Tag Archives: Obama

Sep 17 2012

Hop, Skip and a Jump

 

“Winter is coming, but these sweatshirts are perfect for fall.”   It sounds like the perfect slogan for the winter front of a department store here in the northern reaches of Maine.  Those of us who are beginning to enjoy the cool bite of fall in the air can fully comprehend the message in those words.  What is incomprehensible is why the Obama campaign would tweet this campaign message minutes before receiving the bodies from the Libyan consulate attack.  Yes, our President had your fall and winter apparel on his mind while the rest of us was recoiling in shock from the brutality of unspeakable monsters.

But it is easy, perhaps, to understand his lack of gravitas in this situation.  Three days before the attacks, security officials from these middle-eastern countries warned our Nation that these attacks from terrorists were imminent.   The President chose to skip every one of these security meetings in order to keep campaigning and no Marines were sent to protect the Libyan Embassy until after the carnage.  Marines at the Cairo Embassy were stripped of live ammunition.

Now his response, in the aftermath, is to blame our freedom of speech.  This has prompted the world at large to begin to now openly mock America’s foreign policy.   Even liberal columnist, Kirsten Powers, has implored the President to “stop blaming the victims”.  This, in light of the fact that the first response from this Administration was to blame a movie for the acts of vile hate, as if someone’s expressed opinion validates a response of murder and hate.

The President and his surrogates have also tried to portray this as an random, spontaneous act, believing that Americans would appreciate rape and pillage better if they felt the terrorists just stumbled into it, forced by the opinions of American filmmaker.  Unfortunately, even this silly notion is not founded on any shred of reason or fact.  The President of Libya has stated emphatically that this was a coordinated and previously planned attack by Al-Qaeda, meant to coincide with the anniversary of  9/11.

While the President has tried to heap blame on the freedoms and liberties we enjoy in this Nation, Governor Mitt Romney denounced the attacks and refused to apologize for American freedoms, imperfect as the expressions thereof may be.  For his show of strength, the President and his media surrogates have vilified Mitt Romney.  Imagine a leader doing something so heinous as decrying evil and defending the United States!  It might even be thought of as Presidential, for shame!

Sarcasm aside, the Democrat Party has a virulent strain of the blame-anybody-else-but-me virus running through its very core of function.  It runs from the White House all the way down to our local Senate Races here in Maine.  In Senate District 27, Herb Clark has been trying to convince voters here in the Highlands that he was duped into sponsoring the bill that called for a feasibility study of the East-West corridor.  That he was somehow forced to hop in front of the cameras when he desired the publicity at the bills signing.  And now that he has jumped off the train, he calls his opponent Senator Thomas a “flip-flop” for calling for a slow down of the train so that all the information can be correctly and clearly disseminated to the people affected by the corridor.  Mr. Clark prefers to apologize for the dispensation of truth and knowledge, something we in the Highlands hold in high regard.  Truth and knowledge has the ring of freedom to it.

How are we in District 27 supposed to trust the Honorable Herbert Clark with the sacred duty of making decisions that effect our livelihoods if the good Representative can’t even trust his own judgment?  People of Maine, we are a people who pride ourselves in our discernment and common sense.  If Representative Clark can be so easily “misled”, so easily confused, and can so easily advocate the shut off of information, then we should be certain that he is a poor representation of the voters of District 27.  We should never apologize for the Freedom of Speech, Freedom of the Press and the Freedom Of Information.  The Democrats seem more concerned with placating maniacal monsters and hiding from truth than defending the very Freedoms that make this nation great.

Sep 3 2012

Write Your Name On It

In the process of the everyday execution of my trade and profession, I often have the opportunity to repair and remodel older homes.  One such home was up here in the foothills of the highlands in small town called Brownville Junction.  As the name implies, this little town was once a bustling depot for trains as they ferried the abundant resources of the north woods to areas abroad.  This whole town was built and supported by the rails that ran through them, that is, until the advent of the regulatory tyranny of the Democrat Party in this State.  But that is a story for another time.

As I carefully removed the handcrafted, craftsman style moldings on doorways and baseboards as to preserve them for reattachment, I noticed something very striking and unique about this trim work.  Time to time on the backs of the wood a signature was scrawled in black with the name of the tradesman, his place of residence and date the piece was attached.  I call this unique and striking because in our modernized and mechanized age the time of handmade wood trim is a bygone era and the hands that expertly shaped and signed them have been, in many instances, laid to rest.

Yes, there is a certain sadness to acknowledge the end of an era, but the sentiment is not gone.  As a young boy learning the trades, my mentors would often admonish me by asking if I was willing to sign my name to the work I had completed and they were inspecting.  Now as a father of two rambunctious boys just getting their feet wet in the trades, I often hear myself reminding them that everything they do is a reflection on their name, their reputation.

Can you sign your name to it?  Are you so secure in your abilities and your product that you would scrawl your name, your residence and the time you built it knowing full well that very signature would leave none other to blame for failure but you?  That blackened scrawl that I read in Brownville Junction represented years of learning, hard work, failure, mistakes, experience and finally the graduation to the confidence to write the signature of a craftsman.

Sadly, many leaders of today will not sign their name to their work or, if they do, they won’t stand by it.  It starts with our sitting President, who has blamed everyone but himself for the actions or inactions of his administration.  The fault has consistently been blamed on President Bush, then Congress and his new scapegoat now, shamefully, is his wife and little girls.  When his campaign managers are pressed to answer if the country is better off than four years ago, they dodge repeatedly, then point to the Maine Ron Paul fiasco and say, with all the petulance of a fourteen year old, “at least we’re united”.

Maine’s leader of the Stealth Democrats, former Governor Angus, will not divulge where he stands politically on issues, who his allies are and how he will vote if he is elected.  Thankfully, the people of Maine have his record to look at.  But the Monarch of Mystery still will not even acknowledge the facts that are on the record.  The deficits he burdened this State with he calls theoretical.  He calls the exposition of his corrupt dealings, by pushing through State laws, which would facilitate his wind energy business, a twisting of the truth.  No, the only twisting is a certain King of Lies in the wind.  Can you sign your name to anything…Governor King?  And you want our trust and vote?

Herbert Clark, who is challenging Senator Doug Thomas for his seat, will not stand behind his bill that he co-sponsored in the legislature.  He said he didn’t realize what was in the bill.  How can you call yourself a competent legislator and not know what the bill you sponsored was about?  It was about information, a reminder, Mr. Clark, finding and providing information.  You, sir, and the special interests groups holding your puppet strings are fighting the dispensation of vital information to the people of Maine.  The Honorable Herbert Clark needs to stand by his signature.

Representative Jeff McCabe of Skowhegan has a different approach to the concept of a signature piece.  Mr. McCabe so admired the work of his mentor John Martin that he took Martin’s work and put his own name on it, word for word.  In the real world, it’s called plagiarism.

There seems to be a theme of accountability or the lack thereof, running through the Democrat ranks that are completely divergent from the core of American exceptionalism.  This November the people of Maine and the rest of the Nation must force the Democrat Party to sign their name to their handiwork, make them stand by it and face the repercussions for it.  If we the people do not demand this, they will never do it on their own.