Good warriors are not “just warriors”
A while back a writer bemoaned the fact (his take) that this country no longer had a “warrior” at its head. My interpretation was that he longed for that classic pair of George and Dick.
For me, I am glad we no longer have that kind of irresponsible kind of what that gentleman considers a “warrior.” It takes a good deal of good sense, intelligence, and objectivity to decide (and sell) what needs to be done, and great courage and dedication to take action —and later, to know when to stop. As we have found, it takes very little to start, but a great deal to stop. In the past 50 odd years we have seen two instances where people wanting to go to war have used lies (pardon me, erroneous misinformation) to justify actions they wished to take: Tonkin Gulf got us Viet Nam and something like 50,000 dead; supposed WMDs got us Iraq, maybe 7500 dead, and the collapse of the Middle East, just as was forecast. Afghanistan and pursuit of al Qaeda seemed reasonable, but four months later, when it became known that we weren’t about to catch them and we were in the middle of a civil war we should have stopped. But, of course, that would have taken courage.
On the other side, Harry Truman had tremendous courage and dedication to order the use of nuclear weapons that killed off perhaps 300,000 Japanese, but the alternative was the estimated cost of 250,000 American dead if an invasion was necessary. George H. W. Bush kept his head in the Kuwait crisis. Good read, good planning, good action, and the good judgement as to when enough was enough. He was informed enough to recognize that while Saddam was not a nice man, he was probably the lesser of political evils. More recently the Republican’s devil incarnate, Mr. Clinton, did the same kind of an action in Bosnia in evaluating need, aiding the Europeans, forestalling Russian intervention, and prudently getting out.
Seems to me the measure of a successful “warrior” is not the way he/she fights, but his use of good sense and courage to determine whether he needs to!
Guff Worth, Lakeport
Clinton’s email
The Republicans are really on to a scandal with the Hillary email deletions! Hillary was the wife of a two-term President, a Senator, and Secretary of State. She had the highest security clearance our country can bestow on an individual. Our government trusted her with our most important secrets…and the most important of all, her personal emails!
Indeed, her emails were and are more important than all of our government’s secrets. What would happen if the Russians or Chinese suddenly were able to get possession of these emails? They would find that Hillary had been communicating with her friends and family, revealing such state secrets as what her plans for the weekends were, what she and Bill would be doing on her days off, what movies she liked, and other revealing personal information.
Putin has been secreted away from the public lately, shamed, no doubt, that his security service missed this chance to steal important information that could be used by family-minded Russians on their holidays, relationships within their own families, and other vital information. One could go on and on about how Hillary has compromised our State secrets by chatting with her friends!
Of course, everyone knows that no email is really deleted unless the hard drive is reduced to pieces or the sector written over. Oh, and if Hillary is going to write over the messages, she’d better get started. 31,830 emails were eliminated by her lawyers as part of her private, personal emails, based on keywords, and so these emails are retrievable if the government wants to examine them. Regardless, after Hillary’s shameful behavior, I for one, demand that Hillary’s personal email account privileges be permanently revoked!
A citizen for greater governmental, personal email security,
Charles Moton, Lucerne
Oil rights
The Dems have been telling us for the last 40 years (that I can remember) that we need to get off of Middle Eastern Oil, so when we have a chance to do just that the Dems say NO! Could President Obama’s veto have anything to do with a big fat cat Dem donor telling him he would withhold $100 million in donations to the Democrat Party along with a threat of his friends withholding another $100 million, if he didn’t veto it? Democrat hypocrisy to the infinite degree.
We have a chance to procure oil from an ally who gave us a reliable source of oil, but oh no, lets put a stick in their eye. Canada will sell that oil to China, who is one of the worst industrialized nation polluter, where in Beijing you will not see the sun for weeks at a time and their pollution is off the charts on our scale, it’s unreal. You Dems rail against big corporations yet not a word about one man threatening to withhold $200 million and hardly a word in the lame stream media about this. This is not chump change. Hypocrisy to the infinite degree! But, oh no, lets invest in Solyndra and how did that workout? But, oh no, lets try that again and again and again. Which is the definition of insanity. Fact; it takes 3 therms of energy to produce 1 therm of nitrogen or roughly $16 per gal, so lets try that and watch it fall flat on it’s face like Solyndra.
Solyndra defrauded the American Taxpayers of $500+ million and nobody went to jail. Could it be because they were Dem donors?
Kind of like when the Dems sent almost $1 billion to California to set up ObamaCare. The money went to unions and Democrat allies which will take that money and a percentage of that will be funneled back to the Democrat Party as campaign contributions, pure money laundering!
And while we are at it, remember President Obama calling ISIS a JV Team? Now what? Or an interview with a woman who eats fruit loops in a bathtub! Just wonderful.
Mac McKay, Lakeport
Self deception
Variation is not just the spice of life; it’s the essence of life. We can’t see things move, for there has to be contrast for us to see or hear at all. Our eyes show us still pictures, forty per second; sense lag draws them together and we think we see things move. We can’t hear prolonged sounds; we hear frequent sound waves; sense lag joins them together and we think we hear tones. The changes are from sight to no sight to sight, from sound to no sound to sound. The same with smell, taste and touch. Our lives are filled with change, night and day, sleep and waking, hunger and repletion, thirst and quenching of thirst, youth and age, happiness and despair. We can’t abide constancy.
Sense lag brings our separate sensations together and gives us memory. Without memory, we could have no mind; without mind, we could not live. Constancy of any kind is a violation of nature. Marriage is not a natural institution; from the very vows that join we begin to resent the marital restrictions. All discipline is a distortion of nature; diligence runs counter to it; steady work is a natural absurdity; our behavioral self-control is impossible without an immediate goal in view. A goal is made immediate by language. Nature is distorted in the coils of speech. Our lives are formulated with words. Language makes an illusion and we strive for the illusory goals it makes appear before us. We live by self-deception, and but for silent words of self-deceit, would exist in roving tribes, a brother to the ape.
Dean Sparks, Lucerne
