Racism, Racism, Nothing But Racism

"As a man is said to have a right to his property, he may be equally said to have a property in his rights. Where an excess of power prevails, property of no sort is duly respected. No man is safe in his opinions, his person, his faculties, or his possessions." — James Madison, National Gazette Essay, 1792

Investigators were trying to determine Sunday what may have motivated a 30-year-old man [Shannon Miles, black] accused of ambushing a uniformed suburban Houston sheriff’s deputy [Darren Goforth, white] filling his patrol car with gas in what authorities believe was a targeted killing.

Well, I can help them with that. Let’s start with the obvious. Shannon Miles (a black man) is a crazy guy, just as Dylann Roof (the white man from the Charleston church shootings) is a crazy guy and Vester Lee Flanagan (the black man who killed his white co-workers at a Virginia TV station the other day) was a crazy guy. The latter two claimed they wanted to start a race war. No word yet on Miles, but if we believe in what our grandmothers told us — that actions speak louder than words — he’s already more than half way there.

Also obvious, Barack Obama and Eric Holder (and now Loretta Lynch) are to blame for encouraging an atmosphere of racial divisiveness and, yes, hatred in our society. Anyone honest can see — and the polls have reported — a serious increase in racial tension and violence (Baltimore, Ferguson, etc.) since the beginning of the Obama administration. The racist-to-the-core “Black Lives Matter” movement is quite simply their evil spawn.

Sheriff David Clarke of Milwaukee County, Wisconsin (a regular on Fox News) calls the “Black Lives Matter” movement the “Black Lies Matter.” In an interview with Judge Jeanine Pirro a few nights ago on Justice with Judge Jeanine Clarke said that Obama and Holder laid the groundwork for “this war on police” by supporting ‘activists’ who have disparaged law enforcement based upon a set of lies.”

He continued by saying “I am too pissed off tonight to be diplomatic with what’s going on and I’m not going to stick my head in the sand about it. I said last December war had been declared on the American police officer led by some high profile people, one coming out of the White House, and one coming out of the United State Department of Justice. And it’s open season right now. No doubt about it…

…I’m tired of people calling these black activists. They’re not black activists. This is black slime and it needs to be eradicated from American society. I need every law abiding person in America to stand up and start pushing back against this slime. (It should be noted that Sheriff Clarke is black and elected as a Democrat)

 

On August 31^st Sheriff Clarke said during an interview on Fax and Friends. Clarke pointed out that the headline of that tragic story should be “Black Man Shoots White Defenseless Police Officer,” since Black Lives Matter activists always point out when it’s a white officer shooting a black man.

“President Obama has breathed life into this ugly movement,” Clarke stated. “It is time now for good, law-abiding Americans to rise up like they did in Houston around that Chevron station, an outpouring. But it can’t just be symbolic we now have to counter this slime, this filth coming out of these cop haters.”

Clarke asserted that the Black Lives Matter movement is nothing more than an attempt to weaken the institution of policing.

“If there’s anything that needs to be straightened out in this country, it is the subculture that has risen out of the under-class in the American ghetto,” Clarke said. “Fix the ghetto, and you will see a lesser need for assertive police officers or policing in these areas, and then you’ll see less confrontation. Stop trying to fix the police. Fix the ghetto.”

Illinois grandmother Peggy Hubbard blasted the Black Lives Matter movement last week in an emotional Facebook video, which has gone viral.

Hubbard said that Black Lives Matter activists are focusing on police brutality instead of incidents like the tragic death of Jamyla Bolden, a 9-year-old Ferguson, Missouri, girl who was fatally struck by a stray bullet in her mother’s bedroom while doing her homework.

“You say black lives matter? Her life mattered. Her dreams mattered. Her future mattered. Her promises mattered,” Hubbard said. “Police brutality? How about black brutality?”

On the Hannity show Hubbard said “that anti-police activists don’t want to face reality.”

“We want to glorify the criminals, the bad guys. We want to glorify them and give credence to their life. What contributions did they make?” Hubbard asked.

“It’s not a black issue. This is not a white issue. It’s a human issue. It’s an accountability issue. It’s a responsibility issue. That is what it is,” Hubbard said. “They made this about race. This was never about race. This was about right and wrong.”

Milwaukee Country Sheriff David Clarke joined the program and said that 75 percent of the problems in the black community are self-inflicted.

He pointed to things like father-absent homes, drug and alcohol abuse, poor schools and failure to stay in the workforce.

“The other 25 percent are inflicted by the Democratic Party with their modern liberalism, which is conduct without borders,” Clarke said. “They reward underachievement, they make excuses for criminal behavior like black-on-black crime, and they blame everybody else for the problems that go on within our community.”

When we talk about growing violence in America’s larger cities we frequently focus on New York and Baltimore (and for good reason). But the nation’s capital has been experiencing its own problems along those lines lately. A rather chilling recounting of some of these “local stories” provides the backdrop for a recent column in the Washington Post by Colbert I. King.

Due to the lack of coverage by the mainstream media on the goings on in the nation’s capital I’ll confess that some of the stories of violence and mayhem King is talking about were completely unknown to me, leading King to compare Washington to “the wild west.” One example is the case where the Metro had decided to wave the white flag and stop running bus lines after dark to a particular section of Elvans Road SE because somebody had been shooting at the bus. (After public outcry, the Metro retreated from their decision and sent the buses back anyway.) This was followed by more people being gunned down in the streets and in their homes this month.

King notes that a greater police presence might not make much of a difference because the criminals really don’t seem to care. In one of the most shocking bits of evidence presented, three people were shot one night on Missouri Avenue NW. Sadly, that might not have been a notable enough event these days to raise an eyebrow if it weren’t for one thing… it happened within eyesight of the 4th District police headquarters.

So what’s the solution if you can’t just throw more cops at the problem? Mr. King offers some tough medicine which certain high profile activists these days aren’t going to want to hear. Read this portion carefully.

“Not to get all existential, but the problem is much deeper than synthetic drugs, high-capacity gun magazines, turf wars, rejiggering police deployment or keeping an eye on repeat violent offenders.

We have on our hands — in our neighborhoods, on our streets and maybe living next door — walking disasters: individuals who believe that their lives matter, but not yours or mine. Neither do our laws and institutions.

The Wild West’s outlaws felt that way, too. But it didn’t turn out so well for them. Won’t for ours, either, in the long run.

The challenge, as always: to keep our potential outlaws from going down that path. That’s not up to the police. Look at the faces of the killers and their victims. It’s on us — parents, preachers, politicians, community pontificators — all who profess that black lives matter, to prove it.”

For some reason it’s always tough for anyone taking part in the public discussion to try to bring up the staggering amount of violence which takes place in our cities. (See my blog: Fact vs. Fiction) Because the phenomenon occurs largely in the most economically depressed areas, this largely falls within the black community. Rather than focusing strictly on violence which happens between the races, conversations such as this need to keep in mind that the FBI’s homicide data for 2013 (the latest year available) shows that 2,491 black Americans were murdered. Of those, only 189 were committed by whites while 2,245 (90%) were done in by black suspects. (It should be noted that the same report will show that the vast majority of white homicide victims (83%) were killed by other whites and 14% by blacks.) The vast majority of this can be chalked up to gang activity in the cities. There’s a big problem with violence inside the community, but these conversations are generally cut short any time a white politician or journalist tries to bring it up.

Note that of these 5,723 homicides (not 30,000 as the left-wing media reports) between 64.7% (West region) and 72.1% (Midwest region) were committed with firearms. This 2013 FBI report is loaded with statistics and one could spend hours perusing it. This should be the job of the mainstream media and their talking heads, but it seems that they don’t have time for the facts!

When an analysis from an African-American writer like King treads into these waters, specifically name checking the Black Lives Matter movement, it’s sure to raise a fuss. But it’s also a reality that needs to be dealt with. Reforms in some police procedures, better training and body cameras are all positive steps, no doubt. But if you really want to cut down on the number of deadly encounters between black citizens and the police, it’s never going to happen until a way is found to drive down the crime rates significantly and we start giving the cops a reason not to be policing those high crime communities so heavily. That’s not race war talk, folks. It’s just math.

Kurt Schlichter writes in Townhall.com:

“In the wake of yet another killing spree by an Obama voter, there were the predictable calls to “do something” about guns. It was no shock that the liberals’ preferred solution to the problem of Democrat mainstream media personalities murdering people because of their racial and sexual grievances was to disarm everyone who isn’t a Democrat mainstream media personality who murders people because of his racial and sexual grievances. But what was shocking was how quickly the anti-civil rights left moved on to pursue other tyrannies.

Liberals initiated their “guns are bad” mental macro before the killer had even botched his suicide – the serial bungling of enterprises like the VA becomes more understandable when you see how a liberal can’t even blow his brains out right. Liberal media types immediately started blaming the NRA members who did not do it instead of their fellow media liberal who did. An unconfirmed rumor has it the first reporter who actually finds a mass shooter who is a member of the NRA will get a new Prius from Michael Bloomberg.”

…

“Yet within 24 hours of the hideous murders, the liberals stopped talking about gun control. Obama was back dodging the Senate’s treaty approval power to give the Iranians the bomb. Hillary, whose campaign strategy is to try to out-nationalist and out-socialist Bernie Sanders, was busy comparing GOP candidates to national socialists – though this time, she did not mean it as a compliment. Even Mia Farrow had fallen silent again, taking a break from lecturing her fellow citizens and returning to her usual pastime of making good romantic choices.

Clearly, had the killer not checked the box for every key demographic the Democrats depend on – black, gay, media, liberal, loser – we would be hearing a lot more about it. But there is another reason the liberals moved on besides the inconvenient fact that, as usual, it was one of theirs doing the killing. The left has lost on gun control.”

Let me just say first of all that anyone who thinks I am being callous with the above headline hasn’t spent most of their day the last week watching cable news, like I have. Obviously, the deaths of Alison Parker and Adam Ward were a tragedy and I don’t want to minimize the loss and suffering of their family and friends. But the media’s treatment of this story has long since passed honest respect for the untimely passing of two young people and wandered into obvious sermonizing on the evils of guns. What’s happening now isn’t news coverage; it’s ghoulish capitalizing on a tragedy for ratings and politics.

The reason for the obsession with these two particular crimes is obvious, and has nothing to do with the crimes themselves – it has to do with what the crimes are useful for. The victims are telegenic people and their families and friends all appear to be media savvy. They were killed by a gun and therefore this story provides a perfect vehicle for the activists in the media to push their narrative on gun control.

Consider that Adam Ward’s father has been given almost pro forma coverage throughout this entire ordeal, and that his remembrances of his son have been completely ignored. Meanwhile virtually the entire country can now identify Alison Parker’s dad. Both have similar stories to tell. Why is one on camera perpetually while the other might as well not exist in this story? Because Alison Parker’s dad dutifully stumps for gun control every time the lens is on him and Adam Ward’s dad stated the obvious in his one interview on the subject: stricter gun control laws wouldn’t have kept guns out of the hands of his son’s killer, since the Vester Lee Flanagan successfully passed a mandatory background check before purchasing his gun in the first place.

The media does not give a damn about Alison Parker and Adam Ward, nor the grief of their families. They are using both them and everyone around them because of the spectacle value and because it helps promote a political agenda they believe in. This transparent emotional manipulation at the expense of the legitimate grief of a family that has suffered loss is absolutely sickening to me.

Harris County Sheriff Ron Hickman says that Deputy Sheriff Darren Goforth was targeted because of his uniform. Hickman is referring to the wild, violent, hateful rhetoric coming from black activists who have called for the murder of police in recent weeks.

According to Reuters

“Hickman linked the shooting to anti-police rhetoric following protests against deaths of unarmed black men at the hands of white officers. Goforth was white, the suspect is black.

He said the department assumed Goforth was a target because he wore a uniform, and bluntly addressed protests against police violence and mass incarceration of blacks.

"We've heard black lives matter; all lives matter. Well cops' lives matter too," Hickman said. "At any point where the rhetoric ramps up to the point where calculated cold-blooded assassination of police officers happen(s), this rhetoric has gotten out of control," said Hickman.

The fatal shooting comes eight months after two New York police officers were ambushed by a gunman who had said he wanted to avenge the deaths of black men in confrontations with police.

Hundreds of people attended a vigil on Saturday night.

"I wanted to demonstrate that all lives matter, regardless of color," Carol Hayes, an African American woman, told a local NBC News affiliate.”

There is no comparison between charges of conservative "hate speech" leading to shootings and the ultra-violent, nauseating calls for the outright murder of police by black activists:

“Two teenage girls told Breitbart Texas they saw the shooter fire one shot into the back of the head of the deputy who was simply getting gas for his vehicle. After the deputy fell, they heard three or four other shots. According to the first witness, those shots were fired into the deputy’s back.

The execution of the deputy came just days after black radicals went on an internet radio show hosted from Texas and called for the lynching of white people and the killing of cops to “turn the tide” against blacks being killed by cops. Breitbart Texas reported on Friday morning the details of the radio show and the comments that were made.

One black man spoke up saying they needed to kill “cops that are killing us. The other black male on the show said, “That will be the best method right there.”

On August 29, 2015 Chuck Ross wrote in the Daily Caller:

“Black Lives Matter protesters marching on the Minnesota state fair on Saturday spewed violent anti-cop rhetoric just hours after a Harris County, Tex. sheriff’s deputy was ambushed and executed at a Houston-area gas station.

“Pigs in a blanket, fry ’em like bacon,” activists with the St. Paul, Minn. branch of Black Lives Matter chanted while marching behind a group of police officers down a highway just south of the state fair grounds.”

The White House hasn't deemed it proper to comment on the killing of Deputy Goforth - what's the life of one more policemen more or less seems to be the attitude. Of course, if they acknowledge the deputy's death, they have to answer questions about what role their encouragement of this violent rhetoric had on the execution.

The silence on the left about Deputy Goforth's execution speaks to a towering hypocrisy that reveals their concern about violent rhetoric only applies to their political enemies.

Barack Obama won’t be saying, “If I had a psycho son, he’d look like Vester Lee.” But he might as well. Because Vester Lee Flanagan II, the bigoted maniac who murdered the WDBJ reporter and cameraman on live TV, was a philosophical offspring of the Left.

It’s well known now that Flanagan was a professional victim, nurturing grudges against all and sundry based on his “status” as a homosexual black man. He had an axe to grind with white women because they supposedly made racial statements to him, and against black men because they supposedly directed anti-homosexual remarks his way. And it didn’t seem as if he liked anyone very much.

Of course, most of the bigotry he perceived from others was in his head, a function of his own prejudice, inculcated via decades of liberal indoctrination. When you dislike others, you view them through tinted lenses and ascribe negative motivations to everything they do. Where a fair-minded individual might interpret a comment as innocuous, simply a misunderstanding or an example of the issuer merely having a bad day, you see malice. “Of course it was racial! That’s the way white people are.” And, “That had to be ‘homophobic’ in this society, which macro and micro-aggresses against everything that I am!” (of course, certain things are supposed to be stigmatized). These notions, again, were put in Flanagan’s mixed-up head by liberals and liberals alone. They disgorge hateful, pure and utter nonsense such as micro-aggression theory, “white privilege,” critical-race theory and 1000 other things designed to divide with lies. It is evil.

To paraphrase G.K. Chesterton, “Goods look a lot better when they come wrapped as gifts.” Everything is a gift, but the Left teaches just the opposite: to have a sense of entitlement, to believe you’re owed, to ever and always view our very large glass as half empty. Some have asked, quite naively, how it is that despite Flanagan’s pathetic performance as a reporter, he was hired by more than one media outlet and given chance after chance to right the ship. Well, golly gee, Cletus, it’s a mystery.

Flanagan was clearly an affirmative-action hire, enjoying the daily-double victim status of being black and homosexual. And that was part of the problem: too much was given to him on a silver platter — because of liberalism.

There have been many articles in recent years about how college graduates today enter the workforce with unrealistic expectations about their economic self-worth and starting salary. We hear about how so many of them can’t tolerate criticism and rejection; act as if their own feelings are inordinately important and should command respect; and how they lack a sense of propriety, a grasp of their place in a workplace’s hierarchy. As a consequence, they may barge into an office to vent their feelings, even if it’s neither the time nor the place.

This is all the result of liberal parenting, of the psychobabble disgorged by the likes of Dr. Benjamin Spock. It’s no wonder many young people today have little sense of just hierarchies — their permissive liberal parents didn’t establish a just hierarchy in the home. Instead, they acted as if their family was a dysfunctional democracy and junior a special-interest group that political correctness dictated must be coddled and catered to. Junior seldom heard the word “No!” uttered in exclamatory fashion; junior seldom had to delay gratification; junior got participation trophies just for showing up. He was treated as a little prince around whom the world revolved. He was marinated in “self-esteem” pap in schools, telling him how great and special he was. The result? Junior and many of his peers (not that he imagined he had any peers) grew up to be narcissists.

For the past 100 years our society has been under attack by the progressive liberals. This attack has escalated in the last 20 years and has skyrocketed since 2008. Liberals have managed to get God out of schools so there are no more absolutes of good and evil. The Ten Commandments are considered outdated and in many cases banned from the public square. These commandments have been the basis for are laws for the past 239 years. The rule of law is being replaced by the rule of the majority.

Everything is gray and moral equivalencies rule the day. University deans and professors threaten students with failing grades if they do not pledge allegiance to their agendas. Even speech is being regulated with the banning of certain words such as “alien” and “illegal” when referring to immigrants who unlawfully entered the country. Other words like “him” and “her” are even being banned from many university classrooms as the progressive liberals constantly attempt to alter the narrative to conform to their agenda.

Every good progressive liberal will tell you that given enough money and power they can make our Constitutional Republic into the Utopia of Sir Thomas Moore and not our Founders belief in the self-government of John Locke. Since Cain killed Able with a stone evil has existed in this world. This evil has manifested itself through history in many ways. It has shown itself from attacks by individuals on other individuals to the democide of governments.

[Democide is a term revived and redefined by the political scientist R. J. Rummel (1932-2014) as "the murder of any person or people by their government, including genocide, politicide and mass murder." Most of this democide was carried out under the banner of liberalism in the aim of creating their version of Utopia, i.e., Stalin, Hitler, Mao, Mussolini, and today’s radical Islam.]

Today’s progressive liberals just cannot face the fact that evil exists. To do so would force them to realize that there must be good and if there is good there must be a God. They just can’t wrap their minds around this concept. Instead they look for moral equivalents to justify their beliefs.

When a deputy sheriff, TV reporters, theater audiences, grade school students and teachers, or church goers are murdered by evil or insane people the progressive liberal cannot look to the person behind the gun, knife, or ax. Liberals will blame guns. This is partially because, unlike with Dylann Roof, they can’t blame Confederate flags or 19th-century statues. But it’s also because they’re incapable of putting the blame where it really belongs: the man in the mirror.

Guns don’t kill people. Liberalism does.

The Wishful Thinking of the Anti-Gun Crowd

“No freeman shall be debarred the use of arms within his own lands.” — Thomas Jefferson, Draft Constitution for the State of Virginia — 1776

Most people not raised in the presence of firearms demonstrate possess a fear of guns and are uncomfortable in their presence. In all my years of discussing the ownership of firearms with people (mostly liberals) I have found this to be the case.

As a teenager I owned my first gun, a .22 caliber bolt action Remington rifle. I used the rifle for target and varmint shooting. I was pretty good with targets, but did not have that much luck with the varmints. I soon graduated to a 12 gauge shotgun for hunting and was instructed in its use by neighbor, a WWII navy veteran. Eventually I was trained in the use of .306 caliber repeating rifle, revolvers, and semi-automatic hand guns. I learned the power of the gun and the responsibility gun ownership placed on the owner. I was never afraid to handle a firearm.

On the other hand I know and have known numerous people who do not own a firearm of any class and have never handled one. They have an unnatural fear of firearms as my father did of driving an automobile until he moved to California and had no choice but to learn to drive and purchased his first vehicle. Their first argument against the ownership of a firearm is; “why do we need a gun for home protection, that’s what the police are for.” Most of these folks believe guns should be limited to the military and law enforcement.

In a conversation with a deputy sheriff of the county I live in a few years ago at a neighborhood watch meeting about the ownership of a firearm for personal defense here is what he had to say; “the police will rarely, if not never, be able to get to your home in time to prevent a crime. I cannot tell you to go out and buy a gun to protect your home and family, but I have several personal defense guns in my house.” This law enforcement officer was right on target. By the time the police arrive the damage is already done and they become investigators not crime stoppers.

I have two German shepherds at home and a sign on the gate to my side yard stating “Beware of Dog” with a picture of a mean German shepherd. Sometimes I wonder it a sign in front lawn had a picture of a gun with the words “This is a gun zone.” While the dogs a very good and give ample and loud warnings of people at the door I don’t know if they could handle an intruder with malevolent intent.

To the anti-gun crowd, including educators, guns are evil most of them seem to feel. The guns of the police they'd summon to their aid are bad too. The make believe guns boys play cowboy with are bad too, even the gun a second grader might pencil in when drawing a picture of an "army man" is evil. It's a key tenet of their wishful thinking.

And a very strange brand of wishful thinking it is. Instead of hoping for something to come their way, they're wishing for nothing to happen. Its symbol might be a monkey with it hands over its eyes because it's principal doctrine is that if you can't see any evil, refuse to see any evil, then it doesn't exist. Of course it's only a variation of the old notion that if you don't look a lion in the eye he won't charge. But it's what these people believe. Which is why schools run by similar believers once prohibited any discussion of 9/11, any videotapes, photographs or indeed any reference to it at all. Again if you don't see evil or don't learn about it, talk it out, try to learn the lessons it teaches you, then it doesn't exist, and won't have any power over you.

Without any evidence at all that they're right, indeed in the face of any number of horrible examples proving them wrong, they cling to this belief. Because on some level they believe they want to convince themselves that they're "better than that", better than Virginia Tech, better than Columbine, better than those awful images of people jumping from the twin towers. That they're different somehow — they’re special.

But educators should know something about history. This is an old story and has its roots in a tragedy every bit as compelling as Sandy Hook School. It is the story of Lindisfarne.

An island connected to northern England's coast by a tidal causeway. A holy place, in fact its name today is Holy Island and 1219 years ago (793) it was Christendom's most prominent experiment with what we today would call a Gun Free School Zone. But what happened there should have proved for all time that covering one's eyes, pretending that demons don't exist, that you're somehow "better than that", is worse than futile. Criminally worse.

Lindisfarne was a monastery, renowned for its non-violence, dedicated to learning, to the idea that in the tumult of the early Middle Ages, man could, should be, was "better than that." Gloriously "better than that." And for a while people believed along with them in this "right message" and endowed Lindisfarne with riches, sang its praises in ten thousand churches.

Its ruins today are still a beacon atop a spire of high rock, surmounted by sheer stone walls, far above the everyday concerns of this world.

But they are ruins because one dark in the eighth century Lindisfarne's rock and walls were scaled by Vikings holding their swords in their mouths. Demons out of the northern seas who chased the unarmed monks from room to room in the monastery, butchering them for sport, sacking their golden altar and trampling their precious books underfoot. An event which shook Christendom to its core.

Why did it happen? Quite simply because the killers were drawn by the defenselessness of the place, by Lindisfarne's "right message", by the fact that Lindisfarne abjured violence and trusted as school administrators trust today, in never looking the lion in the eye. Above all by the fact that Lindisfarne would not suffer the presence of armed men who might defend it.

Today most of us don't even remember that there once was such a place. Even though we keep repeating the same mistake it made. We don't remember what we should have learned then; that weakness will, sooner or later, summon horror as Adam Lanza was summoned to Sandy Hook School.

Killers always look for targets of easy access and no apparent means of defense. This tactic goes back hundreds of years. Adam Lanza chose the one target where he had the best chance of not encountering armed citizens, a gun-free school zone. Just as the Vikings didn't choose to assault one of the many fortified castles with armed men elsewhere on the coast but instead chose Lindisfarne. Just as Eric Harris and Dyland Klebold didn't choose a gun show to assault, a rodeo, a police station but instead chose Columbine.

I'm not certain what the solution is. No one wants schools to become armed camps with sandbagged revetments, passwords and barbed wire. Besides the evil one is a liar painted with many tongues and so the monsters who wish to kill children often adopt other techniques. Walter Seifert in Cologne Germany constructed a flame thrower he put to use through an elementary school's windows burning to death eight students, two teachers and horribly maiming many others. You have the three men who buried an entire school bus load of children in California. You have poisoners, knife wielding maniacs, stranglers, bombers, kidnappers and pedophile killers. And Timothy McVeigh used a rented Ryder truck and fertilizer to take 168 lives, including 19 children under the age of 6, and injured more than 680 people at the Alfred P. Murrah Federal Building in downtown Oklahoma City. Should we ban Ryder trucks and fertilizer?

Instead it strikes me that any solution has to be rooted in natural affinity. The relationship of parent to child, neighbor to neighbor, grandparent to grandchild. Not in the fatuous belief that stone hearted killers will obey the resolutions of school boards, the acts of Congress or indeed do anything but laugh at any amount of wishful thinking.

Considering this point one might recall that at Columbine there were no such bonds which could gather and stop Eric Harris and Dylan Klebold. Nor was one considered necessary. Instead there were only rules grounded in a lot of wishful thinking — rules which Eric Harris and Dyland Klebold ignored. So despite a surplus of bravery among individual teachers and students and the presence of an armed sheriff's deputy on duty, who heard the first shots and didn't run towards them as he would have if they were his children, 13 people died.

And there was the school principal clueless about the murderers, who couldn't recall Eric Harris and Dyland Klebold student walking the halls in black trench coats in the days prior to the killings and threatening other students. We can believe his testimony or not but one thing we know for sure is that he wasn't looking for any lions to stare down. Finally there were the despicable parents of Eric Harris and Dyland Klebold who ignored or were oblivious to the collection of weapons and their bizarre behavior. Mothers and fathers in authority over their children who simply wished nothing bad would happen.

And so the concept of a gun free school zone established by authority turned out to be as much of a joke at Columbine as it was the other day in Newtown, Connecticut or at the Century 16 Multiplex movie theater in Aurora, Colorado where 12 were killed and 58 injured — the only theater of 7 in the area that was a gun free zone. This is the same idea that was shown to be a farce at Lindisfarne 1219 years ago.

Now I understand that public education today is a determinedly feminine institution. But they have tremendous leeway under the law and so one thing school administrators and teachers might consider doing is admit the fact that they have no more idea on how to physically defend children than they do about how to build a space shuttle with their second grade paper doll scissors. But among the parents of their pupils are many men who do have that experience and training. There are former or current police officers, soldiers and Marines. There are people who've been shot at and who've shot. People who have had to winkle armed men out of a closed room and take them down — men who will deter evil by their presence.

So for once why can't some hapless school administrator call them in? Ask them what they would do to keep these children safe and then heed what they say. Perhaps take note of what the Harrold Independent School District, in Texas does. It encourages teachers to concealed bring guns to work after they are trained and certified in their use.

In the City of Man people want there to be a reason for everything. People should have a logical reason for any significant thing they do. Life should make sense. Humans so strongly feel the desire for ratiocination to triumph over chaos and that Charles Williams once remarked that “Hell is (the) indefinite.” No matter how bad a tragedy occurs, we try to find a reason or a purpose behind it.

People reach for the easy explanation first. If Lanza didn’t have a gun then he never could have killed innocent children. Let’s immediately ban the guns. We could do a better job of securing the grounds of our schools. Let’s make every place that has children a gun-free zone. The world would be a better place if something that simplistic could succeed.

Yet making murder weapons illegal does very little to deter murderers. Some argue that it makes them even bolder and more sadistic. Adam Lanza, Brenda Spencer, Seung-Hui Cho and the Columbine High School shooters all had the added advantage of no armed resistance as they went on their insane rampages. Cho succeeded in buying handguns despite his diagnosed mental health problems because he simply lied on the background check.

We can’t stop people from getting anything they strongly or desperately want. These things could be guns, drugs, or even the coerced services of child prostitutes. Criminals will always find a way to provide it for a price. We can’t prevent Adam Lanza from getting a weapon even if Dick’s Sporting Goods follows Federal law to the letter and turns down Mr. Lanza’s legal tender 72 hours before he commits his atrocities using another set of guns. We are not going to end child pornography or sexual exploitation, win the War on Drugs or prevent the next mass shooting by focusing on any of these things.

We are going to have to realize that society rife with single-parent families, a tendency to completely desensitize people to violence and understate the sacred value of life, and where people think “I don’t like Mondays” is actually a funny piece of social commentary. It is not a safe place to raise our children.

The anti-gun crowds of educators, intellectuals, and politicians all have agenda-driven arguments for their distain of firearms. Because they do not recognize the existence of evil, due to their secular philosophies, they believe guns are the root cause of the violence in our society. In fact it has been proven that as gun ownership increases crimes against law abiding citizens decreases. (See John Lott’s 2010 book More Guns, Less Crime.) In fact 1927, according to the FBI, had the largest number of mass shootings in the history of the nation.

Economists John Lott and William Landes conducted a groundbreaking study in 1999, and found that a common theme of mass shootings is that they occur in places where guns are banned and killers know everyone will be unarmed, such as shopping malls and schools.

I heard a radio interview with Mr. Lott after the Newtown shooting, and he confirmed that nothing has changed to alter his findings. He noted that the Aurora shooter, who killed twelve people earlier this year, had a choice of seven movie theaters that were showing the Batman movie he was obsessed with. All were within a 20-minute drive of his home. The Cinemark Theater the killer ultimately chose wasn’t the closest, but it was the only one that posted signs saying it banned concealed handguns carried by law-abiding individuals. All of the other theaters allowed the approximately 4 percent of Colorado adults who have a concealed-handgun permit to enter with their weapons.

“Disarming law-abiding citizens leaves them as sitting ducks,” Lott said. “A couple hundred people were in the Cinemark Theater when the killer arrived. There is an extremely high probability that one or more of them would have had a legal concealed handgun with him if they had not been banned.”

Lott offers a final damning statistic: “With just one single exception, the attack on congresswoman Gabrielle Giffords in Tucson in 2011, every public shooting since at least 1950 in the U.S. in which more than three people have been killed has taken place where citizens are not allowed to carry guns.”

There is no evidence that private holders of concealed-carry permits (which are either easy to obtain or not even required in more than 40 states) are any more irresponsible with firearms than the police. According to a 2005 to 2007 study by researchers at the University of Wisconsin and Bowling Green State University, police nationwide were convicted of firearms violations at least at a 0.002 percent annual rate. That’s about the same rate as holders of carry permits in the states with “shall issue” laws.

Despite all of this evidence, the magical thinking behind gun-free zones is unlikely to be questioned in the wake of the Newtown killings. Having such zones gives people a false sense of security, and woe to the politician or business owner who now suggests that a “gun-free zone” revert back to what critics would characterize as “a wild, wild West” status. Indeed, shortly after the Cinemark attack in Colorado, the manager of the nearby Northfield Theaters changed its policy and began banning concealed handguns.

In all of the fevered commentary over the Newtown killings, you will hear little discussion of the fact that we may be making our families and neighbors less safe by expanding the places where guns aren’t allowed. But that is precisely what we may be doing. Both criminals and the criminally insane have shown time and time again that those laws are the least of the problems they face as they carry out their evil deeds

We live in an age of moral relativism that, having no foundation on which to stand, is rapidly descending into nihilism — the absence of morality or any justification for it. I'm going to leave the shooter's intentions alone for the time, as I'm sure those will be discussed at length for weeks.

I'm talking about nihilism not just in the shooter, but in the broader culture that attempts to understand these horrific events without a moral reference point. In the aftermath, we attempt to get more and more legalistic, bureaucratic, and technocratic to solve problems that can't be legislated away.

These events are products of sick, evil people in an increasingly sick culture that has no stomach for "outdated" concepts like absolute right and wrong. We believe if we could just pass enough well-worded laws, we could eliminate this behavior from society. We treat these tragedies as outputs, thinking that we can just tinker with the inputs enough to get our desired results. This is the basic believe of the progressive masterminds.

For God's sake, the bodies were still warm and we were already talking about piles upon piles of statistics, as if the problem of violent gun crime could be solved mathematically with some study or Congressional inquiry. I'm afraid that, absent the presence of morality in our discussions of these murders, we have no tools to solve the underlying problems except legalism and policy making by the intellectual masterminds. People will keep fixating on the problems with guns because we've become woefully inadequate at talking about problems inherent in humanity.

It always amuses me in a pitying way when I hear people retreat even further into nihilism after an event like this by making that old appeal to the "Argument of Evil" which asks, "If there truly is a good god, why does he allow such evil deeds?" As if the very presence of evil invalidates the possibility or under-pinning for good!

Forgive my frustration, but what right do we have to even speak about evil in our society? We are so immersed in violence, greed, sex, instant gratification, and materialism that we've lost all sense of what evil even looks like. To know evil, you must first know good. And while we work ourselves into a righteous huff over "evil" for 2% of the year when these disgusting acts occur, for the other 98% we desperately try to rebel against all forms of conventional morality - that cramps our style, doesn't it?

A child one minute before passing through the birth canal can have a pair of surgical scissors put through his or her brain without society batting an eye. A fully formed, breathing, crying, desperate, helpless baby who is the result of a botched abortion has no entitlement to life in parts of this "enlightened" Western world. And we talk about "evil"?

Government officials pass guns to cartels to slaughter civilians, and we get to talk about "evil"?

It is all so sad. But the bullet ridden bodies of those little angels and angelic teachers in Newtown should show us that wishful thinking won't work, has never worked and will never work. If it did, we'd only have to wish those children back.

Religious Liberty in the Administrative State

“No person, demeaning himself in a peaceable and orderly manner, shall ever be molested on account of his mode of worship, or religious sentiments, in the said territories.

Religion, morality, and knowledge being necessary to good government and the happiness of mankind, schools and the means of education shall forever be encouraged.” The Northwest Ordinance, 1787.

The Northwest Ordinance (formally An Ordinance for the Government of the Territory of the United States, North-West of the River Ohio, and also known as the Freedom Ordinance or "The Ordinance of 1787") was an act of the Congress of the Confederation of the United States, passed July 13, 1787. The primary effect of the ordinance was the creation of the Northwest Territory as the first organized territory of the United States out of the region south of the Great Lakes, north and west of the Ohio River, and east of the Mississippi River.

On August 7, 1789, President George Washington signed the Northwest Ordinance of 1789 into law after the newly created U.S. Congress reaffirmed the Ordinance with slight modifications under the Constitution. The Ordinance purported to be not merely legislation that could later be amended by Congress, but rather "the following articles shall be considered as Articles of compact between the original States and the people and states in the said territory, and forever remain unalterable, unless by common consent.

Arguably the single most important piece of legislation passed by members of the earlier Continental Congresses other than the Declaration of Independence, it established the precedent by which the federal government would be sovereign and expand westward across North America with the admission of new states, rather than with the expansion of existing states and their established sovereignty under the Articles of Confederation. It is the most important legislation that Congress has passed with regard to American public domain lands. The U.S. Supreme Court recognized the authority of the Northwest Ordinance of 1789 within the applicable Northwest Territory as constitutional in Strader v. Graham, 51 U.S. 82, 96, 97 (1851), but did not extend the Ordinance to cover the respective states once they were admitted to the Union.

The prohibition of slavery in the territory had the practical effect of establishing the Ohio River as the boundary between free and slave territory in the region between the Appalachian Mountains and the Mississippi River. This division helped set the stage for national competition over admitting free and slave states, the basis of a critical question in American politics in the 19th century until the Civil War.

The Natural Rights provisions of the ordinance foreshadowed the Bill of Rights, the first ten amendments to the U.S. Constitution. Many of the concepts and guarantees of the Ordinance of 1787 were incorporated in the U.S. Constitution and the Bill of Rights. In the Northwest Territory, various legal and property rights were enshrined, religious tolerance was proclaimed, and it was enunciated that since "Religion, morality, and knowledge, being necessary to good government and the happiness of mankind, schools and the means of education shall forever be encouraged." The right of habeas corpus was written into the charter, as was freedom of religious worship and bans on excessive fines and cruel and unusual punishment. Trial by jury and a ban on ex post facto laws were also rights granted.

The Northwest Ordinance was a clear, unambiguous expression of the beliefs of our Founders. There could be no doubt that this new Congress believed that education and morality should go hand in hand and that as long as the religious practices of one did not violate the social compact or encourage criminal acts such as human sacrifice or refusal to support the common defense of the nation. Religion was not only to be tolerated, it was to be encouraged.

In his 1781 Notes on the State of Virginia, Query XVIII: Manners Thomas Jefferson said:

“With the morals of the people, their industry also is destroyed. For in a warm climate, no man will labour for himself who can make another labour for him. This is so true, that of the proprietors of slaves a very small proportion indeed are ever seen to labour. And can the liberties of a nation be thought secure when we have removed their only firm basis, a conviction in the minds of the people that these liberties are of the gift of God? That they are not to be violated but with his wrath? Indeed I tremble for my country when I reflect that God is just: that his justice cannot sleep for ever: that considering numbers, nature and natural means only, a revolution of the wheel of fortune, an exchange of situation, is among possible events: that it may become probable by supernatural interference! The Almighty has no attribute which can take side with us in such a contest.--But it is impossible to be temperate and to pursue this subject through the various considerations of policy, of morals, of history natural and civil. We must be contented to hope they will force their way into every one’s mind. I think a change already perceptible, since the origin of the present revolution. The spirit of the master is abating, that of the slave rising from the dust, his condition mollifying, the way I hope preparing, under the auspices of heaven, for a total emancipation, and that this is disposed, in the order of events, to be with the consent of the masters, rather than by their extirpation.”

Here Jefferson is referring the immorality of slavery and the wrath of God that will descend on those who support this policy. Jefferson made no bones in referring to God, as he did in the Declaration four times, and warning that an immoral nation devoid of God would no doubt perish.

In his 1796 Farewell Address to the nation George Washington stated:

“Of all the dispositions and habits which lead to political prosperity, Religion and morality are indispensable supports. In vain would that man claim the tribute of Patriotism who should labour to subvert these great Pillars of human happiness, these firmest props of the duties of Men and citizens. The mere Politician, equally with the pious man ought to respect and to cherish them. A volume could not trace all their connections with private and public felicity. Let it simply be asked where is the security for property, for reputation, for life, if the sense of religious obligation desert the oaths, which are the instruments of investigation in Courts of Justice? And let us with caution indulge the supposition that morality can be maintained without religion. Whatever may be conceded to the influence of refined education on minds of peculiar structure, reason and experience both forbid us to expect that National morality can prevail in exclusion of religious principle. ’Tis substantially true, that virtue or morality is a necessary spring of popular government. The rule indeed extends with more or less force to every species of free Government. Who that is a sincere friend to it, can look with indifference upon attempts to shake the foundation of the fabric.”

Washington, however, offered on caveat to absolute religious freedom in his September, 1789 letter to the Annual Meeting of Quakers when he gently reminded them of their obligation to support the common defense. In his letter Washington stated:

“Government being, among other purposes, instituted to protect the persons and consciences of men from oppression, it certainly is the duty of rulers, not only to abstain from it themselves, but, according to their stations, to prevent it in others.

The liberty enjoyed by the people of these states of worshiping Almighty God agreeably to their consciences, is not only among the choicest of their blessings, but also of their rights. While men perform their social duties faithfully, they do all that society or the state can with propriety demand or expect; and remain responsible only to their Maker for their religion, or modes of faith, which they may prefer or profess.

Your principles and conduct are well known to me; and it is doing the people called Quakers no more than justice to say, that (except their declining to share with others the burden of the common defense) there is no denomination among us, who are more exemplary and useful citizens.

I assure you very explicitly, that in my opinion the conscientious scruples of all men should be treated with great delicacy and tenderness; and it is my wish and desire, that the laws may always be as extensively accommodated to them, as a due regard to the protection and essential interests of the nation may justify and permit.”

Once again we see how our Founders viewed the value of religion in the life of the nation and its schools.

Even the Wilsonian Progressives believed in the value of religion and morality in our national affairs and government policies. They believed in criminal and civil laws that would protect one citizen from the actions of another. This changed with the advent of the Post 1960s Progressives when they embarked on a campaign of anything goes sexual liberation and a complete intolerance for religious institutions.

Post-1960s Progressivism has steadily eroded religious liberty and the freedom of association in America. Measures such as the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act and many anti-discrimination laws express a new understanding of rights that rejects the Founders’ view of religious liberty and the freedom of private associations to govern themselves. Recent Progressivism follows the early Progressive belief that effective freedom requires government to redistribute resources in order to provide equal access to the goods that promote mental development and that make life comfortable. This redistributive agenda is combined with a new emphasis on the empowerment of victim groups, sexual liberation, and an aversion to traditional Christianity and Judaism that requires government intervention in the internal affairs of private organizations. Religious liberty today is divorced from the freedom of association and the free exercise of religion, which the Founders understood to be essential for a free society.

The Founders’ conception of religious liberty was anchored in the belief that the natural right of liberty—and religious liberty—meant not only that all persons may worship God in the way each thinks best, but also that all are permitted to follow what they believe to be God’s laws in their daily life outside of church. The Founders understood, however, that actions based on religion are limited by the purpose of the social compact—the security of rights. No one has a right to disturb the public peace, to obstruct others in their religious worship, or to incite crimes.

While the Founders believed that religion, especially Christianity, is helpful to the cause of liberty because it encourages the virtues necessary for the survival of a free society, they held that government involvement in religious organizations must be limited by the very purpose of government: to secure the equal natural rights of citizens to life, liberty, and property. Denial of the rights to religious liberty and to freedom of association violates the right to liberty.

In practice, liberty—including religious liberty—means that individuals are free to organize and conduct their affairs as they see fit through self-governing private associations. Contrary to today’s practice, the Founders understood that churches, businesses, and other private associations had the right to determine all internal policies, including rules for membership, employment, and conduct, free from government interference. As long as these entities do not harm the rights to life, liberty, or property, they should be free to manage their internal affairs.

After 1965, Progressives adopted a new attitude towards religion and private associations, viewing both as threats to effective or positive freedom. The redistributive agenda of early Progressivism required the violation of the natural right to property, but in general the early Progressives supported the traditional family and liberal Christianity. Post-1965 Progressivism (in the interest of sexual liberation) explicitly attacks Christianity and rejects the older morality which supported the traditional family.

One of the first steps along this road to the rejection of morality in our public education system was the 1963 Supreme Court case of Abington v. Schempp. This was a case in which the Court decided 8–1 in favor of the respondent, Edward Schempp, and declared school-sponsored Bible reading in public schools in the United States to be unconstitutional. Associate Justice William Brennan wrote in his concurring opinion:

“[I]t is implicit in the history and character of American public education that the public schools serve a uniquely public function: the training of American citizens in an atmosphere free of parochial, divisive, or separatist influences of any sort. Attendance at the public schools has never been compulsory. [The Constitution reserves] such a choice to the individual parent. The choice which is thus preserved is between a public secular education with its uniquely democratic values, and some form of private or sectarian education, which offers values of its own.”

Not only did this decision fly in the face of the Northwest Ordinance and the intent of the Founders it set the stage for most of the tyrannical laws against religious beliefs we live with today. Used as stare deices for lower courts to follow in subsequent decisions involving the free practice of religion in public schools and the public square such as; banning the singing of Christmas Carols, not allowing Christmas trees on public property, punishing students for wishing a fellow student a “Merry Christmas” or exchanging a Christmas Card. This is tyranny by a minority group that views itself as victims as they feel offended by these practices — practices that do them no harm. This was not the intent of the Founders when speaking of religious tolerance.

Another landmark case along the road to our throwing organized religion’s moral convictions and tenants was the 2003 case of Lawrence v. Texas, decided by a 6-3 vote of the Court.

In this case the Court struck down the sodomy law in Texas and, by extension, invalidated sodomy laws in thirteen other states, making same-sex sexual activity legal in every U.S. state and territory. The Court overturned its previous ruling on the same issue in the 1986 case Bowers v. Hardwick, where it upheld a challenged Georgia statute and did not find a constitutional protection of sexual privacy.

Lawrence explicitly overruled Bowers, holding that it had viewed the liberty interest too narrowly. The Court held that intimate consensual sexual conduct was part of the liberty protected by substantive due process under the Fourteenth Amendment. Lawrence invalidated similar laws throughout the United States that criminalized sodomy between consenting adults acting in private, whatever the sex of the participants.

In this case Anthony Kennedy wrote for the majority:

“These matters, involving the most intimate and personal choices a person may make in a lifetime, choices central to personal dignity and autonomy, are central to the liberty protected by the Fourteenth Amendment. At the heart of liberty is the right to define one’s own concept of existence, of meaning, of the universe, and of the mystery of human life. Beliefs about these matters could not define the attributes of personhood were they formed under compulsion of the State.”

It seems that the Court uses the 14^th Amendment time and time again to override the 10^th Amendment

Justice Antonin Scalia wrote a dissent, which Chief Justice William H. Rehnquist and Justice Clarence Thomas joined. Scalia objected to the Court's decision to revisit Bowers, pointing out many decisions from lower courts that relied on Bowers that might now need to be reconsidered. He noted that the same rationale used to overturn Bowers could have been used to overturn Roe v. Wade, which the Justices in the majority in Lawrence had recently upheld in Planned Parenthood v. Casey. Scalia also criticized the majority opinion for failing to give the same respect to stare decisis that three of those in the majority had insisted on in Casey.

Scalia wrote that if the court was not prepared to validate laws based on moral choices as it had done in Bowers, state laws against bigamy, same-sex marriage, adult incest, prostitution, masturbation, adultery, fornication, bestiality, and obscenity would not prove sustainable.

He wrote that:

“Today's opinion is the product of a Court, which is the product of a law-profession culture, that has largely signed on to the so-called homosexual agenda, by which I mean the agenda promoted by some homosexual activists directed at eliminating the moral opprobrium that has traditionally attached to homosexual conduct. The Court has taken sides in the culture war, departing from its role of assuring, as neutral observer, that the democratic rules of engagement are observed.”

He cited the majority opinion's concern that the criminalization of sodomy could be the basis for discrimination against homosexuals as evidence that the majority ignored the views of most Americans:

“So imbued is the Court with the law profession's anti-anti-homosexual culture, that it is seemingly unaware that the attitudes of that culture are not obviously "mainstream"; that in most States what the Court calls "discrimination" against those who engage in homosexual acts is perfectly legal.”

He continued: "Let me be clear that I have nothing against homosexuals, or any other group, promoting their agenda through normal democratic means." The majority's "invention of a brand-new 'constitutional right'", he wrote, showed it was "impatient of democratic change."

The case attracted much public attention, and a large number of amici curiae ("friends of the court") briefs were filed. Its outcome was celebrated by gay rights advocates, who hoped that further legal advances might result as a consequence. And it did!

Now we have another special victim group demanding a redistribution of resources and special protection under the color of law. If a religious institution or secular organizations like the Boy Scouts they are taken to court by the Gay Rights activists demanding their rights to be a part of the organization even if they are not welcomed. If a business like the photographer in New Mexico refuses to photograph a same sex wedding the photographer is fined $6,637.97. What if a Gay photographer would only photograph same sex commitment ceremonies? Would they suffer the same government sanctions. I doubt it. In this case Gay Rights trump religious rights.

To implement the new view of freedom from Christianity and moral self-restraint, government involves itself ever more pervasively in the internal affairs of churches and businesses. Since these private associations all have employees, they are thus subject to anti-discrimination provisions that actively promote affirmative action policies geared toward sexual liberation and the redistribution of resources to supposed victim groups. Private associations are not allowed to govern themselves, and businesses are often prohibited from treating religion as a positive good. Religious liberty is increasingly confined to the freedom to worship. The natural right to liberty and the specific application of that right as religious liberty and the freedom of association are denied by the contemporary Progressive view of religious liberty.

A Person of Little Integrity

“The supreme quality for leadership is unquestionably integrity. Without it, no real success is possible, no matter whether it is on a section gang, a football field, in an army, or in an office.” — Dwight D. Eisenhower

Colin Powell’s latest self-serving book, “It Worked for Me: In Life and Leadership,” Colin Powell is filled with vivid experiences and lessons learned that have shaped the legendary public service career of the four-star general and former Secretary of State Colin Powell. At its heart are Powell's "Thirteen Rules"—notes he gathered over the years and that now form the basis of his leadership presentations given throughout the world. Powell's short but sweet rules—among them, "Get mad, then get over it" and "Share credit"—are illustrated by revealing personal stories that introduce and expand upon his principles for effective leadership: conviction, hard work, and, above all, respect for others. In work and in life, Powell writes, "it's about how we touch and are touched by the people we meet. It's all about the people."

Colin Powell, born April 5, 1937, is an American statesman and a retired four-star general in the United States Army. He was the 65th United States Secretary of State, serving under President George W. Bush from 2001 to 2005. He was the first African American to serve in that position. During his military career, Powell also served as National Security Advisor (1987–1989), as Commander of the U.S. Army Forces Command (1989) and as Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff (1989–1993), holding the latter position during the Gulf War. He was the first, and so far the only, African American to serve on the Joint Chiefs of Staff.

Most Americans did not know much about Powell until after the 1991 Gulf War (Operation Desert Storm) when he skyrocketed into the public spotlight for his perceived leadership in defeating the forces of Sadam Hussein. The public believed, through a great media campaign, that Powell was the brains behind the quick defeat of the Iraqi Forces when it was actually General Norman Schwarzkopf who led the coalition forces into battle. This would have tantamount to laying all the credit for our defeat of the Nazis in WWII to General George C. Marshall, the Army Chief of Staff rather than Dwight Eisenhower the leader of the allied coalition in Europe and chief planner of the D-Day invasion.

In the ensuing years Powell, a professed Republican, was often considered a presidential candidate, but he never took the bait. Instead he hired on with George W. Bush and became his chief foreign policy advisor during the 2000 presidential campaign and eventually Bush’s Secretary of State.

Dan Foomkin writes in the Huffington Post:

“In his new book, former Secretary of State Colin Powell provides what may be the most authoritative confirmation yet that there was never a considered debate in the George W. Bush White House about whether going to war in Iraq was really a good idea.

In a chapter discussing what he calls his “infamous” February 2003 speech to the United Nations where he authoritatively presented what was later exposed as gross misinformation about Iraqi weapons of mass destruction, Powell notes that by that time, war “was approaching.”

“By then, the President did not think war could be avoided,” Powell writes. “He had crossed the line in his own mind, even though the NSC [National Security Council] had never met -- and never would meet -- to discuss the decision.”

The National Security Council, which was at the time led by Condoleezza Rice, is the president’s foremost advisory body for national security and foreign policy.

The book, “It Worked For Me: In Life and Leadership,” which will be released May 22, is largely a series of leadership parables from Powell, who now spends a lot of time on the lecture circuit. The Huffington Post obtained an advance copy.

Bush insisted in his own 2010 memoir, "Decision Points," that the invasion was something he came to support only reluctantly and after a long period of reflection. During his book tour, he even cast himself as “a dissenting voice” in the run-up to war. “I didn't wanna use force,” he said.

But Powell supports the increasingly well-documented conclusion that there was actually no decision-making point -- or decision-making process -- during the events between the 9/11 terrorist attacks and the March 2003 invasion of Iraq, which had nothing to do with those attacks.”

….

“In Powell’s explanation of how he came to provide the misleading and inaccurate account of Iraq’s WMD capability at the UN, the former secretary of state points an incriminating finger at Vice President Dick Cheney’s office -- confirming previous reports such as the one by Karen DeYoung, in her Powell biography.

In the new book, Powell describes his reaction to the initial “WMD case” from the White House. “It was a disaster. It was incoherent,” he writes. “I learned later that Scooter Libby, Vice President Cheney's chief of staff, had authored the unusable presentation, not the NSC staff. And several years after that, I learned from Dr. Rice that the idea of using Libby had come from the Vice President, who had persuaded the President to have Libby, a lawyer, write the ‘case’ as a lawyer's brief and not as an intelligence assessment.”

Powell gives himself credit for rejecting continued appeals from Cheney to add “assertions that had been rejected months earlier to links between Iraq and 9/11 and other terrorist acts.”

All in all, Powell acknowledges that the speech was “one of my most momentous failures, the one with the widest-ranging impact.” But he also concludes that “every senior U.S. official would have made the exact same case,”

He adds: “I get mad when bloggers accuse me of lying -- of knowing the information was false. I didn’t.”

I can recall of no incident where a former Secretary of State or Chief of the Army, since General George McClellan ran for the presidency as the candidate of the Democrat Party after being fired by Lincoln for his mishandling of the Union forces in the Civil War.

McClellan was nominated by the Democrats to run against Abraham Lincoln in the 1864 U.S. presidential election. Following the example of Winfield Scott, he ran as a U.S. Army general still on active duty; he did not resign his commission until Election Day, November 8, 1864. He supported continuation of the war and restoration of the Union (though not the abolition of slavery), but the party platform, written by Copperhead Clement Vallandigham of Ohio, was opposed to this position. The platform called for an immediate cessation of hostilities and a negotiated settlement with the Confederacy. McClellan was forced to repudiate the platform, which made his campaign inconsistent and difficult. He also was not helped by the party's choice for vice president, George H. Pendleton, a peace candidate from Ohio.

Powell, like McClellan, is a political animal more concerned with his reputation and place at the Washington political table than in is integrity. In a recent interview on the Sean Hannity FOX News Powell clamored for the lack of compromise with our political system. He focused most of his disparaging remarks against conservatives and Tea Party members. He also went on to claim our Founders were great compromisers. This is nonsense. You do not compromise on principles. Powel would still be a slave if Lincoln had compromised on the issue of slavery. We would still be a colony of Great Britain if our Founders had compromised on the Declaration of Independence.

Powell hasn't signaled yet whom he plans to endorse in this election cycle. He broke with his party to support President Barack Obama in 2008, but he stayed mum when asked this week if he planned to do the same this time around. White House spokesman Jay Carney said Tuesday that Obama "appreciated" Powell's endorsement in 2008 and gave reasons why he should back Obama again.

Powell noted last Wednesday that Romney has been "catching a lot of heck" from mainstream figures in the Republican foreign affairs community who he said "were kind of taken aback" by Romney's Russia claims.

"Look at the world. There is no pure competitor of the United States of America," he said. "All the problems we talk about in Afghanistan, Iraq, Iran — they count about 700 million people in a world of seven billion. What are the rest of them doing? They're increasing their economies, they're building wealth, they're educating their kids, and they’re building their infrastructure. That's what we need to be doing."

What Powell does not talk about is his lack of integrity when it comes to getting back a people he did not agree with. There are few spectacles more sad than to see a man burn down his own integrity. Watching someone who has lived their life according to a certain ethos, in this case I will be referring to “Duty. Honor. Country.”, and callously cast that lodestar aside for no discernible reason other than to settle a score shames those who witness the act nearly as much as it shames the perpetrator.

Some very few times we are given the opportunity to appropriately redress a wrong. I say appropriately because a wrong needs to be righted in the same manner in which it was inflicted. A private apology never atones for a public insult. When that opportunity presents itself and is declined one is left with no other possible conclusion than one is dealing with a person devoid of honor and integrity.

Last August retired general and former Secretary of State Colin Powell was presented with the golden opportunity to right a grave injustice he inflicted upon colleagues, upon the man to whom he owed his loyalty, and upon his nation. He not only declined to do so, he dismissed the notion that he had anything to do with the wrong.

Of course I’m referring to the infamous Valerie Plame Affair wherein a CIA employee operating in deep cover at CIA headquarters in Langley had her cover accidentally “blown” by the late Robert Novak after her blowhard husband wrote an op-ed about what he may or may not have learned while “drinking sweet mint tea” with various kleptocrats in Niger. We all know the story on that. The source was Deputy Secretary of State Richard Armitage and Vice President Dick Cheney’s chief of staff (I. Lewis "Scooter" Libby) was eventually and shamefully convicted of having different recollections of a conversation than did Tim Russert.

The Plame Affair re-entered the news last August with the publication of Vice President Cheney’s (say it again and savor the way it rolls off the tongue Vice President Cheney, Vice President Cheney) memoir, “In My Time: A Personal and Political Memoir.”

In his memoir, Vice President Cheney has this to say (by way of Politico):

“Cheney recalls that during the CIA leak investigation, Deputy Secretary of State Rich Armitage stayed silent: “And, it pains me to note, so did his boss, Colin Powell, whom Armitage told he was [Robert] Novak’s source on October 1, 2003. Less than a week later, there was a cabinet meeting. The press came in for a photo opportunity, and there were questions about who had leaked the information that Wilson’s wife worked at the CIA. The president said he didn’t know, but wanted the truth. Thinking back, I realize that one of the few people in the world who could have told him the truth, Colin Powell, was sitting right next to him.”

There is the Plame Affair in a nutshell.

All Colin Powell had to do to stop the budding scandal is stand up and tell the truth. Whether in private to his boss, President George Bush, or in public is immaterial.

Subsequently, Powell was invited on to Face the Nation to talk about Cheney’s book. This is what he had to say about his role in the Plame Affair:

“Then he goes on to talk about the Valerie Plame affair, and tries to lay it all off on Mister Rich Armitage in the State Department and me. But the fact of the matter is when Mister Armitage realized that he was the source for Bob Novak’s column that caused all the difficulty and he called me immediately, two days after the President launched the investigation and what we did was we called the Justice Department. They sent it over the FBI. The FBI had all the information that Mister Armitage’s participation in this immediately. And we called Al Gonzalez, the President’s counsel, and told him that we had information. The FBI asked us not to share any of this with anyone else, as did Mister Gonzalez. And so, if the White House operatives had come forward as readily as Mister Armitage had done, then we wouldn’t have gone on for two more months with the FBI trying to find out what happened in the White House. There wouldn’t have been special counsel appointed by the Justice Department who spent two years trying to get to the bottom of it. And we wouldn’t have the mess that we subsequently had. And so if the White House and the operatives in the White House and Mister Cheney’s staff and elsewhere in the White House had been as forthcoming with the FBI as Mister Armitage was, this problem would not have reached the dimensions that it reached.”

From this point on I’ll borrow heavily from the Washington Post’s housebroken conservative, Jennifer Rubin:

“The extent of the dishonesty is quite stunning. In a Cabinet meeting on October 7, 2003, the White House press corps bombarded President George W. Bush with questions about who the leaker was. Bush said he didn’t know, but there would be an investigation to get to the bottom of it. Powell, who had been told by Armitage just days earlier that Armitage was the leaker, sat there next to the president, stone silent. Not very loyal or honest, was it?

Moreover, the notion that Armitage’s slip was somehow inadvertent is belied by Bob Woodward’s taped interview in which Armitage repeatedly mentions Joe Wilson’s wife, evidently doing his best to get Plame’s identity out there. This was no slip of the tongue. Woodward testified that when he spoke to Libby sometime later that Libby never said anything about Plame.

At issue here is not simply Powell and Armitage’s deception and undermining of their commander in chief. There was a victim, one whom neither Powell or Armitage has ever apologized to. The person who ultimately paid the price for this was Scooter Libby. Had the president and the country known about Armitage, a special prosecutor would never have been appointed. Libby was eventually convicted on the basis of a he-said-he-said dispute between his recollection and that of the late Tim Russert. (Charges concerning Libby’s alleged comments to Judy Miller were dismissed, and he was acquitted on the count involving Matt Cooper.) A compelling case for Libby’s innocence can be found in this account by Stan Crock.”

I never had a problem understanding Powell’s discomfiture with the Bush Administration. If Powell was ever an actual Republican, he was of the Nelson Rockefeller variety. He was not up to competing with Donald Rumsfeld for influence, especially in the aftermath of 9/11. He was brought into the administration to give it credibility in foreign policy — and one can hardly recall without pain the image of him appearing with then-candidate George Bush on the campaign trail and looking like he’d rather be having a root canal — and found foreign policy playing the role of horse-holder to two wars. Having said that, he owed a debt of loyalty to the President who appointed him and to the nation. He also owned common courtesy to a fellow human being, Scooter Libby, whose career and reputation he helped destroy to settle some perceived slight. He still owes us all the candor he failed to deliver back in 2003, candor he eschews in his latest self-serving book.

He didn’t and in the process has proven himself to be a petty and inconsequential man.