The 2012 Endorsement

Never an entity to brook the tide of popular convention, the Madison Conservative has taken note of the omnipotent practice of various and sundry scribes and editorial boards publicly announcing their endorsement of a specific candidate for elective office.

This willingness to subjugate one of this nation’s founding principles is indeed perplexing to the Madison Conservative. Men and women, far superior to those currently searching for temporary power via elective office, have willingly laid down their lives to protect the sanctity of the secret ballot.

This nation has fought to protect and defend this nations’ freedom to vote in an atmosphere of safety and security.

The belief that any individual or organization is somehow ordained to provide direction for the electorate is paramount to a non military coup de tat.

This is not hyperbole – it speaks to the right of the people to vote how they choose without fear of recriminations by the state. When the state endorses, by its silence, the mass media ability to announce support for a specific candidate then freedom itself is under assault.

Does publishing an endorsement count as a campaign contribution? Surely an endorsement lists a candidates positive record without veering into their negatives. In short, it is a political commercial.

For a nation looking for leadership, the willingness to allow such blatant attempts to pollute the public discourse is shameful.

For that reason, the Madison Conservative is hereby making its endorsement for President of the United States thusly:

VOTE.

The Madison Conservative has a preference for whom it will cast its constitutionally protected vote, but will extol that opinion solely from behind the curtain of the voting booth. The Madison Conservative has but one vote and will not consider revealing that precious gift from our founders and framers under any circumstances. That should be the nature of all votes and any attempt at endorsements.

Somewhere today, someone will willingly lay down their lives for the hope that maybe someday their posterity will be able to vote freely and unencumbered by the state.

Do not suffer the fate of those who once thought that any assault on freedom was a merely a question of degree.

It is with the first link of ambivalence that the chain of tyranny is formed.

Terrorism in Libya & Egypt

The Obama administration has for the past week been stumbling over itself to demonstrate just how well they are equipped for providing self inflicted diplomatic wounds with the American people and our allies worldwide. They seem to have forgotten the classic guidelines of incompetence: the American people will forgive the mistake; it is the cover-up that does a politician in.

The mass media has for that time been their more than willing sycophantic accomplices.

The September 11^th attacks this year were to even the most marginally intelligent sentient being an orchestrated terrorist attack. Spontaneous mobs upset with an online, little seen video do not protest en masse with grenade launchers  and a detailed plan to capture and assassinate a United States ambassador.

Yet the continual stream of blathering idiocy continues to be that the actions taken in Egypt and Libya were merely Moslems upset with a video.

Secretary of State Clinton this week finally acknowledged the obvious, as did White House press secretary Carney, yet the President continues to assert his belief of the proven fraudulent premise of the video as being the cause of the unrest.

What has gone unacknowledged by the administration and their media sycophants however, is the source of these terrorist attacks.

To wit:

All such acts are committed by anarchists, cowards - in a word, terrorists.

Terrorists are not associated with any normal classification of ethnic, political or religious collectives.

Consider for a moment the reality of particular actions taken around the world in the last fifty years.

The American people must ask and answer these hard questions on certain types of events.

For example, was the September 15, 1963 bombing of Birmingham's Sixteenth Street Baptist Church, which resulted in the death of four innocent black girls, committed by Americans upset with the Civil Rights movement, or were they simply cowardly terrorists that had no connection with America and the American people?

Was the slaughter of the Israeli athletes at the 1972 Olympics in Munich really carried out by ‘Palestinian’ terrorists, or rather by cold blooded murders intent on only their anarchistic political views?

In the strife of Northern Ireland, was it really Christian’s against Protestants, and vice versa, bombing children, women, to achieve freedom for a group of people? Or was it the acts of hateful ignorant people with no allegiances to the people they professed to want to help?

Do true Christians, Protestants, Catholics really promote the death of innocents? Do any of those religions accept such actions as means to an end, especially a political one?

Do Americans actually allow the premise to perpetuate that true followers of Islam are accepting of the death of 3,000 Americans on September 11^th, 2001?

Do American condone the murders of abortion doctors as merely the acts of Christian extremists, or do Americans consider murder to be murder?

This is one of the dangerous aspects of what are euphemistically labeled as ‘hate crimes’. It attaches connection by presumed thought to a group of people who actually have no belief in the acts of cowardice and terror.

Was the Oklahoma City bombing in 1995 the act of a white ex-military Christian who simply had only minor disagreements with governmental policy, or was Tim McVeigh merely an evil murderer?

This nation must cease branding acts of terror as being carried out by ‘Islamic extremists’ or even ‘Islamic terrorists’

Followers of Islam cannot be terrorists any more than Jews or Christians can be terrorists. Adherence to their faiths precludes such acts of terror.

For those who may consider the Koran a document of hate, please consider a literal reading of the Bible would demonstrate the ‘eye for an eye’ philosophy. Most religious people do not take such teachings literally.

This nation must not attribute acts of cowardice and hate as religious acts of zealotry in any context.

Terrorism is terrorism, perpetrated by evil people with no greater intent than to perpetrate evil.

It is just that simple.

9/11/12 - A Commentary

(ed.note – 9-11 is a time to reflect on the true nature of this greatest of nations. Events have obscured that fact this year and thus a personal commentary is appropriate)

September 11^th is a day that transformed America while focusing a bright light on much of what is so uniquely good about this nation.

The Madison Conservative would suggest watching two videos, links posted below, to help remind the citizenry of those facts. The Madison Conservative does not mean to diminish any of the brave Americans and their heroic efforts on that day and on every day since by singling out the firefighters of these videos, but the firefighters will always have a special place in the heart of the Madison Conservative.

343- We must never forget:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dHayXNAuD8A

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lT6tCQioI9E

The second issue relative to September 11^th this past week has to do with a vile, disgusting and intellectually dishonest op-ed piece written for ‘The New York Times’. The author will not be given acknowledgement by name in this post; such putrid and insipid nonsense merits author identification.

The purveyor of this literary pornography attempted to place blame for the attacks solely on the shoulders of President George W. Bush.

Such outright lies should be discarded on their face, but this op-ed made its way into the presentations and discussions of the mainstream media and so will be refuted here and now, and hopefully for time immemorial.

The first attack on the World Trade Center was in 1993, under the administration of Democratic President William Jefferson Clinton, the convicted perjurer. Our African embassies were bombed in 1996, under the same impeached president. Both cases brought about gravitas statements that the perpetrators, known to be Al Qaeda, would be brought to justice.

The U.S.S. Cole was attacked in 2000, resulting in the murders of 17 active on duty United States servicemen. The cowardly President did nothing, save for more stern proclamations that justice would be brought to bear.

Consider the mindset of a terrorist that just attacked a naval vessel that resulted in no retribution, no measure of retaliation. Of course they would consider bigger and bolder targets. The planning for 9/11 did not occur after the inauguration of President Bush, but rather under the administration of the sexual predator-in-chief.

The Madison Conservative does not intend to place specific blame upon the borderline treasonous President Clinton; the ability to attack this nation lies in the fact that we are a free and open society.

The point here is that if the imbecilic minds that traffic in an op-ed and accept its premises as fact, then the facts must be clearly presented. If there is specific blame to be placed for the potential of a 9/11 attack, then it must be placed solely at the feet of the Clinton administration.

President Bush made many mistakes in dealing with the war on terror, and 9/11 prevented history from knowing what a Bush administration might have accomplished, but in no way can he be held accountable for the attacks.

Such claims are an affront to the American people and must be challenged each and every time they are presented as an historical  fait accompli.

The Madison Conservative extends the offer to publicly debate this issue with the intellectually dishonest purveyor of the Bush accountability claim.

Lastly, while it is too soon to assess the root causes and governmental culpabilities of the September 11^th, 2012 attacks in Libya & Egypt, this point must be made.

The Obama administration is making the claim that a little viewed online movie trailer is responsible for the violence perpetrated upon this nation this past week, and that the assassination of our ambassador to Libya and the breaching of our embassy in Egypt is tied solely to the aforementioned video. The assertion is that the anniversary of 9/112 and none of the administration policies are tied to the violence.

The absolutely ridiculous nature of such a position is belied by the facts as we currently know them.

The American people deserve better than what they are being offered in the way of true leadership.

The Madison Conservative will address these issues in future blogs, before the November election.

Teddy & Woodrow Had it Right

“in order to form a more perfect union…”

The accepted maxim amongst responsible politicians and other such elected officials once held that commentary or criticism of this nation’s foreign policy ended at the shoreline. Critique abroad of an American administration could not be seen or interpreted as being a nation divided as such perceived division could be manipulated by our adversaries; abroad, we were all Americans and spoke with one voice. The internet has rendered that stance unrealistic, as any speech or Twitter/Facebook post is automatically transported around the world and filtered back to us with any manner of interpretation.

The issue today is given that media and world interconnectivity reality, exactly what should our national policy be and how should we present our united version of democracy abroad?

History has presented us with what should be the over-arching policy and presentation standards.

President Theodore Roosevelt received the Nobel Peace Prize for his use of American standing and status in the pursuit of peace. He brought together Russia & Japan to resolve their war and utilized the bully pulpit of American democracy to bring about a peaceful resolution to their conflict. He did not posture to resolve the dispute by demanding an American accepted resolution. He did not attempt to overlay American political sensibilities to the combatants. He did not seek to impose American democratic values upon either party, but rather through skillful negotiations brought about the realities of peace to both sides. There is a lesson to be learned regarding our recent attempts to prescribe preconditions to those attempting to resolve the decades old peace process for the middle east. We should not try to force American reasoning on two socities that do not share our understanding of their realities.

President Woodrow Wilson, having led America through the first world war had hoped to bring to fruition his League of Nations, the precursor to the United Nations. He understood that there was indeed strength in numbers and that the peaceful nations of the world could, if united, thwart the possibility of another world war by demonstrating mutual resolve to peace. Herein lies another lesson in geopolitics to be gleaned by our administration with respect to recent events in Egypt & Libya. We cannot use our bully pulpit to try and enforce our governmental choices on peoples who have not experienced such freedoms. They must first witness it in action by the free countries of the world in unity and then choose their own path forward. It is folly to believe that democratic self-rule can be achieved merely because we wish to impose it.

We have lost that perspective as of late. It appears that American administrations have begun to opt to deal with world crises by attempting to impose American democratic sensibilities upon nations and peoples who have no real understanding of a working democracy. Many societies are based upon different criteria that do not hold that all men are created equal.

We as a nation need to demonstrate our freedom, our American democracy by example, not by well intentioned fiat or edict.

War is War And Not Something Else

The nature of obfuscation in politics is on many levels an accepted norm. The classic joke of a politician’s response to naming his favorite color as plaid, lest he risk offending a portion of the electorate is regularly expected and no longer raises an eyebrow. The concern, however, is that once elected, the verbal gymnastics employed during the election too often carries over into the serious and life affecting act of governing.

The former standard of such imbecilic conduct was the sight and sound of a sitting president of the United States, under oath, requiring a clarification of a specific query by asking “what the definition of ‘is’ is” It brought much ridicule and derision upon him, deservedly so, but in the larger context it occurred within the framework of a civil trial, hence there were no national security issues at play and so it was easily considered nothing more harmful than a politician simply excelling at the art of obfuscation.

The issue today is far more grievous and has serious implications for national security and the future of a thriving democratic republic based upon a self-governing nation.

The United States participation in the United Nations sanctioned actions in Libya can be debated from within the entire spectrum of political thought. The constitutionality of our involvement in such engagements, the presidential authority to act without congressional pre-approval, and even the basic ‘why only Libya?’ if the intended goal is to protect a people from their slaughter at the hands of their own government are all fundamental questions that must be asked and answered.

But before that necessary dialogue can begin, the art of governmental obfuscation must stop.

The stated government position is that the actions taken in Libya are not ‘war’: the official pronouncement is that we are merely engaged in “kinetic military action”

The Merriam-Webster dictionary defines ‘kinetic’ as “active; lively; dynamic”.

While military action would not normally be described as ‘lively’, what else is a military force actively engaged in deploying weaponry anything else but ‘war’?

When a government fails to be honest with its citizenry about the most obvious of issues, it risks its credibility on everything else. The American people may be divided on the proper use of their military, but they know that when that military is firing missiles at another sovereign country, there is little left to the verbal imagination but to describe those actions as ‘war’.

The United States government needs to drop the art of obfuscation when our men and women of the armed forces are putting their lives on the line.

War is not a game of verbal gymnastics, not the art of defining ‘what ‘is’ is”; it is not a ‘police action’.

It is about life and death.

That fact, that reality, in and of itself, demands a basic fundamental and unshakeable level of honesty from a government to its people. Any government that chooses to engage in such simplistic nomenclature nonsense does not deserve the impassioned description of a government,” of the people, by the people, and for the people”.