The American Standard Bearer

Thankfully, my summer schedule has just been slightly simplified. That’s because there is absolutely no chance that I will be wasting three hours and forty bucks taking the kids to see the new Superman movie.

According to the Hollywood Reporter.com, Superman no longer stands tall in a super-hero pose with an American flag waving in the background. Instead, says screenwriter Michael Dougherty, “He’s here for humanity.”

Nevermind that a very large portion of the world’s “humanity” would love nothing better than to see a televised version of the United States being wiped from the face of the earth. The fact that America is perhaps the most humane place that has ever existed and that whole swaths of the globe are inhumane places in the extreme always escapes the left including the two knuckleheads who wrote this movie, Dougherty and sidekick Dan Harris.

The pair have emasculated America’s most treasured comic book superhero by making him stand for, “Truth, Justice and all that stuff.” They thought of that while lounging on a beach in Hawaii. I’d prefer to stick with the Superman who stands for “Truth, Justice and the American Way.”

As for the Dynamic Duo of Dougherty and Harris, I think that they would have better served America if they had done their writing while lounging on a beach in one of those places they really have a heart for, say, Syria or maybe Yemen where “humanity” consists of chopping the hands off of thieves and executing homosexuals.

Score a big win for the left.

The flag amendment was shot down with a one vote spread in the U.S. Senate Tuesday. The amendment would have opened the door for legislatures to ban the burning of American flags in public places but it would also have banned other forms of desecration of the American flag, so it’s really not a surprise that it wasn’t passed.

The tradgedy is that conservatives had an opportunity, at least in part, to restore some original meaning to the First Amendment, but instead chose to frame the issue as one of patriotism. The left recognized that passage of the flag amendment would be a significant setback to their agenda of rewriting the Constitution, aggressively lobbied to kill it, and were successful.

Where conservatives see the Constitution as the foundational document of our republic, the left sees the Constitution as an arsenal or weapons to advance the cause du jour, and there is no more potent a weapon in that arsenal than the First Amendment. The First Amendment has been twisted and stretched to guarantee all sorts of “rights” for the leftist nut squads that make up the dominant media – “rights” incidentally that are not actually named in the First Amendment.

For example, the screechy Susan Estrich was on TV earlier this week speaking about the thoroughly despicable New York Times front page story on the U.S. efforts to track terrorist money. In defending the Times, she said matter-of-factly that the First Amendment guarantees our “right to know.” Estrich may be irritating, but she’s not stupid. She knows the First Amendment says nothing about a “right to know” but for the left, the end justifies the means.

In other words, Estrich claims a First Amendment “right to know” in order to aid the fellow leftists of the Times in once again attacking President Bush. If he were living today, I’m sure Benedict Arnold would claim the British have a “right to know.”

Preventing what amounts to a handful of goofballs each year from burning American flags should never have been the central point of the flag amendment. Rather, the point should have been to bring clarity to what rights are protected and what rights are not protected by the First Amendment.

The following political cartoon appeared this week in the Atlanta Journal-Constitution, a leftist rag with circulation that is dropping like a stone:

The obvious conclusion to be drawn here is that al-Qaida and the U.S. are virtually indistinguishable when it comes to the subject of torture. As an aside, it’s interesting to note that Luckovich uses the image of an American flag instead of “U.S. Military” or even just “U.S.” to indentify the fellow on the right. This is in keeping with the American left’s philosophy that America itself is an evil force on the world stage.

There of course can be no legitimate comparison between the humiliation of prisoners at Abu Ghraib and the hideous murders of Americans at the hands of al-Qaida. Luckovich underscores the serious flaw in the logic that he and his leftist comrades bring to the table with the following comment, “If we want to succeed in Iraq, we have to remember that our most powerful weapon, greater than any bomb we could drop, is our moral authority. With the Bush administration ignoring the Geneva conventions and deciding that in some instances, torture is acceptable, Abu Ghraib and Gitmo resulted.”

The leftist belief that there are no absolutes and that therefore, everything must be viewed through the lense of equivalence is at the root of their myopic inability to distinguish between justice and true evil. Yet, the notion that the problem is not U.S. “imperialism” but rather, the foundational concept within Islam that non-believers must be snuffed is beginning to emerge in the international dialogue.

Ibrahim Al-Buleihi of Saudi Arabia’s Shura Council recently pointed to Islam as the cause of terrorism in the world. On a Saudi TV program in May, Al-Buleihi responded to the suggestion that certain “elements” of Muslim society are bringing unwanted retribution to the larger Muslim society when they produce “images of slaughtering the other” that are broadcast on television around the world.

Al-Buleihi said, “In my opinion, we should not describe these people as deviant. This is the product of our culture…a culture that believes the other does not deserve to live, and is an absolute enemy with whom no understanding is possible.” In other words, he rejects the myth that is promoted by the elitists in our country that terrorism is the result of “extremism” or “fundamentalism” and instead, places the burden squarely on mainstream Islam itself.

Meanwhile, the media and political class here in the U.S. continue to depict this emerging world struggle as the inevitable result of “fundamentalism,” essentially saying that anyone who takes the tenets of their faith seriously are no better than the terrorists.

Not only does that erroneous notion hurt the positive force of Christian and Jewish fundamentism, but it ignores the true evil that is spreading like a cancer. And by dragging the American flag through the mud, Luckovitch and the other despicable traitors at the Atlanta Journal-Constitution are giving “aid and comfort” to our enemies.

A woman who was part of a small crowd of protestors in Bristol, England, threw an egg at Prime Minister Tony Blair, but missed. The egg broke harmlessly on the road and the woman was arrested.

Throwing objects at world leaders, even relatively harmless ones like eggs, is naturally against the law and rightfully constitutes a threat to the leader’s safety. Yet the left in this country is moving us quickly towards a day when throwing eggs at political figures, paticularly when the target is missed, will be protected as a First Amendment right.

The hard left is working hard to prevent passage of an amendment that would make it illegal once more to burn American flags in public. The goal is to deeply embed in the American subconscious, the concept that actions such as lighting American flags on fire in a crowd or throwing eggs at a politician are protected “speech” as long as the intent is political protest.

And you can bet that it won’t end there. The legal arguments regarding this issue in coming decades will weigh the level of political urgency against the level of violence of the action. The more urgent the message is considered, the more violence will be acceptable.

The Senate Judiciary Commitee last week voted to send a constitutional amendment banning the desecration of the American flag to the floor for a vote, and by all accounts, it will be a close one.

Now Dennis Archer, President of the very liberal American Bar Association, is speaking out, confirming what we suspected – that the legal establishment has hijacked the Constitution and they will not give it back without a fight.

Like all liberals who argue against this amendment, Archer points out the seeming paradox that the American flag represents the very liberties that an amendment protecting the flag would crush. It seems to make sense unless, of course, you know the facts.

Archer ominously warns that a flag amendment “would restrict freedom of speech, and for the first time in our country’s political history, revise the Constitution to limit, not expand, the liberties that are the fabric of what it means to be an American.” And with that, Archer has got right to the nub of what is wrong with the liberal argument.

The writers of the Constitution wisely created the amendment process as the mechanism to change the Constitution, and they made it purposely difficult. But judges, all of whom I presume are members in good standing of the American Bar Association, have been effectively “amending” the Constitution for decades now without the approval of our elected representatives.

One such instance of judicial chicanery came in 1989 when the Supreme Court ruled that laws against burning American flags were no longer constitutional. In order to get to that point, the Court had to expand the meaning of the word “speech” in the First Amendment to include “expression.” The writers of the Constitution were no doubt familiar with the word “expression” but they didn’t see fit to include it, and for good reason. There’s a world of difference between speech and physical action.

An amendment to prevent crazy and violent people from lighting objects such as American flags on fire in public places would not “limit” the liberties guaranteed in the Constitution. Rather, it would be a start at restoring the true and original meaning of the First Amendment and it would send a message to the lawyers that were wise to them.

The heavy-handed Stalinists at the ACLU are at it once more, this time attacking the primary vacation destination for millions of Americans. Six Flags America, the ever popular theme park operator is under “investigation” by the ACLU for hair-do discrimination.

A handful of employees have complained that their jobs are in jeopardy because they wear their hair in a way that does not fall within company guidlines. For example, 17-year-old Jonathan DeLeon was asked to loose his three-foot-long dreadlocks. His mother cut some of the hair off but management said it wasn’t enough, so DeLeon quit.

As evidenced by DeLeon’s public statement, the ACLU appears to be trying to put a racism spin on the issue. DeLeon told the Washington Post, that famous clearing-house for ACLU press statements, “They said they wanted an all-American thing. That’s what they said to all the black people.”

The suggestion that Six Flags has racist intentions is absurd. A more plausible explanation would be that the ACLU is using racism the way they often do – as a key ingredient in a campaign of intimidation.

Keeping in mind that the ACLU is an organization founded by communists for communists, with one of their goals being the destruction of capitalism, this latest attack on an American corporation makes sense. Destroy a company’s right to maintain standards of behavior from it’s employees and you will eventually destroy the company.

A hair-do is no different than a suit and tie or an apron. They are all directly tied to appearance and it is arrogant and even dangerous for the ACLU to suggest that employers don’t have the right to expect a standard of appearance from employees.

The ACLU doesn’t intend to achieve it’s goals by armed insurrection as their predecessors did in Russia. Instead, they look for every opportunity to chip away at the rock of American society, bit by bit, until one day the rock is no more and the American flag is replaced with a forbidding red flag.

The American left has long defended the First Amendment while loathing the Second Amendment. The men who wrote the Constitution, of course, thought that Americans should own guns for the purpose of self-defense in the event that a tyranical government should seize power.

The left sees it differently. Guns maim and often kill people, so logically, if we eliminate guns, people will stop getting maimed and killed. They often point to the U.K. as an example of a society where guns are rare. So rare in fact, that until recently, even the police did not carry them.

Yet, serious violence is rising sharply in the U.K., but the weapons of choice are knives. The problem is so severe that Scotland Yard sponsored a 5-week national knife amnesty program that met with just limited sucess.

The Telegraph.co.uk told of a recent gang fight in London, “Even hardened Scotland Yard detectives were shocked by the speed at which a spat between two groups of black youths on a bus at pub closing time escalated, within minutes, into a fight believed to involve a Samurai sword, knives, a claw hammer, baseball bats and hockey sticks.”

Gee, maybe it’s not about guns after all!

I would say that Natalie Maines of The Dixie Chicks is as dumb as a rock, except that would be an insult to rocks. And the fact that performers like The Dixie Chicks are cheered as heroes by the left points to an appaling lack of intellectual substance within the “Progressive” movement.

The amazingly self-absorbed Maines is at it again, doing what she does best – opening her mouth and allowing whatever happens to be rattling around between her ears to spill out unedited. Her latest evacuation includes accusations that other country musicians are lying about their love for our country.

Maines opened up to Adam Sweeting of the Telegraph.co.uk about her shameless peers, “A lot of pandering started going on, and you’d see soldiers and the American flag in every video. It became a sickening display of ultra-patriotism.”

Why does the vapid Maines become sickened at the sight of the American flag or U.S. soldiers? Well evidently, to ponder exactly how she came to be in a place where she could amass such a fortune with only a vaudeville act is asking too much of her. That the United States is engaged in a struggle against an ideology that would not allow three women in skirts to perform on stage the way the Chicks do nor would it allow Maines to speak out publicly about anything is a reality that has eluded her empty skull cavity.

“The entire country may disagree with me, but I don’t understand the necessity for patriotism,” she told Sweeting. “Why do you have to be a patriot? About what? This land is our land? Why? You can like where you live and like your life, but as for loving the whole country… I don’t see why people care about patriotism.”

Hey Natalie, here’s something for you to think about if you should ever decide to try thinking: People are not swarming into Syria or Libya or Yemen or China or North Korea or even Mexico hoping for a new life – instead, they’re coming here.

Now if you’ll excuse me, I need to take a shower.

“When I see an American flag flying, it’s a joke.” – Robert Altman

“When I see the American flag, I go, ‘Oh my God, you’re insulting me.’” – Janeane Garofalo

So the questions are, what is it about America that prompts such hatred from people who have benefited so greatly here and given the choice, what would they do to change it? The answer goes way beyond “Dump Bush” and should scare the beejabers out of every freedom-loving American.

“Progressives” from all around the country are right now, gathered in Washington, D.C. at the Washington Hilton for a three day conference entitled “Take Back America.” The conference is sponsored by Campaign for America’s Future, the Democrat political activism organization that I think it’s fair to say, represents the mainstream of the Democrat Party. And that’s exactly what’s so disturbing about this.

The theme for the conference is an “Agenda for the Common Good” which begs the question, exactly what is the common good according to these folks? Well, it’s instructive to note that they didn’t just pull the phrase “Common Good” out of thin air. The phrase appears in a title by none other than Progressive heroes Marx and Engles: “Socialism and the Common Good.”

To underscore that theme, Hillary Clinton was the keynote speaker at a Democrat fundraiser in San Fransisco two years ago where she graciously informed the wealthy attendees, “We’re going to take things away from you on behalf of the common good.” She was, of course, refering to a tax increase, but the use of the phrase “common good” and the notion that “we’re” taking away from “you” is straight out of the playbooks of Communist regimes of the twentieth century.

The elites who fund the “Progressives” are happy to tend to their financial empires in the morning, then stand at the dias in the afternoon and play at pseudo-Marxism. Stars like Robert Redford, who is attending this conference, believe they are above the fray and are helping to usher in a new way of life, not for themselves, but for the “common” folks.

Redford is actually a prolific Capitalist, with restaurants, a ski resort and the Sundance catalog of trendy merchandise which includes retail outlets, yet he feels the need to tell you and I what we should do with our money. The truly troubling part is that he and the “Progressives” want to cloak their intent to subjugate the rest of us with euphemisms like “Common Good.”

There’s plenty of speculation flying around about the reasons for the President’s low job approval numbers. The most suprising thing is that it’s his base, the dyed-in-the-wool conservatives, who have most recently been heading for the doors.

Contrary to what you might think however, it’s not only because they don’t like what he’s doing (immigration), but because there is a very real sense that the President is not playing it straight. The left has long believed Bush to be a liar but now it’s conservatives by the truckload who are beginning to believe the same thing.

Regardless of what he calls it, Bush has been pushing hard for amnesty, saying that any plan to deport illegals “ain’t gonna work.” He calls the notion that we ought to demand that immigrants enter the country legally impractical. Americans instinctively know that Bush’s plan to force illegals already here to pay a fine and learn English is by far more impractical.

Another thing Americans instinctively know is that Bush is not fufilling the obligations of his office by refusing to enforce laws against employers who hire illegals. No doubt many of his cronies in Texas would go to jail if he were to start.