Maj. Richard “Dick” Winters passed away a couple of weeks ago and Beth has written a wonderful piece honoring his service and his life.
Some of the awards Maj. Winters was honored with for his service: Distinguished Service Cross, Bronze Star with one Oak Leaf Cluster, Purple Heart, Presidential Unit Citation with one Oak Leaf Cluster, American Defense Service Medal, National Defense Service Medal, European-African-Middle Eastern Campaign Medal with 3 service stars and arrow device, World War II Victory Medal, Army of Occupation Medal, Croix de guerre with palm, French Liberation Medal, Oorlogskruis with palm, Belgian WWII Service Medal, Combat Infantryman Badge, Parachutist Badge with 2 combat stars and the Medal of the City of Eindhoven
These brave men and women sacrifice so much in their lives so that others may enjoy the freedoms we get to enjoy everyday. For that, I am proud to call them Hero. We Should Not Only Mourn These Men And Women Who Died, We Should Also Thank God That Such People Lived
This post is part of the Wednesday Hero Blogroll. For more information about Wednesday Hero, or if you would like to post it on your site, you can go here.
The NAACP’s South Carolina office chose to cover a statue of George Washington during its annual rally honoring Martin Luther King Jr., drawing complaints from conservatives that the group was offending the legacy of the nation’s Founding Father.
The state chapter of the civil rights group claims it meant no disrespect and only covered up the statue to provide a more suitable backdrop for speakers at Monday’s event. Pictures taken at the event show the statue was completely covered on three sides by a wooden, box-like structure.
But those pictures prompted an outcry on conservative blogs. Tea Party activist Lloyd Marcus was among those who quickly wrote a retort to the NAACP’s decision.
“I thought, you know, this is just totally absurd, totally ridiculous,” Marcus told FoxNews.com. “I don’t know if George Washington had slaves or whatever but … George Washington was our first president.”
They “covered up the statue to provide a more suitable backdrop for speakers at Monday’s event”.
…Sounds suspiciously like Obama’s excuse for covering up the cross at Georgetown University. Remember that?:
“In coordinating the logistical arrangements for yesterday’s event, Georgetown honored the White House staff’s request to cover all of the Georgetown University signage and symbols behind Gaston Hall stage.”
“The White House,” she added, “wanted a simple backdrop of flags and pipe and drape for the speech, consistent with what they’ve done for other policy speeches.”
Uh huh. I didn’t believe that explanation and I don’t believe this one.
The newspaper reported that most rallies in the capital use the statue of America’s first president as part of the natural backdrop — though the NAACP has tried to cover it up in the past. Marcus said he didn’t buy the state chapter’s explanation.
This misdirected ridiculous behavior by the NAACP epitomizes why I, a black American, will never join or give one nickel to this exploitative divisive organization. With black high school dropout rates at epidemic levels, 80% of black kids growing up in fatherless homes and 50% of black pregnancies ending in abortion, why on earth would the NAACP invest time and energy into running around covering up statues of long dead white guys; rather than addressing “real” issues plaguing black America today?
Regardless of what you think about George Washington, he was our first president. Exploiting the occasion of MLK day to diss America’s first president is part of the NAACP’s continuing effort to find irrelevant crap to protest about, impugn the greatness of our country and live in the past, as if American race relations have not progressed since the 50s.
The NAACP’s mantra is blacks are eternal victims of an eternally racist America; white America should feel eternally guilty, and loyal blacks should feel eternally entitled.
In other NAACP news:
In Maine, Gov. Paul LePage drew criticism from the group after urging its members to “kiss my butt” over the fallout from his decision to skip the group’s MLK Day festivities. In the end, the GOP governor on Monday attended a breakfast in King’s honor, though it was not sponsored by the NAACP.
A suspicious backpack left along a Martin Luther King Day parade route in Spokane, Wash., held a radio-controlled pipe bomb that could have sprayed shrapnel at marchers in the parade.
So I’m willing and eager to work with both Democrats and Republicans to improve the Affordable Care Act. But we can’t go backward. Americans deserve the freedom and security of knowing that insurance companies can’t deny, cap or drop their coverage when they need it the most, while taking meaningful steps to curb runaway healthcare costs.”
Now, why would he be offering to “fix” his “historic legislation”? A GOP House leadership adviser says: “I think it is a bow to the reality of the unpopularity of the law, without actually proposing any real or substantive fixes.” Other senior House Republican advisers were even more emphatic, saying the bill is fundamentally flawed and isn’t fixable.
Two recent polls show a majority of the public favoring repeal.
J-Ru posits that in a democracy, “the governing class can’t survive by pushing policies that the majority dislikes”, hence the wipe-out in the midterm elections.
Will Democrats who defy popular opinion (especially in red states) face a similar comeuppance in 2012? Stay tuned, but, this time around, the White House and congressional Democrats are plainly nervous.
A couple of things have been running through my mind for the past week, and until now, I have resisted the temptation to write about them.
The first idea is one that I haven’t seen explored much in the right-wing blogosphere because perhaps to fair-minded conservatives, it seems like more of the gauche finger pointing we’ve been seeing on display since virtually the moment the Tucson shooting hit the news. The idea that yes, a small number of individuals can be influenced by political rhetoric, or violent images, etc., and the vast majority of those people would be leftists.
Conservatives have used the phrase, “liberalism is a mental disorder” for years, half-jokingly, but I really think it’s time that we explored why the far left is populated by so many people who are so disordered in their thinking, (Fuller, and Loughner being the latest examples).
One definition of insanity is doing the same thing that doesn’t work, over and over again. Socialism fails everywhere it’s tried, yet the left keeps on trying….
Studies repeatedly show that conservatives are happier than liberals, especially married and religious conservatives.
George F. Will wrote that one reason for this was because conservatives don’t put their faith in government:
… they accept that happiness is a function of fending for oneself. They believe that happiness is an activity — it is inseparable from the pursuit of happiness.
The right to pursue happiness is the essential right that government exists to protect. Liberals, taking their bearings, whether they know it or not, from President Franklin Roosevelt’s 1936 State of the Union address, think the attainment of happiness itself, understood in terms of security and material well-being, is an entitlement that government has created and can deliver.
He concluded:
Liberalism is a complicated and exacting, not to say grim and scolding, creed. And not one conducive to happiness.
Two liberal “researchers” from NY University,” John Jost and Jaime Napier, conducted a study to find out why conservatives were happier, and they’re findings were published in May, 2008. Warner Todd Huston fisked the study at Newsbusters:
Even though Jeanna Bryner of livescience.com puts a happy face on the story with her headline, the text following clearly casts conservatives in the worst possible light. Her very first line provides the context of the “research” upon which she reports.
Individuals with conservative ideologies are happier than liberal-leaners, and new research pinpoints the reason: Conservatives rationalize social and economic inequalities.
In other words, conservatives are happy because they ignore the “economic inequalities” of their fellow citizens and don’t worry themselves over other’s troubles. They just don’t care about other people. This is exactly what this “research” claims.
The researchers explain right wing rationalization, this way:
To justify economic inequalities, a person could support the idea of meritocracy, in which people supposedly move up their economic status in society based on hard work and good performance. In that way, one’s social class attainment, whether upper, middle or lower, would be perceived as totally fair and justified.
Note the word, “supposedly”. Like “in the real world” this doesn’t happen. People really can’t prosper through hard work? Really?
What the liberal mind is passionate about is a world filled with pity, sorrow, neediness, misfortune, poverty, suspicion, mistrust, anger, exploitation, discrimination, victimization, alienation and injustice. Those who occupy this world are “workers,” “minorities,” “the little guy,” “women,” and the “unemployed.” They are poor, weak, sick, wronged, cheated, oppressed, disenfranchised, exploited and victimized. They bear no responsibility for their problems. None of their agonies are attributable to faults or failings of their own: not to poor choices, bad habits, faulty judgment, wishful thinking, lack of ambition, low frustration tolerance, mental illness or defects in character. None of the victims’ plight is caused by failure to plan for the future or learn from experience. Instead, the “root causes” of all this pain lie in faulty social conditions: poverty, disease, war, ignorance, unemployment, racial prejudice, ethnic and gender discrimination, modern technology, capitalism, globalization and imperialism. In the radical liberal mind, this suffering is inflicted on the innocent by various predators and persecutors: “Big Business,” “Big Corporations,” “greedy capitalists,” U.S. Imperialists,” “the oppressors,” “the rich,” “the wealthy,” “the powerful” and “the selfish.”
The liberal cure for this endless malaise is a very large authoritarian government that regulates and manages society through a cradle to grave agenda of redistributive caretaking. It is a government everywhere doing everything for everyone. The liberal motto is “In Government We Trust.” To rescue the people from their troubled lives, the agenda recommends denial of personal responsibility, encourages self-pity and other-pity, fosters government dependency, promotes sexual indulgence, rationalizes violence, excuses financial obligation, justifies theft, ignores rudeness, prescribes complaining and blaming, denigrates marriage and the family, legalizes all abortion, defies religious and social tradition, declares inequality unjust, and rebels against the duties of citizenship. Through multiple entitlements to unearned goods, services and social status, the liberal politician promises to ensure everyone’s material welfare, provide for everyone’s healthcare, protect everyone’s self-esteem, correct everyone’s social and political disadvantage, educate every citizen, and eliminate all class distinctions. With liberal intellectuals sharing the glory, the liberal politician is the hero in this melodrama. He takes credit for providing his constituents with whatever they want or need even though he has not produced by his own effort any of the goods, services or status transferred to them but has instead taken them from others by force.
Lefties have a sense of entitlement that knows no bounds.
Conservatives can’t even begin to compete in their world of hatred and venom, where there is injustice around every corner, and nothing that happens to them is their fault.
For the past forty years it’s been one step to the right – three steps to the left, repeat every election cycle. We have been losing ground to this crowd for far too long. Why? You have to look to the ‘reach across the aisle’ brigades for the answer – The Frums, Parkers, Browns, McCains, Scarboroughs et al. Why in heaven’s name would an otherwise sane Joe Scarborough take the deeply disingenuous lefty boob-bait about “right wing rhetoric” from the likes of Kos, Media Matters, and Chris Matthews. Why?! Is there something in the water over at MSNBC?
And no matter how specious and absurd their narrative, no matter how proven wrong, they eventually move public opinion in their direction.
This is what happens to political players when they always have to play defense:
Krugman and his fellow liberals exhibit not compassion but an insatiable lust “red in tooth and claw” for raw political power and the money that comes from that control — control over people’s lives that is won by pitting race against race, rich against poor, producer against consumer and so on and so on. It is a bitterly zero-sum, cold-hearted and cynical view of the world, built on a platform of arrogance, elitist condescension, racial manipulation and topped off by the threat of violence if the rest of us refuse to cooperate.
To oppose any of this effectively, or, to oppose the Left’s agenda in the field of national security and foreign policy, is to directly risk summoning that violence — which is why at this minute former Governor Sarah Palin is being swamped with death threats. It is why European capitals from London to Athens are engulfed in violence or murderous riots.
One reason the crazies have an edge: They have learned how to manipulate a complicit MSM.
In the vile attempt to tie Palin to the Tucson shooting we have witnessed the test run for how the left-wing blogosphere will target Republican candidates and propel false narratives into the mainstream media, and how the mainstream media will take those narratives and run with them.
If Palin is taken down politically over the Tucson shooting, there is not a single Republican candidate who can survive the coming onslaught.
Richard Viguerie at The American Thinker, believes that the left is in the process of totally discrediting themselves:Tucson and the Kamikaze Left:
As the response to the Tucson tragedy shows, the left and the ruling class media are escalating this battle to the point that they completely destroy their own credibility in the process — even to their own detriment. They are, like kamikaze pilots, dangerous in their desperation.
As to those calls for civility and for the political discourse to “calm down”? We Tea Party conservatives were behaving quite well already, thank you very much. The problem is and has been on the left. It is apparent to everyone but the political left and ruling-class media that their calls are cover-ups for the extremism of their own side.
With her children and grandchild, her religion and her patriotism, Sarah is the antithesis of everything the progressives stand for. Palin is not just pro-life, but she emanates life — and good, clean living.
And what does the left do? They try to drag her through the mud to sully her. The hardcore among them want to eliminate her, even if this means putting her life at risk.
The progressives “joke” about gang-rape, make pornographic movies about her, and leer at her legs. (Would any of this be tolerated against Michelle Obama?)
Palin’s church was torched during the primary, a vicious crime that was hushed up by the MSM. And now, with the smears about Tucson, death threats against Palin have soared.
Yes, leftists attack Palin because they envy her beauty; and true, she’s a political threat. But the main reason for the hatred is something deeper and darker.
Leftists loathe Palin because she has retained something that was stripped from them years ago: a wholesomeness, a purity of heart. People on the left despise Palin because she shines a bright light on their shame and unworthiness, which they try desperately to deny.
Maj. Dick Winters
Nice Deb 