OVER AT DOC PLUMBO'S, I VENT ABOUT HEALTH CARE

Oh Canada.

Again.

There's a bit of hagiography (holy legend) about the Second Apostle of Rome, St. Philip Neri, which has the ring of historical truth, and the solid gold seal of metaphysical truth.

Here it is, as recounted by the late Fr. Richard John Neuhaus in his journal First Things:

The story is told of St. Philip Neri (1515-1595) that he gave a most unusual penance to a novice who was guilty of spreading malicious gossip.

He told him to take a feather pillow to the top of a church tower on a blustery day and there release all the feathers to the wind. Then he was to come down from the tower, collect all the feathers dispersed over the far countryside, and put them back into the pillow. Of course the poor novice couldn't do it, and that was precisely Philip's point about the great evil of tale bearing.

Slander and calumny have a way of spreading to the four winds and, once released, can never be completely recalled. Even when accusations are firmly nailed as false, the reputations of those falsely accused bear a lingering taint. “Oh yes,” it is vaguely said, “wasn't he once accused of . . . "

The words of the Bard that you learned in grade school are entirely to the point:

Who steals my purse steals trash; ‘tis something, nothing;
‘Twas mine, ‘tis his, and has been slave to thousands;
But he that filches from me my good name
Robs me of that which not enriches him,
And makes me poor indeed.

A heinous crime against reputation is going on at present in the United States, created by a national media for whom their profession has become an ethics-free zone, with the willing complicity of Democrat politicians and their accomplices in the liberal punditocracy, f'rinstance those public menaces the Race-Shakedown Twins, Sharpton and Jackson.

The crime in question is the slanderous attribution of vicious and repugnant utterances to radio gab-king Rush Limbaugh -- utterances that have been branded "racist" (with good reason), and are being blown around by once-reputable media organs like wildfire through an L.A. county canyon in midsummer, without the merest, slightest, most perfunctory effort to discover whether these things were ever actually said.

Limbaugh categorically denies having said them, and challenges the slanderers to produce a single authentic source for any one of them -- a task that not one slanderer has succeeded in doing, and the furious back-peddling has begun already, though with reservations and without apology or retraction.

Rush Limbaugh is one of the most politically astute voices to command the public ear in America. He is also brash, relentless, occasionally vulgar and sexist, culturally under-educated, and genuinely EDGY (where most on the contemporary arts or discourse scene who claim to be so don't even come close to it). Limbaugh is proof that genuine, Swiftian satire is not yet dead -- though his most vicious and/or hypersensitive critics prove equally that it (satire) may be on its last legs.

One of the areas where Limbaugh can be the most edgy is in matters of race, or more specifically, racial politics. One might sometimes be able to characterize his mode of delivering uncomfortable truths as "offensive" or perhaps, more accurately, "abrasive" -- but I challenge anyone to reveal a single abrasive utterance for which an intelligent person, in the cool light of reasoned debate, could not make some coherent and persuasive arguments. Others might disagree, but even Limbaugh's most outrageous claims ARE basically arguable.

Anyone who claims otherwise, and who attributes to him the kind of mindless bigotry embodied in the controversial "quotes" now scurrying around on the public winds.... well, you could say a lot of things about such a person, but one thing is for certain: he or she has NEVER been a listener to the Rush Limbaugh program. IMPOSSIBLE. In fact, Limbaugh's harshest critics, on any subject, prove again and again that they could not possibly have listened to his show for more than a sound bite. (Or, I will allow, it's possible that they did listen longer than a bite, but they have demonstrated themselves too blind and stupid to grasp what they heard.)

There are any number of legitimate criticisms one could make about Limbaugh's program and his manner in delivering it -- I've made a few above, and there are more. I'm always surprised at how his most vitriolic critics seem to miss everything that they might genuinely criticize, and then spew with abandon criticisms that are patently false, even as they themselves engage in all the crass, hateful, superficial, often cruel ad hominem attacks and dishonesty of which they accuse their target. It's a strange thing -- one which, I'm thinkin', betrays nothing so much as FEAR.

Now, I can picture some sort of academically-inclined leftist phiilosopher/ideologue -- of an intensely serious and humorless and apocalyptically tragic mentality -- cultivating the kind of visceral hatred for Rush Limbaugh which has clearly gripped his opponents in media and politics. But I cannot picture this serious partisan lowering himself to engage in the mindless schoolyard savaging, the casually bald-faced lying, the hysterical bogey-manning that issues from Limbaugh's media enemies day in and day out, to their everlasting humiliation; the non-stop indulgence in the very sins for which they would burn Limbaugh at the stake (or some other form of execution, as cheerily recommended by Chris Matthews and others).

What's going on here is just wrong. And the purpose of it is not simply to discredit Limbaugh's opinions, but to destroy his reputation in order to prevent him, as a private citizen, from pursuing a private business transaction to become part-owner of a sports franchise.

Limbaugh has become very rich doing what he does, and that's probably his biggest sin -- he has enough ready cash to fulfill the ultimate sports fantasy, especially for the fan who was never talented or fit enough to play himself. How much, one wonders, does rank jealousy of both his money and his sports-dream lie behind this all-out effort to sabotage Limbaugh's bid for the St. Louis Rams?

On such things apparently the world turns, and, like Hitler at the English Channel, this advance must be halted in its tracks. A proud moment for the fifth estate.

St. Philip Neri, Holy Fool, pray for us.

Now, remind me, I live in a big, cold urban wasteland.......why?

Off the ol' front porch:


Toward Placentia Bay:


Old lighthouse, Dodding Head, Great Burin Island



Pickin' partridgeberries:


Home again tomorrow. Yeech.

REAL LIFE ~ THE ONION:
A SEAMLESS GARMENT

PRESIDENT-OF-THE-WORLD OBAMA
WINS NOBEL PEACE PRIZE

Mere days ago the kings of the satirical world over at The Onion [read regularly -- die laughing] gave us a short list of the highlights of Barry Obambi's address to the United Nations, among them:

-- Now is a time when we must do something about some problem, perhaps by working with others.

-- If Iran continues to pursue nuclear weapons, then it will have to face blank and blank. Oh shoot, I forgot to fill those in.

Little did they know that, based on these very concepts, that very president would shortly be awarded the Nobel Peace Prize. Or is that Piss Prize?, awarded, as it has been so often in recent years, for little more than consistently pissing on the United States whenever a microphone presents itself -- see: Al Gore, Jimmy Carter, Yasser Arafat....

Little did we know that the criteria for Nobel status would evolve into something resembling a grading category on a kindergarten report card ["does not run with scissors" or, dare I say it, "promises hope and change"] -- marked on a Dewey-esque sliding scale of "pass/fail" or "satisfactory/unsatisfactory", of course.

On a more serious note, the folks at PowerLine have put together a nice summary of the history of Nobel Prizes, ancient and modern, which explains how these absurdities just keep happening, and how, in fact, the once-prestigious award has a very long record of being fairly ridiculous. Read and learn.

Instapundit has an excellent round-up of responses, including a devastating poignard from Richard Cohen at the WaPo (who will temporarily be forgiven for making effective use of a slur on Sarah Palin), and some wise words from my friend David Warren (via RealClearPolitics). Even the Huffington Post is rattled by the ridiculousness of it. [No link -- life is too short....] Gateway Pundit offers up that it was Nobel for "the gift of gab" -- fair enough.

Is this just another case of "Trophy Kid" Syndrome? The unfortunately-named Starshine Roshell seems to have more sense than her parents [cripes, boomers, the things you did to your kids -- Starshine???], and wrote a needed complaint about what it means when you give a trophy to just anybody, merely for showing up. Little did she know that six months later.....

IRONY ALERT: Oh, those cut-ups at Saturday Night Live! Little did they know that the Big Prize would soon be awarded to the President they had slam-bammed the week before for having been in office nine months and achieved absolootly nuttin' -- nada -- not so much.


POST RACIAL AMERICA

Remember that campaign promise? Well, I'm betting it will come true -- later rather than sooner, and in a backwards fashion. I'm betting that ordinary pale Americans ["white" is ridiculous, and "Caucasian" is exclusionary and inaccurate] are going to get so fed up at being called racists for voicing opinions and ideas that have nothing whatever to do with racial considerations, they are going to start barking back or just ignoring the Amen-corners of the Racial Grievance Industry, and eventually silence them all by diminution and irrelevance. It has begun already.

What's terribly sad, though, is that the road to racial harmony has been carpet-bombed in the few months since the ascendacy of The First Black President and Harbinger of Racial Harmony, due entirely to the redoubled efforts of the racial grievance industry, who can think of no other defense of their stumbling standard-bearer as he fraks up his foray into global politics. Check out this sad survey on the question of whether America is or isn't a basically fair and decent society. That opinion among the country's major minority group has turned on a dime [perhaps one of the few remaining in the national purse, Mr. Geithner?] is itself utterly indecent.


SUFFER THE LITTLE CHILDREN

That snippet of Biblical text is often misinterpreted by those who were deprived of learning their King James English: "Suffer the little children come unto to me" means, in today's lingo, "Let the children approach me." The words carry no meaning related to the endurance of physical pain.

Sadly, the two interpretations (correct and not) are increasingly, perversely, fused as we observe in the culture the acclerating normalization of "intergenerational sex". The most recent, most heinous development is the downright weirdsmobile support for convicted child-rapist Roman Polanski, found overwhelmingly among the European (largely the Fwench) "arts community", but leaking frighteningly over into the upper echelons of Hollyweird.

The Polanski affair, however, remains at the fringes of society by virtue (ahem) of having sprouted from the weedy world of entertainment, where no one expects to find normality, whether it is in matters of serial marriage, drug habits, or obscene amounts of money being invested in really really bad taste, from horrible fashions to obese mansions full of kitsch furnishings.

Far more disturbing is the introduction of skewed morality into the politics and education that are supposed to serve the rest of us -- the normal people in nice little homes in ordinary neighbourhoods around the corner from the barber shop. In the United States this skewed crew has come to rest in the nest of Czars -- Presidential appointments to positions of advisory authority and policy influence, appointments requiring no public vetting or representative approval process.

Various czars have been outed as having troublesome records, the most extreme of examples of which have recently crashed -- Van Jones, "Green Jobs Czar", was revealed to be a self-described Communist (bad) and, by any definition, an anti-white racist (way badder). But a President, who is proving himself to be as GREEN as a man can be at his own new JOB, was a long-time admirer and couldn't wait to get Jones on his team.

More disturbing is the presence of Kevin Jennings in a Czar-ship where his capacity to do horrific damage is far greater than Jones's boondoggle. Jennings, by some bizzarro twist of circumstances, ended up being "Safe Schools Czar" -- this despite his being a gay activist whose work and publications all revolve around one aspect or another of being gay in school.

The crowning finial seems to be his intro blurb for a book called Queering Elementary Education [no, I'm not making that up]. Apparently in that Foreword, Jennings totally (and revealingly) steps in it, by expressing some brand of endorsement for a certain Harry Hay, who has an unsavoury connection with the notorious NAMBLA -- the North American Man-Boy Love Association. Learn all you need (and perhaps more than you care) to know about that group from a new book, The Last Undercover [profiled here at Big Hollywood], about the FBI's exposure of its repugnant operations, by intrepid agent Bob Hamer. It's one thing to sacrifice your life for your country -- another to sacrifice the inner sanctity of your own mind, which this poor man probably had to do in order to achieve his aims.

Big Hollywood, obviously a significant source of reflection on the Polanski affair, and thus on larger issues regarding mainstreaming of pedophilia, also offers an interesting piece by a gay conservative who was himself a "Lolito", as he calls it. It won't be agreeable to every reader, but is also food for thought, especially about what happens to the Tolerance Police when fascism becomes fashionable.

John Nolte at Big Hollywood weighs in with a rather chilling piece on Hollywood's pedophilia-mainstreaming agenda. I weigh in on page 4 of his comments, citing a terrific 1997 article by Norman Podhoretz -- Lolita, My Mother-in-Law, the Marquis de Sade, and Larry Flynt -- about how Nabokov's Lolita made pedophilia "thinkable", for which reason Podhoretz, who once made a career of debating against censorship of any kind, came to the reluctant conclusion that Lolita should never be read, and never even have been written. Food for thought, from Commentary -- for purchase, but worth it.

October 9 -- 69th would-be birthday of the composer of Imagine. Imagine all the people living for today. How perfect. How ee-e-e-e-e-w-w-w.

Imagine the vast expensive estate in the British countryside. Imagine the custom-made white grand piano in the gigantic mansion sitting-room with the garden view. "Imagine all the people sharing all the world" (except maybe that giant estate and its sitting room: "Zer vuss rhoom for seven families in ziss house..." -- Dr. Zhivago)

"Imagine no possessions," like the custom-painted Rolls Royce.

Imagine -- the speedo version, but you get the gist...

TERRA NOVA BLOGGING

It's always nice to have an excuse for neglecting the blog, the present one being that I had an urgent mission in Newfoundland: to sleep until whenever, rising only to soak in Dead Sea salts in my old footed tub, then maybe take a drive to Walmart, more to take in the scenery than to buy anything, closing the day with an arduous trip through an episode of Battlestar Gallactica...

Fog has its uses.

Is it any wonder I can't make myself sit down and digest the implications of the Afghano-Obama-ditherama? I read, I listen, I shudder, I look out the window and think better thoughts.

LEARN SOMETHIN' NEW EVERY DAY

Newfoundland experienced a "Wreckhouse wind." I looked this up. Wreckhouse is an area in the southwest of the island, that gets wind blasting off the ocean, funneled down a series of narrow valleys only to burst out onto the plain simultaneously, creating a massive pressure change and some sort of effect that can cross the whole province. You figure it out -- it's all right here. Enjoy the part about it blowing the narrow-gauge railway trains off the track -- Newfoundland central planning strikes again. All resemblances to Canadian Human Rights Commissions or American congress in session is strictly coincidental.

Gateway Pundit gives it short and quick:

EPIC FAIL



Drudge was less kind:

THE EGO HAS LANDED


Chi-town OUT in Round One for the 2016 Olympics, notwithstanding the epic "sacrifices" of Michelle, Barry, and the Really Big "O" [Oprah].




There are lots of reasons to be against a Chicago Olympics.
--Time to give them to some region that has never hosted (Rio)
--Best to let Tokyo have them before their population is too old to field a single team
--Chicago is beset by so many versions of urban nightmare that no Olympics bid could avoid screwing the poor, enriching the Machine, and endangering the visitors

Sticking it to a breathtakingly narcissistic career-Chicagoan now occupying the White House and screwing the poor, the middle class, and the wealthy of America is way down the list of reasons.

Is this a schadenfreude-free zone? Mmmm, it is hard to resist just a tiny little BWA-HA-HA-HA.

Me? I'm pulling for Madrid.

UPDATE: RIO WINS IT

Footnote [and, pathetically, that's all it is]: Apparently the President did take time out from his Shilling-for-Daley-ville tour to spend 25 minutes with General McChrystal while Air Force One was warming up -- their second conversation since the General was appointed more than two months ago. Afghani-where? Oh, you mean that place where we keep encountering "man-made disasters" from the TAH-LEE-BAHN?....

How's that Hope'n'Change working out for ya? for all of us?

POP CULTURE QUERY:

I've never seen a Quentin Tarantino movie --
is INGLOURIOUS BASTERDS worth a look?

Frederic Raphael at Commentary has a review. I read the first couple of paragraphs and was unsure where he was going with it -- there were indications that he has seen Taratino's other films, as well as various compliments to the artistry. Then, fearing that there might be spoilers in the review, I scrolled to the bottom line to see if he recommended it:

As Harvey Weinstein would surely say, when a job is also a hit, what can possibly be wrong with it, unless you’re some kind of a pussyfooting elitist loser? Inglourious Basterds has to be great because, if the boffo box-office figures are true, people love it. It’s therefore undemocratic to go calling it the antihuman dirty dream of a pretentious, vacuous clown primed with Hollywood gelt to do the Jews a favor by showing that they too, given the chance, coulda/woulda behaved like mindless monsters. What does it matter, after all this time, if the world gets sold the idea that what Shoshanna and the Basterds did to the Nazis was exactly what the Jews would have done to the Germans if Harvey had been around to greenlight the project?

Going to Inglourious Basterds reminded me of Lina Wertmüller’s Seven Beauties, in which a concentration-camp inmate commits liberating suicide by leaping into a lake of sewage. Tarantino makes an even bigger splash by getting us all to pay to jump into an ocean of his own effluent from which he and Harv alone emerge, with $$ carved in their foreheads.

I'm guessing.....not?

Why am I not surprised? I've always had this sense that Tarantino, kind of like Cronenberg, is a man with many innate talents who has volunteered them to be enslaved to a set of truly base appetites. Won't be rushing out to Blockbuster for his oeuvre any time soon.

THE WIDER WORLD

I've been ducking any survey of the News o' the World in recent days, since it's all so very chilling, and the Reader of the Free World so increasingly, ludicrously incompetent at coping with it.

For a dose of major league reality, Michael Yon contributes to the Washington Times this morning. Return in kind by contributing to him, and he'll keep on delivering the straight story, from deep within the belly of the major beasts.

And then there's the hub of representative democracy, where the Democrat[ic?] Party is fixing to use legislative sleight-of-hand to ram through a massive health care bill as an amendment to an unrelated codicil to their earlier economic disastrathon. It's not that difficult to understand, but the Heritage Foundation does a good job of breaking it down. America, get ready to kiss your ass [your liberty, your economic security, your children's future] G'BYE!

UNITED NATIONS FOLLIES:

Gale alert: OBAMA WAGS HIS FINGER AND SAYS "THE MURDER OF INNOCENTS WILL NOT BE TOLERATED"

Is that a fact?

Apparently some innocents are more equal than others.


Meanwhile back at Turtle Bay ["Filmore East", says Dennis Miller]:

CANADA GROWS A PAIR AND VOWS TO WALK OUT ON HOLOCAUST-DENYING MADMOOD AHMADINNERJACKET

Do not mess with these people.


Over at Jewish World Review,

GEORGE WILL SOUNDS OFF ON THE "invertebrate" TELEPROMPTER KING

Bile alert: wear you Mackintosh and wellies, and bring your brolley. Will has clearly run out of patience with The One and the bulk-head of his bile boiler has burst its rivets --tsunami!!!



NOW THAT IRAN IS NEARLY NUCLEAR:

Surprise necessities for survival. Number 1 is, like, so-o-o obvious. [From Popular Mechanics, the magazine for essential debunking in a bunk-filled world -- Katrina, 9/11 "Truthers", etc.] Hat-tip/Instapundit.

WHAT I FOUND WHEN GOOGLED
"OBAMA+U.S.+REPUTATION"


You're gonna love this:

I Googled and got an Inauguration Day post that recounts a December 2008 interview with Worst President Ever Jimmy Carter. Money quote:

...not too long ago somebody asked me if the new President could change the reputation of our country in the first hundred days he was in the office and I said he could change the reputation of our country in the first ten minutes...

How's that reputation enhancement working out for you so far, America?

Well, according to our former friends and allies, the citizens of Poland, it's working out like this:







Translated in English, that would be:


TREASON!









[from their website.:]





















[hat-tip: the increasingly essential, Acorn-busting Gateway Pundit]

Hugh Hewitt makes a neat point:

"The kid's not ready." That's what a friend's father has been saying about Obama since the day he was elected. If Matt Latimer's tacky-by-definition tell-all book is to be believed, it's something Bush said as well. "Not Ready To Lead" is sounding more true all the time ("Always Ready To Campaign" could work nicely, though). As so often with President Obama, we are left to believe that he is either 1) haplessly naive, 2) brilliant beyond measure and playing a game of long ball none of us can comprehend, or 3) not interested in what have traditionally been American interests.

Or he's a triple-threat player.

Hewitt links to this gem at the Corner:

Birds gotta fly, fish gotta swim, ACORN's gotta engage in fraud, and Obama's gotta talk. It's really that simple; and it is amazing, given how little this guy actually knows about economics, about foreign affairs, about, well, just about anything...

Obama was reported, after the speech [at the 2004 Democratic Convention] and the thunderous reception that it received, to have said to someone, "You know, I can play in this league."

And so there we have it: Obama really believes at his core that empty rhetoric is the same as substance and judgement.

Read it all.

That curious quotation -- "I can play in this league" -- conjures up a later, similar little squeak of hubris, uttered to Harry Reid: "I have a gift" -- reflected on by Daniel Henninger, with considerable prescience, last April. By September, the increasing consensus is that "the gift has stopped giving, because people have started listening."

And just in case anyone wanted to know precisely when it all started to go horribly, horribly wrong for Mr. Obama, that December interview might provide a clue:

Kira: With the new president elect Barack Obama, what do you think about him being the new president elect and do you have any advice for him?

Jimmy Carter: Well, I have already talked to his major appointments - I have talked to the next Secretary of State and the next Security Advisor who will be in the White House with him and I have also yesterday talked with the person who is going to represent him and United States at the United Nations. So, I have already prepared him for some of the things that the Carter Center is doing that he might find helpful.

Be afraid. Be very afraid.


On a final note, during a conversation with popculture rabbi, Michael Medved, something happened to insure that "John McCain's approval rating among conservatives just skyrocketed." [hat-tip/ Gateway Pundit]

McCain broke down and admitted that "President Carter has earned his place as, if not the worst president in history, then certainly the worst in the 20th century."

SAY WHAT?

WHERE WAS THIS STRAIGHT-TALKIN' SENATOR MCCAIN IN 2008?

DOOBIES FOR ME, BUT NOT FOR THEE

Formerly sane pioneer blogger Andrew Sullivan came to the U.S. from Britain but shows that he doesn't really get why we are no longer a colony. Ya, see, Sully, it was all about dissolving the cast-iron divisions between classes, or perhaps going back to medieval times, between the "Estates". Sully has no use for the First Estate, the governing element of The Church. But apparently he is all in favour of retaining the barrier between the Second and Third Estates: The Nobility and The Peasants.

It all unfolded when Sully got caught sucking on his weed-stash by some of the local constabulary, while at Cape Cod National Seashore, a Massachusetts park.


Now, the good folks of the bean-state have reduced penalties for possession to the misdemeanor category, for which reason they are less hesitant to prosecute than if it were a more serious crime. Most ordinary people caught in Sully's circumstances could expect to get convicted and punished, but the U.S. Attorney in question politely declined to prosecute because a criminal conviction might prove an obstacle to poor old Andrew in his quest for "a certain immigration status" (?) in the United States.

Beg pardon? Well, I await correction, but I'm guessin' that this "certain status" is "spousal", applying to Andrew Sullivan because he married his male partner when Massachusetts legalized such arrangements. If that's the case, I can't imagine why it has to be cloaked in mystery. There's no mystery about Andrew. Maybe the "certain status" has nothing to do with his "marriage" -- in which case it's even more puzzling that the relevant documents hesitate to give this immigration status a name.

Whatever kind of status it may be, the more important thing is that the U.S. Attorney showed blatant favouritism in his treatment of the Sullivan case, and Judge Robert Collings, who heard it, while finding it outside his role to demand otherwise, made a clear finding that Sullivan asked for, and was granted, unequal treatment before the law.

Powerline lays out the case. [hat-tip: Hugh Hewitt]

SEPTEMBER 11, 2001 + 8


Once again Project 2996 honors the victims of the September 11 terrorist attack on America.

Project 2996 was conceived by Dale Challener Roe, who has tried to repeat the tribute annually over the years. I haven't been part of it since 2006, but I decided to play my part again this year, by repeating my tribute to Jack Aron, and taking on couple of others. The Project assigned me another WTC victim, John Thomas McErlean, and I requested the opportunity to pay tribute to Rick Rescorla.


In 2006 I volunteered to write a tribute to one victim, and was privileged to be introduced to Jack Charles Aron, who died in the offices of Marsh & McLennan in Tower 1 of the World Trade Center. A man I had never met or even heard of before was brought to fleeting life again through the words of his friends, colleagues, and family -- my contribution was to collect and sift through them to bring his portrait into focus. He left behind him a wife, Evelyn, a son Timmy, who is now a young man of 19, and a host of heartbroken friends and relatives. He was one of 295 employees of Marsh & McLennan whose lives were taken that day.


Beth McErlean was looking forward to celebrating her 14th anniversary on September 12th. In 1987 she had married John Thomas McErlean, a high-school sweetheart, now father of her four children and a vice-president and partner at the brokerage firm Cantor Fitzgerald. But when her anniversary day dawned, her husband was missing and presumed dead, his office having fallen from its lofty perch on the top floors of World Trade Center 1 into a disintegrated chaos of twisted metal, ash, and fire.

John McErlean had survived the first World Trade Center bombing in 1993. On that day he had carried a woman down 80 flights of stairs. No one knows what he was doing when he met his end in 2001, but his brother Tom figures he was probably engaged in the same sort of service to others.

John Thomas McErlean Jr., a handsome, dark-haired and square-jawed Irishman, grew up in Larchmount, New York. He formed an attachment to that community which drew him there to bring up his own family. He attended Iona, the Catholic boys prep school run by the Irish Christian Brothers in New Rochelle, and then St. Michael's College in Vermont, where he earned his business degree.

In the turbulent years since 9-11, the public has been forced to endure the foul spewings of wretches who need not be named, to the effect that those who died in the towers were symbols rather than human beings, that they represented all the grotesquerie and rapaciousness of American society, even to the extent that they were "little Eichmanns".

Imagine how such a slander would sit upon the relatives of a John McErlean, whose life outside of Manhattan's financial centre made room for being an athlete, a sailor, a coach of children's sports teams, and active member of St. Augustine's Parish. He spent his last summer vacation on Nantucket, flying kites, riding bikes, and building beachside bonfires. John bought a t-shirt that was corny, but whose motto spoke what was for him a profound truth: "Life is Good". "It seems so simple," he said, "but it's true. I've been blessed with a wonderful family and everything I wanted from life." He was 39 years old.

John's son Ryan is now 19, son Timothy 17, daughters Mary and Allie 16 and 12. In their sorrow they have known the generosity of the Larchmont/Mamaroneck Friends in Need organization, which has supported them and, in their mother's words, helped to "remind us all that there is much more good in our world than evil."

Of the nearly 3,000 people who were murdered on September 11 in all three locations, 658 of them were employees of Cantor Fitzgerald -- every single employee who happened to be at his or her desk that morning; the handful who were late, or on vacation, or going about their business out of the office that morning were the only ones left from the entire New York head office. It has been a long road back.


Nearly 3,000 people died on September 11. If not for the heroism of one man, that figure might well have been DOUBLED.

I refer, of course, to the indispensable Rick Rescorla, British/American soldier, hero of Ia Drang at Landing Zone X-Ray in Vietnam, and roly-poly oracle managing security for Dean Witter/Morgan Stanley, who had predicted BOTH World Trade Center bombings (predictions to the Port Authority obviously falling on deaf ears).

You've seen his picture --the iconic pose [taken by the once-reputable and Pulitzered CNN veteran Peter Arnett] on the cover of the best-selling military history, We Were Soldiers Once...and Young, by General Hal Moore, (made into a thrilling film starring Mel Gibson as Moore -- Rescorla is not mentioned in the film despite his key role in the book -- not quite enough room for two heroes!) The book gives an account of a pivotal battle in 1965, which marked the escalation of U.S. involvement in Vietnam to real all-out war.

It is almost pointless to try and memorialize Rick Rescorla, to pile word upon word after all the words which have been written, by people far closer to Rescorla's reality than myself. I've learned most of what I know about him from military blogs like Mudville Gazette [excellent video there] and Blackfive. There are numerous websites devoted to him and his story -- his many stories, since the several phases of his career are each worth their own book. The skeleton of the history goes thus:

Born: 1939 Hayle, Cornwall, the old Celtic kingdom at the far southwest reach of England.

British Service: 1956-1963 Paratrooper, Cyprus and Northern Rhodesia

American Service: 1963-1990 Colonel, U.S. Army, 1st Cavalry Division

I saw Rick Rescorla come swaggering into our lines with a smile on his face . . . saying, ‘Good, good, good. I hope they hit us with everything they’ve got tonight. We’ll wipe them up,’ " recalled Lt. Larry Gwinn in the 1993 book, We Were Soldiers Once . . . and Young. Rick took a bullet in the arm and fought for six hours before the battle he called "a long, bloody traffic accident in the jungle" ended.

More than 300 men died at Ia Drang. Rick earned a Silver Star, a Purple Heart and Bronze Stars for Valor and Meritorious Service..."We were flown away," Rick said to the authors [of We Were Soldiers] "but the stench of the dead would stay with me for years after the battle." [more here]

Security work:
1985 -- joined Morgan Stanley to manage and advise on corporate security

1990 -- concluded from a security review of the WTC that it was vulnerable to terrorist attack, most likely a truck bomb in its underground parking garage

1993 --predictions fulfilled -- Rescorla "jumped on a desk in the middle of the firm and threatened to drop his pants if his people didn't chill out and listen. In the stunned silence that followed, he launched an orderly evacuation, refusing to leave until the entire tower was empty." Following this attack he became convinced that there would be another, more deadly, probably involving airplanes. He advised his employers to move their offices to New Jersey, but they were not persuaded.

September 11, 2001 -- After the north WTC tower was hit by an airplane, Rick Rescorla initiated a timely evacuation (punctuated by his bouts of folksongs and patriotic anthems through a bullhorn) of thousands of Morgan Stanley employees from the south WTC tower, ignoring assurances from the Port Authority that his people were safe and need not move. He went back and back again, to clear as much of the building as he could, for long enough that there are at least a dozen stories of "sightings" and phone calls made while he did his duty protecting his charges. In the end he went in for a last round-up, and was not seen again.

Rick Rescorla was one of only SIX Morgan Stanley employees who did not survive on 9/11. He saved the lives of nearly 2,700 people in the south tower. [Another 1,000 from Building 5 also evacuated safely at his order.]

Rick Rescorla gave his life doing what he had always done, with the dedication and skill he had acquired during his military career. Many of his fellow soldiers have signed on to the effort to award him the Congressional Medal of Honor, for which he is technically ineligible because he had retired from the reserves and did not die in military service.

Surely he is a proper candidate for America's highest civilian honor, the Presidential Medal of Freedom. In any case, the living recipients of the Congressional Medal awarded him their own honor, the Above And Beyond Citizen's Medal, in March of 2009.


Other military personnel have honoured Rescorla in their own way. FOB Rescorla (forward operating base) was established near Farah, Afghanistan. Blending the sublime and the ridiculous, in a way that the honoree would no doubt appreciate, a fitting mural decorates one of the FOB latrines.

Likewise, a beautiful bronze statue, based on Arnett's photograph, has been unveiled at the National Infantry Museum at Ft. Benning Georgia.


Heroes come in all shapes and sizes and vocations. The heroism of a man like Rick Rescorla deserves monuments and wide public recognition. But every good father is a hero to his children, and does heroic service to society by being just that. We throw that word "hero" around a little promiscuously, even as applied to the victims of 9/11. I count myself lucky to be given the opportunity to salute and remember on this day three men who seem to me to deserve that title, for services large and small.

Jack, John, Rick -- in your name, and for all the others

They shall not grow old, as we that are left grow old:
Age shall not weary them, nor the years condemn.
At the going down of the sun, and in the morning
We will remember them.

[For the Fallen, Laurence Binyon, September 1914]

SCOLD-IN-CHIEF GRABS THE AIRWAYS
FOR SPEECH # 18,642
ABOUT HEALTH-CARE-INSURANCE-REFORM-
EVERYBODY'S-A-LIAR-BUT-ME

Gateway Pundit covers the "liar" charge aimed directly (minus only her name) at Sarah Palin.

Never mind that the speech itself piled falsehood upon falsehood, contradicting not only what common sense tells us about the legislation on the table, but also what candidate, and then President, Obama has said in one speech or interview after another.

And someone yelled, "You lie!"

Imagine.

Joe Wilson -- no, not that Joe Wilson, but a Republican Congressman from South Carolina -- exploded at just one in a series of mendacities flowing from the slick lips of El Bambo. He did use the word "lie", which would have gotten him banished from the British Parliament -- but then again, if the American congress allowed for any of the free-wheeling back-and-forth, not to mention the chief executive facing the assembly during a Question Period, maybe the poor congressman wouldn't have lost control of his tongue -- a simple "shame, shame" or "balderdash" would have sufficed.

Instapundit covers the whole question from a variety of sources, including reader James Somers, who opined that:

...it might also be noted that a lot of Democrats and MSM journalists (same thing, I know) who suddenly have the vapors over Joe Wilson’s breach of decorum thought it was just dandy when an Iraqi journalist threw shoes at President Bush...The point is that lefties loved Sticking It To The Man when Chimpy McHitler was president, but now they’re prissily toting around copies of Robert’s Rules of Order.

Velvet-tongued Veep Joe Biden deplored this outburst, as did asp-tongued California flake, Rep. Maxine Waters. And then, of course, the ever-accomodating Senator John McCain urged an immediate apology from Wilson (which did occur) -- forcing us to wonder whether he ever did the same when President Bush was hooted and booed at during an address in the same august assembly.

John Hinderaker at PowerLine [hat-tip: Instapundit] does a thorough analysis of the speech, which he read rather than watched. He guesses that the delivery was Obama standard: "smooth, generally flat, occasionally a bit whiny." Having watched only a few excerpts during the Fox de-briefing, I would say that Hinderaker missed those other qualities that often creep into the Obama delivery, that is, the snippy, scolding sense of irritation that his critics won't roll over and button up in the face of his fundamental superiority. Still, Hinderaker catches that element in the tone of the words, and nails this phenomenon straight-on:

I'm not sure whether Obama and his handlers understand how this sort of talk grates on those of us who are not liberal Democrats (a large majority of the country). Debating public policy issues is not "bickering." Disagreeing with a proposal to radically change one of the largest sectors of our economy is not a "game." This kind of gratuitous insult--something we never heard from President Bush, for example--is one of the reasons why many consider Obama to be mean-spirited.

Hinderaker closes his piece with the ultimate "bottom line":

This was not, to put it kindly, a speech that was directed at thinking people.

Nor, as the writer points out, did it seem to be directed at a people who have ever heard of YouTube, where there is evidence aplenty that Mr. Obama will take any position, at any given moment, if it suits that moment, regardless of how diametrically opposed it is to the position he took the moment before.

Over at American Thinker, Geoffrey Hunt predicts for Obama a "spectacularly failed presidency." A whole bunch of things are going wrong, but Hunt hits on the one that is becoming increasingly obvious:

Obama doesn't have a narrative. No, not a narrative about himself. He has a self-narrative, much of it fabricated, cleverly disguised or written by someone else. But this self-narrative is isolated and doesn't connect with us. He doesn't have an American narrative that draws upon the rest of us...

It's not so much that he's a phony, knows nothing about economics, is historically illiterate, and woefully small minded for the size of the task-- all contributory of course. It's that he's not one of us. And whatever he is, his profile is fuzzy and devoid of content, like a cardboard cutout made from delaminated corrugated paper. Moreover, he doesn't command our respect and is unable to appeal to our own common sense. His notions of right and wrong are repugnant and how things work just don't add up. They are not existential. His descriptions of the world we live in don't make sense and don't correspond with our experience...

In the meantime, while we've been struggling to take a measurement of this man, he's dissed just about every one of us--financiers, energy producers, banks, insurance executives, police officers, doctors, nurses, hospital administrators, post office workers, and anybody else who has a non-green job.

Meanwhile back at the ranch, P.J. O'Rourke was talking "failed presidency" last November.


Today's comic relief:

The president is the descendant of slave-owners. [It must be true -- I read it in the New York Times.] Can we expect him to fork over some reparation bucks any time soon? Boy, it makes me glad my ancestors came over in steerage from Ireland in the 1840's, Germany in the 1880's, and Greece in 1905 -- it means I never benefited from slavery no-now, and don't owe nobody nuttin'.

Apparently Obama's also related to Confederate President Jefferson Davis -- Adams, Harrison, Roosevelt, Kennedy, Gore, Bush, Dodd, Chafee....dynasties anyone?

Comic relief, part deux:

Buffalo's WBEN local talk guy, Sandy Beach, just opened his show with the suggestion that the next time President O'Whopper gives a speech, he should just arrange to have it in a church so the kneelers will be in place.

Heh.

WE PRAY TO THE LORD...

PLEASE HELP ME KEEP DOWN MY LUNCH



[tip of the hat to JammieWearingFool and Gateway Pundit]

Newsflash!

THOUSANDS MOURN FALLEN HERO
AT FUNERAL MASS

...times two...

...in BUFFALO

TWO FIREFIGHTERS WHO GAVE THEIR LIVES
LAID TO REST
Requiescant in pace.



[uh, ...newsflash, take 2: ...and... roll it!]

A KENNEDY PASSES

HEROIC FIGHTER FOR THOSE MARGINALIZED
BY DISABILITIES

DEDICATED TO FAITH & FAMILY

LIFELONG PUBLIC SERVANT

... uh, that would be....

EUNICE KENNEDY SHRIVER, 1921-2009

Requiescat in Pace




[damn! I'll get it this time....
Here we go: Newsflash!...]

ADDENDUM: ANOTHER KENNEDY PASSES

AT LAST

Edward M. Kennedy, the senior senator from Massachusetts, can stop swimming now -- stop treading water and paddling furiously to escape that riptide moment which consummated a lifetime pattern of trampling over rules, feelings, persons, and boundaries of decency to preserve and prosper himself: from cheating on exams, to cheating on his wife, to trying to cheat the American system by getting the State of Massachusetts to do a legal flip-flop [or insert a Joe-Kennedy-hand-pick] every time he wanted keep up the Democrat vote-count in the Senate when a vacancy occurred.

Actually it's not accurate to refer to a "riptide moment", because the Chappaquiddick incident [good analysis here] unrolled with chilling calculation over a period of hours; and while he may have been swept into the moral whirlpool by an instinctive and natural panic, it is plain for all to see that he very quickly made the conscious choice to go with that flow.

[That is assuming, via the benefit of the doubt, that he did not in fact drive off that bridge deliberately -- and why would he do that? Well, it could have made a speedy end to any nasty fallout from accusations of rape or impregnation. The burial, literally, of any autopsy findings on Mary Jo Kopechne leave these speculations both legitimate and eternally hanging.]

It is my sincere belief that the life of any person cannot be summed up in their one worst act. Ted Kennedy could long ago have been completely forgiven for his role in Mary Jo's death, were he sincerely repentant, and (as a putative Catholic) had he availed himself of the Sacrament. But, let's face it, his life was not otherwise sterling, both personally and politically.

He left a shattered wife after 20 years of marriage, for a dissolute life of booze and broads [brought to a close only by his marriage to a fellow-divorcé barely older than his children, which he has insisted now has the Catholic Church's blessing, though God alone knows how].

And he has championed [with at least a coherent consistency not found in many politicians] every cause on the left-wing political menu, often with requisite passion, but just as often with characteristic excess in spleen and calumny against his foes. Reliable and respectable Mona Charen sums this up perfectly today. What time we invest in wondering whether Mr. Kennedy has had the grace to repent his horrific wrong toward Mary Jo Kopechne [feel free to doubt that -- apparently it was one of his favourite topics for a good joke] could just as well be spent on the subject of his unquestionably deliberate character assassinations of Supreme Court nominee Judge Robert Bork, President George Bush, and the American military in Iraq.

Odd, that -- a man whose family was sliced apart by physical assassination found the public slaughter of personal reputation out of one side of his mouth irresistible, while out the other side he was an impassioned advocate of "hate-crime" legislation, and insidious and repugnant vehicle for gagging free speech, which is always selectively enforced (Christians are never considered victims) and inevitably morphs into the creation of "thought crime." (Welcome to Canada)

But then, why should this man blanch at character assassination when he has been able to make himself comfortable with the bodily death of one (Mary Jo) or of millions (the killing fields),

or of millions upon millions (the pre-born) where it suited his larger agenda. [Kennedy was against abortion when he began his political career, but, as Germaine Greer so deftly said it, "I never knew a philanderer who wasn't pro-choice."]

The one time he did hold his tongue while the rest of the Democrats were flapping theirs was during the confirmation hearings for successful Supreme Court nominee, Clarence Thomas -- Kennedy's own well-earned reputation as "an aging Irish boyo clutching a bottle and diddling a blonde" and "Palm Beach boozer, lout and tabloid grotesque" and "the living symbol of the family flaws" [from GQ, Time, and Newsweek, respectively -- long before there was ever a Fox News!] made it impossible for him to meddle in the lurid sex-swamp that the Democrats were juicing up for Judge Thomas. Far from being understanding, the Dems were livid with avuncular ol' Ted for not firing off a shot at that OK Corral.

I'm glad there is a God who is in the forgiving business, since such vast swaths of his creation [i.e., me] are not. The Anchoress, as usual, inspires with her charity and largeness of spirit at these moments. I make my less generous comment part-way down her page.

Senator Edward Moore Kennedy:
Knight Errant of England
-- not everyone thrilled with taking Camelot this far!


Recipient of the Presidential Medal of Freedom
-- not everyone thrilled at this shallow substitute for a Gold in the 100-metre breast-stroke!

Lion of the Senate
-- would you want to be one of these?:

"Once established with a pride, males are usually able to scrounge food from the females, but they also have pride duties: males have to patrol and mark their territory by spraying urine, rubbing secretions of glands on objects, and roaring."

[I think they called it a "waitress sandwich" -- Chris Dodd would know...]


And in answer to the musical question: why am I dissing the guy, now he's dead and can't do any more damage? That's an easy one. It's the rank dishonesty of it all -- the papering over, the re-writing, the distortion not just of the sordid realities of his repugnant personal life, but of the true picture of his performance as the total political partisan, right to the last week of his life where he tried to game the system to overturn his own previous gaming of the system to preserve the filibuster-proof majority in the senate. The longer his "leonine" career went on the more it became self-parody, as he barked and bloviated his way through the process while his underlings tried to prop up his superficial involvement -- best exemplified by his laughable performance at the Roberts and Alito hearings, as he took the field against two men each with more intellectual heft in their left eyebrow than Kennedy has every displayed at any juncture in his academic or political life.

Had the commentators of the past few days simply had the good taste to keep their assessments out of the stratosphere of hagiographical exaggeration, distortion, or just plain lies (Kennedy was a fighter, but it was never personal????) people like me might have just laid off and let it go. But I have heard enough (and I haven't listened that much) to find myself so sickened by the disingenuousness that I had no choice but to vent a little reality into the cloud. So here it was.

What is it with these professional stenographers? It's like calling Michael Jackson "the greatest entertainer who ever was" just because he died. Greater than Gene Kelly, Fred Astaire, Frank Sinatra, Sammy Davis Jr.?

NO.

NOT.

Not even greater than the ensemble cast of the Carol Burnett Show, for cripes sake. Give me a break.

What children these newsmongers are -- once it was their sin to try and rewrite history by knowingly spreading falsehoods (Cronkite on Vietnam) -- now I think they rewrite it because they are too emotionally self-indulgent and memory-challenged to keep their grip on reality on these momentous occasions.

Fortunately, when the flower-shrines have wilted and the kleenexes have been hauled away, most regular folks get on with their lives, and come to the sad conclusion that the world is full of the over-praised, and that these displays of emotional extremism change nothing. How much better to acknowledge a sane assessment of a person's true worth, and feel happy for the good they actually did, than to canonize them without warrant. So it is even with Princess Diana, whose departure still holds all the records for excess. She loved her sons. As memories go, that should be enough.

For the Tedster: Requiescat in pace is enough too.