THE FOUNDATION

“On every unauthoritative exercise of power by the legislature must the people rise in rebellion or their silence be construed into a surrender of that power to them? If so, how many rebellions should we have had already?” — Thomas Jefferson

INSIGHT

“I have a dream that one day this nation will rise up and live out the true meaning of its creed: ‘We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal.’… I have a dream that my four children will one day live in a nation where they will not be judged by the color of their skin but by the content of their character… And if America is to be a great nation this must become true.” —Martin Luther King, Jr.

Editor’s Note: Historian Shelby Steele observes, “There is an awful lot of conservative sentiment in black America, but at the moment, the party line is ruthlessly enforced.” Indeed, those who followed Martin Luther King when he was speaking of freedom, like Jesse Jackson, tolerate no dissension from their liberal ranks now. They have abandoned King’s dream, and aligned themselves with political and social agendas obsessed with color at the expense of character.

Black conservatives of national stature, like Clarence Thomas, Condoleezza Rice, Colin Powel, Ward Connerly, Michael Steele, Jesse Lee Peterson, Alan Keyes, Don Scoggins, Alvin Williams, Ken Blackwell, Thomas Sowell, Star Parker and Walter Williams are routinely castigated by Jackson, et al., as “Uncle Toms” and “puppets.” Yet these are the men and women following the call of King.

Irrespective of one’s conclusion about Martin Luther King’s proper place in history (given what we know about his personal character lapses, including marital infidelity, his association with known Communists and plagiarism in his doctoral dissertation), the two texts cited below (from The Patriot’s Historic Documents section) are well worth reading—for each of them proclaim truth.

“I have a dream”

“Letter from a Birmingham jail”

ICHTHUS IMPRIMIS

“Therefore, putting away lying, ‘Let each one of you speak truth with his neighbor,’ for we are members of one another. ‘Be angry, and do not sin’: do not let the sun go down on your wrath, nor give place to the devil. Let him who stole steal no longer, but rather let him labor, working with his hands what is good, that he may have something to give him who has need. Let no corrupt word proceed out of your mouth, but what is good for necessary edification, that it may impart grace to the hearers.” —Ephesians 4:25-29 (NKJV)

FAMILY

“You don’t need religion to tremble at the thought of unrestricted embryo research. You simply have to have a healthy respect for the human capacity for doing evil in pursuit of the good. Once we have taken the position of many stem cell research advocates that embryos are discardable tissue with no more intrinsic value than a hangnail or an appendix, then all barriers are down. What is to prevent us from producing not just tissues and organs but humanlike organisms for preservation as a source of future body parts on demand?… The slope is very slippery.” —Charles Krauthammer

CULTURE

“In what they insist is not a political maneuver, former Presidents Jimmy Carter and Bill Clinton are working with the organizers of a meeting of the ‘North American Baptist Fellowship,’ tentatively scheduled for January 2008. Hoping to attract thousands of Baptists of different stripes, the conference will focus on how faith should relate to public life and feature discussions on ecology, racism, religious liberty, poverty, HIV/AIDS, and more. However, this effort to unite the Baptists on liberal issues does not include the largest Baptist group in America—the Southern Baptist Convention. A Baptist group that doesn’t represent the largest group of Baptists is like a council of churches that doesn’t represent churches—which is exactly what the Institute on Religion & Democracy found in a new report, ‘Strange Yokefellows.’ It shows that the National Council of Churches (NCC) gets most of its donations from non-religious groups that push an agenda on life and marriage contrary to the doctrinal beliefs of people in the pews. The question facing the church is, will it adhere to the gospels of Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John—or Jimmy, Bill, and the Sierra Club?” —Tony Perkins

LIBERTY

“If you assail the right of the people to honor God, then you assail the first principle of their self-government, which is that we are endowed by our Creator with unalienable rights leading to the consequence that the only form of government that is legitimate is a form of government that respects those God-given rights. No God, no republic. No God, no representation. No God, no due process. No God, no sanctity of individual rights, liberty, and life. The denial of God is an assault not only upon the people’s conscience, but upon their claim to have from God the right to govern themselves through representative institutions. The triumph of this false doctrine of separation, therefore, portends not only the persecution of our faith, but the destruction of our liberty.” —Alan Keyes

THE GIPPER

“With freedom goes responsibility. Sir Winston Churchill once said you can have 10,000 regulations and still not have respect for the law. We might start with the Ten Commandments. If we lived by the Golden Rule, there would be no need for other laws.” —Ronald Reagan

OPINION IN BRIEF

“James Gilmore [the former Governor of Virginia] is really Reaganesque in his Conservative thinking. Every [presidential] candidate claims the mantle. He earns it. … Gilmore is the only candidate who is right on lowering taxes, reducing government spending, fighting the long, long WW IV against Islamists, fixing Social Security and Medicare, stopping illegal immigration cold, promoting life and the family, as well as nominating strict constructionist judges. If Gilmore articulates the choices as they are—and his positions on them through an indifferent, but soon-to-be hostile MSM—like Reagan did, he will connect with Republican voters across the country like he did with Virginia’s faithful Republicans. If Gilmore is compared closely, no one compares as a Conservative candidate. That wins the Republican nomination. The Conservative third of the Nation isn’t ready to surrender the momentum of change to Republicans running as liberals, moderates or disingenuous Conservatives of convenience when a Conservative of conscience, practice, conviction, and promise is available.” —James Atticus Bowden

GOVERNMENT

“Conservatives don’t speak much of ‘ideals.’ They think, more modestly, in terms of norms, which are never perfectly realized, but only approximated by sinful man. Consider homosexuality. Whereas the liberal wants to impose ‘gay rights,’ by law and coercion, the conservative sees homosexuality as a defect, which to some extent can and must be tolerated, because it can’t be ‘eradicated,’ but it can’t rationally be exalted to the plane of normality; and he knows that all talk of ‘same-sex marriage’ is nonsense, like trying to breed calves from a pair of bulls. But to the liberal, the only issue is equal rights; human nature and normality have nothing to say to him. What the conservative sees as life’s mysteries, the liberal sees as mere irrationality. One word is notably absent from the liberal vocabulary: enough. For the liberal, there is hardly such a thing as ‘too much’ government. There is no point at which liberals say, ‘Well, we’ve done it. We’ve realized our dreams. We have all the government we need, and we should stop now.’ No, they always want more government. There is no such thing as enough government.” —Joseph Sobran

RE: THE LEFT

“[Democrats are] wholly unserious in their thoughts and approach. They seem locked into habits that no longer pertain, and absorbed by the small picture of partisan advancement at the expense of the big picture, which is that there nation is in trouble and needs their help. They are sunk in the superficial. When Nancy Pelosi showed up at the White House Wednesday to talk with the president it was obvious she’d spent a lot of time thinking about… what to wear. She wrapped herself in a rich red shawl. Dick Morris said it looked like a straitjacket. I thought she looked like a particularly colorful mummy. She complained that the president had not asked for her input as he put together his plan. He should have. But what would she have brought to the table if she’d been asked to it? It is still—still!—unclear. The other night after the speech, Rahm Emanuel, on PBS, was pressed for what he would have the president do. He blinked as if the question were a diversion. He was there to say Bush is Bad. Why bother with what might be good?” —Peggy Noonan

POLITICAL FUTURES

“The trick for any politician—but especially a populist like [John] Edwards, who is trying to build a case for ending what he calls ‘Two Americas’ —is to appear to be a regular guy. Not too rich, too scripted or too sophisticated. This is increasingly difficult for the multimillionaires who pursue high office these days, but Edwards has mastered the act. At his announcement, he spoke without notes, just talkin’ about a few modest goals: ending the war in Iraq, universalizing health care, ending genocide and poverty. Passionate, but not overwrought, he conveyed the persona of a deeply caring man who wants to make the world a better place. Either that, or the persona of a deeply cunning litigator adept at pulling a jury’s heartstrings, which usually precedes the pulling of someone else’s purse strings. Even the sans-serif font on the John Edwards logo is plain and straightforward. But that’s where simplicity ends and sophistication triumphs. In Edwardsian politics, sans-serif is a tactic and simplicity a strategy. No sooner were Edwards’ words ignored than they were captured in a YouTube segment and posted on his ‘Tomorrow Begins Today’ Web site, which features an array of high-tech options for the wired generation. Visitors can sign up for e-mail alerts, mobile phone messages, and even click on a bar for espanol: El manana comienza hoy. Nothing unsophisticated about that. Edwards, the aw-shucks country boy, may have unfortunate timing, but his mama didn’t raise no fool. Neither did his daddy, who, you may have heard, was a millworker.” —Kathleen Parker

FOR THE RECORD

“I have been listening to people in elected office from US Senators down to who-knows-what; to people who were once in appointed office; people who were once in the military; people who have never been closer to a military unit than standing in front of the gate at a military base with their make-up on and their hair sprayed in place; reporters who evaded the draft (when there was a draft); reporters who are too young to have needed to evade the draft; and cable hosts pontificating on the status of the U.S. military who wouldn’t know an FM22-5 from the menu at McDonalds. I am sick of all of them… Those who are rushing to condemn the President’s plan are putting themselves in great political peril because they need the President’s plan to fail for them to be correct. I don’t know if the President’s plan will work because I am not a military specialist. I am a political specialist and I DO know that politicians who root for America to fail are buying a ticket to retirement.” —Rich Galen

SELECT READER COMMENTS

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“Another fantastic essay from The Patriot! ’If not Iraq, then where, when and at what cost?’ articulates the entire history of the Iraqi War like no one else seems to have the guts to do. It’s good to see someone actually say that Saddam’s WMD did not just cease to exist. They existed in 2002 and 2003 and still exist today. It’s truly puzzling why this has been so thoroughly denied.” —Boulder, Colorado

“To understand the sudden Demo-reversal of support for the surge of troops to Iraq, one must recognize one basic political reality: If the U.S. wins in Iraq, the Demos believe they will lose in ‘08. They must make George W. Bush, and by extension, America, lose in Iraq. They ran on ‘We are not winning the war.’ They now say they were elected to ‘Stop the War!’ How dumb do they think we are? I guess we should be ashamed of the answer to that question.” —Atlanta, Georgia

“The Democrats have been working to undermine our troops in Iraq ever since March 2003, and now they would like to cut funding. They want President Bush, our troops, and the United States to fail, because they think that would enhance their chances of winning the White House in 2008. So their goal is to leave us exposed to more 9/11’s here at home, and to abandon 27 million Iraqis to terrorists and murderers. The Democrats would deliberately squander and trivialize the lives and limbs of our soldiers in this war.” —Overland Park, Kansas

THE LAST WORD

“Americans are torn between two irreconcilable positions on the Iraq war. Some want the war to be a success—variously defined—and some want the war to be over. Conservatives are basically, but not exclusively, in the ‘success’ camp. Liberals (and those further to the left) are basically, but not exclusively, the ‘over’ party. And many people are suffering profound cognitive dissonance by believing these two positions can be held simultaneously. The motives driving these positions range from the purely patriotic to the coldly realistic to the cravenly political or psychologically perfervid. Parsing motives is exhausting and pointless, but one fact remains: ‘End it now’ and ‘win it eventually’ cannot be reconciled… Another Democratic dodge is the demand for a ‘political solution’ in Iraq… Saying we need a political solution is as helpful as saying ‘give peace a chance.’ Peace requires more than pie-eyed verbiage. In the real world, peace has no chance until the people who want to give death squads another shot have been dispatched from the scene. It reminds me of the liberal obsession in the 1980s with getting inner-city gangs to settle their differences with break-dance competitions. If only Muqtada al-Sadr would moonwalk to peace!” —Jonah Goldberg

Veritas vos Liberabit—Semper Vigilo, Fortis, Paratus, et Fidelis! Mark Alexander, Publisher, for The Patriot’s editors and staff. (Please pray for our Patriot Armed Forces standing in harm’s way around the world, and for their families—especially families of those fallen Soldiers, Sailors, Airmen, Marines and Coast Guardsmen, who have died in defense of American liberty, while prosecuting the war with Jihadistan.)