The city where I went to college saw the North American convention of one of the more recent immigrant groups this Labor Day weekend. The usual speeches, workshops, fairs, and networking were there. As were the Democrats in force..several members of Congress, local officials, and DNC and state party honchos. They were playing their typical game while Republicans, in this very Republican of states, largely stayed away except for perfunctory addresses by the secretary of state. Once again, Republicans gave a walk over to Democrats..as they have time and again, out of habit and history. The irony is that this immigrant community, like so many from Asia, is full of people custom made for Republicans..except that the Republicans are largely nonchalant and clueless. In the convention hall, full of children of all ages, nary a child was there who came from a broken home nor were there any parents who were not college graduates or small business entrepreneurs. Even the most liberal Democratic members of Congress from California who showed up, spoke of ‘family values’ and entirely avoided their signature rhetoric on gay ‘rights’, abortion on demand, and NEA run schools. These liberal Dems are smart, they know full well that promoting same-sex ‘marriage’ or tax-payer funded infanticide wasn’t gonna get them anywhere with this crowd where education, marriage, children, and hard work are words with substantive meaning.

 

Democrats know how to court immigrants. Republicans, by and large, keep missing the boat, literally and figuratively.

A half way cursory observation of the Democratic candidates and their special interest boosters presents quite a strange picture as to the Left’s stereotypes of women. Without fail they speak of women as if we are in the sixties and seventies: the clichéd  references to the women’s vote always comes with the usual rote emphasis on abortion, socialized medicine, and affirmative action. That issues like national security, tax policy, trade, and business regulation would be important to women is beyond the grasp of most liberals who are quietly stuck in a time warp. Well, times have changed.

 

Women make more than eighty percent of purchasing decisions in a family household, making the price of Chinese imports at Target and Walmart quite important to an average woman. Women are also the fastest growing segment of small business owners (by 2020 more than half of such entrepreneurs will be women) on whom the burden of excessive regulation, minimum wage, and socialized medicine falls disproportionately. Given that even amongst married women, three out of four work outside the home, the impact of high taxes on their ability to provide for their family is pretty high on their agenda.

 

What is not high on the agenda of most average working women is abortion, gay rights, and affirmative action. The core issue of the feminist Left, abortion, is rated no more than a fifth or sixth as a key factor for women, with gay rights and affirmative action even farther behind. And sadly for the out of touch feminists, more women are pro-life than pro-choice, the younger ones even more so than their older sisters and mothers. In fact, as if the irony of the Left’s caricature of “women’s rights” couldn’t be any starker, polls reveal that the strongest support for abortion on demand comes from..get this…men between 18 and 30 years of age (no surprise there for intelligent people). Put it another way, if all the people who couldn’t bear children (all men plus all the women 45 years and above) were taken off the sample, we will have a small but solid pro-life majority.

 

Liberals look at women as a special interest group to be pandered to with a mindset fixed in the 1970s. Were conservatives to reach out with real bread and butter concerns to American women, chances are that the liberal lock on the women’s vote will break in a few election cycles.

Thirty eight years ago today, they pledged to be the other half of each other, to stand faithfully  shoulder to shoulder in good times and bad till death do them part (honorable men and women actually  meant that once upon a time). Well, death is still quite at bay hopefully. And between them they have had good times and bad…and three children each of whom has been through graduate school and earns his own keep, thank you (well, not before bleeding the First National Bank of Mommy/Daddy Inc. dry on tuition dollars).

 

As one of those three kids, I should be grateful for the stroke of luck my siblings and I inherited: we are that small minority in America who didn’t know the bizarre world of stepmothers, half brothers, mother’s boyfriends, ex-step-cousins, custody battles..etc etc etc. I really don’t know how my parents did it though some of it has to be their concept that marriage was more than the mere capstone of youthful love; it was a subsequent duty to each other and their growing family. They would probably laugh off as incredibly bizarre the modern therapist nonsense that an adult should never sacrifice their ‘happiness’ for their child. Equally nonsense to them probably is the most hackneyed therapist line of all “Oh, I love him/her but am no longer in love with him/her” (what on Earth does that line mean anyway???). The idea of ‘match made in heaven’ or ‘soul mates’ will probably sound silly to them too, ‘marriage is hard work boy, not some fairy tale!’. They have loved quietly, they have sacrificed cheerfully, and they have lived the productive lives of unassuming, educated, honorable people who don’t make the news headlines thanks to their plain, decent, hardworking lives. And they continue to do so as they always have.

 

This is to Mom and Dad…Happy Anniversary and many more to come.

 

And if KsReaganite can be half as good a spouse and parent as his parents are, he is one darned successful fella!

It is widely understood that the person nominated to succeed Judge Alberto Gonzalez as Attorney General will have to be someone acceptable to a sizeable number of Democrats who now control the Senate and are out for blood. The President's field of choosing is thus limited. Far be it for KsReaganite to suggest a name, but so he shall. For how can too many Democrats oppose a feminist Harvard law professor, Boston Democrat, 1970s civil rights activist, mother of a biracial child, first woman to head the Vatican's Social Science Council, and a lawyer named amongst the top fifty influential women in America? Of course the person I recommend is Professor Mary Ann Glendon whose championship of the underprivileged is writ large throughout her career as a legal eagle and whose scholarship is considered la creme de la creme amongst America's law faculties. Who better to be America's top lawyer heading the federal agency responsible, amongst other things, for protecting our civil rights and liberties? For all her liberalism, Professor Glendon's integrity and scholarship is unquestioned and her advocacy for the protection of the law encompasses all the rights enshrined in our constitution for all of us: life, liberty, and property. She will uphold the law and enforce it without fear, favor, or personal feeling.

 

Some Democrats may still vote against her for she is an observant Roman Catholic. After all, we have seen many times before, there is a heavy-set prejudice amongst certain liberal Democrats against having practising Catholics in high judicial or legal positions. Let us not forget that a majority of Democrats have voted overwhelmingly against every Catholic Supreme Court nominee in the last twenty five years. But I believe most Democrats will heed the wisdom of their Camelot hero and judge not a person by the manner in which she or he invokes the almighty. We can ask no more and America expects no less.

 He came from a family where hard work, real education and the values of the Ten Commandments were honored. His life exemplified die hard loyalty in a society infamous for disposable marriages and disposable friendships.  Without the crutch of affirmative action, this child of impoverished Mexican immigrants went from Rio Grande to the gated mansions of power that were heretofore considered the birthright of whiny pedigreed liberals from the New England. And all throughout he remained a steadfast conservative, true to his flag, true to his Commander in Chief, a scourge of the enemies of his country.

 

In other words, Alberto Gonzalez personified everything which the effeminate bicoastal liberal establishment detests. Yes, they finally got him. That is not the saddest part of the saga though. The proverbial deepest cut came not from known vultures like New York’s Chucky Schumer or Teresa Heinz Kerry’s husband, but from Republican cowards like Arlen Specter and Susan Collins. For a few morsels of New York Times’ kudos, to what depths of disloyalty will some men and women go!

All this week CNN did a three part series called God’s Warriors. Hosted by the not-exactly-unbiased Chritiane Amanpour, each part detailed the negative consequences, political and social, of strong religious beliefs be they Muslim, Jewish, or Christian. Fair enough. It is true, as secularists are fond of quoting ad nauseum, that religion has resulted in wars and deaths throughout history that are beyond counting. Religion is something that touches the deepest wells of passion and, as any passionate sentiment, it can do great good and great evil. In that regard religion is no different than sex which is a powerful instrument of love and an equally blunt tool of betrayal.

 

So the question becomes, when is CNN going to have a three part series on God’s “Other” Warriors? You know, people like Mother Teresa whose strong beliefs led her to leave a life of comfort and live amongst the poorest of the poorest in the dirtiest slums on the planet? Or the ancient Jewish tribe of Samaritans who to this day set up tents to feed and quench the thirst of travelers in the West Bank because it is what their spiritual convictions tell them to do? How about Karachi’s Abdus Sattar Edhi, the small time civil servant who invested all his life’s savings in creating a ambulance service for wounded people and animals because that’s what his religion commanded him to do?

 

I doubt CNN will do anything like that. Bashing religiosity takes an agenda, putting things in a balanced perspective takes integrity. CNN is famous for the former and unknown for the latter.

For all their phony advocacy of tolerance, multi-culturalism, popular will, international law and what not, from time radical liberals do end up betraying their true colors. One such event happened at the VFW convention earlier this week in Kansas City when liberal Presidential candidate and champion of radical leftism Senator Hillary Clinton asked that the Prime Minister of Iraq Dr. Nouri Maliki be sacked!  You would think that Dr. Maliki is some puppet dictator that Hillary's disgraced husband put in place in Baghdad. Far from that, Dr. Maliki is the elected Prime Minister of Iraq, chosen by adult franchise in a multi party election that Hillary and her clan opposed tooth and nail. So now, in true radical liberal fashion, she wants to remove the guy from office. Hello, hello...Senator but you did not elect Dr. Maliki, in fact you are not even a constituent. So much for the Democrats' respect for democratic norms.

But then what else is new? These are the same liberal radicals who use unelected judges to usurp the legitimate rights of people to govern themselves through their state legislatures right here in the United States. These are the same fascists who would and do use bureaucrats and petty black robed magistrates to decide who gets to raise a child instead of the two parents. These are the same thugs in pinstripe suits and ugly black pantsuits from Saks Fifth Avenue who want to force poor children to be bused twenty miles away to learn self esteem (or self pity)  from unionized 'teachers' who couldn't find a job in the private sector if their lives depended on it.

One thing Dr. Maliki and the rest of us can bank on is that these radical liberals have little tolerance for anything, any person, and any value which doesn't fit their mold of a goose-stepping march to a socialist Nirvana where 'families' defined by a judge, children are educated into zombies, and toothless legislatures exist at the pleasure of unelected tyrants in dark robes.

Heck, maybe Dr. Maliki should ask for Hillary Clinton to be sacked by the people of New York and sent into retirement. That would be good for both America and Iraq.

In the richest country of the world, there is no excuse for six million children not having access to adequate healthcare. Conservatives are often blamed for this due to their principled resistance to overt government interference in the economy. But lets look at the other side of the coin. Liberals are responsible for a large part for this state of affairs. Firstly, it is these liberal Democrats who have for decades thwarted attempts to allow cross-state purchase of health insurance that could have made good private insurance available to poor people in otherwise expensive markets like New York and Los Angeles. Secondly, in most states and perhaps even in Congress, Democrats would have been able to get guaranteed national coverage for uninsured Americans passed had they mollified the fears of a large majority of Americans that such coverage would not be used to invalidate the Hyde Amendment through the backdoor. Thirdly, the education labor rackets (NEA and AFT), a core Democratic constituency,  have done everything possible to make sure that our public schools produce teenagers full of self esteem and utterly lacking in the old fashioned skills to go to medical and nursing schools.

 

But then why should Democrats really care? Their constituencies are the ultra rich like the Kerrys and Kennedys and those at the other end of the spectrum who benefit from Medicaid. As for children, given the Democrats’ steadfast defense of patently anti-child policies with regards to pornography, child predators, divorce and custody law, protection of the unborn, and quality of education, I have never bought the line that they were the kid-friendly party.  There are plenty of Democrats who are pro-children (Tipper Gore and the late Governor Casey of PA come to mind), but as a party, the party of Clinton and Kennedy is not.

India has just elected her first woman president. Veteran lawyer, legislator, and former state governor Pratibha Patil took over a largely ceremonial post last week. Ceremonial or not, President Patil's election signifies the often nuanced position of women vs. power in the South Asian subcontinent which has elected women heads of government regularly unlike the supposedly more 'equal rights' United States, Canada, and Australia who, between them, have elected one woman head of government (the lackluster weakling Kim Campbell in Canada who lasted a year) in their entire histories. Perhaps it is time for the do-gooder whining liberal feminists in Washington and Ottawa to stop trying to export their brand of counter-productive radical feminism to the rest of the democratic world and concentrate on improving the lives of women, men, and children in their own backyards. The iron fisted rule of South Asian prime ministers like Benazir Bhutto (Pakistan), Indira Gandhi (Indian), Srimavo Bandarnaike, Chandrika Kumaratunga (Sri Lanka), Sheikh Hasina Wajed, and Khaleda Zia (Bangladesh) is ample proof that strong women, like strong men, are built on experience and skills and not artificially cloned in the feminist infested corridors of K-Street lobbying groups living off of taxpayer money.

On these pages (and elsewhere) I have taken issue with Mayor Giuliani's pronounced marital infidelities because it compares, with a difference in degree if not in kind, with betrayal of the beloved, be that beloved be the country, the community, or the spouse. Yes, the comparison is exaggerated, but only slightly. For in every age and land the true man and the true patriot has made little distinction in the fidelity asked by the pledged beloved..be that beloved be a country or a woman. The following verses are a moving example in their content and context of the nature of love for country and family. They were authored by Pakistan's late dissident poet Faiz Ahmed Faiz when he was rotting in jail for speaking out against a tyrranical military regime that had choked his country to the point of suffocation. Years later, when asked whether the poem was dedicated to his homeland or to Alys, his valiant, steadfast, and equally courageous British born wife of thirty years who for years was forbidden by the government to see her husband, Faiz truthfully replied, "both". To the bitter end, Faiz endured all and remained faithful to both his country and his wife...for a true man's fidelity is simply indivisible.

I am being accused of loving you, that is all
It is not an insult, but a praise, that is all

My heart is pleased at the words of the accusers
O my dearest dear, they say your name, that is all

For what I am ridiculed, it is not a crime
My heart's useless playtime, a failed love, that is all

I haven't lost hope, but just a fight, that is all
The night of suffering lengthens, but just a night, that is all

In the hand of time is not the rolling of my fate
In the hand of time roll just the days, that is all

A day will come for sure when I will see the truth
My beautiful beloved is behind a screen, that is all

The night is young, Faiz start saying a Ghazal
A storm of emotions is raging inside, that is all

KsReaganite likes Fox News. That is a given..well with the exception of floozies like E D Hill. But the other day the outburst about a charter school in NYC made me laugh and feel pity for the channel. All these pundits were up in arms about the fact that it was an Arabic-language charter school with an Arabic guy's name and thus must produce Islamist jihadists at some point in the future. Any half way intelligent person, which is admittedly rare to find, would have told Sean Hannity that Khalil Gibran, after whom the school is named, was an Orthodox Christian whose works and mystical poems are revered across America. Not to mention charter schools are needed for us to become free of the NEA labor rackets' hold on our kids' education while Arabic language skills are a sin qua non in the fight againt terror.

On this one, Fox and Friends were entirely out of element and common-sense.

Ten years ago it was the Presbyterians. Three years ago it was the Episopalians. Today it is the Lutherans. Who next? The logical choice would the already leftist Methodists.

The heretofore largest Lutheran denomination, ELCA, joined other ultra leftist rump bodies of America's mainline Protestants today in validating extramarital sexual relationships FOR PASTORS!!  These are the men and women that will be teaching decency, morality, and upright living from the pulpit each Sunday with thousands of children in attendance. Great going guys!

It is little wonder that America's once prominent social consciences, the mighty WASPy denominations like the mainline Lutherans, Episcopalians, and Presbyterians, are on the path of irrelevance and demise. From the seventies onwards when these churches decided to become less agents of Christ and more the 'Faith Wing' of the Democratic National Committee, there numbers, prominence, and relevance is on a sharp turn downwards. People go to church to seek the truth...not the recent General Assembly's version of what the truth ought to be. Does that mean that the Lutherans and Presbyterians will die as a faith tradition?

Hardly. For just as striking as the liberalization and hemmorraghing of ELCA and Presbyterian Church (PCUSA) has been, equally meteoric has been the rise of traditional counterparts like the Missouri- and Wisconsin Synod for the Lutherans and the Presbyterian Church of America for the Presbyterians. Go to any Midwestern town (the region of the country where these denominations claim large numbers of members) on a Sunday and check out the attendance and vitality of these twe kinds of Lutheran and Presbyterian Churches. Where each is headed in sheer numbers count is clear as day.

The sad thing is that even amongst the membership of ELCA Lutherans and PCUSA Presbyterians, large majorities are normal God fearing people who would be aghast knowing that their pastor is quite cool with living a extramarital relationship. Which is why the top, leftist dominated, national executives of these bodies have decided not to permit local congregations and bishops to discipline such wayward pastors.

 

Unless and until congregants take a stance, it is very probable that within the next twenty years the acronyms ELCA, PCUSA, ABC (American Baptist Church), and PECUSA (The Episcopal Church) will stand not for vibrant churches but for collared little lobbying groups operating out of K-Street offices making pronouncements that nobody gives a rat's behind about. That will be truly sad: after all 45 out of the 55 signers of the Constitution belonged to the four denominations listed in this paragraph.

That we are too enamored with technology and legislation is a given. But that obsession, when carried into spheres of national security in time of war, is risky to say the least. Technology is an asset and a great tool to fight terrorism. It does not and cannot replace intelligent, hard working, well trained, and patriotic individuals. Nor can bizarrely acronymed laws that often simply add a layer of bureaucracy. Infiltrating terror networks here and abroad requires old fashioned investigative work that is often tedious, unglamorous, and deemed uncouth by liberals, feminists, and lawyers. Let us not forget that long before the horrors of 9/11, dedicated investigative reporters like Steven Emerson were monitoring the bad guys, creating dossiers, warning anyone who would listen. It was pure drudgery and good old fashioned investigative field work. No wonder a former assistant director of the FBI once said that Mr. Emerson and his think tank, the Investigative Project on Terrorism, knew more about jihadist friendly groups in the United States than did just about any other government entity. Wiretaps and career minded US attorneys are great but the field work is essential. It is the cop on the beat and the conscious neighbor on the block who hold keys to pre-empting terror or any other sort of nefarious crime. Sadly, most local police forces have simply given up the idea of knowing their communities and only a dozen or so major ones (like in NYC and Chicago) maintain full fledged intelligence departments. And the shortcomings of the CIA in recruiting and emphasizing adequate HUMINT has already been mentioned earlier on these pages.

Here we can learn a few things from the British who, with relatively shoestring budgets for gadgetry (and no, James Bond is not 'real'), have managed pretty well for the last two hundred years in ruling empires and the Irish and the Scots and avoiding too many major terror catastropes. How did London do it? Well, whether in India in 1880 or in Belfast in 1980, they had a pretty good, old fashioned, on the ground game.

 Long before America outsourced the service industry to foreigners, it had already outsourced parenting to peer mentors, high school coaches, daycare centers, after school camp leaders, guidance counselors, youth activity leaders. No matter how noble sounding the title or how thrilling the after-school program, ultimately their principal role in today’ America is to step in where parents have stepped out (or forced out by the so-called ‘family’ courts). More and more parents suffer under the delusion, a delusion actively encouraged by those who stand to make money by parental absenteeism, that the character of a child can be built by having a great football coach and a nice church youth group leader. No wonder that lazy parents want to wash their hands off their kids by pawning them onto back to back after-school activities. Individuals who were once supplements to child rearing are now the de facto parents.

And after all these activities and hi-tech schools, are kids any better off? Not really. By any measure of achievement and health indicators, America’s children are fatter, dumber, and whinier than ever before. They have not failed, their parents have.

That Democrats are singularly unsuitable for running the delicate machinations of foreign policy and national security was proved again last week by Senator Barack Obama, the freshman senator and Presidential hopeful from Illinois. Senator Obama believes that the United States should invade Pakistan, a key ally in the war against terror and our principal partner in the hunt for Bin Laden. This is the same Obama who wants to negotiate with Iran, Venezuela, Syria, and Cuba....our deadliest enemies.

Would someone please tell the imbecile from Chicago who our friends and enemies are! Even a liberal Democrat from Illinois should know a little more about foreign policy.