The most recent Newsweek cover story gives a powerful glimpse of one of America's deadliest enemies in the war in Iraq: the demise of homefront stoicism. The story talks about a couple that is supposedly representative of a lot of military families, i.e., husband serving in Iraq on an extended tour while wife and children are longing for months for his return. There are entire paragraphs about how the marriage is under stress, how the wife is feeling neglected, and how the military is adverseley affecting families. The only thing not explicitly mentioned and endorsed is that servicemens' wives who have affairs or divorce for boredom and take the kids away from their father are justified in doing so. Maybe in the next issue of Newsweek we'll see that stunning justification of misconduct.

Helllooooooooo!!!!!!

There is a war going on there...and men are risking their lives each and every hour so that their wives, children, communities, and country can have the luxury of living normal lives. Have we as a society lost all perspective entirely? A man is risking it all, voluntarily, for his family and country and all the family can do is say they are feeling 'neglected'? And all the country can do is take away his children because of his absence?  That many of our brave men are fighting so heroically despite having such an excruciating burden on the back of their minds is a testament to the unflinching sense of duty that only sheer patriotism can instill.

What a contrast just two generations make. Soldiers and sailors going abroad to protect our freedoms abroad in World War II left behind spouses who were fiercely proud of their soldier, who held strongly the ramparts of the home front never once complaining of loneliness of stress of separation, who knew that the sacrifice for freedom was a shared sacrifice. Before that, in the costliest war this country has ever known, wives and sweethearts of Union soldiers waited and prayed for the salvation of their beloved Union and the triumphant return of their beloved bluecoat. Entire novels and anthologies have been written glorifying the almost universally stoic sacrifice of these women, without whose unflinching loyalty this United States will likely not have survived. The loneliness and stress in a deployed soldier's home was a cause for pride and a source of strength.

That was the America that won wars.

What kind of America is this? I sure hope that the Newsweek story is not representative of too many, let alone most, military families. For if it is, we have already lost many future wars.

 

They are dirt-poor, freezing in literal Arctic cold, and the proudest Americans you can think of at this moment. Indigenous folks in the Nelson Lagoon villages in Alaska, on the precipice of another harsh winter, have refused to accept discounted heating oil from Venezuela because of Venezuelan President Hugo Chavez’s offending remarks about our president. Their president. A president whose politics they probably hate.

Think about it. These are nomadic people who are generally not even on the radar screens of most Americans, living in an environment that makes my own Kansas feel luxuriously tropical. They are a forgotten minority, except when big-spenders like Ted Stevens need a few votes. When they talk about ‘freezing to death’, these Inuit and Aleuts mean it in the very literal, mortifying sense. And that is the risk they are taking on a matter of pure patriotic principle.

What a contrast to the well-fed comfortable East Coast elite of both parties who couldn’t stop their love affair with fine French wine when the French president and prime minister made similar remarks on the eve of the Iraqi liberation war. Au contraire,  conspicuous consumption of French wine had then suddenly become a snobbish mark of ‘dissent’ from the ‘warmongers’. And one presidential candidate even boasted how the French would like him to become President…of the United States of America!

Do they even produce patriots in the Northeast anymore?

 

Perhaps it was too much to ask that absolute power not corrupt even slightly. But when Lord Acton’s dictum become completely operational against your fondest hopes and reasoned assumptions, you surely wonder.

When I look at the incredible list of Republicans in Congress whose ethics fell far short of the promise, I have to wonder ruefully about the young man still in college who put his heart and soul into many a blustery Kansas evening on a campaign to end 40 years of one party rule in Washington. That was 1994. Within four years things had become to unravel. Leader after leader whose phony claim to the moral higher ground was but a façade to hide their mistresses. Child advocates who were child predators. Tax cutters who didn’t see a pork project they did not like. Christians who appealed to the basest instincts of xenophobia. Protectors of life who forgot the genocide of the unborn the minute K-Street money and chic anchorwomen schmoozed them. Champions of personal liberty whose cowardice in face of a frustrated public cost us liberties we may never recover.

This was the majority I helped elect and re-elect in the hope that someday we will reach the Shining City on the hill that was promised to us by the late Ronald Reagan. Yes, there were those who kept the faith, the likes of John Kasich of Ohio, Dr. Tom Coburn of Oklahoma, and Sam Brownback of Kansas. But these men were few and far in between. They could not stem the tide of moral compromise, personal and public, that today is ready to sweep a thoroughly compromised majority to humiliation.

The God of the Israelites admonished them to remember who delivered them from 40 years of aimless of wandering. The message evidently did not reach the soon to be GOP ex-majority.

 Earlier this year I switched to a new dentist..the previous one was a comptent fellow but just sounded too, well, Californian. The quality of care is similar at the new dentist though this office has a better professional management, follow up, communication protocols. The cost (after insurance) are the same. What is strikingly different is the approach. My previous dentist (like almost all dentists and doctors) was a professional. He did his job well and said thanks for coming in. This one astounded me after my very first root canal and since. He calls me personally the evening following my morning visit to see how I am doing, whether I am feeling any pain, can I eat alright etc etc. Until now I thought that kind of genuine caring, beyond the quick hurried visits with prefunctory questions from egotistical doctors, was a thing of the past

Coming from three generations of healthcare professionals, I had heard many times growing up that while doctors, nurses, and dentists diagnosed and cured, it was God that healed through the hands of these professionals. It was not a surprise to find that my new dentist is actually a member of the Christian Medical and Dental Society. Maybe his faith has something to do with his wholesome approach to his professional calling.

I have begun to dread each coming week before the general elections. The last two weeks have brought revelations of two supposedly family values Republicans (Don Sherwood of PA and Mark Foley of FL) being anything but corrupt politicos whose values should be kept as far from my family as possible. What next? Maybe another one of the fellers from Tennessee or Michigan who was elected on representing our values is found out to be no different than Teddy Kennedy? This is the proverbial deepest cut of all....the very people who were sent there to represent our values and beliefs, values and beliefs that liberal Democrats had made a mockery of. The only difference is that the Democrats openly ridiculed our Judeao-Christian values while these corrupt Republicans did the ridicule in private while taking our votes and money in public. Maybe a GOP defeat in the House will serve well a majority that forgot why it was there and who sent them there. Nothing cleanses the soul like a large dose of well earned humility.

 

Not many things unite the two candidates for New York attorney general, except a shared legacy of immense pain from the foulest betrayal. Republican Jeanine Pirro was in the news this week as she went public with the blatant infidelity of her husband who seems to have been a serial philanderer and father of an illegitimate child. Democrat Andrew Cuomo’s life and family were torn apart a few years ago when his now ex-wife Kerry, mother of his three kids, was caught engaging in repeated adultery with a polo player. As to why Cuomo, a rather semi-intelligent lawyer of a decent background, would marry a woman whose genetics have been hard wired for adultery (Kerry Kennedy Cuomo is a granddaughter of Joseph P. and niece of John F. Kennedy), only he knows. Nobody , not even liberal Democrats, deserve the pain and devastation that adultery brings.

It is a telling expose of thoroughly confused attitudes that cracking insensitive jokes is a matter considered worthy of public condemnation and accountability, while betraying your spouse is a ‘private’ matter better left hushed up and eventually forgotten.

 

So we hear that the ever notorious Anna Nicole Smith and her lawyer exchanged ‘non-binding’ vows abroad a cruise ship. This is in the aftermath of the lawyer claiming that his famous client is pregnant with his child…(an entirely new meaning for attorney client privilege and professional ethics of lawyers). But I have got to give credit where it is due: this couple is honest in exchanging its vows. They openly admit it is not a marriage and that the vows are not binding.

Which is in stark contrast to half the people in America who get married and make a mockery of the ‘to have and to hold…till death do us part’. Marriage in our country is somewhere between a huge joke and a massive travesty. In no other instance are pledges given more solemnly, more publicly, more expensively, and less seriously.

 It is certain that Republicans will lose seats in both chambers of Congress. The only question is how many. And yet, that’s not the worst which will befall the party of Lincoln this year.

The post-mortem of these elections will register loud, screeching, knee-jerk noises of the vultures and the hyenas. These cries, to which the faint-hearted are extremely susceptible, will demand that the Republican party abandon its defense of faith, family, and freedom, at home and abroad. There will be ransom notes asking for the party to forget those who have no voice: the unborn. Pundits will spin statistics, as they always do, telling us how the GOP’s fight against terror and its stance for human rights cost it the suburbs. Blah, blah, blah. Essentially the same nonsense one heard in 1862 and 1866. The moneyed faint hearted class of believe-nothings wants to use the frustration of ordinary Americans and attendant incompetence of a few Republican leaders to pry away the raison d’etre of the Grand Old Party.

Thank God, Phyllis Schlafly is still alive and vibrant. It shall be up to the stout hearted like her and her kind to keep the GOP feet to the fire, to give the RNC a spare backbone when little people like George Pataki and Christy Whitman advocate wholesale capitulation. It will be in the wee hours of November 8, 2006 that the battle for the soul of the party will begin in earnest.

Martin Luther King Jr., said it well that the “character of a man is revealed not in times of comfort and convenience, but in moments of confusion and controversy”. That time of confusion and controversy descends on the Grand Old Party on November 8, 2006.

Will the Republican Party stay true to its character?

 

One word…a million images and a continuing attempt to reach a consensus on defining it. Some such attempts are made out of conviction and with good faith while others are tinged with a sneaky desire to let the guilty go free amidst Babel like confusion.

Terrorism.

Easy it is not to define it…for ease often requires a propensity to offend nobody. Simple, however, it is.

An individual, group, or state deliberately engaging in physically harming, by acts of violence, non-combatants for the purpose of achieving a political or policy objective.

That is how I would define terrorism today. I doubt Mr. Kofi Annan or Senor Chavez will like it. Oh well….KsReaganite can’t please everybody!

Now, one has to wonder about the antecedents of Venezuelan President Hugo Chavez. Was the man born and raised in barn? Did his mom not teach him any manners? I mean that's the conclusion I can draw given that President Chavez is an educated man and a former paratroop officer. No matter what the policy differences, a gentleman doesn't go to someone else's front porch and call the owner of the house a devil or something even half as offensive.

Criticism is one thing..being an ill mannered ignoramus is quite another.

Being another one of those linear thinking traditional males, I generally avoid any newspaper advice columns that smack of therapeutic nonsense of the Dr. Gilda- or Ask Miss Manners variety. Usually, as far as I am concerned, those snippets are written by women who have too much time on their hands and too little reality on their resumes.

Marybeth Hicks is decidedly different and refreshingly iconoclastic. Okay, I admit it..her Washington Times column "But Then Again.." has lately become an addiction for me. You can find it at http://marybethhicks.com/frameset.html as well. This woman writes from the heart: the heart of a savvy professional, a mother, a wife, a woman of faith, who  genuinely enjoys in a lighthearted manner what she does in a given day or week or month. A lot of her weekly musings about the antics of her household of six brings back nostalgic memories of my own childhood and parents (and I am sure it will for many others as well).

No pontificating, no glamorizing, no feel good advice...just plain normal living with its ups and downs in Marybeth Hicks' columns. If you miss, like I do, television shows like Family Ties, read about the trials and tribulations of Marybeth Hicks and her brood. Fair warning...do not be sipping a drink while reading because the chuckling and laughter is likely to cause spills.

One of the most decent and downright honorable men I have known in my life is Steven Anthimedes. A second generation Greek American small businessman still in his mid twenties, the young man is the epitome of the little things that have made and continue to make ours the greatest civilization on the planet. He's the guy you can call at 3.00 am and tell your woes; he is the fellow who wouldn't bat an eyelash before coming over to pick up a buddy too inebriated to drive; he is the neighbor who cheerfully mows the lawn for the elderly lady down the street. I have known him since he was a teenager and am proud to call him a friend and a brother who lives up daily to his (and mine) fraternity's credo of being a man 'who thinks of the rights and feelings of others rather than his own'. And so, when the Republican party called on him to do the almost impossible, he did not think twice.....men whose ancestors came from the land of Pericles and Leonidas know a thing or two about duty.

You see, Steve is running in a reliably Democratic district against the entrenched number two Democrat in the Kansas House of Representaitves, Representative Jim Ward. Mr. Ward is an extreme liberal lawyer whose main claim to fame has been as the chief lesgislative obstructionist for the extreme liberal Democrat Governor Kathleen Sebelius. Representative Ward's toadying has been rewarded amply from the governor's bulging coffers filled with money from the trial lawyers and the national abortion industry. And as Mr. Ward is busy picking up PAC checks from the governor's ultra-liberal and labor union buddies, Steve is knocking on the doors of his neighbors sharing with them his commonsense Kansas ideas about a safer state, stronger families, and lower taxes. I don't know who will win the race in the district but Mr. Ward will no longer be getting the free ride has enjoyed for a long time.

While courage is a commodity in rather limited supply amongst scared Republicans this year, it is abundant in a Southeast Wichita district where a young man with convictions is taking on a well financed stooge of the liberal special interests in Topeka.

It is well said that evil triumphs only because good men choose to do nothing. That, my friends, is certainly not the case in Wichita, Kansas this year!

To my friend and brother  Steve..a hearty PHI ALPHA!!!

To all my readers, wish my buddy well and say a prayer for him please!

One of the possible candidates for 2008 still under the radar screen is my own Senator Sam Brownback. I say that not only because he is my senator, but because he has most of the strengths that other favorites do, without carrying their ugly baggage. That Sam is still under the radar screen is largely due to his own dimunitive, humble personality.

Personal: The man has been married only once, has procreated children only with his wife, and she is the only ladylove in his life (these days quite a rarity amongst politicians). Definitely not an ethically challenged man like the former mayor of Gotham. A soft-spoken former law professor who has two adopted children as well, Brownback is quite the genuine poster-child for personal and social rectitude. His personality is such that I am yet to find a Democrat in this state (and I know many) who does not like the man after meeting him in person. That Reaganesque quality makes many Democrats here afraid of him, I have been told by several. Brownback is an impossible guy to dislike!

Money: The man is married into money (the wife is from the wealthy Stouffer family) but his genuine ability to connect one-to-one (people in Kansas insist on that from politicians) makes him a very good fundraiser. I have seen him in action....I had the privilege of being his chauffer for a day during one of his earlier campaigns stops in my city when he was running the first time for the Senate.

Politics: Unabashedly, but very humbly, a leader of the right-to-life movement in Congress and a champion of free trade, anti-ballistic missile defense, compassionate welfare, global religious freedoms, comprehensive immigration reform, and the right to bear arms. In other words, a follower of Ronald Reagan's principled, optimistic, hope and growth agenda. In other words, he is no 'compromise on anything' McCain and he is no 'believe in nothing' Pataki.

Watch out for this man....he could be our next President. Plus it's time again for a Kansan to be in the White House anyway. The last time it happened, I wasn't even born...so I'd like to see that.

Two weeks ago, the United States House passed a bill prohibiting the slaughter of horses for human consumption. It was the humane and decent thing to do. Horses, like dogs, have been the best friends of men since the beginning of time. Most Democrats, along with almost all Republicans, voted for the measure. The sheer hypocricy of the Democrats struck me again: not one of them protested about imposing their sense of morality on those strange ones who may think that horse-flesh is a delicacy.

And what does it say about a person who thinks that slaughtering horses is horrible and should be illegal but killing children is an 'unfortunate' choice that must be legal at all costs?

What does it say about a society that rightly shudders at the notion of killing horses but celebrates the killing of the most helpless child as a hallmark of individual autonomy?

The mealy mouth attitude amongst policymakers and opinion-makers is certainly not an isolated phenomena in our contemporary culture. Even in the supposedly competitive corporate world, it is increasingly difficult for executives to say something substantive. Someone I know closely is blessed to be working for a very good, caring, and community oriented company (lets call it ABC Inc) but even here sometimes one has to wonder if political correctness is the newest religion. On a recent project, he asked for certain key files from a client's pointperson two and a half months prior to the completion date of the project. Well, twenty four hours prior to that deadline, his company had STILL not received the completed files; this was after reminding this pointperson every week to send them to ABC Inc. This kind of behavior affected every aspect of the project and took its toll not only on on ABC personnel and that of ABC's client's but also some of their endpoint customers. So what was the post-project observation of the management? Well, there were some "communication issues" and they understood that my friend felt "a little frustrated".

Communication issues?? No, there was sheer and outright negligence on part of an individual or two at ABC's client's business which could have potentially affected ABC's liability and that of the endpoint customer.

Frustrated?? No, frustrated is when you're waiting in line at a DMV office to see some uncaring bureaucrat. This was more like a you gotta be kidding.

I wish three words were absolutely removed from the corporate vocabulary..communication, issues, and frustration. This troika of words has become the first tool in the arsenal of avoidance. Every case of negligence or shortcoming can be explained away by 'communication' (how is rudeness or negligence on one person's part a communication problem with anybody else anyway?).Every major failing is an 'issue' rather than a problem to be solved and accountability to be established. Every serious greivance is considered a frustration, a patronizing description which bespeaks a lazy desire to make everything go away.

It's a pity because there was once a time that singularly amongst the Western world, Americans were known to be the most plain spoken. Now, it seems we speak Kerrylingo even in the halls of our commerce.