Independence And Responsibility.

Howdy, whoever may wander by here.

My work has become a day/night/weekend pursuit and has bitten a huge chunk out of my life. Most of the time I arrive home after six p.m. and spend two or three hours just getting ready for the next day. I also catch up with the family, pay bills, and do chores, in that brief interval, too. My ability to keep up with current events suffers, of course.

In the end analysis, I don't think that I'm missing too terrible much.

I believe in history. By that I mean that by a disciplined study of past events, of the individuals who were involved, and the motivations or interests at stake, you can usually make a reasonable wild-assed guess about how a given situation may work out.

As an individual and a citizen I desire to live, work, and raise my family in an environment reasonably free of state interference and secure from identifiable threats. I believe that I share my basic desires with a huge majority of my fellow citizens. My politics, and the agendas to which I lend support,are means to those ends and in no way represent pursuit of any rigidly defined utopic objective.

This brings us to our current Democrat/Left/Liberal/Moonbat (and Establishment Uber Media) posture that they have adopted since the President's speech the other night.

Who are these people, and how did they end up any place but the quiet wing of their respective State Hospitals?

I am forced to depend on CBS radio news for hourly updates during the work day. Since the Downing Street Memo story went the way of the Texas ANG documents (not as forgeries, but rather by failing in their purpose to incite mobs to storm the White House), CBS radio has shifted into Tokyo Rose mode. There is NO good news from Iraq. I get the exact number of U.S. deaths in Iraq since OIF with every hourly update. The loss of a single helicopter over a battle zone has become news on par with that missing girl in Aruba, or even the Michael Jackson trial. GDP growth has to be reported, but by God they don't have to mention how many months GDP has expanded, and they spend more time explaining how short term interest rate raises my knock our economy into the dark ages...

Meanwhile the Democrats have decided that even if American voters don't believe them when they try to sell income redistribution, punitive taxation, and international oversight of our national security, they can go ahead and attempt to represent the failure to find significant WMD caches in Iraq as a lie vice an intelligence failure. They deny that the democratization of Iraq (and hopefully the wider mideast) as being remotely related to the war on terror in general, or the 9/11 attacks in particular.

Recent history has shown that when Democrats commit to a script for a big propaganda push it usually bites them in the ass. Afghanistan was not the eater of U.S. armies, Baghdad wasn't Stalingrad, and car bombings and assassinations across Iraq are truly horrible NOW but are all too understandable as the flailings of a murderous, all but defeated, class of barbarians who know all too well what a secure Iraq will mean for regimes like Saudi, Pakistan, Egypt, Iran, and all the other failed thugocracies in the region.

They are talking themselves into a corner that not even NPR/CNN/Oprah can get them out of. I said earlier that I don't get the minute to minute stuff any more, and that I don't need it. The new script is that Democracy in Iraq is insulated totally from 9/11, and that the meme for measuring victory in both is... is.... in short, impossible to attain for any Rethuglican administration.

We aren't stupid, folks. Not the people that went to school before the eighties and have paid even a modicum of attention to the world while we went about building careers and families.

OBL committed 9/11 because WE ARE INFIDELS. Not because Bush was president. Not because we harbor designs on the barbaric world of the Mideast. Paying their price for their product, then ensuring the security of the rest of the world's access fails the "imperialism" test. The Islamists find themselves in the same boat as the Soviets in that their repressive regimes fail when they have to compete with free societies - even if they kill their own without restraint to keep the dictatorships and mullahocracies in place.

Satellite TV, the internet, Uncle Samir in Kansas and his letters home. Those are what is killing Wahhabist Islam. It took thirty years of public bluster and periodic slaughter capped by 9/11 for us to take them seriously. Now we do. At least the adult portion of American, Australian, Brit, and Japanese society does.

The other people in the West that have missed the jihadist message are too busy trying to keep what little power remains in their rustic political enclaves to do more than exploit the costs associated with defending western civilization. And they do so with breathless histrionics and such clumsy denial of current history (and their parts already played) that the picture, as a whole, transcends the outrageous and moves right into the piteous.

What fucking morons these people are. This war has not been run perfectly. The nation's border security and immigration controls are a farce. We have no energy policy, in a time when we really need to work at taking the legs out from under the jihadist money pipeline. That bastion of Constitutional oversight known as the Supreme Court has just legalized the state seizure of private real estate for transfer to other private interests, all in the name of economic improvement.

Yet our economy grows. Nascent democracies in Afghanistan and Iraq are indeed rising, as well as in other, wholly unplanned places like Lebanon and the Ukraine. People are dying for freedom. It's not good, but it is the historical price paid to overthrow tyranny. And as pathetic as our homeland security truly is, it has sufficed (in conjunction with our international efforts to locate, kill, or capture jihadists) to prevent a second 9/11. So far.

Which party stands for progressive ideals of democracy, justice, and individual pursuit of happiness? Not the Democrats, who carp and bray and belittle the goals we have undertaken to accomplish - all without offering any alternatives, and all with perfect immunity from prying media inquiry...

They prioritize regaining their lost power, which has been removed from them by the acts of free citizens in free elections, over defending us from and ultimately defeating jihadist terror masters responsible for murdering thousands of our citizens in the past and currently in combat with our forces in Iraq and elsewhere.

We fired a government back in 1776. We tired of being the cash cow for a disconnected and unaccountable regime - a regime that presumed to dictate our economic and intellectual lives in exchange for the privilege of our being their subjects. That process cost blood and much treasure, and took a decade just to get us disconnected from England. Beginning in 1980 we began to fire another government that had failed to deliver on their duties as enumerated in our Constitution. The difference then was that we revolted by voting, and the revolution continues to this day. We must find a way to reach the Judicial Branch, soon, and temper them, as well, lest their fiat legislative machinations do irreparable damage to the concept of representative government.

The Democrats have commissioned a dozen, a score, a hundred polls over the last few years. They see a tiny blip where support for the war is concerned and they seize on it as proof they are gaining traction. They would never even consider that the dissatisfaction on display is because we aren't prosecuting it vigorously enough. There's no room behind their foreheads for any thought like that.

This weekend I've got four days off. The flag will fly all four days. We will cook ribs in the driveway with family and friends on Monday. We will read the Declaration of Independence. We will ooh and ah at the fireworks. We will remember at what cost our holiday was bought.

It's kind of sad. The jihadists fight because their world is doomed by the spread of freedom. The liberal/left/democrat franchise is based on victimhood and a moral vacuum, and they are just as threatened by individuals pursuing their own freedoms AND the exercise of civic responsibility as are the jihadis.

I await the door into face moment for the Left; it must come if history repeats its recent cycles. They are out there on their plank, sawing furiously behind themselves.

I wish you the very best of Independence Days. Remember where we came from, what we face, and what we must do to make this grand experiment keep on working.