The Greatest American

Was the Gipper the Greatest? An interesting and highly-publicized (but unscientific) Discovery Channel poll-of-everyone says so. The voting finished with Ronald Reagan on top, followed in order by Abraham Lincoln, Martin Luther King, Jr., George Washington and Benjamin Franklin. While I've got no quarrel with the Top 5 finishers, I do have a different order and my own Top 10.... 1. George Washington "First in war, first in peace..." You should know the rest. He started it all and I blame the public schools for his fourth place finish in the Discovery Channel poll....2. Abraham Lincoln Abe saved the Union.... 3. Martin Luther King, Jr. I think it was George Will who rightly said, " He (MLK) saved our soul"....4. Ronald Reagan Dutch was nearly number three. He saved the world and liberated hundreds of millions from a horrible scourge. And, no, I'm not referring to Jimmy Carter....5. Ben Franklin He's got to be up there somewhere. This seems to be as good a place as any....6. Thomas Edison As an individual (and as a symbol) Edison embodies the best of American creative genius....7. My Mom She could have ranked higher on the list, but she was a lifelong Democrat.... 8. Samuel Adams A leader in the mold and manner of Franklin and Jefferson, Adams personally threw tea in Boston Harbor. And he made good beer.... 9. Alvin York The gold standard war hero and sharpshooter. Led seven men against a German position in the Argonne Forest; killed 25, captured 132 in one day, mostly by himself, with a handgun and an old rifle he brought with him from Tennessee.... 10. Woody Hayes For a lot of good reasons, but mostly because it's my list. Do your own.

"For this I Froze at Valley Forge?"

If George Washington was alive today, we're not sure exactly what he'd say about the Supreme Court decision that came down this week. We do know he wouldn't tell a lie. But based upon the way he felt about Mount Vernon ("I had rather be on my farm than be emperor of the world.") and the warnings he gave us ("Occupants of public offices love power and are prone to abuse it."), we're pretty sure he'd be on Fox News giving us some basic civics lessons. On June 23 the liberal wing of the Supreme Court traded their black robes for cheesy gold blazers and pounded a "For Sale" sign into every lawn in America. In a stunningly stupid decision (Kelo et al v. City of New London, 04-108), the Supremes gave local governments broad power to seize private property in order to generate more tax revenue. The 5-4 squeaker was carried by the usual cast of "living Constitution" dimbulbs: Souter, Stevens, Breyer and Ginsburg. They were joined by Ronald Reagan's second bad seed, Anthony Kennedy (the first was Ron Jr.). Thanks to these geriatric judicial jackasses, a developer can dupe or bribe a city council member (now, there's a tough putt) into holding a couple of sham hearings where he can state a case for bulldozing Grandma's house, making way for the best 7-11 ever. If the developer "promises" to sell enough Slurpees, smokes and super-unleaded (and hire enough unmotivated people) to generate more taxes for the city, ol' Grandma will soon be sleeping in your basement, bitching about your food and tying up your best TV with her game shows...."Hard cheese for you and Grandma." It may not have been the headline, but it was certainly the message. While the decision in Kelo v. New London outraged editors of papers and other thoughtful people across the nation, across party lines and of many political positions, here's what THE NEW YORK TIMES ("the paper of record") put on-the-record in a June 24 editorial: "The Supreme Court's ruling yesterday that the economically troubled city of New London, Conn., can use its power of eminent domain to spur development was a welcome vindication of cities' ability to act in the public interest." Let's put the Gucci on the other foot for these people. TIMES heir-chairman-publisher (but mostly heir) "Pinch" Sulzberger no doubt has a retreat in The Hamptons with all the other beautiful elite. I believe that a beachfront "Cabela's" outdoor superstore would do very well in The Hamptons. I can make a case that a "Cabela's" will raise many more tax dollars for the community than are paid by the putz publisher. More taxes "serves the public interest" according to the high court. Unfortunately, we will have to raze Pinch's place in order to make room for the store. Pinch will just have to live in one of his other houses (perhaps in New London). We can only hope there's room left for Grandma to live in a small trailer on the beach behind the store.... Smart People Say Smart Things. No, I'm not talking about Karl Rove (though he's pretty smart and it was fun to watch the whacky among us wiggle and whine when Rove drew attention to their own words and actions). I'm talking about founding father Thomas Jefferson, our 3rd President (and a "liberal" long before the term became a label for the mentally ill). Jefferson left us sage advice as we keep our eyes on the Supreme Court, the White House, Senate, House of Representatives and now, unfortunately, every city council member in fifty states: "When governments fear the people, there is liberty. When the people fear the government, there is tyranny. The strongest reason for the people to retain the right to keep and bear arms is, as a last resort, to protect themselves against tyranny in government." Does anyone think Jefferson would have quietly moved into a condo while the Charlottesville City Council put a WalMart on top of Monticello?

What's in a Name?

"Beat it." Despite professing a decades-long affinity for sleeping with young children, a wealthy 46-year-old California man was acquitted this week of ten charges including felony conspiracy, gross sexual abuse and several counts of serving alcohol to minors. Neither a well-documented history of paying millions of dollars for victims' silence nor widely-circulated photographs of the eccentric millionaire dangling a baby from a hotel balcony could influence the citizens of Santa Maria or anyone else to decide this freak is a threat to children. The jurors said they didn't like the young accuser's mother so they found the defendant not guilty of all charges. The perverted perp is fortunate his name is Michael Jackson. Even so, it wasn't too long ago that the only way he could have gotten away with stuff like this would have been if his name was Michael Kennedy.... So, that's why they don't call him Richard. A long time ago, when Mrs. Durbin looked at her newborn son, she presciently called him "Dick." The boy, now Senator Dick Durbin (D-Tehran), went on-the-record, over-the-top and beyond-the-pale in the Senate well this week when he likened American service men and women to Hitler's Nazis, murderer-of-millions Pol Pot and Joe Stalin's henchmen who ran the Gulags. Why? Durbin (rhymes with 'turban') thought he could abandon any sense of proportion and score some cheap political points by jumping on the bandwagon of bedwetters crying about the conditions at the Guantanamo Bay terrorist prison camp. Seems somebody told the senator we're keeping the terrorists in small rooms that are sometimes real hot and sometimes real cold where there's loud, irritating music playing at all hours. Didn't this guy ever live in a college dorm? Or spend a night in a Motel 6? Put aside the point that the illegal combatants being held in Cuba have no protections according to the Geneva Conventions (we could shoot every one of them at any time according to the letter of the law). And set aside the fact that our soldiers in Baghdad went to work today wrapped in body armor under sunny skies with a high temperature of 111. Dick Durbin's despicable demagoguery is inflaming and enabling those who will blast our men and women with something much worse than rap music. Durbin is at-best an idiot and he may be a traitor. In either case, he's a danger to the rest of us and he's gotta go.... Happy Anniversary, Julius and Ethel Rosenberg! Nope. Not their wedding anniversary. Today is the day we celebrate the electrocution of the commie couple convicted of "conspiring to commit espionage during wartime." By passing American nuclear secrets on to the Soviet Union, they helped Stalin become a nuclear warrior by 1949. Despite some spirited hand-wringing by the NY TIMES and their fellow travelers, the reprehensible Rosenbergs took a deep seat on Ol' Sparky at Sing Sing Prison on June 19, 1953. (On a humorous note, Julius went down like a sack of spuds with one jolt, but it took three to send Ethel to hell.) In 1995, the contents of something called the Venona Project were released by the NSA, including extensive records of Soviet intelligence activities through its heyday. Among the matters made public was confirmation of the Rosenbergs' treachery. So today we celebrate justice well-served in the case of the vile Rosenbergs and, unlike in the cases of Michael Jackson and (so far) Dick Durbin, the guilty will never hurt anyone again.

Broadcasters and People with Barrels Full of Ink

This Sunday's Prayer. "Dear Lord, please keep and protect your moonbat Howard Dean from the forces that would mute him or attempt to cure his mental illness. Make his voice loud and his stage large. Deliver unto him the broadest audience with the most frequency until the first Wednesday of November, 2008. Amen".... Lefty Moves Up to the Bigs. The Al Jazeera IslamoFascists of the IBHL (International Broadcasters of Hate League) have signed journeyman Riz Khan to host "an interactive interview show." Most recently the international anchor for Al Jazeera's minor league affiliate CNN, Riz will miss his old team, but is excited about joining the lineup at the parent club. "I owe CNN a lot. I pretty much learned to lie from Mr. Turner and I'm going to miss my teammates in Atlanta. But the opportunity to plan, broadcast and rationalize beheadings and bombings on the air while openly promoting an anti-American, pro-terror and extermination-of-Israel agenda is, well, a personal and professional dream-come-true. At CNN we were sometimes held back by the slightest pretense of objectivity. Now I can forget about the change-up and just throw the high hard one. All praise to Allah.".... Coughing Up a Hairball. The networks were a-twitter this week with the announcement that Bob Woodward's "Deep Throat" is alive and being sold by his kids before he can die quietly from regressive dementia in his daughter's basement. For those of you too-young or too-busy to hash through the minutiae of a 30-year-old burglary, the now 91-year old Mark Felt was the number two guy at the FBI who confirmed enough of the essentials of Woodward's reporting to serve as spine-starch for The Washington Post. And so they ran with the story that would bring down the President. But despite what we've been told this week by the usual suspects in the lamestream press, Mark Felt was not a good guy. He was simply steamed that he didn't get the top job in the Bureau. So he violated his sworn oath and took a dump on Richard Nixon by spilling classified information to a reporter. Felt, in fact, is a convicted (later pardoned) felon; tried and found guilty of illegally wire-tapping the conversations of a "subversive" group. When he ratted out the Dickster, Felt made Woodward an instant rock star, lionized by the liberal elite for running off a popular Republican president who ended a dirty war he inherited from the Democrats. The intrepid Post reporter has been drinking (and serving others) his own bathwater ever since. If you ask me, Nixon should possibly have been drummed out of office for establishing the EPA, hampering business and bloating the bureaucracy. But that's never been any kind of punishable offense in Washington D.C. In the end, nothing good whatsoever came out of Watergate. We have the whole sordid affair and all its players to thank for the national navel-gazing and self-loathing that led to four years of Jimmy Carter, the most feckless and corrosive president in our history.... The Clock is Ticking, Kofi. According to Sen. Joe Biden (D-Hair Club for Men and weekly contributor to any slanted Sunday morning talk show that will have him), we can expect to see John Bolton confirmed as U.S. Ambassador to the United Nations as early as this week. The surrender monkeys in the U.S. Senate have counted the votes and, like it or not, their pals at the UN are going to see a reformer sitting in America's chair at the big table. I have two important questions to put to Ambassador Bolton as he hops on the bus to the Big Apple: "Should we associate with and fund an immoral, historically ineffective, bloated organization comprised of terrorists, dictators, rapists and thieves?" And: "Why shouldn't we resign from the UN, revoke diplomatic credentials and deport the criminals in a move that will strengthen national security, re-purpose valuable real estate, eliminate parking problems in Manhattan and liberate many tables in New York's finest restaurants?"..... This Could Be Fun. While Mr. Bolton heads to New York, that state's junior senator may be heading to the mattresses. The June 8 issue of Vanity Fair will print an excerpt from a "well-researched" book highlighting the bad behavior of Her Heinous Hillary Clinton. The Truth About Hillary: What She Knew, When She Knew It, and How Far She'll Go to Become President is being rushed for an earlier-than-planned release later this summer. Expect the Clinton attack pack to pull out all their time-tested tricks in defense of the Hildebeast. So what's going to be fun about even more stories of Mrs. Rodham's unscrupulous conduct? Simple. This book is nobody's idea of a hit piece by the "vast right wing conspiracy." Author Ed Klein has impeccable credentials as a mainstream media bootlick for the left. The Senator's defenders are going to have to eat one of their own to cover up her mess this time. So pop some corn, pour a frosty, put your feet up and let the games begin. This book just might turn out to be some great TV. Maybe next week we'll lead off with a prayer for Ed Klein. We wouldn't want to see him contract a case of "Vince Foster's Disease."