CAPT BILL PINE, USN

A man is indeed fortunate who can claim to have two or three real friends in his life.  By “real friend,” I mean a man who sees you at your worst, battling demons or life or physical foes and not only runs to join you, but does so with a smile on his face and joy in his heart.  He is the man that you just know will come to your side when you need him and without asking.  I have had two such friends in my life.

My friend, Bill Pine, was one of those two.

In 1982, I took my son, Michael, to a  meeting of Boy Scout Troop 1345 (“The best troop alive!”) in Burke Center, Virginia.   When I asked the Scoutmaster if they had room for Michael, he grinned and told me that there was a spot for both of us in the troop.  It was a big troop, with a dozen uniformed leaders.  When I was introduced to the assistants, the Scoutmaster said, “This is Mike McCarty.  He and his son are joining the troop. He’s a Marine.”

There were a lot of nods and smiles, but one fellow with a cocky air and a crinkly smile said “A Marine, huh?  Well, I guess everybody ought to have one of them for his own.”   I had just entered the wonderful world of Bill Pine.

Bill Pine was a man of many talents.  He was an educated man who at the time of his retirement from the Navy was the Oceanographer and Meteorologist of the Atlantic Command.  He was a rugged warrior, a veteran of riverine operations with the South Vietnamese Navy.  He was a loving father and grandfather and his wife’s best friend.  He liked working with wood and stone and being on the water.  And he had a sense of humor.

At one point, our Scoutmaster was a very senior IRS officer. He was was a great guy, but very straight-laced.  Once, when Bill called his office, Bob’s secretary asked the nature of the call.  “Uh, well, this is the Acme Sperm Bank and we wanted to tell him his account is badly over-drawn.”

He was a wise man and trusted leader.  When my marriage went to hell, he gave me the wisest counsel possible by just inviting me to spend a quiet weekend with Pam and him.  “You can talk or not talk or just stretch out in the hammock in the back yard.  But come.”

And he was a natural woodsman.  In February 1983, he invited me to camp with him and his friends, Duke and Barry Vickery, on their annual campout along the Middle Fork of the Savage River in Garrett County, Maryland.  It was a backpacking campout—tents and campfire cooking—that came to include our sons and grandsons.  It was serious camping, miles back in the woods, in temperatures that would often drop below zero and, once, snowed us in when 44 inches of snow fell after we got to the site.  Many of the happiest days of my life have been spent around a campfire with Bill and Duke and Barry.

When it came time for me to choose a best man for my second wedding, there was no doubt that it would be Bill.  That’s a pretty apt description; along with my Dad, my Grand-dad, Pat Oates and my sons, Bill Pine joins that pantheon of men who have been examples for me of what “a good man” is.

Bill Pine—Naval Officer, warrior, husband, father and shipmate—died suddenly and unexpectedly on Thursday night.  As Pam told me on the phone last night, they didn’t just break the mold when they made him, “they beat the living hell out of it!!”  I think Stevenson was describing Captain Donald William Pine, United States Navy (retired) when he wrote “Home is the sailor, home from the sea, and the hunter home from the hill.”

"Alpha Mike Foxtrot, Shipmate.  Sleep well, Green Worm.  Blue Worm, out.”

SOMEBODY GET A ROPE! SOMEBODY FIND A TREE!

One of the darkest blots on American History is the terror of lynching loosed on freed slaves and their descendants in the last half of the 19^th Century and the first half of the 20^th.  Quite often, the mad demand for vengeance led the mob to lash out at the handiest target, whether that person was guilty of a crime or not.

Now, a city burns because “justice” was denied.  I suppose the new definition of justice is just hang somebody, even if he didn’t commit a crime.  Welcome to the first half of the 21^st Century.

THE CHICKENS COME HOME TO ROOST

A few days after President Obama first took office, he held a meeting with the Congressional leadership.  He discussed, among other things, his goals for economic recovery and invited all the leaders to join him in working to resolve the economic crisis.

At the end of the meeting, the Minority Whip, Eric Cantor handed him some notes on modest ideas to further that goal.  The President took them, but told Cantor that it was his own plans that would go through.   "Elections have consequences," he told Mr. Cantor.  "I won."

At that time in January 2009, the Democrats controlled both houses of the Congress.  Now the Republicans have taken control of both houses.

For four years, the President has been protected from having to show any backbone because Senator Reid has refused to let most legislation even reach the floor for debate or vote.  He did this so that his own caucus would not do something stupid, such as actually passing legislation received from the House and sending it to the President to be signed or vetoed.  That was OK with me, because the voters kept the Senate in Democrat hands and elections have consequences.

Now Harry Reid is as irrelevant as Mrs. Pelosi.  Senator McConnell and the Republicans are in control.  For the President, the chickens of arrogance are clucking away in the Oval Office.  Elections have consequences, and that works both ways.

A PROPOSED SOLUTION TO ILLEGAL IMMIGRATION

[The links to certain words and phrases are not mine. Feel free to ignore these free-loading swine.]

The real problem with our immigration system, to the extent that we have a system any longer, is that the world has learned to use our innate goodness against our own interests.  We are the envy of the world.  We are a generous people, fair and forgiving.  We have taken the great precepts of Anglo-Saxon law and entered them into our National DNA.  

Our forefathers saw fit to craft a Constitution designed to protect citizens of the United States from despotism.  I submit, however, it was never meant to allow non-citizens to abuse the rights of the people.  As I mentioned in yesterday’s entry, that principle has been stood on its head as criminals who infiltrate our country turn our own Constitution from a shield to protect us FROM government into a sword by which politicians can allow strangers to our nation to profit from their criminality at the expense of the citizens of the United States.

The presence of tens of millions of “undocumented” aliens, i.e., criminals present in violation of the laws of the United States, indicates that those people are confident that the laws of the United States do not apply to them and that they may wag their noses at our laws.  For those who say that they must be here because their home countries are too poor have oppressive and corrupt governments, I suggest that they follow the example of our forefathers.  They did not presume to unlawfully enter some other country and to demand the rights of that country’s citizens.  No, they took up arms and asserted and won their rights within their own country.  Instead of cowardice, they pledged their lives, their fortunes and their sacred honor—to the extent of actually shedding blood—to earn the rights of citizenship. Do we really want to add to our national bloodline the genes of people who are to cowardly to fight for their rights? 

Therefore, I suggest that the simplest way to stop this usurpation is to amend our Constitution to ensure that it is a Constitution of, for and by only our citizens and those we allow into our country in accordance with our laws.  Accordingly, I offer the following for consideration:

PROPOSED AMENDMENT XXVIII

      1.  The rights, privileges, and protections afforded to citizens of the United States by this Constitution, the laws enacted pursuant thereto, or rules or regulations derivative therefrom, shall apply only to citizens of the United States and those persons lawfully present therein.

2.       2.  No person who has unlawfully entered the United States or who, having been lawfully temporarily admitted, has lost that status due to the expiration or termination of that lawful admission, may assert any right, privilege, or protection afforded by this Constitution, the laws enacted pursuant thereto, or rules or regulations derivative therefrom.

3.      3.  Any person found to have entered the United States without prior affirmative permission from the government of the United States, or, having been lawfully admitted to the United States, to have lost that status due to the expiration or termination of that lawful admission, shall be subject to immediate and summary return to that Nation from which the individual entered the United States, without recourse to any Court or agency of the United States.  Furthermore, any person found to have unlawfully entered the United States without prior affirmative permission from the government of the United States, or, having been lawfully admitted to the United States, to have lost that status due to the expiration or termination of that lawful admission, and been deported in accordance hereto shall thereafter never be eligible to seek lawful temporary or permanent admission to the United States.  The absence of any official record establishing such lawful presence in the United States shall constitute final and prima facie evidence of such unlawful presence.

4.       4.  No person born within the national boundaries of the United States of parents who are not then lawfully present in the United States may claim citizenship based on the principle jus soli or Amendment XIV of this Constitution; and any child born of parents who were lawfully within the United States at the time of such child’s birth but who are thereafter deported due to termination of that legal status may not claim citizenship of the United States until such child has reached the age of twenty-one years and has made application for and been granted admission to the United States at the embassy of the United States in such foreign country as that child may then reside.  No right shall exist for such child to first enter the United States in order to assert a claim to citizenship, and if such claim is denied, such denial shall be final and shall not be subject to judicial or other administrative review.

5.       5.  The rights to limitations on search and seizure, protection from self-incrimination, indictment by grand jury, attorney representation, trial by jury, bail, and resort to the Courts of the United States by writ of habeas corpus shall not apply to persons who are not citizens of the United States or not lawfully present therein. 

 

6.       6.  This amendment shall be effective immediately upon ratification pursuant to Article V of the Constitution and shall also apply to any person then unlawfully present in the United States, regardless of the date of such person’s arrival in the United States; and furthermore, the protections against ex post facto laws guaranteed under Article I, section 9 of the Constitution shall not apply to persons unlawfully present in the United States at the time of ratification of this amendment.

7.       7.  Neither the Congress, the Executive, nor the Courts of the United States may exercise any discretion in the interpretation of this amendment to interpret, lessen or limit its terms, it being the intent hereof that the onerous provisions of this amendment serve as clear evidence to all persons that unlawful entry into the United States shall result in summary and immediate removal therefrom and lifetime bar to readmission.

AN AGE OF UNMITIGATED GALL

At the height of its power, no nation on Earth dared to speak ill of Rome because of the assured response that such presumption would rain down on its leaders and its population.  At the height of the British Empire, Kipling wrote "For Kings must come down, and Emperors frown when the Widow at Windsor says 'Stop!'"

Thus, I fear for our Nation.  A nation that only 30 years ago brought the USSR and the communist thugs that ran it to their knees is now the laughing stock of the emerging Russian Empire. Our borders are a fiction, and the unworthy successor to Ronald Reagan who now inhabits the White House can think of no better response than to go to another fund raiser populated by the multi-millionaire sycophants of Hollywood, all in the name of the so-called party of the people, the Democrat Party.

That party, the party of FDR and Harry Truman who unleashed the power of the atom on a Nation that thought it could sucker-punch the United States into submission on a quiet Sunday morning in Hawaii, is now beholden to to the whiners of its so-called Warren Wing.  No better example exists of the cancer that that wing is spreading in our national body than the refusal of the Democrats (with some few sane exceptions) to acknowledge that we have tens of millions of criminals in our midst who hold us in absolute disdain.

A few examples of the shoddy thinking, or outright dishonesty, of the liberal mind follow:

1.  A few years ago, I heard a a report on National People's Radio in which an apologist for criminal aliens argued that they should be given their education and should receive welfare from the taxpayers of California.  "We don't want any special treatment," this mutton head moaned.  "We just want our share!"  My reaction was, "Then go back to Mexico--that is where your share resides."  Of course, the NPR commissar's reaction was to agree with the statement.

2.  At the end of last week, our national community organizer-in-chief hosted the presidents of Honduras, Guatemala, and El Salvador.  The main point of discussion was the dumping by those three countries of tens of thousands of illegal immigrants on our southern border.  After the meeting, Honduran President Juan Orlando Hernández was quoted in Politico Magazine as complaining that the United states was not doing enough for his country.

Susan Glasser, the Editor of Politico Magazine asked Mr. Hernández, "Your foreign minister was interviewed on NPR and said that it’s 'outrageous' that the United States has spent so much money on border security and so little money helping Honduras and the other countries of the Northern Triangle. Do you agree with that?"

Hernández replied that the US needs to send more money, more "investment," his way.  "[If you just keep] investing in border security and not in the source of the problem, in the genesis of the problem, then we will have more of the same."

Ms Glasser then asked, "And is that an outrage that we have our priorities so wrong?"

Hernández said, "Of course for us it’s uncomfortable and frustrating knowing that our neighbor isn’t doing its part."

I suppose we could just revisit the 1920s and 1930s and send in the Marines to root out the bad guys, shoot them, and clean up the mess, but I doubt that los tres presidentes would like that.  Have you ever tried to deposit a Marine Rifle Company in a Swiss bank account?

3. Now, we have groups of illegal aliens (we used top call such things "conspiracies" back in the day, but now they are "interest groups") who are demanding that they be allowed to sit down with the President of the United States and dictate, er, uh, discuss what the US policy on illegal immigrants should be.  According to today's on-line Politico, "Undocumented immigrants demanded Monday that national advocacy groups boycott meetings with President Barack Obama until they are included in talks on how he will use his administrative powers to fix the immigration system."  Never mind that they have no right to take part in the discussion!

So here's my take on their view.   It is as if I had broken into your home and then insisted that you could not make me leave until you provided a lawyer for me and then had to feed, clothe, house and support me until a judge decided if I could stay and mooch off you forever.

There must be another way.  See you tomorrow.

I'm Back

After a long season of the blahs, I'm back and will be posting, starting with a post later today.  Now, I guess I'll have to see if I have been missed.