THE FOUNDATION

“His integrity was most pure, his justice the most inflexible I have ever known, no motives of interest or consanguinity, of friendship or hatred, being able to bias his decision. He was indeed, in every sense of the words, a wise, a good, and a great man.” —Thomas Jefferson

PUBLISHER’S NOTE

Today American mourns the loss of a great Patriot: Charlton Heston. Heston died at home Saturday with his wife Lydia at his side. He was 84. As an actor, Heston won an Oscar in 1959 for his role as “Ben-Hur.” He also portrayed Moses and Michelangelo, as well as many other roles. Heston was a rarity in Hollywood: someone who fought for constitutional integrity and civil rights including the palladium of all rights, those guaranteed by the Second Amendment. Indeed, Heston was elected president of the National Rifle Association in 1998 and served until 2003, when he stepped down due to health concerns. Also in 2003, Heston was awarded the Presidential Medal of Freedom, the highest civilian honor in the U.S. This great friend of Ronald Reagan and of liberty will be missed.

The Patriot offers some of Charlton Heston’s finest speeches on our website: On the 2nd Amendment and on the culture war.

INSIGHT

“Today, my heart is heavy with the loss of Charlton Heston. America has lost a great patriot. The Second Amendment has lost a faithful friend. So have I, and so have four million NRA members and eighty million gun owners. And so has every American who cares about the Bill of Rights, individual liberty, and Freedom. My heart is heavy, but not without a sense of pride. Pride in a man who devoted his life to his profession with grace and dignity. Pride in an American who devoted himself to civil rights, to correcting injustices around him, and to standing up for what he knew was right. Pride in a friend who stood with me and stood with fellow NRA members to preserve our freedom for future generations. Pride in a patriot who believed with every fiber of his being that our Bill of Rights is the foundation of our freedom that makes Americans singular among the masses of nations. And now, Charlton Heston has passed that duty to us—the next generation. I am as proud to continue his cause as I am to have known him as my friend.” —Wayne LaPierre, Executive Vice President of the National Rifle Association of America

GOVERNMENT

“One of the biggest problems with government intervention in the economy is that politicians usually have neither the knowledge nor the incentives to intervene at the right time. Bruce Bartlett has pointed out that most government intervention in an economic downturn comes too late. That is, the problem it is trying to solve has already worked itself out and the government intervention can create new problems. More fundamentally, markets readjust themselves for a reason. That reason is that people pay a price for their misjudgments and mistakes. Government interventions are usually based on trying to stop them from having to pay that price. People who went way out on a limb to buy a house that they could not afford are now being pictured as victims of a heartless market or deceptive lenders. Just a few years ago, people who went out on that limb made money big-time in a skyrocketing housing market. But now that they have been caught in the ups and downs that markets have gone through for centuries, the government is supposed to bail them out. Solving short-run problems, especially in an election year, often means creating long-run problems. Pumping money into the economy can help many problems. But do not be surprised if it also leads to inflationary pressures and financial repercussions around the world.” —Thomas Sowell

CULTURE

“The economic crisis now breaking upon us will be both a political and cultural event that may well be a turning point in our nation’s history as consequential as the Great Depression. Which, by the way, is the historical standard to which some smart people—like former Federal Reserve chairman Alan Greenspan—are comparing this event… The cultural roots of this crisis have to do with Americans’ refusal to recognize natural limits. Americans have lost the ascetic virtue of self-discipline and have become impatient with the idea of constraints on their individual will. This is deeply rooted in American history and psychology… Our liberation from natural and traditional constraints can only continue in an atmosphere of steady, broad-based material progress, which, aside from the 1970s stagflation lull, we’ve experienced since World War II ended the Depression… Yet we cannot blame our politicians for failing to lead us, because they are the products of a consumerist culture that does not take ‘no’ for an answer. How many politicians of either party could hope to win office by telling voters we have a responsibility to delay short-term gratification for the long-term good of the country?” —Rod Dreher

LIBERTY

“I think the [California] state court is looking at the state Constitution upside down. The court finds no constitutional right to home school one’s children. But in a free country, people are free to do anything not expressly prohibited by law. If the Constitution is silent about home schooling, then the right is reserved to the people. That’s how the Framers of the U.S. Constitution said things are supposed to work. Last week, the appellate court surprised everyone by agreeing to rehear the case. The San Francisco Chronicle reports that the judges ‘hinted at a re-evaluation of its entire Feb. 28 ruling by inviting written arguments from state and local education officials and teachers’ unions’. On top of that, state Schools Superintendent Jack O’Connell says he thinks home schooling is legal and favors choice in education. That’s reasonable news. But why is education the business of government? It’s taken for granted that the state is every child’s ultimate parent, but there’s no justification for that in a free society. Parents may not be perfect—some are pretty bad—but a cold, faceless bureaucracy is no better.” —John Stossel

THE GIPPER

“It is truly fitting that America observe April 9 in recognition of our former prisoners of war; that date is the 46th anniversary of the day in 1942 when U.S. forces holding out on the Bataan Peninsula in the Philippines were captured. Later, as prisoners of war, these gallant Americans were subjected to the infamous Bataan Death March and to other inhumane treatment that killed thousands of them before they could be liberated. In every conflict, brutality has invariably been meted out to American prisoners of war; on April 9 and every day, we must remember with solemn pride and gratitude that valor and tenacity have ever been our prisoners’ response… To our former prisoners of war who endured so much, we say that with your example and with God’s help we will seek to meet the standards of devotion you have set; we will never forget your service or your sacrifice.” —Ronald Reagan

OPINION IN BRIEF

“Obama’s success is truly a remarkable commentary on the goodness of Americans and how far we’ve come in resolving matters of race. I’m 72 years old. For almost all of my life, a black having a real chance at becoming the president of the United States was at best a pipe dream. Obama has convincingly won primaries in states with insignificant black populations. As such, it further confirms what I’ve often said: The civil rights struggle in America is over and it’s won. At one time black Americans did not have the constitutional guarantees enjoyed by white Americans; now we do. The fact that the civil rights struggle is over and won does not mean that there are not major problems confronting many members of the black community but they are not civil rights problems and have little or nothing to do with racial discrimination. While not every single vestige of racial discrimination has disappeared, Obama and the Rev. Wright are absolutely wrong in suggesting that racial discrimination is anywhere near the major problem confronting a large segment of the black community. The major problems are: family breakdown, illegitimacy, fraudulent education and a high rate of criminality. To confront these problems, that are not the fault of the larger society, requires political courage and that’s an attribute that Obama and most other politicians lack.” —Walter Williams

RE: THE LEFT

“Barack Obama, who informs campaign audiences that he taught constitutional law for 10 years, might be expected to weigh in on the historic Second Amendment case before the U.S. Supreme Court. The justices are pondering whether the 1976 District of Columbia law effectively prohibiting personal gun ownership in the nation’s capital is constitutional. But Sen. Obama has not stated his position. Obama, disagreeing with the D. C. government and gun control advocates, declares the Second Amendment’s ‘right of the people to keep and bear arms’ applies to individuals, not just the ‘well-regulated militia’ cited in the amendment. In the next breath, he asserts this constitutional guarantee does not preclude local ‘common sense’ restrictions on firearms. Does the Draconian prohibition for Washington, D. C., fit that description? My attempts to get an answer have proved unavailing. The front-running Democratic presidential candidate is doing the gun dance.” —Robert Novak

POLITICAL FUTURES

“For the Democratic party, 2008 was supposed to have been an ideal year. There’s an unpopular, lame-duck Republican president presiding over an iffy economy and an unpopular war. Plus, the Democrats won big in the 2006 elections, and there’s no Republican vice president in the race to draw on the power of incumbency. No wonder that for much of 2007, the polls suggested that the only mystery would be by how much Sen. Hillary Clinton would beat former New York Mayor Rudy Giuliani in the general election. Indeed, for Democrats not to walk into the presidency in November 2008, the conventional wisdom was that the absolute unthinkable would have to transpire. And now it almost has.” —Victor Davis Hanson

FOR THE RECORD

“Drama is no match for the harsh certainties of mathematics. And the mathematics of the Democratic primaries demonstrated that it was practically impossible for Clinton to win the nomination. Go to Slate’s online delegate calculator and give her an improbable 60-40 victory in all ten remaining primaries from Pennsylvania through South Dakota, and she still comes up short. Add in an imaginary revote that gives her 60 percent of Florida’s delegates, and she still loses. Only if she were to add to all this a similarly fanciful win in an illusory do-over in Michigan would she finally overtake Obama in pledged delegates.” —Jonathan Gurwitz

SELECT READER COMMENTS

(Our servers automatically delete “Reply” messages to this e-mail. To submit or to view reader comments visit our Reader Comments page. Join the debate at the Patriot Blog.)

“I need to point out discrepancy Mark Alexander’s essay, ’ANWR’s Spotted Owl.’ You said, ‘Total annual consumption of oil in the U.S. is about 7.6 billion barrels.’ Several paragraphs later you noted that ‘there’s an estimated 10 billion barrels of oil [in ANWR], and that is enough Black Gold to keep Teddy Kennedy and his constituents warm and cozy for a century.’ Ten billion barrels amounts to 16 months of usage, not the 100 years your article says. I am sure you would like to correct this mistake.” —Brentwood, Tennessee

Editor’s Reply: We had several reader comments to this effect. However, the numbers are correct. Please note that the article referred to Ted Kennedy and his constituents, not the entire U.S. Like most Americans, we don’t consider ourselves constituents of Ted Kennedy!

“I too have been to ANWR many times. I lived on the North Slope for three years and routinely went to Kaktovik for work. As was written in The Patriot, there is nothing there but a few bugs in the summer. A very few herds pass through, but the Alaska pipeline has been careful by not interfering with their migrations. What I found very interesting was that the locals, the Native Americans who live there, are invariably incredulous as to why the oil fields are not explored and developed in the area.” —Tokyo, Japan

“It’s a shame the EPA wasn’t around sooner so they could have saved the dinosaur and a few other extinct species. That way there wouldn’t have been room for Homo sapiens and nothing left to worry about.” —Cleveland, Ohio

THE LAST WORD

“’When you set out to take Vienna,’ Napoleon famously advised, ‘take Vienna.’ That might be updated to: ‘If you’re going to bowl, bowl better than a 37.’ That’s what Barack Obama scored when he set out to demonstrate he was just one of the guys at a Pennsylvania bowling alley recently. He started with a gutter ball. Hillary Clinton responded with an April Fools’ Day gag about deciding the nomination with a bowl-off. ‘A bowling night. Right here in Pennsylvania,’ Clinton proposed. ‘The winner take all. I’ll even spot him two frames. It is time for his campaign to get out of the gutter and allow all the pins to be counted. I’m prepared to play this game all the way to the 10th frame. When this game is over, the American people will know that when that phone rings at 3 a.m., they’ll have a president ready to bowl on Day One.’ The saddest part is that this was, without a doubt, the absolute funniest thing Hillary Clinton has ever said (after, of course, ‘I believe you, Bill’). Unfortunately, Obama missed an opportunity to explain that he was bowling so badly because he was under sniper fire.” —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 granted their lives in defense of American liberty.)