THE PRESIDENT, WASHINGTON BASEBALL, AND STEPHEN DECATUR

            I am so tired of being embarrassed by my President.  I really am.  I try to give him the respect that any person who occupies that office deserves.  We only get one President at a time, and this is his time—and for some reason, he invariably uses it to embarrass us.  The latest case in point is his appearance at the United Nations this morning.   

He had an opportunity to be a statesman.  He had an opportunity to show himself to be worthy of his Nobel Peace prize.  He had an opportunity to be a visionary.  All three legitimate uniforms were in his wall-locker back in the clubhouse, and what did he do?  He pushed them aside and showed up in the clown costume of a two bit Chicago ward heeler, a party hack.

To use the baseball analogy that Edward-Isaac Dovere used in his Politico article referenced above, he threw a couple of inside puff balls to Putin and then, in the grand Washington tradition of Jonathan Papelbon, he threw blazers at the head of his own Country and kicked us in the groin in the dugout!  According to Dovere, the President then “invoked the invasion of Iraq as an example of how the United States itself stumbled by going against international law.”  That’s a great way to establish moral authority—calling your own country an international outlaw. 

He had an international stage, and he wasted it for the sake of the political hacks who make up his base.  Dick Cheney left office seven years ago.  He was only Vice President.  But, having done nothing of real substance in seven years, the President reverts to the only real consistent policy of his presidency:  blame the guys who came before him.  And then as an afterthought, he takes a few puny swipes at the Blowhard of the Month—who is self-destructing on his own, thank you very much. 

That, of course, is the real fear of the Democrats:  Trump slithers back into the subways and sewers of New York City and people take an even harder look at Hillary Clinton and her ever-changing stories:  I gave all the e-mails, er, well, not all of them, but certainly all that I wanted to ever see the light of day, and besides it was Ms Abedin's fault, the one I set up to be paid by the State department and a Party loyalist and maybe the Bill and Chelsea Foundation (about which I know nothing, Colonel Hogan, absooooluuuutely nothing!) and its all a plot against me.

And then, to complete the baseball analogy, he decides on his own to come back out of the dugout to tip his hat at…..himself.  He should have learned from Jayson Werth of the Washington Bugs…Mosquitos…. Gnats, that’s it, the Washington Gnats.  Here is Werth only 7 weeks ago:  :  “We are only a game back right now, but as we get healthy, we’ll be rolling again. It’s our division to lose.”  As of tonight, the Insects are nine-and-a-half back and failing fast. 

According to Dovere, 

Obama held himself up as an example of how to make international diplomacy work. The U.N. is a body famous for spending a lot of time and money sitting around in rooms like this one, he said, bemoaning what’s gone wrong in the world and urging international action, but rarely delivering much more than resolutions.

That’s a huge contrast to the Iran agreement he spearheaded, Obama said. If the deal is “fully implemented," he said, "the prohibition on nuclear weapons is strengthened, a potential war is averted, our world is safer. That is the strength of the international system when it works the way it should.”  

Unless it doesn’t.  To quote the World War II RAF pilots who were fed up with qualified assurances,  “And if my grandmother had wheels, she’d be a bloody motor-bus.”

Nope, it was a bad day for the home team in that snake pit on the East River.  Our own manager shot us in our collective foot.  And he did it intentionally.

We need another Stephen Decatur.  “My Country.  In her intercourse with foreign nations, may she always be in the right.  But right or wrong, my Country.”  Do we have some dirty laundry in our closet?  Some, but nowhere near as much as the “Hate America First” bunch would have you believe.  Should we air it in public?  Just remember what our mothers taught us.

No, you blew it, Mr. President.  And when the team is doing as badly as you suggest we are, baseball has a tried and (sometimes) true solution:  Fire the manager. 

Sorry kid, we’re gonna option you to the Mexican League.

WHAT IS SO WRONG WITH A “DO-NOTHING” CONGRESS?

With the departure of Speaker Boehner, the “livid left” has once again trumpeted its disdain for what its denizens call the do-nothing Congress.  What they are really doing is expressing their continued disdain for the United States Constitution.

Why do I rant?  Well, anyone who reads the Constitution and studies the Constitutional Convention will quickly realize that the Framers intended for the Congress to do very damned little.  First, they intentionally strictly limited the powers of the central government.  It was to do those things, and only those things, that needed to be uniform in order for the Nation to survive:  provide for the National defense, institute a single foreign policy, provide a postal system and a system of roads to connect the States, introduce a single currency, and set up a uniform system of tariffs to control the importation of foreign goods.

Everything else was left to the States as the best source of government for the people.  Want to introduce an expensive and far-reaching system of public welfare?  Do it, but don’t insist that your neighboring states adopt your plan.  Want to fund and organize a system of public education?  Great.  Do it.  Pay for it with taxes you raise locally.  Manage it by a system of local school boards that will decide what needs to be taught.  They are right there and know best what the children of their locality need to be taught.  Want to allow workers to organize in unions.  It is your State.  Have at it.  Once again, don’t insist that the other states follow your lead.  The voters of those states can decide for themselves.  And for Heaven’s sake, keep Washington, DC out of your State, except to the extent that it has been delegated powers in the Constitution.

To ensure limited federal government, the Framers loaded the Constitution with protections for the people from the government.  First and foremost was the system of checks and balances, the system that President Obama and the Democratic Party find so loathsome today.  In order to enact a law, majorities in both Houses of Congress and the President must agree.  If a proposed law cannot garner that support, the Constitution says, in effect, it is probably a bad idea and should not be imposed on the people and the States.  Give the President the authority to veto a bill that has made it out of Congress.  If the super-majorities needed to over-ride a veto cannot be reached, it was probably a bad bill and should not have been enacted into law.  And give the Congress, especially the House, the power of the purse. 

“The power of the purse.”  The great check on tyrannical power that my generation had to understand.  If, somehow, a bill was enacted into law, and the voters changed the makeup of the Congress, the Legislative Branch could limit or prevent the Executive from carrying out a particular law by with-holding funding for that purpose.  Today, we incorrectly call that “shutting down the Government.”

Why do I say “Incorrectly?”  It is because the professional politicians in Washington, with their three-day work weeks and lengthy recesses no longer frame, debate, and enact individual spending bills for the various departments of the Executive Branch.  They could, but that means that the first business of the federal government will be to stay in Washington and work out those spending bills.  Instead, it is considered better from a political point of view to lump all spending authorizations into a single omnibus bill that “must be signed.”  Recently, the Republican Party has balked at that blatant attempt by the Democrats to perpetuate the bread and circuses system it has imposed on America.  Constitutionally appropriate that might be, but people like Harry Reid and Nancy Pelosi and Presidents Clinton and Obama, have placed party above Country and have, instead, resorted to a beautiful—if corrupt—public relations campaign to mislead and outright lie to the American people about the Constitutional duties of the Legislative and Executive branches.

Because we spend so much time in high schools teaching about truly unnecessary subjects, what my generation knew as “Civics” has pretty much disappeared from the curriculum.  When I graduated from high school back in the ancient days of the early 60’s, there were only two tests that students in Illinois were required to have passed in order to graduate:  one on the United States Constitution and one on the Illinois Constitution.  Today, Pennsylvania has a whole series of tests administered all through elementary and middle school to measure reading comprehension and math proficiency.  High School students take three “Keystone Tests” in Algebra I, Literature and Biology.   Observe, if you will, gentle reader, that our students will probably have read all sorts of obscure literature but not the Constitution. Now, I am all in favor of a solid classical education which exposes our students to the great prose and poetry of the English language, and even some of the garbled 20^th Century junk that is passed off as great literature, but the sweetest use of the English language that I have ever read is still the Preamble to the Declaration of Independence.  Our students can tell you all about the Harlem Renaissance and their rights under the Constitution, but don’t have a clue about how the Constitution is supposed to work, that rights come from our "Creator", not the Constitution, and that their ignorance is harmful to the future of our Nation.

So, I implore the great American people to insist that we replace Langston Hughes with James Madison as required reading.  Only if Americans really understand the Constitution  and the system that protects us our freedoms to read and write and sing and pray and speak without fear of policing by the Government in Washington will we truly be free.

IT IS TIME FOR EUROPE TO STAND ON ITS OWN

Listening to NPR this morning, the topic was the flood of Syrian economic “refugees”  (people who won’t fight for their own freedom and, instead, move to some other country to sponge off of that nation) attempting to enter western Europe, in general, and England and Germany in particular.  Lest my definition seem unduly harsh, NPR has been full of interviews where the “plight” of the refugees has been reported.  Repeatedly, I hear the complaint that “We are stuck here when we had expected to be in Germany (or Britain) by now where my wife could have had her baby without us paying for it, and we would have housing and an ‘allowance.’”

At this juncture, most are being stopped at the Hungarian border as Hungary attempts to protect its sovereignty.  (My guess is that Hungary has a legitimate fear that if it lets them in, they will be stuck with these people when the rest of Europe says “Enough is enough.”  In a blurb for later programming, I caught a remark by some European commentator complaining that the US is not taking its “share” of these people.

That is an interesting comment, coming as it does in the year that we remember the 70^th anniversary of VE day.  For the last 70 years, we have spent blood and treasure to keep Europe free and to allow it to develop. We funded the Marshall Plan. We have spent huge percentages of our GDP to maintain troops in Europe, while the Europeans invested in developing their economies.

Recently, we have been inundated by economic “refugees”  from Central and South America who are illegally entering our country.  I have not heard a single offer from Europe to take these deadbeats off our hands.  It is time for Europe to man up and solve its own problems without foisting them off on us.