**And now a word from my inner swaggerer…

Europe is a chick’s name. That’s right, you heard me. The word Europa from which Europe is derived is of feminine gender in origin. In Greek mythology Europa was a Phoenician princess abducted by Zeus. Zeus disguised himself as a bull to pull off the caper.

So, what do we have? Let’s review: Europe is a defenseless but pretty chick fooled by a bunch of bull and ravaged by a God.

Yep. Sounds about right.

Now what about America? How chikified is our name? Well, not much.

As it happens America is named after Amerigo Vespucci, a cartographer and explorer from the mid 1400s who was one of the first westerners to map the coast of the Americas. He was a man, baby.

A man’s man, an explorer, a man of means (well, early in his life, anyway), a sailor. A real tough guy. And even if that isn’t true, at least a person with a swinging anchor and some ballast which is more than we can say for the weeping, cringing Europa.

And since the naming, our two continents have certainly lived up to the theme. Europe, constantly ravaged, always weeping, forever moaning about being nice to folks, and never strong enough to stand on its own for long has been as weak and feckless as can be imagined.

On the other hand America has been the jewel of the world. America was born of the woman but strode forward in confident, self-possessed strides leaving mommy behind sniffling and waving her handkerchief to her successful son and warning him not to forget to write or at least leave a text message. America has spawned riches uncountable with its toils and with the United States at its head has become the world’s father and policeman. It’s a manly nation to say the least.

So, what’s in a name, William old sod? Nothing less than the expression of character (or weakness thereof). We Americans stand astride the world in manliness while Europe swoons by our side in supplication… and nagging, nagging, nagging like the gnarled old hag she has become. Even Zeus would be tired of her by now.

Yep. Europe is our bi_ _h.

Take that you Euroweenies!

So, go on. Call me a cowboy. But whose twirling rope are you Euroweenies gonna reach for when you’ve let the Islamofascists take over your lands? Whose six-shooters will come in handy when the Chinese are blowing you away? Which man in the white hat are ya gonna call on when you suddenly find yourself surrounded by hostiles on all sides? If’n yer lucky, pardner, we might jess lope on by and help ya out. Ya never know. Give us a whistle and see.

… OK, I feel better. And now back to the news.

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That was what he replied when asked where in the Constitution did Congress have authority to mandate health care on every American.

Using the general welfare excuse is like a get-out-of-jail-free card for liberals. The Constitution is not a particularly long document, nor is it a complicated one. But it does not agree with government controlling industries, or mandating what Americans can or cannot have, or government regulation of religion, and so on. Yet all liberals have to do is pull out that little golden ticket: general welfare. To liberals, it cancels out everything else the Constitution says. They can do whatever they want, as long as it’s supposedly “for our own good”. They can use those two little words — general welfare — to excuse all manner of evils. And while there are plenty of wonderful words in the Constitution they could zero in on — freedom, justice, liberty — liberals will always hone in on the one phrase they can use to excuse all the wrongs they’re committing. It’s a perverted meaning, but what does that matter? It gives them the ability to excuse anything they try to shove onto us — amnesty, government run health care, abortion, civilian trials for terrorists — and still be able to say it’s “in the Constitution”.

Don’t think of this as a flaw by our Founding Fathers. It isn’t. What liberals are doing is a distortion and a perversion, and deep down, they know it. The Constitution of the United States is one of the most profound documents ever written in the history of man, and all liberals want to do is twist it around to use it for their own sick means.

Cross-posted from Cassy’s blog. Stop by for more original commentary, or follow her on Twitter!

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This is the final installment [of] my three part report on the Intercollegiate Studies Institute’s one day conference on The Roots of American Order. So here is part two of mine titled Lift a Glass to the Past: America Rooted in Tradition or a New Covenant? (Click for parts one and two)

After a break for lunch, Mark C. Henrie took up America’s Britishness. Henrie wrote the ISI’s A Student’s Guide to the Core Curriculum that explains the value of a traditional core of studies in Western civilization and his session reflected that study.

Capitalizing on Birzer’s citation of Edmund Burke who praised the colonist’s essential Britishness, Henrie made the point that America is best understood not as a break from tradition but as the culmination of a long series of continuous ideals that range back through Western history, specifically through England.

Henrie says that we get four essentials from England.

1. The English language and literature
2. The common law and a respect for the rule of law
3. A desire for self government
4. Manners and a social order

One of the questions that researchers have often wondered is why American English and British English are essentially the same? Why didn’t America reinvent English for its own purposes in the same way the Dutch altered German, for instance? Henrie says that the reason is that the focal point of language in the colonies was contained in the King James Bible and that pervasive reliance on a single source of language arrested any development of a widely diverging American version of English. We Americans inherited the English language through the Bible.

Next Henrie talked of our ideals of law. As an example of the American focus on the law, Henrie notes that Blackstone’s Commentaries on the Common Law was more popular per capita in the colonies than it was in England. He also said that it was likely that the ideals of “life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness” came from Blackstone.

Our ideals of self-government are also a British idea. Accordingly, Officials in Parliament were initially elected from their own local areas and sent to Parliament to represent the nation just as we continued to do in Congress.

In the Q and A afterwards, though, I noted that one of the reasons that the Crown couldn’t understand our point of view on representation in Parliament was because we took our representation a tad farther than the British did.

In England, once elected to Parliament it was expected that those that took their seat were to stop worrying about representing their home turf and consider themselves as representatives of the whole of Britain. On the other hand, since we in America were so geographically isolated and since we did not initially have here a national body in which to sit, we had a higher expectation that our local representatives would go into colonial government to represent the views of those that elected them. In many cases, Americans bound their representatives to the voters and allowed them little room for maneuver while members of the House of Commons in Britain had no expectation at all that their constituents back home would control their efforts in Parliament in any way.

So, when Americans expected to have an actual seat at the table in Parliament where our own officials might sit to represent us, British officials deemed such a thing unnecessary because all of Parliament sat in virtual representation of the whole of the Empire. The Crown simply saw no reason for Americans to sit in Parliament but this was an abrogation of their right to self-government as far as the colonists were concerned.

As an outgrowth of this expectation of self-rule all the way down to the local community, federalism was born and this was an entirely new idea.

Finally, as Burke noted, America was bequeathed a particularly British sense of manners, comportment, and a social order that also saw us more like the British than unlike them. The Britishness that undergirded our entire culture in all parts of the colonies was strong enough to stave off the various other European influences (French, German, Spanish, what have you) and maintain our status as the true heirs to British sensibilities.

Once again we see that we are beholden to our traditions.

Finally we heard from E. Christian Kopff on The Philadelphia Miracle.

Reflecting the religious theme of the day’s events, Kopff recalls how nearly every founder termed our founding as a miracle born of divine intervention and that our efforts were not just efforts for us but for all mankind.

But he noted that Machiavelli said that every nation must be forced back to its first principles at some time or lose itself and that we are today at such a crossroads.

Here I think another Machiavelli quote is pertinent to the discussion:

Princes and republics who wish to maintain themselves free from corruption must above all things preserve the purity of all religions observances, and treat them with proper reverence; for there is no greater indication of the ruin of a country than to see religion condemned.
– Niccoló Machiavelli, The Discourses. 1517.

I might also stretch this to include civil institutions along with those religious. We are today in a state of eschewing our civil and religious traditions and this has led to our current discontent as far as I am concerned.

Kopff discussed how he thinks the conventional wisdom on the Constitutional debates states that there was some unknown shift during the debate of the Constitution from the one-state-one-vote plan to the current system of proportional representation. Kopff thinks that the delegates were actually persuaded by arguments of proportionalism as opposed to cajoled by some corrupt bargain as some historiography has led some to believe.

Kopff notes that during the debate, John Dickinson of Delaware said that experience should be “our only guide” because rationalism may “lead us astray.” (see the quote I started this piece out with above) Not only does Kopff think that the delegates were persuaded by Dickinson’s argument here, but he thinks there was a realization by the delegates that tradition and history should serve as their bedrock.

He rejects that the Enlightenment influence was as pervasive as many argue it was. He points out that rationalism — as espoused by Rousseau, for one — as a thing that is born free of past encumbrance is impossible. Kopff asserts that rationalism can only be built on tradition and past experience, he posits that tradition validates rationalism.

To my mind, he makes a good point. After all fans of rationalism seem to imagine that at its inception rationalism represented an anti-religious ideal and a breaking from tradition, a new way of thought. Yet, these same people accept that rational thought can be born of nothing, not based on past experience? Isn’t that the same thing as divine revelation? I mean, divine revelation insists that it is born of God’s word and not of earthly traditions and man’s efforts. And here comes rationalism divorced from man’s tradition to be born as if from a miraculous revelation? It seems to me that the rationalists merely exchanged the idea that God is divine with the idea that the individual human’s mind is divine.

Without experience and tradition, rationalism most certainly can lead us astray. We are seeing that today with a left-wing wishing of what could be if only…! With the left’s insistence that our traditions and systems are useless, corrupt, or need the panacea of “change” to “fix” them, we are truly seeing the “rational” going uninformed by tradition and experience in America today.

We are all too often rejecting our American principles as venal and broken. We have for fifty years told the world that we are wrong, even evil. And now we have a president that has made it his duty in nearly every single speech he’s given to say that we have been wrong on everything. Is it any wonder that we have an enemy in radical Islamists that have taken our word for it and decided to punish us accordingly?

The truth is, we are not a nation that needs to be remade. We are a nation that needs to get back to first principles. Are there some problems with our early ideas? Certainly. But to throw the baby out with the bathwater is a fool’s action. The fact is, we are a great nation because of our traditions and principles, not despite them and we need to retrain our citizenry in those principles.

I was glad to have gotten the chance to attend this ISI conference and look forward to its future efforts. In the mean time, if you’d like to see a whole series of video and audio lectures on American exceptionalism, history, and traditions some that stretch back some 40 years, visit ISI’s lecture series on its website. There you’ll see some great lecturers from folks like the four I met this weekend (and including them). ISI also has an interesting blog called First Principles that is worth visiting.

Part One: Lift a Glass to the Past: America Rooted in Tradition or a New Covenant?

ISI Conference Part Two: Christ in Our Soul

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This is part two of my three part report on the Intercollegiate Studies Institute’s one day conference on The Roots of American Order. So here is part two of mine titled Lift a Glass to the Past: America Rooted in Tradition or a New Covenant? (Part one can be seen here)

The second speaker of the day was Brad Birzer who regaled us on America’s Judeo-Christian History.

Bizer began his session by noting that historian Donald Lutz discovered that the founders used Christian references in their pre-war writing far more than any other source. St. Paul was the most referenced New Testament figure with Micah 4:4 being the most referenced Old Testament verse.

But they shall sit every man under his vine and under his fig tree; and none shall make them afraid: for the mouth of the LORD of hosts hath spoken it.

On this Lutz quotation, though, I want to clarify something. Many have bandied about the claim that Donald Lutz said that 34 percent of the founder’s writing contain direct Biblical citations. This claim is not altogether true. On the other hand, it is not something to quickly dismiss as fans of the Enlightenment influence want to do, either.

The problem is that Lutz’ research didn’t reveal that this 34 percent came “directly” from Biblical citations. What Lutz found was that the Bible and quotes from sermons of the period added up to his finding of 34 percent. Lutz wasn’t saying the 34 percent was made up solely of Biblical quotations. It is a bit misleading to say that this large number of citations “came from the Bible” when a portion came from the sermons of famous preachers of the era — and political sermons at that. Granted sermons are generally of religious content, but a quote for a sermon isn’t the same thing as a direct citation from the Bible.

Add to this the fact that Lutz also found that the Federalist Papers and the debates about the Constitution contain very few Biblical citations and we get another shade of this debate that is necessary to consider. Many Atheists and Enlightenment influence fans claim that the lack of Biblical citations during this second period of the American founding proves that religion was meaningless. But I warn these deniers that Lutz was also not saying that the Bible was meaningless. In his study, after he notes that the Biblical influence seemed to disappear from the founder’s writing during the Constitutional phase, Lutz says it isn’t “surprising since the debate centered upon specific institutions about which the Bible has little to say.”

The fact is that this 34 percent of Protestant Religious citations isn’t meaningless. It still shows that a great preponderance of the founder’s citations were religiously based, and of the Protestant religion at that. It also shows that religious appeals formed a large part of the thinking of the founding era as they geared up both for war with Britain and the formation of the United States of America.

I sort of wish that Birzer had gone into this further, but I understand why he didn’t. He had a finite amount of time and this diversion would have moved away from his main point. In any case, both sides make at the same time too much and too little of Lutz’ study.

Birzer next noted that America was, indeed, a land of religious freedom even if its particular parts were “islands of intolerance.” He notes that the religious freedom that our early years are famous for did exist, but not in the laissez faire style we’d like to wish it were. Sure it was illegal to be a Catholic in Maryland after 1689, for instance, or one had to be an Anglican to hold office in Virginia but those particular restrictions were less extent in other parts of the country. Each segment had its particular religious sect as the officially recognized religion, but there wasn’t a single religion for all of the colonies leaving people free to choose where they might like to live in accordance with their individual principles.

The summation is that religion played a supremely important part in the early days from the first colonists to the founding era.

As an example Birzer notes that as laid out in his “On Conciliation With America,” Edmund Burke’s characterization of the American Colonies was that the colonies were born of English liberty and religion.

In this character of the Americans, a love of freedom is the predominating feature which marks and distinguishes the whole… This fierce spirit of liberty is stronger in the English Colonies probably than in any other people of the earth, and this from a great variety of powerful causes…

If anything were wanting to this necessary operation of the form of government, religion would have given it a complete effect. Religion, always a principle of energy, in this new people is no way worn out or impaired; and their mode of professing it is also one main cause of this free spirit. The people are Protestants; and of that kind which is the most adverse to all implicit submission of mind and opinion. This is a persuasion not only favorable to liberty, but built upon it.

Birzer, though, also pointed out that a chief motivating factor in rallying Americans to the revolutionary cause was an anti-Catholicism that was inflamed by the Crown’s 1774 Quebec Act that gave an official Crown-recognized status to French Catholics in Canada. This fear of “Papism” led many Americans to fear for their liberties expecting a creeping Catholic tyranny to invade their colonies through the Crown’s apostasy.

Birzer notes, though, that in many ways the establishment of local rule in the colonies was a bloodless coup of sorts. He gives the example of Charles Carroll of Carrollton a Roman Catholic who led Marylanders to form an extra legal government that eventually simply took over the colony as the official government in the minds of the people. At some point, the poor Royal Governor had to just go home because he was simply ignored by the whole colony as they favored their fellows instead.

Of course, Carroll’s efforts led him to become a celebrated citizen despite his Catholic religion and this, in turn, broke down some of those religious barriers for Catholics, at least in Maryland.

Birzer really pressed the point, though, that the main reason that colonists feared Papism was because of the top-down leadership of the Church, a style that necessarily negated, as far as they were concerned, the liberties that the colonists valued above all else.

He summed up his talk by asking of us all a question. In some parts of the colonies, men were required by law to bring two things to church with them on a Sunday morning: Their Bible and their rifle. These men were ready to give their all to protect their liberties. But are we today still ready to reclaim what is ours? With all the world flexing its muscles, from North Korea, to China to Iran, are we as Americans ready to fight to reclaim our legacy of freedom or are we to roll over and allow an out-of-control, socialist government to usurp our liberties as enemies gather at our gates?

Next: More British Than the British!

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Is the United States a grand experiment, a new covenant invented out of whole cloth by the fertile minds of the founders from never before seen ideas or is it a nation spawned from deeply rooted traditions of western thought? This was the question posited in a one-day-long conference on classicism in America’s founding, sponsored by the Intercollegiate Studies Institute (ISI) and held in Skokie, Illinois, a near northern suburb of Chicago.

The short answer is that the liberal mindset that holds that we should invent the USA anew with each succeeding generation is an erroneous conception of what the United States was meant to be when it was founded. Sure America has some ideas never before seen by political man, but at heart, America is rationalism informed by tradition, not some amorphous mélange of constantly changing ideas.

The founders created a new nation based heavily on Western ideas through British tradition, not one based solely on rationalist thinking. As they struggled to set their new nation on its new Constitutional course, for instance, the words of Founder John Dickinson of Delaware served as their benchmark.

Let experience be our only guide. Reason may lead us astray.

An intimate crowd of 60 some participants enjoyed four separate addresses by lecturers associated with ISI. Appearing behind the lectern were Bruce Thornton, Professor of Classics at Fresno State University; Brad Birzer, Professor of History at Hillsdale College; Mark C. Henrie, Senior VP and Chief Academic Officer of ISI; and E. Christian Kopff, Professor of Classics at the University of Colorado, Boulder.

In these three installments, I will lay out what we talked about at this interesting one-day conference.

Part One: How it all Began

We began the morning with Bruce Thornton whose topic was America’s Classical Roots. Through Thornton we discovered the roots of democracy and western thought in classical Greek history.

As Thornton began, one of the points he made at the top was that politics is a result of citizenship and this was something new to man in the time of the ancient Greeks. Before the concept of citizenship men were governed by mere power as opposed to participation. What struck my mind with this point is that so many Americans today pronounce their disinterest in politics and have a mistaken conception that politics and politicians are separate from them. But, as Thornton reminds us, politics IS we the people. Politics isn’t separate from us, it IS us.

With this in mind, we must also remember that the law is also owned by we the people. Our politicians, our officers of the law do not own it. We do. It would behoove us to remember our role as citizens in this compact instead of sitting idly by grumbling about our out-of-control government.

Thornton warned us that it is a great mistake to dismiss the ancient Greeks (and Romans for that matter) as the fathers of our democratic freedoms just because they don’t today live up to our modern concept of what democracy and rights are. The idea of citizenship, though unevenly applied, was a revelation for the day and we cannot be over harsh in our judgment of their intellectual progress because they hadn’t yet reached the same level we have today. Yes, there was slavery, sure women did not have the same equal consideration under the law, but giving the citizen any role in government at all was an incredible breakthrough that should not be dismissed.

After all, for all of man’s history until the ancient Greeks (as far as we know) there were no other cultures that even had names for the totality of humanity. These peoples often used tribal words meant to describe people as “us” while everyone else was “them.” It manifested as if “them” were less than human, i.e. not “us.” But the Greeks philosophized about the human condition — again even though unevenly applied — they thought of humanity in totality.

Slavery is another touchy subject, of course. All the way until our Civil War, slavery was endemic to mankind. It had only been since the 1830s with England in the lead that the concept of slavery had at long last begun to suffer a loss of ready acceptance. So, to say that the Ancients are easily dismissed because they had slavery is ridiculous because they knew no other condition. But even at that, there is proof that the ancients were beginning to wonder about the legitimacy of slavery. Thornton related a concept from one of these philosophers (whose name I don’t recall) who said — and I paraphrase — The god makes men yet nature enslaves no one. The point here is that men use power to enslave. Slavery is not a natural condition but man made one.

Thornton’s main point was that the classical Greeks served as our touchstone, our bedrock for the American system. The main concepts of citizenship, participation, and the ideas of government were laid in those early centuries before Christ. Our founders cited the ancients more often than other influences except Christian principles in their tracts, letters and papers on their efforts to launch the U.S.A. So, to say that America was entirely “new” is absurd and a misreading of history.

Next: Christ in Our Soul

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Judge Andrew Napolitano announced on the Glenn Beck Show this week that he is planning to do a Constitutional Law seminar on Fox News. I see this as the next avenue of Tea Parties: We begin to talk about the U.S. Constitution, and what liberty really consists of, in detail, and we keep talking about it.

Thomas Jefferson said:

“… God forbid we should ever be twenty years without such a rebellion. The people cannot be all, and always, well informed.

The part which is wrong will be discontented, in proportion to the importance of the facts they misconceive.

If they remain quiet under such misconceptions, it is lethargy, the forerunner of death to the public liberty…. And what country can preserve its liberties, if its rulers are not warned from time to time, that this people preserve the spirit of resistance? Let them take arms.

The remedy is to set them right as to the facts, pardon and pacify them. What signify a few lives lost in a century or two? The tree of liberty must be refreshed from time to time, with the blood of patriots and tyrants. It is its natural manure.”
Thomas Jefferson Papers, 334 (C.J. Boyd, Ed., 1950)

That is an awesome quotation – an awesome thought.

Napolitano is the author of a wonderfully informative book, Constitutional Chaos. I’m looking forward to the lecture or lectures as a way to get the conversation started.

Not everyone is anxious to hear the Judge’s ideas, however. It would be naive to think Liberals would be interested in the U.S. Constitution. I found one Liberal site admitting they are “more than a little queasy” at some of the issues Napolitano addressed yesterday:

Freedom of choice and control over your own body will be lost.

More of your hard earned dollars will be at the disposal and tender mercies of federal bureaucrats. It was not intended to be this way.

We can vote the bums out of their cushy federal office

…we can persuade the state governments to defy the Feds in areas like health care where the Constitution gives the federal government zero authority.

We can ask our state legislatures to threaten to amend the Constitution to abolish the income tax, to return the selection of US senators to state legislatures and to nullify, to nullify! all the laws that Congress has written that are not based on the Constitution.

But there is one thing we can’t do. Just sit back and take it.”

Napolitano has been laying out our politically incorrect abuse of the US Constitution for a very long time. Here’s a snippet from the introduction to his book Constitutional Chaos:

What’s at Stake in America Today

I, myself, am a strong and fervent believer in Natural Law. The only valid laws are those grounded in a pursuit of goodness. Anything else – like taking property from Person A and giving it to Person B, like silencing an unpopular minority, like interfering with freedom of worship – is an unjust law, and, theoretically, need not be obeyed. St. Thomas Aquinas said only just laws impose an obligation of obedience, because unjust laws are not within the power of the government to enact; and only laws that seek goodness are just. This is the essence of Natural Law. No government may enact laws interfering with our freedoms no matter how popular the enactment.

The positivist would say since the government gives freedom, the government can take it away. The Natural Law says only God gives freedom and the government can only take it away as a punishment for violating the Natural Law, and then only through due process.

To a positivist, the government’s goal is to bring about the greatest benefit to the greatest number of people. Under the Natural Law, the only legitimate goal of government is to secure liberty, which is the freedom to obey one’s own free will and conscience, rather than the free wills or consciences of others.

The problem today in America – the greatest and gravest threat to personal freedom in this country – is that the positivists are carrying the day. Under their sway, the government violates the law while busily passing more legislation to abridge our liberties.

If we wish to survive the near future with our rights intact, we need to understand the size and scope of the threat. We must also understand its true identity: a government that breaks its own laws. ~  Constitutional Chaos, Judge Andrew Napolitan

About Natural Law, new President George Washington said:

The foundation of our national policy will be laid in the pure and immutable principles of private morality; …the propitious smiles of Heaven can never be expected on a nation that disregards the eternal rules of order and right which Heaven itself has ordained…”

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After Newt Gingrich declared that DeDe Scozzafava’s exit left and out of the NY-23 special election was the “statesmanlike thing to do,” DeDe be-itch slapped the brilliant Newt with her endorsement of Democrat David Owens.

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For the Project Valour-IT competition, the Marine Corps team is doing all kind of fun stuff. We’re going to have trivia and games, and we’ll also be spotlighting Marine heroes throughout the competition. To get the ball rolling, Cassandra asked me to kick things off by interviewing my Marine, my boyfriend Matt. I’m ridiculously proud of him, of course, and brag about him whenever I can as it is. And as if I don’t yak about him enough on here already, I get to feature even more fun stuff about him now, too.

In all seriousness, Matt truly is a hero to me, just like the thousands of other Marines out there. I can say without any bias that he loves what he does, he loves the Corps, and he loves his country. He’s willing to fight and die for America and for all of us. I may be his girlfriend and I’m certainly biased, but it’s still a pretty incredible thing.

So, with all that said, check out Matt’s and my “interview” after the jump, and there are a few pictures of him at the end as well. (Sorry they’re all with me, too, but I don’t have many pictures of Matt in uniform that doesn’t have me in them also.)

What is your rank and MOS in the Marine Corps?

- Corporal, 0311 (Infantry Rifleman).

How long have you been serving?

- Five years, and I just reenlisted in September of 2008.

Why did you join the Marine Corps?

- Because it was the hardest branch, and I wanted to challenge myself. From what I saw during my time in the Army, the Marine Corps was stricter and had more rules. That was what I wanted. I also wanted to go to Iraq and fight for my country, I wanted to get deployed. I felt like everyone else was doing their part; why shouldn’t I?

What was serving in Iraq like?

- In the beginning, when I first got to Iraq, it was worrisome because I thought I could just be attacked at any moment and was scared of dying. But after taking mortar fire for a couple of weeks, I got used to it and wasn’t scared anymore. I knew if it was my time it was my time. All I cared about was getting home to my family, and I was more concerned about how they’d feel if I was gone. I got to see Saddam Hussein during his trial, because I was guarding the embassy in Baghdad. I got to sit in during his trial. When I came back the first time, we landed in Maine, and everyone was real friendly and really happy about us coming back. Retired Marines were coming up to us, shaking our hands, and it was great.

The second time I went, I was more familiar with the country and I wasn’t worried at all. We would do convoy missions, and we were in some very well protected vehicles called MRAPs (Mine Resistant Ambush Protectant), and they can take small arms fire without doing any damage. It can take a 7.62 round without penetrating the armor, and that’s the primary round of our enemy, with the AK-47s. We were worried more about IEDs, so it was like fighting a silent enemy. You can’t find them, you just hope you don’t get blown up. Most of the other Marine units on patrol got hit my IEDs, but we didn’t. We were very fortunate. But every day, when you got into your truck and started riding out, you never knew what would happen. You would get these guys coming up to you with their arms in the air yelling “ALLAH AKBAR!”, which is what they yell when they’re about to blow themselves up. So you would grab your M-16 and just get ready to shoot them if they were going to try anything. For the most part we just tried to have fun. We would pass a lot of the times doing stupid sh*t and making up dumb jokes. A bunch of us, for example, got one Marine to drink a ChemLight to see if his pee would glow. He threw up, and his pee definitely did not glow. When we got back, it was in Massachusetts. It wasn’t as great of a homecoming, because we had just returned to our own country for the first time, and no one greeted us. We were in uniform, and everyone just stared. No one smiled or said thank you or anything. You wanna talk about not feeling welcome in your own country? We didn’t feel welcome. We felt like no one cared. We got treated better in Ireland drinking beer in the airport. It was a real sh*tty homecoming, until we got back to Camp Lejeune and got to see our families and everything.

What was the homecoming like?

- Homecomings are always great when you have a woman there that cares about you. When I got home, my girlfriend was there waiting for me. She could’ve been standing out there for hours for all I know, but she was there when I got off the bus. The feeling of knowing that someone is going to be there waiting for you, someone who cares so much about you, made the homecoming worth something, worth more than it did the first time. That’s what every Marine wants to come home from deployment to, a good woman who’s faithful to you and who cares about you. Also you realize you were taking for granted everything the United States has to offer before you left, especially coming back from a place like Iraq. You walk into a store and they have fresh food, fresh fruit, fresh water. In Iraq sometimes water is even hard to get.

Do you think Americans appreciate your service?

- I think most of them do. I always appreciate it when someone comes up to me and says thank you, but I feel more inclined to say thank you for them being supportive. There’s a lot of people who want to serve but can’t, for whatever reason. As long as they’re supportive, I’m more thankful for them than they should be for me, personally.

There are some people, especially on the Left, who don’t support the military. How do you feel about that?

-They have the right to say what they want. They’re Americans, and that’s their right. Of course, the only reason they have that right is because the military [is] willing to fight for it. They can put it down all day long and sit around at home being a coward, but at the end of the day, it’s thanks to the military that they can put us down. It’s thanks to the military that they aren’t speaking Japanese or German or Russian.

What does being a Marine mean to you?

- Being a cut above the rest. It’s not always about physical ability, sometimes it’s more mental. It sounds cliched, but it’s the whole “the few… the proud” thing. We’re very proud of who we are because of our training. I feel like we get better training than any other branch.

What about America is worth fighting for to you? The Marines have been known as the best fighting force the world has ever seen, but what is it that you are actually fighting for?

- Opportunity. People have more of an opportunity here than in other countries. It is a country that’s been through some hard times, but so have a lot of countries. What makes this country so great is… you can call it freedom, but it’s not what people usually think. It’s not the freedom to do whatever you want. The freedom to have a job, to raise a family, to not have a communist dictator running your life. The freedom to speak up and not have repercussions from your government, with them dragging you outside your house and shooting you, or raping your wife right in front of you. People like to put down this country, but it’s a lot better than most other countries. It’s a melting pot. If it’s so bad here, then why do so many other people leave their countries to come live in the United States? I fight for the Constitution. The Constitution was made for the United States, for the people, by the people. A document was signed that freed Americans from tyranny, and I’m not fighting for the president or my mom or my girlfriend. I fight for the Constitution, I fight for everybody.

Some people wonder all their lives wondering if they made a difference. The Marines don’t have that problem.

Cross-posted from Cassy’s blog. Stop by for more commentary or follow her on Twitter!

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]]> http://www.stoptheaclu.com/2009/10/25/spotlight-on-a-marine-corps-hero/feed/ 0 http://www.stoptheaclu.com/2009/10/25/obamacare-is-unconstitutional/ http://www.stoptheaclu.com/2009/10/25/obamacare-is-unconstitutional/#comments Mon, 26 Oct 2009 01:07:47 +0000 Jay http://www.stoptheaclu.com/?p=28859 Specifically, the mandate portion requiring all Americans to have health insurance is unconstitutional. The Federal Government does not have this authority, because it is not enumerated in the Constitution. An amendment would have to be passed in order for this authority to exist. Otherwise, expect Obamacare to be challenged all the way to the Supreme Court and lose in a slam dunk case.

Verum Serum finds this problem for Dem’s isn’t new, it was a stumbling block for Hillary care back in the 90’s too.

A mandate requiring all individuals to purchase health insurance would be an unprecedented form of federal action. The government has never required people to buy any good or service as a condition of lawful residence in the United States. An individual mandate would have two features that, in combination, would make it unique. First, it would impose a duty on individuals as members of society. Second, it would require people to purchase a specific service that would be heavily regulated by the federal government. Federal mandates that apply to individuals as members of society are extremely rare. One example is the requirement that draft-age men register with the Selective Service System. The Congressional Budget Office (CBO) is not aware of any others imposed by current federal law.

Ed Morrissey brings in the authority of James Madison and Thomas Jefferson:

Money cannot be applied to the General Welfare, otherwise than by an application of it to some particular measure conducive to the General Welfare. Whenever, therefore, money has been raised by the General Authority, and is to be applied to a particular measure, a question arises whether the particular measure be within the enumerated authorities vested in Congress. If it be, the money requisite for it may be applied to it; if it be not, no such application can be made. (James Madison, via Quoty)
[O]ur tenet ever was, and, indeed, it is almost the only landmark which now divides the federalists from the republicans, that Congress has not unlimited powers to provide for the general welfare, but were to those specifically enumerated; and that, as it was never meant they should raise money for purposes which the enumeration did not place under their action; consequently, that the specification of powers is a limitation of the purposes for which they may raise money. (Thomas Jefferson, via Quoty)
If Congress can do whatever in their discretion can be done by money, and will promote the General Welfare, the Government is no longer a limited one, possessing enumerated powers, but an indefinite one, subject to particular exceptions. (James Madison, Letter to Edmund Pendleton, January 21, 1792 Madison 1865, I, page 546)

However, Democrats are trying to dodge this question.

Also see Ed Morrissey’s detailed and in depth discussion on this.

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]]> http://www.stoptheaclu.com/2009/10/25/obamacare-is-unconstitutional/feed/ 0 http://www.stoptheaclu.com/2009/10/02/spokane-to-vote-on-right-to-have-no-rights/ http://www.stoptheaclu.com/2009/10/02/spokane-to-vote-on-right-to-have-no-rights/#comments Fri, 02 Oct 2009 17:47:20 +0000 Van Helsing http://www.stoptheaclu.com/?p=28052 A strategy for destroying our constitutional rights that goes back to FDR’s disastrous regime is to replace them with whimsical new rights that effectively reduce us to slaves. Roosevelt schemed of inflicting an “Economic Bill of Rights” that would make a farce of fundamental real rights, such as the right to own property.

Comrade Obama revealed that he shares a conception of rights that would have horrified the Founding Fathers when he stated during a debate that healthcare is a human right, implying that you have a right for the government to force other people to pay for the goods and services you consume. Seen from the other side, this means you have the right for the government to expropriate the product of your labor and give it to someone else. You have the right to be a slave.

Now Spokane, a city that normally represents the sane side of Washington State, has climbed aboard the slaves rights campaign with a “Community Bill of Rights” that entails sacrificing basic freedoms to attain liberal utopia. It will be on the ballot next month, calling for the following:

1. Residents have the right to a locally-based economy

2. Residents have the right to affordable preventative health care

3. Residents have the right to affordable and safe housing

4. Residents have the right to affordable and renewable energy

5. The natural environment has the right to exist and flourish

6. Residents have the right to determine the future of their neighborhoods

7. Workers have the right to be paid the prevailing wage, and the right to work as apprentices, on certain construction projects

8. Workers have the right to employer neutrality when unionizing, and the right to constitutional protections within the workplace

No doubt all of this sounds wonderful to moonbats. But a moment’s reflection reveals that only a totalitarian government could guarantee these “rights,” and only by trampling the real rights enshrined in our constitution.

A “right” to a “locally-based economy”? This is a right for the government to impose draconian restrictions on trade. A “right” to affordable and renewable energy? This means the government has a right to spend your money on subsidies for windmills and pixie dust.

There’s a reason the Founding Fathers didn’t grant us the right to a chicken in every pot. Rights guarantee freedom. Entitlements, handouts, and moonbattery guarantee slavery.

On a tip from gibbswtr. Cross-posted at Moonbattery.

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