On November 19, 1863 Abraham Lincoln gave the Gettysburg address.  It is unfortunate that too few people understood the significance of what Lincoln said.   If you want to read the full text, here is the link:

http://www.d.umn.edu/~rmaclin/gettysburg-address.html

We have come to dedicate a portion of that field, as a final resting place for those who here gave their lives that that nation might live. It is altogether fitting and proper that we should do this.

But, in a larger sense, we can not dedicate — we can not consecrate — we can not hallow — this ground. The brave men, living and dead, who struggled here, have consecrated it, far above our poor power to add or detract. 

It is for us the living, rather, to be dedicated here to the unfinished work which they who fought here have thus far so nobly advanced. It is rather for us to be here dedicated to the great task remaining before us.

that we here highly resolve that these dead shall not have died in vain

It is impossible to improve on what Lincoln said, we can only pause to remember how very different this was from what we are hearing today.  I fought in the Vietnam War.  I understand how deeply it hurts when your country decides, after careful reflection, “that it wasn’t worth it after all.”  That is the opposite of what Lincoln had in mind.  It is the opposite of truly honoring sacrifice.  I fear we are making the same mistake today.

The only real way to honor those who have given their lives in combat is to rededicate ourselves to the cause for which they died.  Words of memoriam, without such a commitment are meaningless.

TDM

As Townhall pointed it, liberals were bragging about the VA as an example of how great socialized medicine works.   Perhaps the best example of this was by Paul Krugman:

http://krugman.blogs.nytimes.com/2009/05/27/medicare-and-the-va/?_php=true&_type=blogs&_php=true&_type=blogs&_r=1

You see, we actually have a real live case of impressive cost control in health care: the VA system.

Krugman was right about one thing, the VA is a perfect example of how socialized medicine works.  If ObamaCare is allowed to continue we will all experience the VA level of service.  If you doubt that, read the following article about the NHS from Forbes published in 2013.  You won’t see this type of report in the main stream media:

http://www.forbes.com/sites/scottatlas/2013/07/05/happy-birthday-to-great-britains-increasingly-scandalous-national-health-service/

Waits for care are shocking in the NHS, frequently exposed by British media reports, and long proven by facts, yet they go virtually unreported in the U.S.

Access to medical care is so poor in the NHS that the government was compelled to issue England’s 2010 “NHS Constitution” in which it was declared that no patient should wait beyond 18 weeks for treatment – four months – after GP referral.

Just think about what this means.  You visit your doctor on June 2, 2014. You find out you have cancer and need surgery.  Great news!  You have been moved to the top of the list.  Your first appointment with the surgeon is October 6, 2014.  But wait, this gets even better.  Your surgeon is not actually available on October 6, 2014, so your diagnosis is changed so that this delay doesn’t get reported.  That is exactly what Forbes reported happened at the NHS:

BBC subsequently discovered that many patients initially assessed as needing surgery were later re-categorized by the hospital so that they could be removed from waiting lists to distort the already unconscionable delays. Royal College of Surgeons President Norman Williams, calling this “outrageous,” charged that hospitals are cutting their waiting lists by artificially raising thresholds.

When you think about it, this is brilliant.  If you delay surgery long enough the patient dies.  Then you report no delay because dead people don’t need surgery.

Isn’t this remarkably similar to what is happening at the VA. The problems at the VA should be no surprise.  It would be more of a shock if this wasn’t happening.  This is what happens when a government bureaucracy tries to run a health care system. It has been happening for years in the UK.  It has been happening for years at the VA.   It is what we can expect under ObamaCare if we are stupid enough to let this happen.  Instead under ObamaCare it will be much worse.

TDM

Most of us, old enough, remember the song “Send in the Clowns.”  It was actually based on an old circus saying that if the act wasn’t going well, then send in the clowns to do some jokes.  Yesterday, Nancy Pelosi chose the same tactic with regard to the Select Committee on Benghazi.  She is quite literally sending in the clowns:

http://www.politico.com/story/2014/05/nancy-pelosi-benghazi-john-boehner-panel-106937.html

Boehner, on the other hand, named some very serious people:

http://www.weeklystandard.com/blogs/boehner-names-members-benghazi-select-committee_791211.html

So let’s look at the starting lineups:

Democrats

Elijah Cummings

Adam Smith

Adam Schiff

Linda Sanchez

Tammy Duckworth

All are on record as saying there is nothing to investigate and this is a Republican waste of time and money.  All are famous for giving Democratic talking points instead of answers.  They were clearly given the assignment to defend the Obama administration against the other committee members.

Republicans

Susan Brooks

Trey Gowdy

Jim Jordan

Mike Pompeo

Martha Roby

Peter Roskam

Lynn Westmoreland

The Republicans are all attorneys and several are former prosecutors.  It would be hard to image a committee with such an obvious mismatch.  If the people want to see a political circus, the Democrats have the upper hand.  If they want to see someone drill down and get the truth, the Republicans are in a far superior position.  I think it is pretty safe to say that any additional information is bad for the Obama administration or they would have released it a long time ago.

I think the Democrats have made an enormous mistake.  Public sentiment is strongly in favor of getting answers.  Few people believe the Obama administration is telling the truth about anything.  In addition, the timing is terrible, for Democrats.  The House is going into summer recess.  All of the network shows are going into the re-run mode.  Even American Idol and Dancing with the Stars are done.  That means there is really nothing else happening, that is remotely interesting, other than baseball and the Benghazi hearings.

Go ahead.  Send in the clowns.  Do you think even CNN will buy it?

TDM

Every President seems to come into office promising to fix the VA once and for all.  Obama was no different.  He actually increased VA spending.  He also appointed General Eric Shinsecki, a retired four star general and former Chief of Staff of the Army.    One would have expected better results.  Instead we are discovering that some people, actually a lot of people, at the VA are falsifying records to create the illusion of providing good service.   The situation is so bad that there is bi-partisan outrage.   No one in either party even pretends that this is acceptable.

I doubt seriously that this particular problem was actually Obama’s fault.  I am not sure there is much he could have done differently.  But, it is still his problem for one simple reason.  At a time when everyone is demanding answers from someone they can trust, no one trusts Obama.  I haven’t heard anyone in either party even pretend that Obama is capable of fixing this.  They probably won’t even ask his opinion.  They certainly won’t ask for his leadership.

Obama could fire Shinseki and it wouldn’t matter.  He could appoint someone else to investigate and it wouldn’t matter.  He could give a public speech on why he is outraged and it wouldn’t matter.  Actually, he has already tried some of this.  Today Obama held another, press briefing to say he was on top of this.  Nice, but he said the same thing back in 2008.  Nothing Obama can say or do is remotely relative.  That is the problem.

The VA is the second largest government department, after the Department of Defense.  It employs nearly 280,000 people.  The 2012 budget was $132 billion and the proposed 2014 budget is $157.2 billion.   If money could fix the VA it would have been fixed.   If adding more people or spending more money on great computer programs could fix the VA it would have been fixed.  Obama is hardly the first President to try and fix the VA and fail miserably.  The real lesson here is that government management of the VA is the problem.  As long as we rely on the federal government to manage the VA health care system we are going to see the same results.

The big lie that Obama told was that big government works.  It doesn’t.  It never has.  It never will.  It hasn’t worked anytime, anyplace it has been tried.  The bigger the government the bigger the problem.  That is why the VA is so important.  It is the biggest of the big and it is a total mess, again.  The real problem with the VA is that the government is trying to fix the problem.  Obama is a case study on why big government has not, will not and cannot work.  It also doesn’t help that Obama was so self-righteous about it:

http://www.nationalreview.com/campaign-spot/378322/obama-2007-time-end-deplorable-conditions-some-va-hospitals-jim-geraghty

Obama 2007:

“After seven years of an Administration that has stretched our military to the breaking point, ignored deplorable conditions at some VA hospitals, and neglected the planning and preparation necessary to care for our returning heroes, America’s veterans deserve a President who will fight for them not just when it’s easy or convenient, but every hour of every day for the next four years.”

Obama 2012:

“For the first time ever, we’ve made military families and veterans a top priority not just at DOD, not just at the VA, but across the government.”

Obama 2014:

What was that again, I just learned about it on the news? (Ok.  I paraphrased this)

The VA scandal matters for another very important reason.  The sharks are in the water, they are circling in desperate search of prey.  The main stream media is on it and they are openly soliciting anyone who works at the VA to contact them and tell the story.  They did not do that with regard to Benghazi.  They did not do that with regard to Fast & Furious.  They did not do that with regard to the IRS targeting scandal.  But they are sure doing it now and it won’t stop with the VA.  For the first time whistle blowers in the Obama administration have been given the all clear to come out of the woodwork and they are going to arrive in droves.  This will be similar to what happened when Tiger Wood’s wife chased him off the road with an 8 iron.  This type of story, like a big forest fire, will start generating its own wind.  The Camel’s nose is under the Obama administration tent and it will never ever be the same.

TDM

In August 2010 U.S. intelligence located the compound where Osama bin Laden was hiding.   Although Obama has tried to take credit for getting finding Osama bin Laden it was the Bush administration that did the heavy lifting.  The following blog tells how this really happened:

http://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/the-path-to-osama-bin-ladens-death-didnt-start-with-obama/2012/04/30/gIQAfFmdsT_story.html

This obviously makes more sense than the Obama/Pelosi/Feinstein/Reid theory that enhanced interrogation techniques never yielded any results worth the effort.

Obama was handed Osama bin Laden on a silver platter.  But the administration was afraid to take action, so they demanded more proof.  In desperation the CIA came up with a silly plan that yielded zero results.  They set up a doctor to do a fake vaccination program apparently hoping to accidentally get some DNA that could positively identify bin Laden.  That doctor has now been rewarded with a long prison term in Pakistan and the world was rewarded with a resurgence of polio.  The Rotary club had been engaged in a long campaign to irradiate polio from the earth.  They were heartbreakingly close, because the entire world was united on one subject, the goal to irradiate polio.   The recent White House vow to never stage another fake vaccine program is proof of the damage done by this irresponsible decision:

http://news.yahoo.com/white-house-vows-cia-not-stage-fake-vaccine-220506787.html;_ylt=AwrSyCW6yHpTxygAG3zQtDMD

Now polio is resurging around the world and even threatens us here.  I doubt that anyone in the main stream media will notice that this is the result of a huge blunder by the Obama administration.

http://abcnews.go.com/Health/polio-spreading-abroad-threatens-us/story?id=23597103

Thanks to brilliant scientific minds like Jenny McCarthy at least some American parents won’t let their children get vaccinated making us more vulnerable than necessary.

It will take years to recover from this blunder and in fact we now may never reach our goal of eliminating polio.  The problem is made worse by the sad reality that no one in this world believes Obama about anything, so why would they believe him now?

TDM

In 1837 Hans Christian Anderson published a short story titled “The Emperor’s New Clothes.”  In the story some swindlers convince the Emperor that they have created new clothes that are so fine they are invisible to those unfit for their positions, stupid, or incompetent. Since no one was willing to admit they couldn’t actually see the clothes, including the Emperor, he ended up going out in public stark naked.  Then a little kid, who hadn’t got the memo, pointed out the obvious that the Emperor wasn’t wearing any clothes at all.

Today we are seeing the modern version of this fairy tale; it is sadly all too true.  No one in the main stream media or the liberal left can bring themselves to acknowledge the truth.  We elected a naïve incompetent, inexperienced, lying radical who had accomplished nothing.  Why on earth would anyone expect this man to suddenly become competent?  Why would anyone expect him to show the leadership that comes from experience?  Why would anyone expect him to tell the truth about anything when it was obvious he was lying about everything.  Why would anyone so radical to respect our constitution or the rule of law?  Why would anyone expect a man who had accomplished nothing to suddenly start to be effective?  The real shock would have been if the results had been different.  Obama has always been covered with the invisible cloak of greatness that only existed in the myths invented and sustained by the naïve and fawning main stream media.  Some people realized this from the start.  Others were more than willing to believe the myth.  Now it is brutally honest that this cloak of greatness never existed and Obama stands before us now, completely naked.

Obama promised the most transparent of administrations and he has kept his promise.  We can all see right through him.  To those who are aware, he is impossible to even watch.  It is hard to observe this man pretending to be a leader without being embarrassed for the country that put someone like him in power.

The liberal left and the main stream media are still trying to carry the water for Obama, but they know the truth.  While you still hear people try to defend him, primarily by blaming everything on Republicans, no one looks to Obama for leadership.  The best they can do now is desperately attempt to convince themselves it wasn’t really his fault.  But the truth is now impossible to ignore.  Obama has no clothes, he never had any clothes.

TDM

When I was young I remember the Spy vs Spy cartoons in Mad magazine.   One spy was black, one was white and they kept self-destructing while trying to outwit each other.  In many ways this reminds me of what is happening in politics today.  Only today instead of spy vs spy, we are seeing stupid vs stupid.  Democrats are self-destructing at an unprecedented rate with RINO Republicans engaged in a desperate race to catch up in the race to disaster.

RINO Republicans, led by Jeb Bush, are trying desperately to pass some kind of immigration reform.  This desperate effort is driven by clueless RINO consultants who stupidly believe that if Republicans cave on immigration reform they will somehow miraculously get more Hispanic votes.  But, there a problem with their plan.  Obama is doing so many incredibly stupid things with regard to immigration that Republicans have been unable to keep up.  He released thousands of convicted felons because they were here illegally.  Odds are that a high percentage of these convicted felons will act like convicted felons.  This is almost certain to cause serious heartburn for Democrats running for re-election.   In addition, Obama seems to announce some new executive order refusing to enforce existing immigration laws on a daily basis.  Even RINO Republicans are finding it impossible to justify immigration reform while Obama is in office.  Why bother changing anything when we have a President who doesn’t actually care about the law?

So in the latest battle of stupid vs stupid I believe that Democrats are winning the race to oblivion, by a narrow margin.  It is hard to be optimistic, based on past performance, but I am not sure that even the incredibly stupid and naïve Republican establishment can hope to match this level of insanity.

TDM

Bill and Hillary Clinton have a life long history of lying.  The problem with people who are habitual liars is that they have trouble remembering which lie was told when.  People who just tell the truth don’t have this problem. The most recent example of this was when Bill rose to defend Hillary against the allegation by Carl Rove that Hillary may have had brain damage as the result of a fall.  Frankly, based on years of watching Hillary’s act one could argue that there is more than ample evidence of brain damage but that is another story.    The problem here is that while defending Hillary, Bill forgot what lie she had told so he gave the wrong answer:

http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-2629288/Bill-Clinton-reveals-took-Hillary-six-months-work-accident.html

Hillary’s concussion ‘required six months of very serious work to get over,’ Bill said. ‘It’s something she never low-balled with the American people, never tried to pretend it didn’t happen.’

Actually, Hillary did try to low-ball it with the American people, just as Bill is trying to low-ball it now. If, as Bill says here, it took her six months of serious effort to recover from a brain concussion that is a really big deal.

This is worse than anything Rove said.  Rove just pointed out the fact that she had a serious fall and that she was wearing the type of glasses that people wear when they have a serious brain injury.  Since the glasses Hillary wore during her non-answer session regarding Benghazi looked like a failed google glass experiment that was an easy call.

The liberal left is trying to convince itself that getting this information out now is good for Hillary.  This was just like they want to believe that having Monica Lewinsky surface now is a good thing for Hillary.  They are wrong.  There were already concerns about Hillary’s age and that always leads to speculation regarding health.  This is not going to make the issue go away.  Instead it guarantees it will always be an issue for her in the future.  Just incase it does start to fade all Republicans need to do is make some kind statement about how they don’t think Hillary’s health should be an issue.

The other lie is the one about Hillary’s great record of accomplishment.  The problem is that so far neither Hillary nor any of her supporters can actually point out any accomplishments.  The really big lie is that Hillary is qualified to do anything.  If she hadn’t married Bill Clinton no one would know she even existed.  She is the polar opposite of a self-made woman.

Hillary has a remarkable record of being in the right place and the right time only to accomplish absolutely nothing.  Never in the course of human history has one individual been given so much opportunity yet achieved so little.  One would have thought that there would be “some” accomplishment even as a result of pure luck, but no, Hillary managed to avoid that too.  I guess you could say she came, she saw, she squandered and then lied about the rest.

TDM

John 8:32  “Then you will know the truth, and the truth will set you free.”

One of the primary problems facing this nation is that too many people cannot separate truth from fiction.  There are just too many people, in positions of influence, who are repeatedly saying things that are not true.  At times it is easy to get discouraged.  Sometimes it seems as though truth doesn’t even have a chance.  However, history teaches us that no strategy based on a lie can long endure.  At some point truth will out.  That does not mean that we don’t have to endure a lot of pain in the meantime.

The truth will come out.  If the documents withheld or redacted were favorable to either Hillary Clinton or Barack Obama they would have been released.  If the people who have not been allowed to give testimony had good things to say about Hillary Clinton or Barack Obama we would have already heard them testify.  There is a reason documents were withheld.  There is a reason documents were redacted.  There is a reason witnesses were stopped from testifying.  There is a reason Hillary Clinton only testified for a few minutes and then tried to deflect further questions by throwing a hissy fit.  There is a reason the White House will not tell us where Barack Obama was on the night of September 11, 2012.  There is a reason the committee selected by Hillary Clinton to investigate the State Department never even interviewed her.

There is a lot of evidence that people fear the truth.  They will do anything and everything to block the select committee from doing an investigation.  They will try to discredit the findings before the committee even has a chance to start.  This is proof that this matters and that Republicans have a duty to finally get this done.  We have let people get away with lies for far too long.  It is time to expose the truth.  The truth will set us free.

TDM

In 1649 Richard Lovelace published a poem titled:  “To Lucasta, Going to the Warres.”  The last line of this poem is a stark reminder of the importance of honor.

Yet this inconstancy is such,
As thou too shalt adore;
I could not love thee (Dear) so much,
Love’d I not honor more.

The Watergate burglary could have been written off as much ado about nothing. It was, after all, a third rate burglary. Republicans got caught trying to break into the Democratic National Committee headquarters.  Who cares?  Does anyone think that Democrats have never tried to spy on Republicans?  Please!  What made Watergate important was the relentless pursuit by liberal Democrats and the Washington Post.  They hated Richard Nixon and they were determined to destroy him.  Republicans stood up for Nixon, until it became obvious that Nixon was lying.  At that point Republicans chose honor over politics and told Nixon it was time to go.

That was not an easy decision.  Republicans knew that this would be a huge political victory for Democrats.  They also knew this would be devastating for the country.  They were right. North Vietnam would never had invaded South Vietnam if Richard Nixon was still in office.  Take away Watergate and South Vietnam might look a lot like South Korea today.

When Bill Clinton was impeached Democrats chose politics over honor.  After the story first broke several Democratic Senator said that if Bill Clinton lied on national TV they would vote to remove him from office.  But at some point, even though Clinton was clearly guilty of perjury, Democrats decided politics trumped honor.  Not one single Democratic Senator voted to remove Clinton from office, even though he was clearly guilty of perjury.  The only justification was that Clinton just lied about sex so it didn’t matter.

There is overwhelming evidence that the Obama administration was involved in a cover-up with regard to Benghazi.  The only defense offered by Jay Carney is that the e-mail about Benghazi wasn’t actually about Benghazi.  That doesn’t even pass the snicker test.  But sadly Democrats are once again choosing politics over honor.

The ethical decision would be for Democrats to appoint responsible people to the select committee and direct them to focus on the truth.  That is the honorable thing to do.  Yet there is zero chance that Democrats will do that.  If they do participate in the select committee at all it will be primarily to obstruct justice and discredit the committee.

So far I cannot identify a single Democrat who will stand up for truth and justice over politics?  Does one have to sacrifice honor to be a Democrat in congress?  Is there really no one?

TDM