Big Dogs Weblog

Senator Barack Obama did an interview with the Army Times and in it he said he had to earn the trust of the military especially since he has not served. Obama is accurate in this statement but to develop the trust of the military the men and women who serve in it need to know the Commander in Chief is ready to stand behind them and ensure they complete the job that the elected leaders sent them to do. Obama and the Democrats want to pull the troops out of Iraq and give victory to the enemy. Obama talks a good game but the truth is he has stated he has a 16 month withdraw plan and while he will listen to the commanders, the decision is his.

America’s military does not decide when and where to go to war. Those decisions are made by the people elected to office and though everyone likes to call this “Bush’s war” the fact is, Democrats and Republicans in Congress voted to send the military into combat. The troops went willingly and did what they were told. They do not have the luxury of changing their minds for the sake of political expedience because they are obligated to serve when and where they are told. A member of the military who refuses to fight in the war has committed a crime and can be severely punished but no such punishment exists for members of Congress who vote to send them to war and then change their minds based on a poll.

Obama certainly has a long way to go. Here is a tip Barry, learn what you are talking about:

Earning trust, he said, means listening to advice from military people, including top uniformed leaders, combatant commanders and senior noncommissioned officers and petty officers. It also means standing up for the military on critical issues and keeping promises, Obama said.

Petty Officers ARE noncommissioned officers.

It is interesting to note that Obama, despite his admitted lack of service, feels he is better qualified to lead the military than John McCain who was serving in the military when little Barry was living with his typical white grandmother and experimenting with drugs. Barry cites his service on the Senate Foreign Relations Committee and his extensive travel as a youth as qualifications. I believe that McCain has quite a bit more experience in travel around the world and he has it as an adult, not a hazy eyed child. Additionally, Obama has been in the Senate about 4 years and has been campaigning for about 2 of them. How much did he learn from the position on that Committee when he has not been there very much?

Obama also talked about accountability:

During the interview, Obama discussed the issue of accountability for military leaders, including times when, he said, he believes the Bush administration has blamed senior officers for things that were not their fault. He contrasted his own personal standards of accountability that he said would apply if he becomes president.

His own personal standards of accountability? He has not taken responsibility for anything. Anyone who does something wrong is labeled as “not the person I knew” and is summarily thrown under the bus. Obama took no responsibility for spending 20 years in a racist, hate filled church. Obama has taken no responsibility for the controversial statements made by his surrogates and his “present” votes while a state senator certainly lack any hint of responsibility.

Barack Obama will not get the military vote. He can take credit for programs or bills that he had little or nothing to do with and he can make pie in the sky promises about what he will do for the members of the armed forces but they are not like the mind numbed drones who follow his every move. They know what he is about and since an overwhelming number of them are conservative, they do not like his liberal policies. Members of the military want to win and come home, in that order. They do not want to come home with a loss because their leaders lacked the testicular fortitude to follow through on their actions like they did during Vietnam.

In General Patton’s most famous speech he said:

When you, here, everyone of you, were kids, you all admired the champion marble player, the fastest runner, the toughest boxer, the big league ball players, and the All-American football players. Americans love a winner. Americans will not tolerate a loser. Americans despise cowards. Americans play to win all of the time. I wouldn’t give a hoot in hell for a man who lost and laughed. That’s why Americans have never lost nor will ever lose a war; for the very idea of losing is hateful to an American.” The Famous Patton Speech

The idea of losing is not hateful to liberals because they want America to lose. Patton understood the American psyche and he knew that we all admire winners and that the thought of losing is hateful to any true American. When Patton made this speech he said that this is why Americans have never lost nor will ever lose a war but that was because he did not know the breed of Democrat that would soon infest this nation. Patton is still spinning in his grave because of Vietnam.

Barry Obama has a prescription for losing and the members of the military do not want to be losers. They joined to serve this nation in peace and war and they are dedicated to ensuring VICTORY. The only exit plan they understand is the plan that Patton and all true patriots espouse:

WIN.

Tags: accountability, commander, McCain, military times, Obama, patton, war

It is always interesting to see how people act in politics. No matter how principled they claim to be, politicians always seem to sell themselves out for political expediency. Look at the way Hillary and Obambi came together after all the mud slinging and name calling. John Kerry (he was in Vietnam) is no different and we have seen it a number of times. His latest is an assertion that John McCain lacks the judgment to be president.

This is the same John Kerry who wanted McCain to be his running mate in 2004. The vice president needs to be ready to take over for the president in the event the president becomes incapacitated. John Kerry certainly felt that John McCain had the judgment to do just that in 2004.

Kerry claims that McCain has changed in the last four years. While I agree that some of McCain’s positions have changed they do not preclude him from having the judgment to serve as president. John McCain has not changed his positions nearly as much as Kerry or as Obama and yet Kerry felt he had the judgment to be president and he would have us believe that Obama has better judgment than McCain.

John Kerry will say or do anything to ensure Obama wins in November. That is all well and good but perhaps he should look up the meaning of the word integrity and see if he can muster up a little of it. Kerry lacks any ethical principles and demonstrates this by turning on McCain for political gain.

John Kerry was for McCain before he was against him…

Breitbart

Tags: judgment, Kerry, McCain, Obama

George Santayana is credited with saying “Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it.” This goes along the lines of the thinking that people learn from their mistakes. Unfortunately, there are segments of any society (and some individuals within) that would prefer to ignore the past, thus guaranteeing a repeat performance of history, bad and good.

People like Bill Clinton write books that are supposed to be an accounting of thier lives and public years but those books leave out the bad things that happened and they gloss over or spin things that cannot be avoided. This is dangerous because people who read those accounts believe that is the way things happened and the accounting of history is changed. We see this every day with people repeating falsehoods in order to make them part of the collective psyche so they will be accepted as true. The repetition and gullibility of people is why a site like Snopes exist.

The Germans have a sordid history in the last century. They had a maniacal leader who exterminated millions of people, most of whom were Jews. Adolph Hitler was on a quest for power and was hell bent on taking other county’s land by force. He wanted to rule the world. He was, by all accounts, a certifiable nut though I am sure there are instances in his life where he did good things. However, ignoring him and failing to display his life before the public does no one any good. For if we hope to never repeat his mistakes then we must know them and learn from them.

Madame Tussauds’ Berlin affiliate had a wax statue of Hitler displayed in a bunker. The look was sullen and it was obvious that this was supposed to be the way Hitler looked near the end, when defeat was all but certain. There was a big ruckus about the display. People complained that it should not even exist and that it was wrong. Only moments after the doors opened a maniac (someone no less maniacal than Hitler) ran in and ripped the head off the statue. He was arrested but people in Berlin are hailing him as a hero. The saddest part of the story is that people think that his actions were appropriate.

In Pearl Harbor there is a museum and the Arizona rests at the bottom of the Harbor. There are pictures of Japanese airplanes and the people who were in command of them. We do not slash them with knives or destroy them because they are a part of history. Those displays do not honor the people who attacked us, they show the history of how it happened.

There are plenty of items of history that are displayed everyday and people don’t run around destroying them. The people of Germany need to get over this idea that the mention of Hitler is taboo and tantamount to treason. He was a part of their history and they should acknowledge it. By recognizing the danger that just one person can inspire the Germans, and the rest of the world, will be less likely to repeat the mistake of blindly following a charismatic lunatic to destruction.

We have museums that demonstrate the horrors of the slavery that once was a legal part of this nation and we have plenty of memorials to the people who fought for state’s rights and those who fought against them. Somewhere along the way slavery was ended and that was a good thing. Of course, we have our deniers as well. There are those who refuse to allow a Confederate Flag, who refuse statues to Confederate soldiers and who refuse to allow anything that demonstrates the struggles of that time in our history. They refuse by erroneously calling it racist when the Civil War was not about race or slavery. It was about state’s rights and slavery was one of the issues.

Whether it is Germany, the US or somewhere in between, people must be willing to face the ugly chapters in history in order to keep from repeating them.

Source:
TimesOnline UK

Tags: history, Hitler, vandalism, wax museum

Attention is drawn to more moonbattery with regard to the Second Amendment thanks to my friends at Red Maryland. Seems that a person named Erwin Chemerinsky, the dean of University of California Irvine school of law (and supposed Constitutional scholar) is very upset with the decision of the Supreme Court that affirms our Individual right to keep and bear arms:

The Supreme Court’s invalidation of the District of Columbia’s handgun ban powerfully shows that the conservative rhetoric about judicial restraint is a lie. In striking down the law, Justice Antonin Scalia’s majority opinion, joined by the court’s four other most conservative justices, is quite activist in pursuing the conservative political agenda of protecting gun owners.

If the terms “judicial activism” and “judicial restraint” have any meaning, it is that a court is activist when it is invalidating laws and overruling precedent, and restrained when deferring to popularly elected legislatures and following prior decisions.

Never before had the Supreme Court found that the Second Amendment bestows on individuals a right to have guns. In fact, in 1939 (and other occasions), the court rejected this view. In effectively overturning these prior decisions, the court both ignored precedent and invalidated a law adopted by a popularly elected government. Baltimore Sun

According to this so called scholar, upholding the Constitution is judicial activism. Despite Chemerinsky’s claims that the Court changed previous judicial rulings, that is not what happened. Since the Court has NEVER ruled on whether the Second Amendment is an individual right there is no way the Court changed history. However, even if it did what would be the problem? The Court is obligated to overturn any ruling that was in error. If a previous Court ruled on something and it turned out to be incorrect then the Court is obligated to fix it. If the Court were bound to uphold all previous decisions then we might still have slaves and the Dred Scott decision might not have invalidated by the Thirteenth Amendment. Interestingly, the Dred Scott decision provides us with the Court’s views on the Second Amendment even though the issue was not about gun rights.

In its opinion on the matter, the court stated that freeing a negro would cause several problems:

It would give to persons of the negro race, who were recognised[sic] as citizens in any one State of the Union, the right to enter every other State whenever they pleased, singly or in companies, without pass or passport, and without obstruction, to sojourn there as long as they pleased, to go where they pleased at every hour of the day or night without molestation, unless they committed some violation of law for which a white man would be punished; and it would give them the full liberty of speech in public and in private upon all subjects upon which its own citizens might speak; to hold public meetings upon political affairs, and to keep and carry arms wherever they went. Cornell Law

Chemerinsky, in his liberal fantasy of a world, would have people believe that the Court has gone against previous rulings (despite the fact that it has never ruled on the matter) and would ignore the fact that the Court, in a statement during a ruling on a different matter, affirmed the INDIVIDUAL right to keep and bear arms. The supporting statements in Court decisions hold weight. In the Scott case the Court affirmed the individual right even though that is not what they were asked to rule on.

Chemerinsky describes the 1939 US v. Miller decision (and others) as rulings ignored by the Court. What are those other cases? If this guy is the dean of a school of law then one would expect him to be able to come up with the names of the cases. Instead, he uses a reference to unnamed cases to give the reader the impression that many cases exist. In reality, very few cases involving the Second Amendment exist and Miller in 1939 discussed the type of weapon, not who was allowed to posses it.

It is also interesting to note that Chemerinsky states; “the court both ignored precedent and invalidated a law adopted by a popularly elected government.” First of all, if the law was unconstitutional then it does not matter what precedent there was (none) and it does not matter that it was instituted by a popularly elected government. The Bush Administration is a popularly elected government but that has not stopped the left from filing suits and from the VERY SAME Supreme Court from ruling against the President. I guess to a liberal there is one standard for laws they like and one for laws they do not.

I also think it is interesting that when the popularly elected government of California enacted, through the vote of the people, a definition of marriage that was not good enough for a lower court. The court, in that case, ruled the law and legal definition of marriage unconstitutional and allowed gay marriage. How many people from Chemerinsky’s side hailed that ruling as a wonderful day in jurisprudence.

The fact is, regardless of what anti gun nuts say, the Supreme Court affirmed the individual right to keep and bear arms, the same thing the people who wrote the Amendment stated about it when they described what it meant. It is also a fact that more lawsuits will be filed in order to completely define exactly what that Amendment means and, when is all said and done, the left will be even more upset because we will finally have our rights appropriately defined and have protection against those who will usurp those rights.

Of course, the 5-4 decision should give all conservatives chills down their spines. There were four justices that were unable to see the meaning of the Amendment correctly despite the numerous writings describing it, written by the very people who authored the Amendment. We need to elect a president who will appoint justices who are able to interpret the Constitution the way it was written, using the words of the people who wrote it.

Now, if we could only get deans of law schools who understand the law…

Tags: constitution, gun laws, judicial activism, Second Amendment

A piece by Dick Morris appeared today at the Rasmussen Reports web site. In the piece Morris states that the Supreme Court handed Obama a gift by voting 5-4 in favor of individual rights to gun ownership (which is what every person who debated the Amendment stated when they were writing it). I won’t get into why Morris thinks it was a gift because it is not really important to his basic misunderstanding of the Second Amendment.

In the piece Morris claims the justices made a “sea change” in Constitutional law and he claims:

By demonstrating how willing they are to toss aside decades of jurisprudence in pursuit of a conservative agenda…

I would like Morris, Constitutional scholar that he is, to explain what decades of jurisprudence were tossed aside since the Court has NEVER ruled on this issue. As I pointed out in a previous post, the Court ruled on whether a person’s rights were violated when he used a sawed off shotgun. They ruled that since the weapon was not one commonly associated with a militia (though those weapons have been used by the military for years) the guy (Miller) had no standing and his rights were not violated. As I pointed out though, the Court acknowledged the individual right in Dred Scott v. Sandford when they said that freeing Scott would allow him to keep and bear arms. So the jurisprudence has been in place since 1857.

Dick Morris also claims that gun control laws have no doubt saved lives and lowered crime rates but the truth is places in this country with the most stringent gun control laws have higher crime rates and higher rates of murder. Places where people’s rights are not violated by the government have lower crime and lower murder rates. Look at states where they have must issue laws and compare them with places that have strict control and there is a stark difference. Professor John Lott researched this and his conclusions support this.

Regardless, Morris is usually more informed than this so I wonder what his motivation is.

Perhaps it is because he is hawking his new book and he wants to help with the sales. Morris is smarter than to actually believe what he wrote about gun laws and the Second Amendment so I can only conclude that he is manipulating an emotional issue to sell a book.

I usually like Morris’ insight on politics but in this case he is woefully uninformed.

Tags: dick morris, founding fathers, Second Amendment, supreme court