $250,000 to kill Judge Wood. On May 29, 1979, Harrelson did so, shooting Judge Wood fatally as he left his home at Chateau Dijon, an upscale townhouse complex along Broadway Street in the San Antonio suburb of Alamo Heights. Harrelson was eventually apprehended, his involvement with Chagra was revealed, and both men were sent to prison, with Harrelson receiving a life sentence for Wood's murder and Chagra receiving a thirty-year sentence for the drug case.
Coincidence? Perhaps, but consider this: in the 2007 movie that was adapted from McCarthy's novel, the character of Carson Wells - a hitman hired to retrieve the drug money from Chigurh - was played by Woody Harrelson, Charles Harrelson's son. Hmm.
And having grown up in El Paso, there is a personal connection between me and the Chagras. Whenever my family would take an extended summer vacation, we would leave our pets at a kennel along Doniphan Drive called "The Spa for Paws". At the time, it was owned by a member of the Chagra family. Small world.
I'm just not a big believer in coincidences and it isn't hard to see malevolent design behind many of the problems our society faces. Take our public schools, for example. There is no doubt that public education in this country has been a massive failure, and has been so for the entire thirty-four years I've been alive. Yet year after year, politician after politician, Democrat and Republican, promises to reform the system. But the system is the problem. A few days ago, Robert Stacy McCain said it best:
The problem with the public education system is the system itself. Parents who send their kids to public schools are constituents of the world's largest welfare program. Whatever the total federal expenditure is on K-12 education, every dime of it is "waste, fraud, and abuse," a stupid idea with stupid consequences.
You cannot defend public education and call yourself a conservative. The entire history of public education shows that it has been, from Day One, a liberal project aimed at achieving liberal policy objectives that have nothing to do with actual education.
More than anything else, public education is a propaganda vehicle for teaching American children falsehoods, including the belief that government can give you stuff for "free." Let the government give people something for "free," and you automatically guarantee two things:
It will be ridiculously expensive.
Whatever it is, will suck.
A-freakin'-men. I remember my own experiences with public schools as a kid, growing up in El Paso and later Laredo. The hare-brained teachers blaming everything on Ronald Reagan, the description of anything liberal or Democratic as "good" and anything conservative or Republican as "bad," the factually inaccurate nonsense taught across the curriculum, and the inability of teachers and/or administrators to impose any sort of discipline on the student body - making the schools seem more like prisons than educational institutions.
I was glad to leave public education behind in 1989, when I enrolled in a Catholic high school. Over the course of the four years that followed, I received one hell of an education and was able to hit the ground running when I started college immediately thereafter. Would that have been the case had I attended a public high school? I'm not so sure.
In my years as a history professor, I've been questioned by many a student who was taught that the Cold War was just a fabrication of the military-industrial complex of this country and that Communists were really just misunderstood nice guys who wanted equality for everyone. No understanding of the tens of millions slaughtered by Mao Zedong, Joseph Stalin, and Pol Pot. No understanding of the principles of Communism that drove those monsters. How pathetic and disheartening, and no wonder that a historical ignoramus like Barack Obama could get elected president. His lack of knowledge, which I pointed out in a previous post, simply reflects that of so much of the general population.
Look, I understand that not every private school, be it secular or religious, is wonderful. But I have personally experienced the difference between the two, and it is monumental and undeniable. So what would I replace our public schools with? Nothing. Stacy McCain is right, public schools are a colossal waste of time and money. Time to dispose of them altogether.
Common sense, though, is in short supply these days. But one prominent figure in the entertainment industry who is firmly rooted in the real world is Ted Nugent. Take a look at this video of an interview he gave to Texas Monthly editor Evan Smith (a different interview than the one I referenced back on July 6):
I often find myself conversing with people who are reluctant to consider the possibility of using deadly force to defend their lives, family, or property. When I tell them that I will use deadly force to protect me and mine, their reaction is often one of horror, as if I am some kind of monster. I don't get it. Is it morally better to simply allow one who intends me or mine harm to simply have his way? Absolutely not. That sort of pacifism - any sort of pacifism - is simply foolish. And I don't suffer fools gladly.
To close things out, here's clip from the 1959 film Rio Bravo, where Dean Martin and Ricky Nelson sing a western tune called "My Rifle, My Pony, and Me":
Why is it that movies like this are no longer made? I'm thinking that Cormac McCarthy was slightly off with his title, No Country for Old Men. Perhaps today's society is better described as No Country for Good Men.
I certainly hope so. Some really good news came out of the Texas Legislature on Tuesday, May 19: a bill to allow faculty, staff, and students with concealed handgun licenses to carry their firearms on campus received preliminary approval from the State Senate, with final approval possible today. From the news report:
The bill would allow college students who are at least 21 years old and licensed to carry concealed handguns to bring those weapons into state campus buildings. The vote was 20-10 after about 90 minutes of debate.
It would apply to all universities and colleges in the state, but private institutions would be able to opt out.
Sen. Jeff Wentworth, R-San Antonio, said he introduced the bill because of the 2007 massacre at Virginia Tech, where he said victims were “picked off like sitting ducks.”
“I would feel personally guilty if I woke up one morning and read that something similar had occurred on a Texas campus,” he said.
I would certainly feel safer were I allowed to carry my own sidearm to work. It has always bothered the hell out of me that despite having been subjected to the necessary legal background check, having received the necessary training, and having paid the prohibitive fees to obtain a concealed handgun license (CHL), I am still barred from protecting myself at the one place - the university - I spend most of my time at away from home. All because some leftists have an irrational fear of firearms.
Predictably, most faculty at most Texas universities, including the one at which I was most recently employed, were aghast that the state of Texas might actually allow its licensed, law abiding citizens to defend themselves on their holy ground. I'm reminded of the old comment that some American soldiers in the European theater of World War II were said to have made about Gen. George Patton: "There goes Old Blood and Guts. Our blood, his guts." Except that Patton, unlike the linguini-spined liberals I'm talking about, was a highly competent professional who knew what he was doing. In the case of my fellow professors, it's "my blood, their cowardly ignorance."
But the battle for common sense in this matter is far from over:
If the Senate gives the bill final approval — which could happen today — the controversial measure could go back to the House, where it died last week because lawmakers did not make the deadline to debate it.
However, legislative rules do allow House lawmakers to take up the Senate version if they do it before midnight Tuesday.
Exactly half of the House members, 75 of 150, have signed on as supporters of the bill, a legislative priority of the Texas State Rifle Association, an affiliate of the National Rifle Association.
The notion that making colleges and universities "gun-free zones" will somehow magically prevent tragedies of the type that took place at Virginia Tech is little more than wishful thinking. Not unlike the belief that electing a socialist to be President of the United States will restore fiscal sanity to Washington. Or that singing "Kumbaya" to Islamists will make them love America.
