What it takes to be President

They're all abuzz on the radio today about Condeleeza Rice. I love Condeleeza Rice. She is a brilliant Soviet scholar who can stand toe-to-toe with Putin and his gang of thugs. I would pick her for National Security Advisor or Secretary of State again. But VP? Nope. Waste of her talents.

Amidst all the buzz, some pundit asked if Rice, or Rubio or Pawlenty or whoever, had the experience to be President. That one heartbeat away thing and all.

Experience to be President? Where, exactly, does one get such experience?

Oh, c'mon, Schlub, that's easy— you get it from being a Senator or Congressman or mayor or governor, yeah, especially governor, 'cause that's like being a minature President.

Uh, no.

All that "experience" makes you a better politician. And politicians are the LAST persons who should be President. Indeed, all the people you think should be President, shouldn't.

Let's take Ronald Reagan as an example. Guy should never have been President. I mean, an actor? With chimps? Divorced? Didn't go to Harvard, either. A governor, sure, but you know, California, the Twilight Zone. Wore a cowboy hat, too, so just not the sophisticated brie-eatin' Foreign-Affairs-published sophisticate we want to elect so Europeans will stop calling us rubes.

Won in a landslide, yes, but only because of the same "infected toe" situation we are in today: running against Jimmy Carter, who was Obama Lite. Besides, winning by a landslide is no measure of Presidential stature, as the current situation proves.

It's what you do afterwards.

Reagan was an astonishingly brilliant President, the best one of these modern times, a hero, a wonder. And he shouldn't have been, given professional politicians' criteria for leading. So, why was he?

Simple. He regarded these truths to be self-evident:

a. The individual is more important than the mass.

b. The United States is an aberration, historically unique, and while this model serves as example, it only works here. Be grateful, be awestruck, that you are an American.

c. Nothing can be accomplished through government. Indeed, government must diminish so the individual can flourish.

d. Rights are inherent, not granted.

Find me that person. Don't care how old they are, what their job is, where they live. That person is a President.

Declaration 2.0

We hold it self-evident that the United States of America is the only country ever founded under the concept that the individual matters. Every preceding country was founded by conquest, and ruled by elites who regarded their population as mere peasants to be managed, controlled, and kept in their places. Not so here. The idea of America transcended race, religion, ethnicity and social class, a concept so radical that an additional war was fought between countrymen some eighty years after America's founding to settle remaining questions. Even today, there is resistance. Some persons just simply don't like the idea of others living freely.

And those persons have become our rulers. The very factions our founders warned us about have coalesced into parties, both of which seek control of the country. One of those parties has become so dangerously anti-freedom that it must, at all costs, be completely replaced and destroyed in the next election cycle. The replacing party, while not so bad, still believes that government is the solution and will, under its four year reign, do as much damage to individual rights as the party they replaced.

This must stop.

Therefore, the people of this country proclaim a pox on both your houses, and advise the politicians, party leaders, government functionaries and bureaucrats that we are mad as hell and are not going to take it anymore. Either you recognize that we, the People, have primacy over your plans and programs and bureaus and regulations, or be prepared to ride feather-covered rails out of town.

Get me?

Letter

Dear Justice Roberts,
 
My first inclination was to call you a traitor to the Constitution. After all, you just sold America down the river. But, upon reflection, that may have been a bit hasty.

Because I see what you did: you struck down the Commerce Clause and labeled the penalty a tax. Good on ya. We no longer have to worry about the government using the general welfare as an excuse to tell us what to eat, what to buy, where to live, and what to say. And, despite Baracula's disingenuous arguments to the contrary, a tax is a tax. And I, like you, believe a country gets the government it deserves and if we were stupid enough to elect this Marxist, it ain't the Supreme Court's job to protect us from our own stupidity.

But...

You did not have to go through all the strenuous effort to make Obamacare constitutional. Given their arguments, and your response, you should have let the whole thing collapse. Instead, you went out of your way, in an absolutely uncalled for manner, to justify upholding it. That was far beyond the call of duty, and shows you to be in somewhat of a snit. The problem is, when judges get into a snit, innocent people suffer. Comrade Obama and the Monarchist Party got this thing through by perpetuating a fraud, and you, in a snit, aided and abetted it.

You did not act like a judge. You did not protect the innocent.

See, in order for this whole law thing to work, we schlubs have to believe that wise and impartial judges will fill the gap between the schlubs' ignorance of the law's millions of conflicting and nonsensical nuances, and ongoing criminal efforts by Monarchists and Frauds to use those conflicts as means for cleaning out the schlubs' wallets. But if judges get into snits and make rulings they and their buddies can discuss and admire over brie and champagne in country clubs we schlubs can't afford to join, then you have abandoned your responsibility to us. And if judges are more interested in their own snits than the schlubs' need for protection, then the law is just words on paper.

Words on paper can be burned.

So, based on your ruling, the government can now tax us for a state of being. Today, it's lack of health care insurance. Tomorrow, lack of a college degree? How 'bout being white? Oh that'll never happen, you snort.

Uh huh.

You do realize you have devolved the Supreme Court into just one more body part of Leviathan, right? That the Court is uncaring of me and the rest of the schlubs, your "let them eat cake" attitude quite apparent? Okay, good, as long as you realize that.

And I do realize that you have kicked it back to us, saying, "If you don't like decisions like this, then stop voting for Democrats, Monarchists, and other Tory parties." Okay, wid you, bro, and I never have voted for groups like that. But murder isn't supposed to happen, either, and aren't you judges responsible for meting out proper justice to murderers?

Perhaps you should have considered that, instead of the snit.  

So, it could very well be that you are not a traitor. But, I'll bet you could play one on TV.

Your friend,

Schlub

R.I.P., RB

Ray Bradbury died the other day. For those of a certain age and geekiness, it’s like the passing of Elvis, or Jackie Onassis. An era fades.

Ray Bradbury was the guy who lit the spark. Marvel Comics taught me to read, but Ray Bradbury taught me to love it. Sure, Robert Heinlein and Alex Key and Sheila Moon and Madeline L’Engle did, too, but it was Bradbury who formed the core.

I can’t remember the first time I read one of his stories. I think it was somewhere around 1967. I used to spend my afternoons in the Ft. Rucker library while Mom went to the Commissary, and I would check out about 10-15 books when she came to get me. One of his was in that pile, probably The Martian Chronicles, dunno, but, by the summer of 1968, he was absolutely my favorite author and I had read…everything. R is for Rocket was his best anthology, neck-and-neck with The October Country and S is for Space. My favorite novel was Something Wicked This Way Comes, which was made into not-a-half-bad movie with Jason Robards (although, overall, RB didn’t translate well into film. Remember the Rock Hudson Martian Chronicles? Ugh).

There was something about his style, sentences careened across theme and event and crashed back into themselves, evoking an incredible sense of place and atmosphere. It felt like RB got it, that he knew the essence of growing up and the ephemeral moments of play and sunset and the smells of newly mown grass and how…fleeting…it is.  All Summer in a Day, wow.  I read Dandelion Wine back then, too, and didn’t really get the stories but the sense of it, the passing of things that make up memory, I got that.

I stopped reading him sometime in the late 70’s. Was into Tolkien and Herbert and Hesse then. A few years ago, I picked up some  stuff he had written recently but stopped about halfway through the first story because something was missing.

I think it was me.

Anyways, salud, mazeltov, mud in your eye, RB. You were the best. The Man’s out there. Go find Him.

Letter

Dear Governor Romney,

Pretty much in the bag, ain’t it? Stunning, I’ll bet. After all, we real conservatives don’t hold you in the highest regard (that whole Romneycare thing), and it’s supposed to be another Tea Party year. But there you are, only a fat lady song away from being President. You’re probably crediting your campaign, your campaign manager, the Republican National Committee, your scintillating speeches and Ken-doll looks, for that, but you shouldn’t.

It’s just a matter of timing.

Now timing is nothing to sneeze at. Mostly it’s a skill, requiring measures of patience and decisiveness and cojones, and Schlub is the master of it (por ejemplo, I managed to sell a house and retire a lot of debt just before things went into the crapper). You don’t evince a lot of decisiveness, and your cojone-ness seems on the diminished side, but you do have a fair amount of patience. And all good things come to those who wait.

Because the time is now. Marxists took over the Presidency and Congress and, after three years of torching the countryside, we real Americans have had enough.  Whatever social issues divide us, we thoroughly understand that electing Democrats to office this November is tantamount to joining the Soviet bloc, so we will, en masse, vote Republican. That you happen to be the candidate is just a fortuitous situation.

For you. Not for us.

See, you emerged from a field of midgets. Any one of them —Newt, Santorum, Paul— would win just as big as you’re going to this November. Heck, an infected toe would win. So don’t be thinking you’re the next Reagan or something.

You’re not.

The big disqualifying factor, the one thing making you the candidate of timing rather than time, is that you believe government is the answer. To everything. Now, you are definitely a nice guy, good family man, brilliant businessman, and you do believe in individual rights. But you, and the rest of the Republican Party, still consider legislation and bills and laws and regulations to be the answer to all of mankind’s problems. Oh sure, you do it from a conservative perspective, still regard private property and freedom as paramount, but you still want to manage all of that from DC.

See, Gov, we conservatives have had enough of government. We don’t want you to help us, make our lives better, look after us. We can do that ourselves. We want you to leave us alone.

And while you’ve promised to eliminate Obamacare, change the tax code, and get rid of regulations, you still have a penchant for universal healthcare of some kind, some kind of income taxes, and other kinds of regulations. It’s a better kinder approach, but it’s akin to sharpening the guillotine so the peasants won’t suffer. Know what I mean?

No, you don’t. Which is why this is the last election I vote for Republicans. I will be joining a third party on November 7^th and voting neither Dem nor Rep in 2012.

But at least you get to be President. Once.

Your friend,

Schlub

Expelled

The sheer genius that is Community continues apace, with that astonishing tribute to Starburns and subsequent disciplinary action.

E Pluribus Anus.

Assemble

Avengers, that is.

Schlub and Baby Schlub went to the Mighty Marvel Marathon at Tyson's Corner, preceding the midnight release of The Avengers. What an absolute blast. Iron Man, Cap, the Wasp, Hulk, Thor, and Black Widow were there. What's funny, Iron Man told me none of them knew each other, they just all happened to show up appropriately dressed. Wasp and I advised Widow that she really wasn't an Avenger, never was, but she is so kick-ass she gets a by.

And then the movie...

Schlub, and every other Marvel True Believer, has been waiting 50 years for this movie.

Masterpiece.