Steve investigating a double murder

INTRODUCTION

During my three years serving with the United States Air Force Office of Special Investigations in the Philippines we received imminent danger pay (IDP) for about half that time and nonessential military personnel and dependents were restricted to base and/or their houses for about half that time due to the terrorist threats from the New Peoples’ Army communist insurgents. As a United States citizen did you know that members of the United States military were at that level of threat and danger while serving in the Philippines in the late 1980s? No, you didn’t. It was an unadvertised war.

The period from June 1987 through August 1990 was simultaneously the best and worst time in my life. It was three years in hell that impacts my daily life to this very day in 2013. Not a single day goes by that I don’t wake up thinking about that time in the Philippines, people I served with and people who were needlessly murdered or go to bed at night without dreaming about those days and people. The fear and anger are still palpable.

Even as I try unsuccessfully to clean the memories from my mind and life something always seems to happen to resurrect them. In 2005 or 2006 I received a telephone call from an FBI agent who was trying to extradite a NPA terrorist responsible for killing American servicemen from the Philippines to the United States to put him on trial for murder, and I was the primary tactical counterintelligence collector in that case. The FBI agent wanted to know everything I knew and remembered from those days and where he could gain additional insight.

From time to time I receive emails from agents who served with me in the Philippines thanking me for this or that. Here is one recent example of those emails that I received just this year – 2013 (I removed the name and email address):

Hey Steve,
Not certain if you remember me, but I remember you. You were one of the guys I trusted. You showed me how to do my job as an Agent, and how to stay alive while doing it. You and good old XXXX and XXXX…Good times.

Notice how the retired agent in that email refers to me as teaching him how to do his job AND stay alive while doing it. Some people have questioned some of my “war stories” over the years regarding the Philippines and yet I get the occasional email from former and retired agents thanking me for teaching them how to do their jobs AND stay alive while doing it. As you will read in this book, those were very dangerous days.

I was the Non Commissioned Officer in-Charge of Tactical Counterintelligence Collections for AFOSI District 42 from 1987 through 1988 and continued to work tactical counterintelligence collections through August 1990. That period was the most violent in Philippine-American relations since World War II and included multiple terrorist attacks by the New Peoples’ Army communist insurgents against United States military personnel and resources and I was right in the thick of it.

Everything in this book is true and it includes international intrigue, death, organizational incompetence, individual incompetence, violations of international law, Air Force regulations, organizational regulations, Philippine law and the military Status of Forces Agreement (SOFA) between the United States and the government of the Philippines – by me. I have left some things out of the book for personal and private reasons, but everything on the following pages is true and accurate to the best of my recollection almost 23 years later (I have plenty of notes, draft manuscripts, news articles and awards for refreshing my recollection).

I have been trying to write this book as fiction in order to protect certain people and classified information since 1996 and although I actually wrote several draft manuscripts, I have never submitted it for publication. Now, however, a couple of events have prompted me to write this book as nonfiction and reveal everything I remember about the successes and failures of Air Force tactical counterintelligence collections in the Philippines.

One of the first phrases I heard after four Americans were killed in Benghazi, Libya on September 11, 2012 from the administration was that there was “no actionable intelligence” leading up to the attacks. Consequently, there were no preventative measures that could have been put into place to save those four American lives. I am intimately familiar with the phrase “no actionable intelligence” and how it leads to the unnecessary deaths of Americans overseas and it made my blood run cold when I heard it last year in the wake of Benghazi. I knew the moment I heard it that some coward in government had screwed up.

Another reason I want to write this book right now and as nonfiction is due to a recent interaction, or attempted interaction, with my old organization, the Air Force Office of Special Investigations.

I received the following email on April 20, 2013 (I removed the email addresses here):

—–Original Message—–
From: ELMER G CATO
Sent: Sat, Apr 20, 2013 11:48 pm
Subject: SteveBussey.com (ELMER G CATO)
Regarding: General Questions

Full Name: ELMER G CATO

Email Address: elmercato@gmail.com

Comment: Hi Steve. I am Elmer Cato, a former journalist based in Angeles and now First Secretary and Consul here at the Philippine Embassy in Washington D.C. I chanced upon your blog while searching for our former friends in the Public Affairs Office–Tom Boyd and Wayne Crist. I am working on a book on Clark and the insurgency and I guess you are the person I need to talk to so we could compare notes. I hope you are somewhere near. I am sure we have many stories to share.

I also received an email from Mr. Cato, which I’ll talk about later in this book, alleging that the NPA killing of four United States Air Force members around Clark Air Base in October 1987 by the communist NPA insurgents was sponsored by the Libyan government as reprisal for Ronald Reagan bombing Libya. Now, I didn’t know that in 1987 and that’s the first time I’ve heard that allegation and I cannot confirm it. Mr. Cato did not elaborate on that information in his email.

After receiving the above email I spoke with my wife and best friend about how best to handle Mr. Cato’s request. I exchanged several emails with him in an attempt to determine if he actually was who he said he was and if he had some firsthand knowledge of the relevant events, and I explored his claims online as best I could.

After determining that Mr. Cato at least appeared to be legitimate I contacted my old organization’s public affairs office through the AFOSI web site and alerted them that I had received this interview request from an employee of a foreign embassy, and asked them how best to handle the situation. I provided my cell phone number and email address in my written request. Well, here it is May 9, 2013 and I have not yet heard back from HQ/AFOSI. But, the emails from Mr. Cato have stopped.

Consequently, I have decided “what the hell,” just write the damn book as I see fit without concern for potentially classified or sensitive information because, apparently, my old organization isn’t concerned.

So without further adieu, let me give you some background.

There are some extremely professional American intelligence and counterintelligence agencies and individuals in America but unfortunately my old organization, the Air Force Office of Special Investigations, was not one of them. To say it was dangerously naive and unprofessional would be a dramatic understatement. I have seen reports that the AFOSI sustained the highest casualty rate of any Air Force organization that fought in Iraq, and I believe it.

AFOSI: The Air Force Office of Special Investigations was created on August 1, 1948 as a federal law enforcement and investigative agency to conduct major criminal, fraud and counterintelligence investigations and if I remember correctly, it had about 1,200 credentialed special agents when I entered my AFOSI training in September 1984. Here is how the AFOSI describes itself at its web site:

FUNCTION
We are a federal law enforcement and investigative agency operating throughout the full spectrum of conflict, seamlessly within any domain; conducting criminal investigations and providing counterintelligence services.

MISSION
To Identify, exploit and neutralize criminal, terrorist and intelligence threats to the Air Force, Department of Defense and U.S. Government.

When I was stationed in the Philippines, AFOSI was what is commonly referred to in the military as a “stovepipe” organization. AFOSI was completely independent and none of the AFOSI offices on Air Force installations around the world reported to, or were under the authority of, any of the Air Force commanders on those bases. AFOSI detachments reported to their district offices who in-turn reported to the headquarters, AFOSI at Bolling Air Force Base in Washington, D.C.

In the Philippines I was the Non Commissioned officer in-Charge of Tactical Counterintelligence for AFOSI District 42, but we also had a base level investigative detachment that employed approximately 40 special agents, civilian investigative assistants and administrative personnel.

The Communist Party of the Philippines and the NEW PEOPLES’ ARMY (NPA): All you need to understand about the NPA is that it was formed in about 1969 as the armed wing of the Communist Party of the Philippines and conducts a “protracted peoples’ struggle” against the government of the Philippines to impose a communist government.

The NPA conducted assassinations of Filipino government officials, police and military as well as bombings. They collected revolutionary taxes from businessmen and individuals and held teach-ins in communities small and large. The armed struggle was multipronged manifesting mainly as urban terrorism in the cities and a more conventional battle against the police and military in the countryside. The NPA did not, however, conduct attacks against U.S. military personnel or resources until after I arrived in 1987.

MARCOS v. AQUINO: According to the Wikipedia entry, Ferdinand Marcos was president of the Philippines from 1965 until 1986, although most people consider him a “right-wing” dictator. In 1983 he, or his administration, was accused of killing his primary political rival, Benigno Aquino, Jr., on the tarmac at the airport in Manila. Aquino’s wife, Corazon Aquino, eventually ousted Marcos in what became known as the “People Power Revolution” in February 1986.

The Aquino government was extremely left of the political center and that caused a great deal of angst among the more right-wing military. That angst led to several very bloody and deadly coup attempts over the next few years, as well as a proliferation of the communist NPA. And that’s where I entered the scene in June 1987.

Over the next three years I would find myself an illegal participant in an undeclared and unadvertised war where Americans were targeted and killed and with no trust in my own organization or government.

Chapter 1 – Prelude to Hell

I wasn’t completely naive when I went into the AFOSI but I did have pretty high expectations. As an investigator (detective in the civilian world) for the Air Force Security Police at Dyess AFB in Abilene, TX I had worked with AFOSI special agents and knew something of their training and capabilities. I also knew they were the executive investigative agency in the Air Force and investigated most major crimes. To me, they were on a par with the FBI and all of the other federal investigative agencies. But I was soon to be very disappointed.

I entered the AFOSI Special Investigations Academy as a 26-year old Staff Sergeant with just less than 8 years time in the Air Force in September 1984 at Bolling AFB, Washington, D.C. Minus my basic training and technical school in 1976 and 1977, I had been a Security Police Law Enforcement Specialist (base cop) for about just more than 7 years and had been an investigator for the last two of those years. So I wasn’t too intimidated by the AFOSI Academy because, after all, it was just one more law enforcement course for me and I found them very easy.

The AFOSI training was good but not up to my expectations. I thought their priorities were wrong in deciding on which topics to give a lot of training and instruction and which topics to cover briefly. One of the topics they gave short shrift, in my opinion was intelligence and counterintelligence seeing how we were still in the midst of the Cold War with the Soviet Union and, despite President Reagan’s best efforts, there was no end in sight. They basically just mentioned it in passing as a part of liason with foreign nationals, learning the culture in a foreign nation, etc.

Nevertheless, I successfully completed my eleven or twelve weeks (can’t remember) of training and received my box-tops, as we called them (badge and credentials), from the general the second week of December 1984. After graduation I flew back to Dyess Air Force Base in Abilene, TX to close out the house and do my out processing paperwork for my new assignment to Maxwell AFB, Montgomery, Alabama, while Veronica and the kids stayed with her parents in Virginia Beach, VA.

I arrived at my new assignment with my wife and kids in January 1985 and began my one year probationary period and what the Air Force called my Career Development Course – my CDCs – which was a correspondence course to augment my training at the Special Investigations Academy. We took the usual time to settle into base housing, explore our new surroundings and get familiar with my new office and role in life.

Phil Lambert, my new supervisor, had big plans for me. My new office, AFOSI Detachment 840, was way down in their drug investigation statistics and Phil wanted me to reinvigorate the drug investigations program and even work as an undercover narcotics agent. So, I did.

At one point over the next two and a half years I worked a joint drug investigation with the Montgomery, AL police department wherein I brought in another AFOSI undercover drug agent and after all the arrests were made and the case concluded the Chief of Police wrote a letter to my boss stating that we had essentially shut down drug traffic in Montgomery for two weeks.

Now I know two weeks doesn’t sound like much, but shutting down drug traffic in any medium sized city for any period of time is a very big deal. Apparently, the word was out that “the feds” were in town!

During the summer of 1986 I made a series of trips to Blytheville, Arkansas as an undercover narcotics agent to help them with a case they had. It was difficult traveling back and forth and leaving Veronica and the kids, especially since we had a new baby – our fourth – but the case was very successful operationally and I learned a great deal that would serve me very well the following year when I transferred to the Philippines.

I also worked as an undercover narcotics agent in an operation in Little Rock, Arkansas sometime during this period, I can’t remember exactly when, that was also a great success. I hated being gone from Veronica and the kids for six straight weeks, but it was what my job and career required. It was a tough operation with some specific problems but again, I learned valuable lessons that would serve me well in the future.

Veronica and I discussed our future in the Air Force as the year 1986 got long in the tooth. I knew we would be hot for another assignment somewhere in the world either at the end of 1987 or the beginning of 1998 because the average time on station in the Air Force was three years. And since I had been given back to back stateside assignments in Abilene, TX and Montgomery, AL, I knew our next assignment would be overseas. Especially since my only previous overseas assignment had been a “short tour” in Thule, Greenland and I had never served a long tour overseas.

So we decided to fill out our Air Force “dream sheet” and request an assignment to the Pacific Theatre to at least try to have our say in where the Air Force sent us next. Veronica didn’t like the cold and she had already visited Germany when her father was in the Navy. She had also been stationed in Iceland with her parents and really didn’t care to experience the cold and snow of Germany or the fog and rain of England – both probable assignments had I not requested the Pacific Theatre.

I had no idea that the HQ/AFOSI Personnel office would be so quick on the trigger with a new assignment. I can’t remember exactly, but I received orders to AFOSI District 42, Clark Air Base, Republic of the Philippines in late 1986 or early 1987, with a reporting date in June 1987. What was funny as hell though, was that the assignment listed a job code, or position number, that indicated I would be a technical service agent – the bug and camera guys. Tech Services in AFOSI was a sub-specialty with very specific training that I didn’t have. But Phil was excited as hell that I was being assigned to the Philippines because he had already served there and loved it. I’ll get back to that in a minute.

I contacted HQ/AFOSI about the job code and was told that it was a mistake. They reissued my orders with another job code with which I was unfamiliar. A little investigation revealed that it was Non Commissioned Officer in-Charge of Tactical Counterintelligence Collections. That was not a formal sub-specialty but was another investigative area in which I had no specific training or experience, and that worried me. I had been a base cop, general criminal and fraud investigator and an undercover narcotics agent and knew absolutely nothing about counterintelligence – tactical or otherwise.

Phil Lambert described tactical counterintelligence to me and assured me that the family and I would love the Philippines. The AFOSI, according to Phil, was highly respected by the Philippine government in general, and the police and military in particular. He said my days would be filled with playing golf and my nights attending cocktail parties with Philippine government officials. My job would be to pump them for counterintelligence information that tended to indicate a threat, or potential threat, to U.S. personnel and resources in the Philippines and document what they told me in Intelligence Information Reports – IIRs. The IIRs would go from me to the local intelligence/counterintelligence analysts, then to HQ/AFOSI and finally to all other federal intelligence and counterintelligence agencies.

I always had the utmost respect for Phil Lambert. During my 20-year military career Phil was absolutely the best supervisor and fellow agent I worked under and with. I trusted Phil with my life and career advice, but he was wrong on his predictions concerning my upcoming assignment in the Philippines.

As a news and political junkie even back in 1986 and 1987 I had watched all of the news coverage I could about the bloodless coup that ousted Philippine President Ferdinand Marcos and installed Corazon Aquino as president. And that news coverage included reports of the communist CPP/NPA and whether or not they would take advantage of the instability to conduct terrorist attacks against Philippine government and other targets. All through 1986 and into 1987 the Philippines, as a nation, were portrayed in the American media as the typical unstable third world government and country.

As I watched the news with concern I also saw the concern on Veronica’s face, knowing that we were headed to the Philippines. Veronica had never expressed concern over my chosen law enforcement career, including my work as an undercover narcotics agent, and she didn’t verbalize any concerns about my being the new NCOIC of tactical counterintelligence collections in the Philippines even in the face of concerning news reports. But I could tell that she was worried at least to a small degree.

I broached my concerns with Phil and he did everything he could to reassure me. He told me that my entire family and I would love the Philippines and the NPA communists were absolutely – unequivocally – no threat to me or other Americans serving in the Philippines.

According to Phil, the NPA were worried about drawing the U.S. government and military into their insurgency as well as angering local Filipino businesses that depended on American dollars for their livelihood and existence. According to Phil, any attack on U.S. targets by the NPA would shut down most of the businesses around Clark Air Base and place the local businessmen in opposition to the NPA. Instead of winning the hearts and minds of the people the NPA would create new enemies within the community. Phil was dead wrong.

During this entire story you are going to repeatedly ask yourself just how inept the AFOSI is. Well, this story will give you a head’s up in that regard.

In the winter of 1987 I had to travel back to Little Rock, Arkansas to testify in the Article 32 hearings (pre-trial hearings) from the undercover narcotics operation I participated in earlier. During that trip I told the attorneys from the Judge Advocate General’s Office (JAG) not to drag their feet scheduling and carrying out the courts-martial of the accused because I had an assignment to the Philippines and really didn’t want to travel all the way back to Arkansas for the trials. My admonition, apparently, fell on deaf ears.

Prior to leaving for the Philippines I was told that I would have to return to the States for the courts-martial of some 15 accused drug deals and users. So, Veronica and I took 30 days of military leave prior to leaving for the Philippines and visited family in Florida and Virginia and decided that Veronica and the kids would stay with her parents in Virginia until I returned for the trials and afterward they would travel back to the Philippines with me. Little did I know how quick my turn around trip was going to be.

Toward the end of that leave in June 1987 while in Virginia, I received a call from my old district office in Alabama instructing me that I would have to return to Arkansas in early July after being in the Philippines for only two weeks and my expected stay in Arkansas would be two weeks. I asked what I should do because I was scheduled to fly to the Philippines the next day, if I should extend my leave and just stay in the States until the trials or go into a temporary duty status at the nearest Air Force Base, but was told that I couldn’t miss my flight to the Philippines the next day! So, I left the next day for the Philippines.

I met my new commander the first day I arrived in the Philippines, Colonel Cuniff. He immediately asked where my family was and I explained they would be joining me after my return from Arkansas. He asked why I was going to Arkansas and I told him. Good Lord I thought the man’s head was going to explode. He yelled at me and asked why in the hell I was even there!

I explained everything to him and he turned to his chief of admin and told him, “You contact District 8 and have them send us an “f-ing” fund cite, I’m not paying for this BS TDY!” A fund cite is a numerical identification for the unit and account funding a particular thing in the military and Col. Cuniff was not going to use his unit’s money to fund my trip back to Arkansas. So, that’s pretty much how I started my tour of duty at AFOSI District 42, in the dog house with my new commander. But, I learned a great deal during the next two weeks.

During my first two weeks in the Philippines I met everyone in the district office and the base detachment. I learned that my office had three people, an officer in-charge (OIC), a tactical counterintelligence collector and me. Unbelievably, that was it and we had to cover six U.S. military facilities spread out over two-thirds the island of Luzon.

My new office – me – was responsible for collecting and reporting tactical counterintelligence information that would tend or actually indicate a terrorist or intelligence threat against Clark Air Base, John Hay Air Station, Wallace Air Station, a communications facility at San Miguel in Capas, Tarlac, the Crow Valley Training Facility and the communications facility atop Mt. Cabuyo in the Northern Philippines. All of that with just three guys in a third-world country with an active communist insurgency and after the United States was surprised by the bloodless coup that toppled the Marcos regime a scant one year before!

Now don’t get me wrong, there we other intelligence and counterintelligence agencies in the Philippines that engaged in cross reporting and helped us collect information to secure our facilities and personnel. We had the Naval Investigative Service (NIS before they transitioned to the NCIS), the CIA out of the embassy in Manila, the Defense Intelligence Agency (DIA) and of course the omnipresent U.S. Agency for International Development or USAID, who I always suspected of being an intelligence agency.

The problem, of course, is that each of those agencies had their own parochial interests and were loathed to share information. Their reporting went through their own headquarters, was scrubbed by analysts and then finally disseminated back down to us in a completely vanilla form long after the fact.

I spent two weeks reading country information, old IIRs, memorizing source/informant dossiers so I could work those human sources of information effectively, and just essentially learning my job. I did go out with my new partner, Jim, on several source meets and operations.

Jim took me and introduced me to several of his overt Filipino counterparts from whom he collected counterintelligence information on a routine basis, including Philippine Constabulary Captain Edgardo Baydo, Lieutenant George Gaddi, Major Efram Alameriz and a few others. Additionally, he introduced me to Major Jack Ebwan, the head of a Philippine Army intelligence unit stationed at Camp Olivas, the Philippine Constabulary Provincial Headquarters in the town of San Fernando, Pampanga Province.

The meetings were very boring and I remember thinking that all of our overt contacts were simply feeding us BS in return for envelopes of cash. In fact, Jim once told me that he knew most of the information was BS because it didn’t match up with any other reporting and much of it was old information and warnings that had never come true in the past. But, we were graded, or evaluated, on the number of tactical counterintelligence items we reported per month instead of the veracity of our reporting and each thing our overt – professional – contacts told us was an “item” to be counted by the bean counters in Washington. After all, Jim told me, there was no “real threat” to Americans and American resources in the Philippines.

On one occasion Jim told me that he had to do something with his wife and kids that night and asked if I could take one of the office cars and meet an informant in the parking lot outside the main gate of Clark Air Base. I was to give the informant an envelope of cash and he was going to give me an envelope of classified Philippine government documents. My self-preservation radar immediately went up and I asked Jim if I was allowed to be armed for the meeting and he explained to me that I was not because that would be a violation of the Status of Forces Agreement between the U.S. and Philippine governments – we were not allowed to be armed off base, even with just our side arms.

It isn’t that I didn’t trust Jim, but that I didn’t know Jim. Sure, he was an AFOSI special agent just as I was and there was an implicit trust there, but what he was asking me to do really seemed outside our job description and outside international and U.S. law. We were tactical counterintelligence agents and not intelligence agents. AFOSI, as far as I knew, had no “spy” mission. Additionally, I wondered why Jim had set the meeting if he had plans with his wife and what he would have done had I not been there. Was Jim trying to “get dirt” on me for our time working together going forward, did someone have dirt on Jim, was my own agency testing me for some reason to see if I was trustworthy, or was this just standard operating procedure in the Philippines? I had no way of knowing.

The AFOSI was an extremely conservative law enforcement/investigative agency and they did run operations against their own people and agents from time to time. Phil Lambert once told me that on the one hand we had the legal limits and on the other hand we had the AFOSI limits and that I should try to stay somewhere in the middle during my career.

I left Clark Air Base about an hour before my scheduled meeting that night and drove around town by myself to make sure that I wasn’t being followed. I arrived at the meeting location in the parking lot about 15 minutes before the scheduled meet and waited. As I waited I noticed how hot and humid it was and how the place just stank of urine, feces, diesel fumes and dirt. I hated it, I thought, and found it disgusting.

I watched as small children, out in town after 10 O’clock at night, tried to sell chewing gum and flowers to American GIs out on the town for the night and prostitutes tried to lure them into the local bars. Loud rock music blared from open doors and windows in the “American section” of Angeles city reminding me of every movie and television show I had ever seen about Vietnam.

Finally another vehicle pulled into the parking lot and came to a stop next to the driver’s side window of my car. I rolled down my window and the Filipino driver of the other car tried to make small talk with me but I interrupted him and asked if he had something for me. He gave me an envelope and I opened it and saw type written information on onion skin paper and the word “SECRET” stamped in red ink. I handed him an envelope with 500 pesos in it and as he was thanking me I hit the gas and drove off. I took the envelope of “secret” information straight back to the office and locked it in the safe.

When I saw Jim the next day I engaged him in some conversation and asked him how long he had been in the AFOSI and what his career field had been prior to joining the AFOSI. It turned out he had been in the AFOSI about as long as I had but instead of a law enforcement background he had been an Air Force vehicle mechanic in the motor pool. He had no law enforcement background and training other than his AFOSI Special Investigations Academy, his CDCs and his two or three years on the job. I told Jim never to ask me to do anything like that again because unless it was my operation with my informants then I wasn’t doing it.

After two weeks I finally traveled back to Little Rock to give my testimony in the drug trials in late June 1987 but surprisingly, the courts-martial were postponed because the sister of one of the defendants wanted to attend but the timing was not convenient for her. So, we had to wait. Finally, in early August 1987, Veronica and the four kids met me in Little Rock and we all flew the 30+ hours to the Philippines. It was a grueling trip with extended layovers in Los Angeles and Guam.

The entire ordeal of trying to schedule a permanent change of station move coordinated with multiple courts-martial, moving a family of 6 people, including four kids under the age of 11, learning a new job, engaging in espionage against an unstable third-world government taught me in short order exactly how inept the organization for which I worked was, and I knew I was in pretty deep trouble for the next three years. I was proved right in no time flat when the bloodiest coup attempt in the history of the Philippines kicked off shortly after my return and then the killings in October 1987.

The post mortem assessment of the Chechen bombers in Boston is both amazing and embarrassing. Watching the Sunday morning talking head programs today makes me wonder three things; how long it will be until political correctness once again kills in America, is there some sort of radicalization serum or ray gun we don’t know about and why do we keep pushing immigration into America from highly volatile parts of the word where the more radical sects of Islam are predominant?

Listening to the various news programs this morning I heard such passive phrases as “self-radicalized,” “how he was radicalized” and the younger of the two Chechen terrorists may have been “brainwashed by his older brother,” and it all made me sick to my stomach. Using the passive voice when talking about terrorists being radicalized only serves to assuage them, and others, of their guilt by implying they were held down by someone and injected with some sort of radicalization serum and hit with a radicalization ray gun.” It passively lays the blame on whoever may have “radicalized” them. And it also sickens me to call the Boston Marathon bombing “homegrown terrorism.”

What about this scenario, a pre-planned sleeper cell? Just place yourself inside the mind of an enemy commander and envision, if you will, a scenario of how to get a few enemy terrorist cells into our country. Would you not try to get the most innocuous and seemingly benign people you could who could easily blend in and had plenty of time to build their cover stories and fold into the great melting pot? Of course you would.

Since the attacks on 9/11/01 many counterterrorism and counterintelligence analysts have worried about “sleeper cells,” people and groups of people living among us in the United States awaiting orders from someone to conduct terrorist attacks or waiting for some precipitating event around the world to signal the time for their attacks. And, it may be significant that the two Chechen terrorists came to America as kids, possibly 9 and 15-years old when they arrived because we know there are Islamic regions around the world where the children are trained from birth to hate the United States and Israel and trained to be Islamic fighters and nobody in the world is more seemingly harmless than a couple of kids. Has anyone asked how these two Chechen terrorists were raised for those years in their homelands?

The younger, and surviving, of the two Chechen terrorists is now 19-years old and arrived in the United States approximately 10 years ago when he was 9-years old, according to reports, which places his immigration here post 9/11. But it also places his date of birth right at the beginning of the first Chechen War and he still lived in Chechnya for the second Chechen war with Russia which began in 1999. And, it was during the 1990s when radical Arab/Islamic jihadists fought in Chechnya while those young men were growing up there.

So we have to ask ourselves what the possible Islamic jihad influences are in Chechnya. According to Wikipedia:

The Arab Mujahideen in Chechnya…is an international unit of Islamist Mujahideen fighting in Chechnya and other parts of the North Caucasus.

It was created by Fathi al-Jordani[2] in 1995 during the First Chechen War, where it fought against the Russian Federation in favor of Chechnya’s independence as the Chechen Republic of Ichkeria. Since the outbreak of the Second Chechen War it played an important part in further Chechen resistance.

Here are some things we know in our post motem of the Second Boston Massacre:

America has been at war since at least 9/11/01 with certain sects within Islam;

There are very volatile and violent regions of the word where radical sects of Islam are prevalent;

People around the world with a belief in Islam train their children from birth to hate America and Israel and train them as jihadi suicide bombers, fighters and terrorists;

There is no such thing as a “radicalization serum” or ray gun;

We are importing and even fast-tracking emigrants from very radical parts of the world where jihadist Islam is the order of the day.

We have a right and responsibility, as a soverign nation-state, to protect ourselves first and foremost above and beyond allowing any immigration at all, much less from those countries where our enemies reside.

America needs to stop being so damn politically correct and understand that we are at war with a clearly identifiable enemy from known parts of the world and fight that war accordingly. And we need to stop allowing our governors to tell us to lay down our civil rights, civil liberties and unalienable rights, such as gun control, for a false sense of security domestically while they import international terrorists from volatile regions around the world through stupid politically correct immigration policies. Enough is enough!

I’ve always said that liberals and progressives are the little children in American sociopolitical debate because they concentrate on emotion versus fact, logic and reason. But, they reached new lows yesterday when President Obama selected a “Sandy Hook” parent who tragically lost a child during the December 2012 tragedy at Sandy Hook Elementary School to deliver his Saturday address to the nation.

According to a clip I saw on the Sunday morning talking head shows the Sandy Hook parent referred to the current attempts at additional gun control as “reasonable gun responsibility measures.” Boy, talk about obvious emotional manipulation!

Progressives have a long and dangerous record of manipulating the English language in order to manipulate emotions and sociopolitical debate, such as the Associated Press recently dropping the term “illegal alien” and at least one politician attempting to force NASCAR to drop the NRA as a sponsor or change the name of a race. Then of course, there is the entire political correctness agenda we have suffered under for the past several decades.

The fact liberal and progressive politicians, pundits, media personalities and others do it is of course a problem, but a bigger problem is the millions of Americans that fall for it. I’m looking for many progressives in my Twitter feed and on my Facebook page to parrot the new emotional phrase all day and night this coming week, “reasonable gun responsibility measures.” Gee, doesn’t that sound just nifty!

Let’s get something straight; there is nothing reasonable about government overreach and the infringement of liberty. More than just the 2nd Amendment, this debate is about the 4th Amendment, the 5th, the 9th, the 10th and the 14th Amendment and probably a few others. There is nothing “reasonable” about having your mental health records submitted to the federal government for the “clearance” of your unalienable rights and liberties.

There is nothing reasonable about the federal government violating the 9th and 10th Amendments and please, don’t tell me what the Supreme Court has said. The Supreme Court is a part of our federal government and is therefore equally limited in its powers and authority just as is the rest of the federal government. The Supreme Court is also that august body that gave the habeas-okayeas to eugenics, abortion, separate but equal and so many other abominations.

Paraphrasing George Washington, the Constitution is sacred on us all until an explicit act of the whole people changes it. That folks is the amendment process. Our Constitution does not change with the simple passage of time, judicial or legislative fiat or due to one political party winning an election.

It is time for adult Americans concerned with fact, logic, reason, rights, responsibilities and liberty to speak up and question past assumptions concerning federal powers versus individual liberty. We must no longer accept things as reasonable simply because someone applies that word to their proposed despotism. There is nothing reasonable, responsible or any other soft-sounding emotionally manipulative phrase in unrestrained government power in violation of our Supreme Law of the Land.

Americans need to use the opportunity in this current “gun control” debate to assert ourselves and reclaim our birthright. Accordingly, do not let yourself get rat holed into debating just the 2nd Amendment because then you will find yourself doing nothing more than defining the word “infringed.” We need to expand the debate to cover every single issue in the entire Constitution that applies to this matter and use it to talk about the exercise of federal powers across the board.

And please realize when politicians are attempting to manipulate your emotions through bogus words and phrases – cute, cuddly sounding and seemingly benign and innocuous little terms. Refuse to be treated or spoken to like a child!

More than just stupid; modern Americans are slothfull and irresponsible when it comes to the issue of freedom.

Many Americans buy into the thesis espoused by Senators Dick Durbin (D-IL) and Diane Feinstein (D-CA) that our rights are not absolute. They believe that our rights are subject to a court test and legislative fiat at any given time for any given purpose. Rather than black letter law they believe in transient emotions and “fairness.” Well, let’s play along.
Modern politicians and other progressives claim it is not a 2nd Amendment infringement if they outlaw guns that look like AK-47s and M-16s because you can still “keep and bear” other firearms. They hold the same belief with the so-called high capacity magazines (an ammunition magazine they have placed an arbitrary number on). Now let’s apply those same standards to the entertainment and news media.

Why does Hollywood “need” to show all the blood and gore in modern movies? They didn’t used to. It used to be that television shows and movies didn’t show the immediate effect of someone being shot. You would just see a character grab an area of his body to signify he had been shot and in the next scene you might see a little blood in that area of his or her body. Now though, they show blood and body parts flying across the screen! Why? Why do they need to do that?

As movies and television shows have changed to become far more graphic, sexually as well as violently, are American society has changed exponentially for the worse and become much harsher. So there is obviously a correlation between Hollywood violence and societal violence – more so than progressives can show with the things/rights they attack. So let’s pass laws to limit Hollywood’s ability to be so graphic.

Remember, according to progressives our rights are not absolute. And we would not be infringing Hollywood’s freedom of speech anyway because they could still make movies with the same messages, for now anyway, but just less graphically. And while we’re at it, let’s look into the issue of academic freedom for progressive and liberal teachers and professors.

I believe that liberal and progressive teachers and professors are a dangerous and subversive threat to our Constitution – domestic enemies of our Constitution, if you will – and should be subject to restrictions. It would not conflict, of course, with their perceived 1st Amendment rights because they could still teach what is actually in the textbooks but just with some “common sense” and “fair” regulation. Who among us can oppose “common sense” and “fairness?” Is that what we’re all about now?

Now, let’s talk about a woman’s alleged absolute right to an abortion, or birth control or anything else. Let’s apply some conservative “common sense” and “fairness” to an alleged right to homosexual marriage – which is not absolute. Let’s talk about someone’s alleged “right” to healthcare that cannot possibly be “absolute” if someone else has to pay for it. Let’s talk about every single thing progressives and liberals hold near and dear to their hearts.

Once you admit the premise that rights are not absolute and government power is, all hope for a free society is lost forever, and that’s stupid.

“I would rather be exposed to the inconveniences attending too much liberty than to those attending too small a degree of it.” –Thomas Jefferson

Only despots and tyrants contrive ways to infringe the rights of the people.

I was debating gun control as it related to single-incident mass shooting events with an individual last night when the specific issue of the gun show loophole came up. I told the person to find me one example of a mass-murderer purchasing his gun at a gun show and then we’d talk about it. The person’s response was, “there is the potential.” To me, that equates to “maybe.”

When will Americans stop sacrificing their unalienable rights upon the Altar of Maybe? We can sit here and play “the maybe game” all day if you want.

A potential murderer may purchase a weapon at a gun show.

Someone may break into your house and steal your gun.

An attacker may take a gun from a rape victim and use it against her.

A concealed carry permit holder may hit innocent bystanders while confronting a gunman.

A veteran with PTSD may have a bad day and use a gun against innocent people.

A parent may not feed a child properly.

A parent may not educate a child properly.

You may get heart disease from too much salt.

There may be man-made global warming.

You may get into a car crash.

A teen may decide to smoke due to a television character smoking.

We may convince people to eat healthier and bring down obesity rates.

We may save one child.

We may stop a terrorist.

We may bring down drunken driving rates.

“Maybe” is only limited by the imaginations of 300 million minds in America. I’m sure you can sit around and think of all kinds of possibilities and they would all sound very serious. Are you willing to submit your unalienable rights to a never ending child’s game? I’m not. I stand with Thomas Jefferson.

What are “rights” and are they absolute or not? What is the meaning of unalienable? These are critical questions right now in America because they are being thrown about today like candy from a float at the Macy’s Thanksgiving Day parade.

America was founded on the belief in “unalienable rights” and designed as a grand experiment in self-government. While American society was intended to be “governed” under certain limitations and restrictions by temporary stewards, the American people were not intended to be ruled with politicians and jurists picking away at, defining and redefining, our rights and liberties. In short, America was designed based on certain absolutes.

Therefore, it is incumbent upon every American to always ask the next question in sociopolitical debate – get to the next level – challenge assertions and talking points made by those temporary stewards, academics and jurists. Here are two examples of what Americans must challenge, and how, if we are to remain free:

Conservative jurist Antonin Scalia asserted in the landmark 2nd Amendment case D.C. v. Heller, “The court recognizes that the right to bear arms is not absolute, that some restrictions may be placed and that “the right was not a right to keep and carry any weapon whatsoever in any manner whatsoever and for whatever purpose” meaning there can be some regulations on bearing arms, such as banning felons from owning weapons, the mentally ill, and having registration requirements.”

Congresswoman Nancy Pelosi (D-CA), in discussing the 2nd Amendment recently said, “rights are not absolute.”

First of all, both statements are self-defeating and nonsensical. If it is not absolute in and of itself, in the absence of crime or other abuses, then it isn’t a right to begin with. In America our unalienable rights do not come from government so government has no legal, moral or ethical authority or power to determine, define and limit those rights. Notice I said “unalienable rights,” that’s important and I’ll explain more in just a moment.

You have to ask these folks which rights they’re talking about because in America there are really two types of rights; unalienable rights endowed us by God and civil rights contrived and bestowed by civil society through government. This is a very important distinction because the former are absolute and unalienable while the later are neither.

Our Founders codified only one exception to our unalienable rights, conviction of a crime upon the application of due process of law.

So in actuality, there are only two legitimate restrictions upon unalienable rights; your unalienable rights end where those of another man begin, and your rights can be restricted, even taken away, upon due process of law after being accused and convicted of a crime against society. Even God Himself who endowed us with our unalienable rights made those provisions in Mosaic Law.

Civil rights are different. Civil rights are those rights contrived by civil society for the orderly conduct of that society. Civil rights include voting, civil marriage, legal protection of assets through incorporation, certain tax breaks, trust and estate laws and more. These “rights” are not absolute and can be controlled by the society which created them and should probably be called civil privileges rather than rights.

Unalienable means that from which you cannot be alienated by other men. But, in the law there is this animal called form over function. What I’ve just written about can be considered the form of our American founding and experience, but what would be the actual function?

The function is that in a free country government does not alienate us from our fundamental, natural, human rights through prior restraint. We do not infringe the rights of the many due to the crimes of the few. It is one thing to prohibit a convicted felon from owning a gun but quite another all together to prohibit law abiding free men from buying an AR-15 or even a high capacity magazine. The former is a civil, prudent and reasonable act of modern society while the later is despotism.

Once you admit the false premise that rights are not absolute then you have submitted your life, your body, your will, the fruits of your labor, the future of your children; your very existence to the whims, temporal interests, jealousies and hubris of transient men and women in government.

American government and society are not shades of gray as would-be despots and tyrants would have you believe, but were founded upon certain absolutes for our own protection and the protection of our posterity. It is time to demand and enforce our birthright, our absolute and unalienable rights.

Many political conservatives have a problem with “Black History Month” because we actually believed Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. when he said to judge people by the content of their character and not the color of their skin. Conservatives actually believed in desegregation and worked toward that dream – ending Jim Crow segregation – for several generations and feel that the idea of “Black History Month” only serves to re-segregate America and pit race against race.

The idea of setting aside a month to celebrate famous black Americans was to give black children people of their own race, people with whom they could connect on a personal level, to look up to in order to overcome the belief that blacks in America are, or were, inferior. However, that can and should be done simply by including famous black Americans in Civics and History classes throughout the school experience without a special month that risks re-segregating the races in America or otherwise inflaming passions. Insert your cliché here – the ends do not justify the means, anything worth doing is worth doing right, etc.

Black History Month, however, does provide us with an opportunity to take a larger sociopolitical look at America. Now, a quick note to liberals and progressives; do not misunderstand anything I’m about to say and do not put your stupid words and fears in my mouth. I did not and do not support any segregation, Jim Crow era or otherwise.

As hideous, inhumane and stifling as it was, Jim Crow era segregation saw many black Americans rise to extremely high levels in society, politics, business and science, against all odds. Again, use whatever cliché you wish; necessity is the mother of invention; out of chaos comes order; the cream always rises to the top – whatever – the fact is that many great Americans who were raised during Jim Crow segregation to some extent or another broke through, men and women such as Colin Powell, Condi Rice, Clarence Thomas, Bill Cosby, Walter Williams, far too many to list here.

But what has happened since the advent of the American welfare society, Affirmative Action and all the other “liberal compassion?”

According to the Census in 1960 approximately 80% of black children were born into traditional nuclear two-parent homes. But by the 2000 Census over 70% of black children were born to single-parent homes and we know that being raised by a single mother is a leading indicator of poverty and crime in America. How and why has this happened? Think about the American Indian and how “we” destroyed an entire people.

Sociologists and politicians claim there are far more reasons for what’s going on in the American black community, namely subtle racism and Republican presidential policies, conservative “dog whistles,” etc, but I’m reminded of the old saying, “sometimes when you hear the sound of hooves in the distance, think horses and not zebras.” Sometimes the obvious actually is the answer.

The traditional nuclear family is the cornerstone of Western Civilization, all civilization really, but with very few exceptions blacks in early America were predominately slaves and were not allowed to build those families. Husbands and wives, when there were husbands and wives, were split up and sold off in many cases as were the children of slaves. After the Civil War many freed blacks took the names of their previous owners and had no real family identity of their own upon which to fall back, save possibly the slaves who had built and maintained clandestine marital relationships without their master’s knowledge.

So by the time President Johnson ushered in the welfare state in the mid-1960s the American black family was a scant 100 years old and had no deep roots on which to depend. Additionally, due to only 100 years in freedom stifled by Jim Crow segregation, blacks in America accounted for a very high percentage of poverty while constituting a very small percentage of society as an identifiable group. Consequently, a much larger percentage of black Americans as a group qualified for welfare and other government subsistence, including inner city housing.

Much like the American Indian, a large percentage of black Americans were herded onto government reservations but instead of scrub land in Oklahoma, these new reservations were the inner cities of Detroit, Chicago, New York and others. Then, just like the Indians, the male head of household role was supplanted with government subsistence thereby subverting the role and necessity of the man and undermining the very family structure upon which all civilization is built.

When you supplant the male role in the family and society you create a void and all voids must be filled. Just like happened with the American Indian men, drugs and alcohol soon filled the void for black men and that always leads to increasing crime rates. The increased crime, of course, leads to increased incarceration, criminal records and problems securing adequate future employment thereby initiating an extremely vicious cycle.

The comparison here is not that welfare has been detrimental to the black family and not white families. To the contrary, more numbers of whites have traditionally been on welfare than blacks but the percentages, as identifiable communities, are higher for blacks than whites so the damage is magnified proportionally.

Additionally, the white family structure in America is centuries old versus the 100 years for black American families so it takes longer, due to the extended family support structure, for government to destroy the white family structure and the results are less noticeable due to the numbers and percentages.

Rather than backdoor reparations, “fairness,” a helping hand up or even “affirmative action,” welfare has proven a detriment to the American black family structure and community. It was nothing more than a way for racist Democrats – a political party in which hateful and violent racist and segregationist roots run very deep – to control American blacks just like their forefathers “handled” the American Indian.

Now, on top of all that I’ve just said, the problems are exacerbated and accelerated with the death of the civil rights movement guiding light, Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. and the advent of self-serving, opportunist poverty pimps and race-baiters who began teaching and preaching entitlement, hate, blame, separatism, revisionist History and group-think versus individualism, personal and family responsibility and self-respect. The death of Dr. King saw the proliferation of the black separatist movement which has inspired re-segregation.

Instead of working to get off the government reservation and reassert the traditional male head of household role and rebuild the family structure, the poverty pimps preach more government handouts, more government programs, more largesse, more control and more reservation mentality, all the things destroying the black community in America.

If Black History Month is not the appropriate time and opportunity to have an honest discussion and attempt a little problem solving, then it is all for naught.

Deceased former LA cop Chris Dorner is being hailed as a hero by many on the political left. People are saying that he “took it to the powerful” and some leftist news organizations are claiming he exposed deeper problems in our society.

In the past I have heard leftist news commentators refer to domestic terrorists Bill Ayers and Ted Kaczynski (Unabomber) and union members who commit violence as being “on the right side of the argument.” But, what if. . .

What if former and retired members of our military Special Forces took their oath to protect and defend the Constitution of the United States against all enemies, foreign and domestic, and to bear true faith and allegiance to the same, seriously and started assassinating outspoken political leftists?

I’m not talking about the violent overthrow of our government or assassinating American politicians. I’m talking about what if former SEAL Team snipers, members of Delta Force, etc., started targeting people like Michael Moore, Jane Fonda, George Soros, Ted Turner, union bosses Richard Trumka and Jimmy Hoffa, Jr., leaders of other clearly leftist unions, the leaders of La Raza or the New Black Panthers, etc.?

Personally I would not like to see anything like that because as a retired special agent & former cop (pro rule of law) I, of course, oppose murder, but also because it would most likely thrust our entire society into chaos and render us nothing more than a 3rd World nation. But for this philosophical exercise, what would be the rightwing versus leftwing media reactions in the context of current media reactions with respect to Christopher Dorner?

Would so-called conservative media extol the virtues of such men and give the incidents deeper philosophical discussion as CNN and others are doing now with Dorner? Would so-called “right-wing activists” extol the virtues of such men? How about conservative pop culture types like Ted Nugent and Dirty Harry himself – Clint Eastwood? The answer is clearly no.

So, why are American leftists so enamored of Christopher Dorner? I know that answer; American leftists believe the ends justify the means whereas conservatives believe in the rule of law and the ballot box.

Years ago when my dad was still alive, a 30-year Navy man and veteran of two wars, my little brother was talking to him about Desert Storm and how a couple of events haunted him. Dad said, “of course it bothers you because you were raised to be a good person.”

I’ve heard a psychiatrist explain PTSD as the normal reaction to abnormal events, and I agree with that characterization. However, I think there’s a pretty good way to explain it even further to people unfamiliar with it, war and the military. How many of you have had a truly life threatening event and survived? How many have you have lived in fear for months on end and still had to perform at work? I don’t mean a dog running out in front of your car but a true near death experience. How would you like to live the possibility of that life threatening event happening at any moment, without notice, every day for 6 months or a year? How about living with the probability every day?

Think of your emotions as a plate. How many of you have experienced a truly emotional day, whether a wedding, funeral, death of a loved one, arguments at work, whatever, and then told a spouse or child that you were sorry, you just couldn’t deal with their issue at that moment because your day had exceeded your capacity to cope? Did you snap at them? The truth is that your “emotional plate” was full for that day and that moment.

I have a dinner plate that will hold a generous portion of roast beef, potatoes, carrots and even a slice of bread with butter. The plate looks pretty full but holds the food just fine. Over time the plate will hold steaks, meatloaf, fish dinners, snacks, pork roast, maybe a little barbeque, vegetables, and so many other things. But can you imagine what would happen if I tried to load all of those foods onto that plate at the same time?

I have a favorite coffee cup that will hold about 8 ounces of coffee at one time. But over the years I’ll bet I’ve put hundreds upon hundreds of gallons of coffee into that little cup because I use it every day and drink probably a pot of coffee per day. While very unassuming, it’s a good little cup and does its job very well day after day, week after week and year after year. But what if I tried to pour an entire pot of coffee into that little cup?

Some of you come home from work after a particularly emotional day and have a Scotch, grab a beer, pop in a video, listen to your music, anything to clear your head and scrape off your emotional plate. But what if you couldn’t? What if you had to keep your plate full and then pile on all of the emotions the next day, and the next and the next and every day thereafter for 6 months or a year? What if you were not able to partition your family emotions from your professional emotions?

There are also different dishes for different jobs. You have to have a microwave safe dish or a pan that will sustain 350 degrees in the oven for a certain length of time. I was in the AFOSI academy in 1984 and because I was so excited and into my new career I bought one of the black coffee mugs with gold trim and lettering. I did not know that gold paint was made with some percentage of real gold – metal. I placed that coffee mug in the microwave and just about started a fire. And because the mug was not made to go into the microwave it was scared for life with little pock marks all around the beautiful gold markings.

We have now raised three generations of children to believe that violence is so unacceptable, is never an answer, that they cannot even defend themselves physically on the playground. We have raised them to believe that they are protected, that their self esteem is so vital, that they are entitled to so much. We have taught them that it is their effort that matters and not the outcome. Then, untrained for real life, not tempered for the job, we send them off to war as if putting metal in the microwave and make them commit the most heinous violence one human being can commit against another.

We make them live in slit trenches, eat cold meals from bags, void their waste into holes in the ground, watch their friends be violently killed, kill other humans and then we’re stunned, just taken aback when they come home screwed up from their emotional plates being overloaded. We’re shocked when we have record suicides in our active duty and veteran populations.

Modern war no longer involves set piece battles with frontlines and a rear area so every GI we send off to war is literally at war. Even the so-called rear areas with the non-front line combat arms troops receive daily direct and indirect fire.

Our soldiers, sailors, airmen and Marines have no opportunity when deployed to clean the meatloaf from their emotional plate before they slap the seafood dinner on it. They just pile it all on day after day, week after week and month after month. Every day is a day filled with the fear of killing or being killed. They go to sleep at night wondering somewhere in the back of their mind if their hooch is going to explode with mortar or rocket fire or if a sniper bullet is going to pierce their shelter. Is there going to be an attack on the perimeter tonight?

Fear can be friend and foe alike but it is always an emotion taking up space on your emotional plate. Eventually the plate will become full, then over loaded and it may eventually break. Then add to that the emotions of missing a loved one back home, missing birthdays and the birth of a child, anniversaries and then the death of a battle buddy or best friend. Throw on top of that the emotion of killing a fellow human being. Now consider the fact that a few weeks of boot camp and specialty training probably cannot overcome 14 or 15 years of human conditioning (Pre-K through 12th Grade) in a liberal – progressive – society that has taught you everything you are being ordered to do is wrong.

There is a reason we used to raise kids a certain way. It’s called reality. But we have now taken a normal emotional plate and replaced it with a dessert plate and then asked these young adults to fill that dessert plate with full meal after full meal. We have set ourselves up for failure and screwed entire generations of Americans.

Today is somewhat of a political poutourri:

“Forward”

“Forward” was the president’s campaign slogan last year and at least one news channel adopted something similar, “lean forward.” But here’s my question, have you ever driven past your turn and had to back up the car? Have you ever walked past something you were looking for and had to walk back for it?

The old saying is that those who fail to learn from history are doomed to repeat it but it is even far worse than that in modern America. With our federal government’s myopic vision forward we are repeating sins of the past while also screwing up whole generations of children.

As I’ve written before, President Obama poked fun at Mitt Romney during the 2012 campaign by saying something to the effect that Romney’s policies were right out of the 1950s. Well folks, there can be no dispute that since the 1960s we have broken our once great American society. America used to actually work and we can identify a point it time where and when it stopped working; the 1960s through the 1970s as we became increasingly liberal – progressive.

We have intentionally screwed up our public school systems. Do you realize there are university classes and private organizations that devise and test teaching methods? On the surface that sounds good but the reality is multi layered; our schools used to work and now they don’t; liberals and progressives never admit failure; they are using generations of school children as lab rats; our society has worsened as our schools have increasingly failed.

Sometimes you have to back up to see what went wrong and why. How and why did things use to work and how did we break them? A myopic view of “moving forward” is not in and of itself a good thing but can be in and of itself a bad thing.

Speaker Boehner and Sequestration:

I saw Speaker Boehner (R-OH) send out a tweet referring to a newspaper’s fact check that “sequestration” was a White House idea, and that bothers me. I know it was a White House/Administration idea but the fact is the GOP-controlled House bought into it and passed it. Sequestration could not have gone anywhere or be a problem today had Speaker Boehner never allowed it up for a vote or if the House GOP caucus would have voted it down. Additionally, many in the GOP congressional delegation defended sequestration after it passed.

I’m sorry, Mr. Speaker, but you broke it so you bought it. You passed it so you own it.

Cop Killer Dorner:

The manhunt is still underway for the LA cop-killer, Dorner, and now there is a $1 million reward for information leading to his capture. I don’t know if they’ll catch the guy or not, but there are Facebook pages and Twitter tweets popping up supporting him and calling him a hero…truly disgusting.

The Pope:

The Vatican announced today that the Pope will resign and some in Hollywood, and other vile peeps on the political left, are celebrating and insulting the pontif as well as the Catholic Church. I hate that they do it but I love that they expose themselves as the truly vile people they are versus the illusion of some loving, open minded and diverse crowd. We can never have enough or too much evidence of the filth on the American political left.

10 Million Gun Owner March:

There is a Facebook page trying to gin up support for a 10 million gun owner march in Washington, D.C. this May and I whole heartedly support them. I don’t know what it will take to save America but I do know this; Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. became involved with the Civil Rights Movement in the 1950s and it too until after his death in 1968 to get real civil rights reforms across America. What ever conservatives and libertarians do, such as this march, it will have to be a sustained effort.

Too few conservatives are activist and we tend to pack up our stuff and go home after a political win or loss. All great movements in history were sustained efforts. The American Revolution really began in the 1760s and not 1776.