The Problem According to Proverb 21

This is written in the spirit of truth – not intended to be an attack, but instead an honest assessment of our current President.  This has been attempted in many books and movies, and multiple theories abound about Barrack Obama.  This came to me as I was reading Chapter 21 of Proverbs.  These thoughts are further tempered by thirty-five years as a soldier, a social scientist by degrees, and a Christian by the power of the Holy Spirit.  That said, I really hope I’m wrong.

First and foremost, it seems he is a False Witness.  Christianity, which he professes to be an adherent of, has a founder who was unapologetic.  Jesus said of Himself, “I am the Way, the Truth and the Life, no man comes to the Father but by Me.” Thus a faithful witness would say, “Apart from Jesus Christ there is no hope.”  He would lovingly explain Islam is a false religion and, “Allah is not the God of Abraham, Isaac AND Jacob.”  He doesn’t.  A False Witness would promote covetousness, division, homosexual marriage, and abortion, Obama does.

Obama does not appear to respect the “common man.”  The plans of the diligent lead to profit -- but Obama mocks this principle of Proverbs.  Both by saying, “You didn’t build that” and if Obama realizes you did, then “it’s not fair” that you have it.   The way of the guilty is devious, but the conduct of the innocent is upright.  He habitually sets up straw men by mischaracterizing the upright’s positions, and then attacks their character by assaulting the very same straw man he fallaciously devised. 

A fortune made by a lying tongue is a fleeting vapor.   His credentials of “community organizer” were established by commencing class-warfare on unsuspecting citizens.   He has gained his power primarily by persuading the uninformed and the ungodly to vote for him.  His principal tactic is to demonize his opposition and to promise he is different.  And different he is --he is worse.

When justice is done it brings joy to the righteous but terror to evildoers.  Obama has completely perverted this principle.  In Obama’s America, the nuns of the Little Sisters of the Poor found themselves facing a hostile US Government -- demanding they provide drugs that induce abortions to their employees, in the name of health care no less.  With Obama in power, law-abiding Americans legitimately fear he’ll try and take their guns away; all the while arming the Muslim Brotherhood.  Obama makes deals with communist dictators and is feckless against rogue nations.  His red lines for our enemies are drawn with invisible ink; our government, now $18,000,000,000,000.00 in debt, is underwater in red ink

Obama is a tyrant of the worst kind; he hounds the people who he knows will play by the rules, and then gets in bed with the coyotes.  He mocks those who cling to the one true God, their God-given rights and their guns.  He hides behind the Secret Service, the police, and the military, never having dreamt of one day growing up and joining their honorable ranks but instead alternately denigrating them or rendering their sacrifices irrelevant.  His “executive actions” undermine the rule of law and his incessant indictment of the enforcers’ intentions undermines their efforts to bring order out of anarchy.
 

Finally, he is incapable and afraid of unleashing the dogs of war, even as he dribbles in drones on select locales.  He won’t let the dogs out to deal with the real evildoers the way that they, and the world, would understand and respect.    Obama entreats evildoers to obey leash laws, while at the same time he domesticates and devastates our nation’s watch dogs with social engineering and decreasing the pack to pre-WW II levels.  Of course when the evildoers are off the chain, ignoring Obama’s invisible red lines (they're evildoers after all), he stands ready to send in his emasculated military to combat Ebola.   

So what do I consider to be the heart of the problem?  Primarily, that Obama lacked a father to help him become a man -- a father that loved him enough to whack him when he needed it, to model a manly demeanor, a man to teach him how the real world works.   I’ve known more than a few Drill Sergeants that could have helped him overcome this Dad deficiency.  Those like Jeremiah Wright, Frank Marshall Davis, Bill Ayers, and Al Sharpton can’t cut it.  The problem now - people like Putin and those in Pyongyang have concluded our President is a punk.   

In the meantime, we can only pray our President will meet the Father to the fatherless, the One whom the Son said He is one with and the only way to.  There’s hope.  In the Lord’s hand the king’s heart is a stream of water.

Suspension of Disbelief

      I was trying desperately to think of some good news to write about.  Although I have a couple columns already written, and even though they’re completely accurate, they’re despondently depressing.  As I conducted a mental inventory of the countless current events in our 24-hour cable news-cycle, I was committed to trying to find some good news, but ultimately, it was to no avail.   Maybe this is what is meant by the maxim, “No news is good news.”

     For whatever reason, this quest to find some good news brought to my mind that 2007 quote from Hillary Clinton when she deliberately disrespected one of America’s most famous four-star generals.  To put it in complete context, here is an excerpt from the NY Sun: “Senator Clinton squared off yesterday with General David Petraeus, and came closer than any of her colleagues to calling the commander of the multinational forces in Iraq a liar. Using blunter language than any other Democrat in the last two days, Mrs. Clinton told General Petraeus that his progress report on Iraq required ‘a willing suspension of disbelief.’"

     In order to find some good news, I am going to pursue Hillary’s strategy. As Wikipedia explains, “Suspension of disbelief or willing suspension of disbelief is a term coined in 1817 by the poet and aesthetic philosopher Samuel Taylor Coleridge, who suggested that if a writer could infuse a ‘human interest and a semblance of truth’ into a fantastic tale, the reader would suspend judgment concerning the implausibility of the narrative. Cognitive estrangement in fiction involves using a person's ignorance or lack of knowledge to promote suspension of disbelief.”

 
     Frankly, it is my belief that far too many Americans are engaged in cognitive estrangement all too often.  Whether it is mindless computer games or the endless distraction of countless cable channels pumping out inane reality shows, the fact is, many of our fellow citizens reside in a virtually unreal reality.   Uninformed and unashamed, they are simply not tethered to Terra Firma – but truth be told, just as with ignorance, it too may well be blissful.

     Could it be for some of us that entertainment cannot overcome the second law of thermodynamics?  What that law tells me is that entropy causes systems to move towards disorder and chaos.  Although endless entertainment can absorb one to the point of overlooking obvious evidence, it doesn’t suspend the unpleasant effects of that second law.  Although I am unwilling to risk diabetes of the mind from the intellect-killing candy that masquerades itself as entertainment, I am thankfully aware that there is lifesaving insulin available, a source of news outside the grasp of much of this entertainment-obsessed world.

     The Word of God, the Holy Scriptures, predicted the problem that presents itself now.  Jesus spelled it out for those willing to put down their play toys long enough to listen to Him, “And ye shall hear of wars and rumors of wars: see that ye be not troubled: for all these things must come to pass, but the end is not yet.  For nation shall rise against nation, and kingdom against kingdom: and there shall be famines, and pestilences, and earthquakes, in diverse places… and ye shall be hated of all nations for my name's sake.  And then shall many be offended, and shall betray one another, and shall hate one another.  And many false prophets shall rise, and shall deceive many.  And because iniquity shall abound, the love of many shall wax cold.”

     For me, this loss of love is not news that could not be known. Jesus foretold it.  I believe it.  That settles it.  Jesus tells me not only to suspend my disbelief – He tells me to increase my belief.  So as I look around this tragically fallen world, the only good news I can find is the same that was delivered to some lowly shepherds some 2,000 years ago.   An angel of the Lord appeared to them, and the glory of the Lord shone around them, and they were terrified.  But the angel said to them, “Do not be afraid. I bring you good news that will cause great joy for all the people.  Today in the town of David a Savior has been born to you; he is the Messiah, the Lord.”  

     And so, if the loss of love is the sign of things to come, what did the Savior show us?  By this we know love, that He laid down his life for us.  And that He commends his love toward us, in that, while we were yet sinners, Christ died for us. That is the only really good news I’m aware of.

This column also appeared in the 31 DEC  2014 Upson Beacon.

Tornado or Tipping Point?

Could your reading this column change the course of history?  It is my hope that this brief column will feel like the breeze of a butterfly blowing on your cheek.  In 1972, Edward Lorenz delivered in Washington, D.C., a paper to the American Association for the Advancement of Science entitled Predictability: Does the Flap of a Butterfly’s Wings in Brazil set off a Tornado in Texas?  What he suggested was “a small change in the initial condition of a system could cause a chain of events leading to large-scale phenomena.”  This is now popularly referred to as the "butterfly effect."   Had the butterfly not flapped its wings in Brazil, you might not be reading this right now. 
 

We used to have a maxim – “How many Rangers can you fit in the back of a truck?” The answer: “All of them.”  Said another way, there is always room for one more Ranger.  At some level, that seems right – you can always squeeze in, or pile on, one more.  At another level, we know that is wrong.  This concept is expressed in the old saw “the straw that broke the camel’s back.”  Some may remember the old plastic camel kids’ game.  The players would take turns putting a piece of “straw” into one of the two baskets on its back.  Eventually, one last, little piece of straw would break the beast of burden’s back.  The one who put that last straw in would be the loser.

One might define the point where the camel’s back breaks as the “tipping point.” That exact point where the camel goes from being a useful conveyer of cargo to a broken beast is the tipping point.  Malcolm Gladwell wrote a business book titled just that – The Tipping Point.  In it, Gladwell defines a tipping point as "the moment of critical mass, the threshold, the boiling point". The book attempts to explain the "mysterious" sociological changes that mark everyday life.  In it, Gladwell states, "Ideas and products and messages and behaviors spread like viruses do".   Examples some of us might be able to relate to could include the previously popular “pet rock” or perhaps the omnipresent “smart phone”.    From “relatively rare” to “everyone has one.”  Somewhere between those two poles was the “tipping point.”

President Barack Obama plainly said he wanted to “fundamentally transform” the United States of America.  For many Americans, that sounds more like a virus than a vision.  In the latest Gallup survey, only four in ten Americans approve of the job Obama is doing. The latest Rasmussen poll indicates two out of three American voters think our country is headed in the wrong direction.  Only one in four thinks that we’re going in the right direction.   

The trouble with tinkering with a complex system is that you can’t always predict the outcome of your tinkering.  If you’re arrogant enough to think that you can fundamentally (and radically) transform a complex system, you are just plain reckless.  One sixth of our economy, our very health care system, is being fundamentally transformed by a bill that was built on lies.  The unanticipated and unintended consequences of a bill that not one Republican would vote for, nor one Democrat even read, are still being exposed. What we do know is that Dr. Gruber and President Obama lied to the American people in the process.  As a matter of fact, the fact-checking website Politifact named President Obama's claim that people could keep their health insurance plans if they liked them its "Lie of the Year" for 2013.

The danger with Barrack Obama is that he’s producing a “Tornado in Texas.”  Barrack Obama has put more guns into the hands of ordinary Americans than the US had under arms in all of World War II. In the US last year, there were over 21 million background checks for gun purchases.  The total number of Americans that served during all of World War II, in the Pacific and European theaters combined, was 16.1 million. In the last year alone, there were five million more checks for gun purchases than all of the Americans that served during all of World War II.  Manufacturers mockingly made Obama “Gun Salesman of the Century.”  You’ll recall ammo sales also exploded – to the point of shortages.

Is Barrack Obama more like a tornado or the tipping point?  Is he more like the transformer-in-chief, or the straw that breaks the nation’s back?  We may not have healthcare for our well-being, but America will be well-armed.   

This column originally appeared in the 24 DEC  2014 Upson Beacon.

Birth of a nation and the birth of a King.

The world marks Jesus’s birthday as 25 DEC 0000.  The United States Army marks its birthday as 14 June 1775.  The first birth opened the door to eternity in paradise with God; the latter gave birth to a nation.  Both of these events were not without significant sacrifice.  The commander-in-chief of our fledgling Army was confronting an abusive king; the baby born in the town of Bethlehem was a King. 

Shortly after His birth in Bethlehem, the Baby’s parents fled with Him to Egypt to avoid the brutality of King Herod.  Shortly after the birth of our Army, it was in the field to face the brutal British forces at the battle of Long Island. In August of 1776, in preparation for that New York battle, the Father of our Nation addressed the American forces on the gravity and greatness of their cause:

            “The time is now near at hand which must probably determine whether Americans are to be freemen or slaves; whether they are to have any property they can call their own; whether their houses and farms are to be pillaged and destroyed, and themselves consigned to a state of wretchedness from which no human effort will deliver them. The fate of unborn millions will now depend, under God, on the courage and conduct of this army. Our cruel and unrelenting enemy leaves us only the choice of brave resistance, or the most abject submission. We have therefore to resolve to conquer or die.”

Within two years of our declaration of independence from that oppressive British king, our nation’s Army was in desperate straits.  Freezing to death at Valley Forge, they were desperately declaring their utter dependence on the benevolence of that manger-born King of kings.  In the bitter winter of 1777, General George Washington was distressed by the overwhelming military supremacy of British forces and the utter lack of supplies for his troops encamped at Valley Forge.   American soldiers died at the rate of twelve per day, with many not even having blankets or shoes. The desperate state is documented in a letter from Washington to John Banister:

            “No history, now extant, can furnish an instance of an Army's suffering such uncommon hardships as ours has done and bearing them with the same patience and fortitude.  To see men without clothes to cover their nakedness, without blankets to lay on, without shoes, by which their marches might be traced by the blood from their feet, and almost as often without provisions as with; marching through frost and snow, and at Christmas taking up their winter quarters within a day's march of the enemy, without a house or hut to cover them till they could be built and submitting without a murmur, is a mark of patience and obedience which in my opinion can scarce be paralleled.”

The violence and suffering our founders and fighters endured in the war for independence can’t be exaggerated.  The joy expressed by Washington at its end can’t be overstated.  On Friday, April 18, 1783, General Washington issued the following order:

            “The Commander in Chief orders the Cessation of Hostilities between the United States of America and the King of Great Britain to be publicly proclaimed tomorrow at 12 o'clock at the New building; and that the proclamation, which will be communicated herewith, be read tomorrow evening at the head of every regiment and corps of the army. After which the Chaplains with the several Brigades will render thanks to Almighty God for all his mercies, particularly for His overruling the wrath of man to His own glory, and causing the rage of war to cease amongst the nations.”

While one birth bought us freedom from tyranny for the past two-hundred and thirty-nine years, the other bought freedom from the wages of sin for all of eternity.  For unto us a child is born, unto us a son is given: and the government shall be upon his shoulder: and his name shall be called Wonderful, Counselor, The mighty God, The everlasting Father, The Prince of Peace.   Of the increase of his government and peace there shall be no end.  The birth of a nation – propitious, the birth of a Savior – priceless.

 Latest Column (17 DEC 2014) in the Upson Beacon. Birth of a nation and the birth of a King.

“a day that will live in infamy”

This past Sunday was Pearl Harbor Remembrance Day – “a day that will live in infamy,” the President declared and many newspaper headlines echoed shortly afterward.  If one were born on or before that infamous day, they are at least 73 years old now.  That is old enough to have acquired some firsthand experience - old enough to amass a lot of wisdom. The Japanese surprise-attack on Pearl Harbor was the “9-11” of their generation.

On that dreadful Sunday morning, the soldiers charged with scouting for enemy aircraft that would seek to assault the island thought that they saw something threatening in the sunny skies.  But nothing had happened before that date.  Surely those difficult to detect, barely visible aircraft they saw that morning were American, right?  Perhaps it was just another friendly training mission returning to the island.  After all, there was no state of war between America and Japan.  Wasn’t it just another tranquil morning in a place that can truly be described as paradise?  Complacency is so comfortable.  Thinking the unthinkable is just plain, well, tedious.   Fortunately, it is almost forgotten now, right?  

As a well documented article about that day in Wikipedia recounts the chilling facts for us, “At 06:05 on 7 December, six Japanese carriers launched a first wave of 183 aircraft composed mainly of dive bombers, horizontal bombers and fighters.  Without warning and without a declaration of war, the Japanese hit American ships and military installations at 07:51. The first wave attacked military airfields of Ford Island. At 08:30, a second wave of 170 Japanese aircraft, mostly torpedo bombers, attacked the fleet anchored in Pearl Harbor. The battleship Arizona was hit with an armor-piercing bomb which penetrated the forward ammunition compartment, blowing the ship apart and sinking it within seconds. It was one of eight U.S. battleships at the dock, five of which were sunk and the remaining three were badly damaged. Overall, nine ships of the U.S. fleet were sunk and 21 ships were severely damaged. The overall death toll reached 2,403, including 68 civilians. 1,178 others were wounded during the attack, including 35 civilians.  Of the military personnel lost at Pearl Harbor, 1,177 were from the Arizona.”

As it turns out, those weren’t American aircraft after all.  If only those men charged with watching would have had better hindsight, perhaps they would have seen what was coming.

America’s vast ocean borders have long served as a buffer from invasion.  There are those in Texas, California, and other border states that now think they too detect a problem.  They look to their south and see a threat they think could unleash a torrent of trouble.  Recent focus has been on the thousands and thousands of unaccompanied illegal minors from Central America that have flooded our southern front, but that is not the only source of the influx.  

A 2014 intelligence report compiled by the U.S. Customs and Border Protection agency (CBP) and covered by The New American reveals that, “1,443 people from China were apprehended while crossing the U.S. border so far this year, with an additional 1,803 people either turning themselves in to U.S. authorities at official ports of entry, or being caught attempting to illegally enter at the ports of entry.  Twenty-eight individuals from Pakistan were apprehended while crossing the U.S. border this year, with another 211 individuals either turning themselves in or being caught at official ports of entry.   Thirteen Egyptians were apprehended while crossing the U.S. border this year, with another 168 either turning themselves in or being caught at official ports of entry.  Four individuals from Yemen were apprehended while crossing the U.S. border in 2014, with another 34 individuals either turning themselves in or being caught attempting to illegally enter at the ports of entry. Four individuals from Somalia were apprehended while crossing the U.S. border in 2014.  Another 290 either turned themselves in or were apprehended at official ports of entry.  Since it is not possible to know how many people crossing our border illegally escape detection, the above figures suggest that many more people from across the globe have crossed our southern border, including some with terrorist connections or originating in nations where the current Ebola virus outbreak has occurred.” 

The Center for Immigration Studies had a recent report regarding immigration enforcement activity by ICE. They contend that enforcement continued to decline significantly in 2014, according to ICE’s own records.  They report that “total deportations credited to ICE, the majority of which were illegal aliens arrested by the Border Patrol and CBP officers at the ports of entry, declined 15 percent from 2013 to 2014.”   The report continues, “deportations from the interior dropped 34 percent from last year, and are 58 percent lower than the peak in 2009.”   It concludes, “catch and release policies continue. In 2014, deportation processing was initiated for approximately 143,000 aliens out of the 585,000 aliens encountered by ICE agents. Tens of thousands of those let go had been labeled a criminal threat.”  Stunningly, “the number of aliens who have received a final order of removal, but who are still in the United States, has risen to nearly 900,000. Nearly 167,000 of these are convicted criminals who were released by ICE and are currently at large.” 

Failure to enforce our laws is folly - rewarding lawbreakers is even more foolhardy.  There is no doubt that there is trouble when a nation cannot or does not enforce its borders.  History has taught us that not everyone that comes to our shores has our best interests at heart.  To that end, 17 states filed a lawsuit last week against President Barack Obama’s administration over his decision to create legal status for millions of illegal immigrants via his executive actions.   Texas, joined by our own state of  Georgia, as well as Alabama, Idaho, Indiana, Kansas, Louisiana, Maine, Mississippi, Montana, Nebraska, North Carolina, South Carolina, South Dakota, Utah, West Virginia and Wisconsin are all attempting to make the administration enforce our laws.  

And just think, the Japanese came illegally long before the alleged illegal executive amnesty was even being offered to illegal aliens by Obama.  With that in mind, I offer only one admonition to all law-abiding Americans, Remember Pearl Harbor!

This column was printed in the 10 DEC 2014 Upson Beacon.