You could have heard a pin drop

At a time when our politicians tend to apologize for our country’s prior actions, here’s a refresher on how some of our former patriots handled negative comments about our country. These are good.


JFK’S Secretary of State, Dean Rusk, was in France in the early 60′s when DeGaulle decided to pull out of NATO. DeGaulle said he wanted all US military out of France as soon as possible.

Rusk responded, “Does that include those who are buried here?”

DeGaulle did not respond.

You could have heard a pin drop.

When in England, at a fairly large conference, Colin Powell was asked by the Archbishop of Canterbury if our plans for Iraq were just an example of ‘empire building’ by George Bush.

He answered by saying, “Over the years, the United States has sent many of its fine young men and women into great peril to fight for freedom beyond our borders. The only amount of land we have ever asked for in return is enough to bury those that did not return.”

You could have heard a pin drop.

There was a conference in France where a number of international engineers were taking part, including French and American.

During a break, one of the French engineers came back into the room saying, “Have you heard the latest dumb stunt Bush has done? He has sent an aircraft carrier to Indonesia to help the tsunami victims. What does he intend to do, bomb them?”

A Boeing engineer stood up and replied quietly: “Our carriers have three hospitals on board that can treat several hundred people; they are nuclear powered and can supply emergency electrical power to shore facilities; they have three cafeterias with the capacity to feed 3,000 people three meals a day, they can produce several thousand gallons of fresh water from sea water each day, and they carry half a dozen helicopters for use in transporting victims and injured to and from their flight deck. We have eleven such ships; how many does France have?”

You could have heard a pin drop.

A U.S. Navy Admiral was attending a naval conference that included Admirals from the U.S., English, Canadian, Australian and French Navies. At a cocktail reception, he found himself standing with a large group of officers that included personnel from most of those countries.

Everyone was chatting away in English as they sipped their drinks but a French admiral suddenly complained that, whereas Europeans learn many languages, Americans learn only English. He then asked, “Why is it that we always have to speak English in these conferences rather than speaking French?”

Without hesitating, the American Admiral replied, “Maybe it’s because the Brit’s, Canadians, Aussie’s and Americans arranged it so you wouldn’t have to speak German.”

You could have heard a pin drop.

AND THIS STORY FITS RIGHT IN WITH THE ABOVE…

Robert Whiting, an elderly gentleman of 83, arrived in Paris by plane. At French Customs, he took a few minutes to locate his passport in his carry on.

“You have been to France before, monsieur?” the customs officer asked sarcastically.

Mr. Whiting admitted that he had indeed been to France previously.

“Then you should know enough to have your passport ready.”

The American said, “The last time I was here, I didn’t have to show it.”

“Impossible. Americans always have to show their passports on arrival in France !”

The American senior gave the Frenchman a long hard look. Then he quietly explained, ”Well, when I came ashore at Omaha Beach on D-Day in 1944 to help liberate this country, I couldn’t find a single Frenchmen to show a passport to.”

You could have heard a pin drop.

# # #

A tip of the hat to my friend, Fred Witzell, who posted this reminder

that's been around a while.

http://texasfred.net/



Obama's flaccid words versus a moment in history

Obama & Congress Shrink Freedom in America

By Alan Caruba

Whether it was the Hitler Youth or Mao’s Red Guard, one of the elements of every totalitarian regime is to create organizations that indoctrinate a nation’s youth to blindly follow the leader.

They are a far cry from America’s Boy and Girl Scout movement in which patriotism mixes with learning a wide variety of useful skills and, if you’ve been paying attention, the Boy Scouts refusal to permit gays to participate has cost them various forms of support. In June 2000, the Supreme Court ruled that the Boys Scouts were within their Constitutional rights hold this position.

The Boy and Girl Scouts are private groups, but a far more insidious government sponsored youth corps is making its way through Congress. In late March the House of Representatives approved a plan to set up a new “volunteer corps” for the nation’s youth. The legislation makes references to “uniforms” and the need to train future “public sector leaders.” Nothing much about it sounds voluntary.

The vote reauthorized the National and Community Service Act of 1990 and the Domestic Volunteer Service Act of 1973; acts that originally were intended to fund AmeriCorps and the National Senior Service Corps.

The current problem is all that talk by Barack Obama of a “National Civilian Security Force” which he envisioned as being as big and well-funded as the U.S. military. That would put it somewhere in the vicinity of more than a million, all goose-stepping around your city or hometown like some homegrown Taliban.

To assist this Force, Rep. Alcee Hastings (D-FL) introduced a bill in February (H.R. 645) to construct no fewer than six “national emergency centers” that reek of the camps the Nazis set up initially to imprison their political enemies and later to kill Jews, Catholics, trade unionists, homosexuals, and gypsies.

Meanwhile, over on Capitol Hill, Obama’s Secretary of the Treasury, Timothy F. Geithner wants more and more power to regulate everything in the nation’s financial sector. Banks stocks plummeted on that news.

If the existing government entities such as the Federal Reserve, the Securities and Exchange Commission, Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation, and the Security Investors Protection Corporation to name a few were blind to the growing threat to the nation’s financial system, why would we think some supra-agency would offer any more protection?

“It all comes down to whether these agencies were actually willing to exercise their authority,” an insider with decades of experience said to me when I posed that question. It was not just their failure, but included the cover up by members of Congress who protected Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac until both government sponsored entities had to be seized before a complete implosion occurred.

For a bit of legerdemain, while everyone was watching the White House scoundrels, the House of Representatives voted 285-140 in late March to put approximately 1.2 million acres off limits for any natural resource development. By this vote, they denied Americans access to 8.8 trillion cubic feet of natural gas and 300 million barrels of oil according to the Interior Department’s Bureau of land Management.

The BLM oversees 26 million acres designated as part of the National Landscape Conservation System that environmentalists say permanently “protects” the land. This Green Talk for further denying Americans access to our vast natural resources, leaving us forever dependent on foreign oil and natural gas despite the endless nauseating talk of becoming “energy independent” in the name of national security.

From proposed youth corps, to civilian security forces, to expanded regulation of the nation’s banking and investment sectors, to the set-aside of lands representing natural resources that will never be available, the net grows wider and tighter to curtail the freedoms Americans take for granted and deny them the energy they require.

It’s something to think about before the knock on the door late at night or in the early morning hours before you’re taken off to a concentration camp for having dared to express an opinion.

Our Best Hopes, Not Our Worst Fears

By Alan Caruba

I will be attending the 2008 International Conference on Climate Change March 2-4 and will be surrounded by perhaps 500 or more of the world’s leading skeptics of global warming. Sponsored by the Heartland Institute, scientists, economists, and policy makers will come together from many nations to share the facts that so clearly debunk this global hoax.

Generated out of the United Nations through its Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, the reports that underwrote the global warming hoax were from the beginning protested by many of the scientists and others invited to contribute to them.

It didn’t matter, though, because (1) the findings reported were based on flawed or deliberately false computer models and (2) the findings were preordained and determined by an inner circle of global warming propagandists for the purpose of creating a global crisis that would put more and more control of the world under the control of the UN.

The failure of its predecessor, the League of Nations, should have been a sufficient lesson to avoid the creation of the United Nations, but the world that followed the end of World War Two yearned for a way to avoid another one. What it got was a collection of the worst cynics who did the bidding of dictators most of the time while plotting to become themselves the greatest dictators in history. The United States was always the exception and, as often as not, the point of the sword when military action was required.

The world has always been a scary place. There are always people ready to commit the worst crimes against humanity in the name of some political, economic or religious doctrine. Despite that, more of humanity is freer now than it was at the beginning of the last century. It took a number of large, small, and Cold wars, but the outcome is brighter for millions because brave men and women made great sacrifices for freedom.

Always, too, there have been voices saying, “This is not our war” or “This war is a bad idea”, but freedom is a particularly American idea, even though it has been pursued by many people in many nations for many centuries. Born in the crucible of war, the American experiment has always been the standard, the lamp of liberty held high.

Part of being free is to be free of the lies and deceptions that are widely disseminated to convince people to give up their freedom for an illusionary security, for guarantees that government will take care of you from birth to the grave.

I was reminded of this while making preparations to attend a conference where scientific proof will be the measure of what is real or not. The conference is a confirmation of the freedom America provides to those for whom only the truth matters. This is a conference about what real science offers in the face of superstition and political subversion.

I was reminded, too, of something President Ronald Reagan once said: “Whatever else history may say about me when I’m gone, I hope it will record that I appealed to your best hopes, not your worst fears, to your confidence rather than your doubts. My dream is that you will travel the road ahead with liberty’s lamp guiding your steps and opportunity’s arm steadying your way.”

The election that lies ahead for Americans must be about our best hopes, not our worst fears about the hobgoblin of global warming and the illusion of “energy independence.” Its outcome must be based on truth-telling, not vague promises of change or naïve beliefs that the nation can be protected by making deals with thugs or by not engaging them on the battlefield as so many Americans did in the past to preserve a future based on freedom.