(My young friend “Bill Reader” passes this along…)
I have not got much time to write this, so I will keep it brief. This is all to the good in the current political environment anyway. The last couple of projects I have started have become non-topical before I could find sufficient mental space to comment on them.
Right now, I want to talk to you… you personally… about how battles are won and lost. Why? Because your life depends on it, soldier. You… sitting there in your office chair and grimacing at the unspeakable horrors that crawl out of the president’s mouth like under-boiled crawdads… are really sitting on the front lines of a war. And you will fight in it, like it or not, because out here there is just one alternative. Don’t believe me? Take one look at that debt clock, and then go ask those master clock-makers in Greece what happens when that sucker ticks too long. The life on the line in the culture war is your life. It’s time to take it seriously.
Now, we don’t have the luxury of a boot camp out here, and if we did, we wouldn’t have the time to train you. But that’s all right. Out here on civilian street, we’ve got it a lot easier than the brave men and women from our armed services who fight on dusty battlefields, instead of from a comfortable desk. All you really need out here is a philosophy.
I’ve been fortunate enough to hear a lot of liberals whine, moan, grouse, grouch, and pitch temper tantrums. In the midst of all of it they’ve got one tactic that seems unfailingly effective, however, and why this should be, I don’t know. They just tell conservatives something is out of bounds, and magically, it’s suddenly out of bounds. If something is really effective, or gathering steam, well then, it’s crazy and can’t be used. I often wonder to myself, how does that mystical process work?
I’ve got it figured out, though. See, you, right now, you’ve got what we like to call decency. Reams of it. Miles of it. Much, much more of it then you need right now, in fact.
Oh, wipe that expression off your face, soldier. You don’t need to become Freddy Krueger to understand that your sweet aunt Fanny would be utterly useless on the battlefield. Don’t expect to doily the Dems into submission. Sure it’s a nice sentiment. Suitable for framing. But like most nice sentiments, it sublimates into mist on contact with reality.
Your problem is that when you land a punch on the other guy and you hear him scream, you stop or you pull the next blow. When you start to get ahead, you slow down because the other guy starts protesting that it’s not fair. You get a guy who broke in and is trying to kill you on the ropes, you give him a breather if he says he’s tired. Maybe you don’t act like that in real life. Fine. But don’t try to tell me you don’t do it in politics. I’ve watched you do it.
You wanna win this thing? I hope so, because you probably won’t survive losing it. So learn to channel your inner madman. When the media cries and wails that they don’t like what you’re saying, don’t quiet down like frightened church-mice faced with an enraged friar. Say it louder. Say it twice as loud. When they scream that it’s not fair, I want you to find the part of your mind that loves to hear them cry. Say the same stuff, but elaborate on it in detail. And when they do finally go from distressed to anguished, then I really want you to start buffeting them with the argument. Do. Not. Give. Them. A. Moment. To. Rest. Scream until they stop trying to win the shouting match, laugh when they burst into tears, never miss an opportunity to kick them when they’re down, and do all three until they realize that the best way for them not to lose is not to play.
Rest assured, you still won’t have come close to sinking to their level. We have not had the decades of practice at studied nastiness it takes to become that kind of twisted creature. If you learn to take off the kid gloves now, fight the battle like you mean to be alive at the end of it now, we’ll never be in danger of becoming like them. Protract this by letting them take the US over the edge and I make you no promises.
But you must learn that when your enemy tells you he is in pain, that’s a good thing, and you should do lots more of whatever you just did. I’m not telling you that “nice guys finish last”. Stupid guys finish last. The way we act in one-on-one conflicts would be laughed out of the tactics book by a battalion of pacifist dodos armed with sharpened vegetables. I’m not telling you to “fight fire with fire”. I’m not advocating for voting in the name of the dead or saying we need militant people swinging batons wandering around outside polling places. You’ll know I’m reading from the Democrat playbook the day I tell you that our politicians ought to use massive sums of public money to pay off voting groups. I’m not telling you “the ends justify the means”. In the boisterous history of political theory a call for the grassroots members to cherish the discomfort of their opposites is so quaintly polite as to be practically invisible… not that you’d know it by looking around you these days. The means are hardly extreme. And answer me this: if you aren’t looking to make them uncomfortable, why talk to them at all? All I really want you to do is act like you actually want your country back, not like it would be kind of convenient if they could see their way clear to considering the possibility of potentially relinquishing at least a small portion of the nation they’re crushing with their intolerable regime of lies.
Think you can handle that, soldier?
Superb. And timely.
Go for their throats.
And if we win in November, God willing, that’s when the fight really starts. Because these batsards will still be there, as entrenched as ever – in the media, in the beauracracy, EVERYWHERE – and they need to be sought out and confronted and rocked back on their heels and rooted out. Because they will be doing everything in their lying, deceitful power to undermine Romney, AND THE COUNTRY, because to them the only thing that matters is to win and retain power.
It took these traitors generations to achieve what they have and we need to realize that it will take constant vigilance and constant pushback – maybe for generations – to get our country back.
The price of self-governance is steep. And a large part of the payment is nothing more arduous than paying attention, to at least the same degree that the morons around us pay to American Idol.
Failure to do this puts us on the road to serfdom.
And Americans Don’t Serf.
Batsards? I was going to correct that but I actually like the sound of it. Batsards. F**king Batsards, every one of them. Yeah.
I like it too!
“A shower of bastards” was a phrase I heard from “Father Ted”, a British comedy, recently.
You forgot the schools and universities. That’s *their* boot camp, where their soldiers are made.
Fraking bastages!
I thought they were opposed to fraking?
Actually there is an old saw that when you start taking flak you are over the target.
According to some old WWII bomber pilots I’ve known, the flak started at the coast and got heavier as you approached the target. They said that you knew it was going to get really bad when the enemy fighters pulled back from attacking you. They didn’t want to fly into their own flak. And if you actually heard the flak explode over your own engine noise, you were in really big trouble.
My Dad joined the Navy in 45/46 and was a pilot. He had a bunch of magazines from that era and one of the things they said was when in a dog fight, when you see a little smoke coming from the enemy plane, you don’t stop shooting. You shoot until you see flames and that plane is going down, otherwise it might circle around and get your or one of your buddies. I hope Conservatives will keep that in mind as the liberals whine.
I spent 5 months off the coast of Iran in 1980. I’m convinced that Carter used the Embassy Hostage incident to demonstrate the we are Nice Guys who would only go to war in a Fair Fight.
Thanks to him, my kids might get to go to war in a Fair Fight….with Iranian nukes.
Our kids are going to pay in blood for the last four years.
Forty. Years.
Our kids and grandkids are going to curse all our names for the mess we’ve left them. What the government – Democrats and way too many Republicans alike – has done is economic pedophilia. They’ve screwed our children’s futures to buy votes today.
We already are.
We’re fighting the tide. And there’s an enemy invasion on while we’re doing it.
But I’d rather go out like the Poles charging tanks with lances then cower.
It’s about damned time somebody said this.
For over 30 years in the oil business, from $12-$100 barrel oil, I’ve heard nothing but putrid vitriol about my work from the rabid, sanctimonious Left. Once they got their hands into the till, these innumerate idiots blindly threw money at anything that wasn’t coal, oil, natural gas or nuclear. Meanwhile, my industry has created Shale Gas, which now sells for the equivalent of ~$18 per barrel. Yet STILL they squawk.
My kids are reliably conservative, but despite their chosen professions (MS Petroleum Engineering and 1st Year Med Student) they don’t understand how close we are to melt-down.
Tell your kids, tell your neighbor’s kids, tell every damned person under 30 that crosses your path. This ain’t “cool” anymore, this is Real Money, for the Rest Of Their Lives, and Money is Blood.
And, just in case, 5000 rounds of 9mm Parabellum on the top shelf of the closet (with the appropriate tools to make ‘em shoot straight).
As an oil man, you might appreciate the Center for Industrial Progress: http://industrialprogress.net/. It’s a fairly new organization that proudly defends fossil fuels and their benefits to human life.
For someone who hasn’t “got much time to write,” they certainly found the time to over-stuff this essay with fanciful, militaristic fluff.
Here is the tl;dr tweet version: “Power comes from debasing yourself and you must become that which you hate.”
So you hate the military, and by extension, the troops who volunteered to join? Glad to see the maskirovka come down, tovarisch!
With logic like that I sincerely hope you are a Park Ranger and not an Army Ranger. The fresh air might do you some good.
If the war metaphor was a horse, it would have started out dead, been brought back to life, killed and then resurrected to be executed. He even took time out from his Drill Sargent routine to cart out Aunt Fanny and her doily. Laughably overblown rhetoric lacking in any real substance. I suppose we should be thankful he didn’t start block quoting Alinsky.
RLTW!
Putrid nonsense. Always with the ‘don’t stoop to their level’. With friends like you, who needs enemies? Just remember, Guest, your hands are clean because others dirty theirs for you.
PJM has arrived; David Brooks is posting to it under a pseudonym.
> I’m not telling you “the ends justify the means”.
Actually, the ends are the only thing that can justify the means.
After all, it is the means that produce the ends.
Absolutely true.
I remember after the GOP landslide in 1994, as soon as Gingrich and Dole took over Congress in Jan. 1995, they started waffling rather than trying to do what teh voters had given them a mandate to do. And after Okla City they just folded their tents, altogether. Yes, they would have had to take on the media and Pres. Clinton, but the voters who elected them did so on the basis that they rpomised to fight. And they quickly wussed out.
That’s why I couldn’t support Gingrich in 2012–when he had the chance he didn’t execute the plays, and soon enough he only made a show of trying.
What is best in life?
I enjoyed this article. Barack Obama will lose in a landslide this Election day.
Yet now is not the time to be complacent. We are engaged in a battle for the heart and soul of America, and an electoral defeat for the president will not change that.
Now is the time to fight.
Read more of my article: http://www.americanthinker.com/2012/10/time_to_fight.html#ixzz28PAFpQ50
Wow, that’s really racist, and hateful to women. All is forgiven if you post a picture of yourself and you are a minority, but otherwise you are the worst person in the world.
WWWWAAAAAAACISSSSSST!!!1!
*Snicker*
Good sarcasm. Tastes good.
It’s a technique used by the spineless ones for generations. You can frequently experience it with modern women – it’s a favorite weapon in their arsenal of shaming tactics. Rand even described the technique in Atlas Shrugged as being a tactic of the moochers. Use your opponent’s integrity, generosity, self-respect, kindness, etc. against them. Make their virtues, their BEST, into a weapon to manipulate them, usually by accusing them, either explicitly or implicitly, of being devoid of that attribute. The interesting thing is that it only works if you actually DO have that attribute AND are willing to fake reality for them by changing your behavior in the mistaken belief that doing so is a virtuous act. Furthermore, it is a tactic only used by people who can assume these things. If you were actually the kind of person they condemn you for being, or the kind of person who would not fake reality for them, it wouldn’t work.
“Who is the most guilty person in the room?” The evil person, or the person who facilitates evil by handing over his own integrity to the evil person as a tool?
The Left has been fighting by Prison Rules for decades while The Right plays by Mayberry Rules.
Conservative union members don’t speak up at union meetings but they sure call in to talk radio to let us all know all union members aren’t like that.
Citizens-in-name-only become slaves in fact. Don’t whine about RINOs if you won’t even have an argument in real life. Stop rushing to talk radio to desperately try to convince other conservatives not to raise taxes in a recession. Stop thinking liberals are just lacking some facts and they will become conservatives. That’s like telling an anorexic to eat a sandwhich. Eating is the one thing their whole life is devoted to avoiding.
Be prepared to politically stomp on the GOP when they re-elect Boehner, Cantor, and David Drier to House leadership 14 seconds after the Nov 6 election. All of our enemies aren’t on the other side. Many are in our midst sabotaging our efforts in committee and on staffs. “If you ain’t TEA Party you ain’t doing it Right.” We will likely have to drag Romney to the conservative outcome every day he’s in office, but we have to do it. It can’t be delegated and ignored until 2014 and 2016. “You have a republic, if you can keep it.”
Saw this the other day, and it’s perfect:
“Keep calm. Finish him.”
Love it. I’m going to make that in the style of the old British poster.
http://memegenerator.net/instance/27870860
To quote Arnold:
Conan, what is best in life?
To crush your enemies, see them driven before you, and to hear the lamentation of the women!
Don’t forget to vote for your Republican Senate candidate, even in Missouri.
I am not a soldier.
We are not at war.
This is no battle.
To make this kind of moral equivalence and then to call your readers “soldier” is indefensible. Ask the men who have been in real battles in real war. I’m sure they will love having you compare them with some guy like me sitting in his office chair.
Yes, the times suck. But take a minute or two to bring up Images.google.com and search for images of Arlingtono cemetery.
Those are soldiers. And they fought in real battles. In real wars. And gave their lives for America.
Cut the crap. Call a spade a spade. Criticize the times and motivate your readers to get involved. Fine.
But I’m no soldier. And neither are you, pal. And to compare yourself to a soldier is to insult soldiers.
Get it?
Metaphor?
I read this article, and the comments, and I keep hearing Billy Beck’s voice in my head.
Do you all understand what you’re getting into here?
I don’t dispute the premise. I just don’t think most of you realize where it’s going to take you.
@19 and @20: I volunteered and was in a real war (Viet Nam.) And I fear living in America after an all too likely economic collapse more than I was afraid in any American base in Nam. In Nam I was surrounded by fellow citizens who knew we faced a violent enemy. Here in the San Francisco Bay Area I’m surrounded by people who regularly scratch cars with Republican bumper stickers, often deface homes with Republican signs and have no compunction against yelling at me in public quite vociferously.
I spent 25 years after getting out of the Army thinking that I could leave the fighting to others. I then started to get more knowledgeable and more worried, but still, I didn’t do more than vote and make an occasional post or write a (very) occasional letter to the editor of the local paper.
What did that lead to? A major U.S. publication declaring, “We’re All Socialists Now.” A national debt that ensures my daughter and her children and grandchildren will live with stifling debt. An America with fewer options and less influence. And me surrounded by undereducated and underemployed people with all too little understanding of history and the consequences of ignoring it and human nature.
So, Paul A’Barge, you may not be a soldier, but I was. And I understand that as a citizen of my country I have obligations no less real and important as those of the folks in uniform.
And Rollory, whether we understand it or not, we’ve all “gotten into it.” As for “where it’s going to take us?” Where do you think we’re going now?
Good article. It sounds like the only bound should be is it constitutional, legal, and truthful, which by itself is enough to seperate us from them, since they dont recognize those bounds either. But forget about being a gentleman, or being decent, or not being racist, or not hitting somebody when they are down, especially since the left defines what each of these things are, and never follows their own rules. We are fighting a completely ruthless enemy, who follows no rules at all, but loves to impose rules on others, so a certain degree of ruthlessness is needed.