Modern Day Heroes
For far too long, we’ve become accustomed to thinking that heroes only pop up on battlefields and football fields.
For far too long, we’ve become accustomed to thinking that heroes only pop up on battlefields and football fields. Lately, we’ve come to understand that doctors and nurses also deserve medals and trophies and our appreciation.
But there are others. For instance, there are those sheriffs in Virginia and elsewhere who are refusing to enforce their governors’ unconstitutional infringements on the Second Amendment.
In part, the Founding Fathers created a totally unnecessary controversy when they drew up the second of our inalienable rights. It reads, as I’m sure you all know: “A well-regulated Militia, being necessary to the security of a free State, the right of the people to keep and bear Arms, shall not be infringed.”
If only the entire Amendment consisted of those final 14 words, we’d all be a lot better off. Without that opening rationale, the Leftists wouldn’t be able to argue that individual Americans aren’t part of a Militia. Frankly, I don’t know why they felt the need to explain the purpose of that right when they didn’t feel called upon to explain the logic behind any of the others.
I don’t have a lot of heroes, but I have just recently added a name to the short list. It’s Shelley Luther. She doesn’t wield a gun or a stethoscope, just a comb and a curling iron. But she’s got plenty of what Tom Wolfe attributed to the astronauts, the right stuff.
She’s the owner of the Salon a la Mode in Dallas who was arrested and sentenced to a week in jail and fined $7,000 for opening her business before the authorities gave her permission.
She followed the rules about limiting the number of people allowed in her salon at any one time and maintaining the 6-foot distancing between her customers. But that cut no ice with Judge Eric V. Moyés, a black liberal activist, who gave her the opportunity to avoid jail time if she would admit what she had done was wrong and apologize for “being selfish.”
Instead, she explained that being shut down for two months had eaten up her savings and she had two children at home who needed to be fed. So, no, the Texas patriot replied, she wouldn’t apologize for believing that two hungry kids trumped executive orders.
Shortly prior to her incarceration, Dallas released a thousand prisoners, lest they contract Covid-19. So, Judge Moyés was sending her into an environment where the authorities felt she might die, all because she had helped a small number of Texas ladies get over two months of bad hair days.
I’m sure, the Judge would have preferred that Ms. Luther be locked in a stock in the public square so people could pelt her with ripe tomatoes, but, unfortunately, those contraptions had pretty much gone out of style after the Salem witch trials. But then, one would have hoped, so had judges like Cotton Mather and Eric Moyés.
In a just world, Shelley Luther would run against Moyes and win. Then she could be a judge and feed her kids quite well on the $150,000-a-year salary and even wear her bathrobe to work.
I should add that Texas Governor Greg Abbott rescinded his executive order, but only after Ms. Luther had spent two nights in jail. It shouldn’t take a backlash from the people to force a Republican governor to stop behaving like a typical Democrat with fascistic leanings.
New York Gov. Cuomo told me more about the C-19 virus in one report than Anthony Fauci and Deborah Birx have in two months.
In a detailed report about his state, he said that of the thousands of people hospitalized 1% were in the prison system; 2% were from the homeless population; 22% from assisted living facilities; and a whopping 66% from those who had remained quarantined in their homes and apartments!
He also broke down by age those who had been hospitalized: 0-10 years, 1%; 11-20, 2%; 21-50, 8%; 51-60, 14%; 61-70, 20%; 71-80, 19%; 81-90, 14%; 91+, 6%.
Since New York has been the state hardest hit by the virus, the numbers are significant. They are not a small sample. They tell us that staying indoors is dangerous. They also tell us that it’s only those over 50, and particularly over 60, who have been in gravest danger.
And yet none of those facts seem to have influenced the regulations laid down by the experts and the politically-motived governors and mayors and members of Congress.
Speaking of which, anyone who thinks that Schumer, Pelosi and their Democratic colleagues aren’t stretching out the shutdown because they know the best – perhaps the only – way to derail Trump’s re-election is by destroying the nation’s economy are naïve at best, incredibly stupid at worst.
Although I wish we could get rid of the Education Department, Secretary Betsy DeVos has recently undone the damage that Joe Biden did when he was Barack Obama’s righthand flunkey. It was Biden who pressured America’s colleges and universities to deny male students accused of sexual assault their right to defend themselves against the vile charges.
It was Biden’s mission to guarantee that female accusers would always be believed and that their male targets would always be punished, turning the concept of due process and the presumption of innocence until proven guilty on its head.
It was merely Biden’s way of wooing well-heeled radical feminists so they would support him on that future date when he’d be running for president.
But, now, thanks to Tara Reade’s accusation, Biden is grateful that his policy only covered campuses and wasn’t national policy. It is amusing, though, to see the likes of Hillary Clinton, Mazie Hirono, Kamala Harris and all the others who were carrying the torches and lynch rope when Brett Kavanaugh stood accused, lining up behind Biden, insisting that every woman needs to believed unless the person being targeted is a Democrat.
As for Biden’s reversal, it’s proof that an old dog can learn new tricks, especially when it’s his bone that’s in jeopardy.
Bill Clinton picked up where Richard Nixon had left off, when he allowed China to join the World Trade Organization. We now know that he played nice with China because they were helping to finance his re-election campaign. It didn’t matter to him, George W. Bush or Barack Obama, that China took advantage of our goodwill gesture by moving our factories to their country, costing us two million manufacturing jobs; absconding with a major portion of our pharmaceutical industry; continuing to steal our intellectual property; and manipulate their currency, the better to beat our brains out on trade deals.
Missouri’s Josh Hawley, who is quickly becoming one of the two or three best GOP senators, is working to get us out of the WTO.
Like the UN and the WHO, the WTO is one more entangling foreign alliance that Washington and Hamilton warned us against.
I never had much use for the A.C.L.U., but it has only grown worse with the passage of time. Today, when the State is employing its powers to deny citizens their civil liberties, even going so far as to shut down churches and synagogues, and arresting and fining ministers, rabbis and their congregants, in violation of the First Amendment, the group is devoting all its attention to making mail-in ballots the norm, in order to make it easier for Democrats to employ voter fraud to win elections.
It would be a move in the right direction if they stopped defending the rights of bums and addicts to use our city streets as their urinals, and, instead, pressured governors and state legislatures to once again enforce vagrancy laws and provide the mentally incompetent with asylums where they could be treated and safely housed.
With several medical research labs desperately seeking a vaccine that will work against C-19, I find myself wondering what percent of people will refuse to get take advantage of the discovery when some lucky lab gets the patent.
After all, flu shots are readily available and yet millions of people refuse to be inoculated even though influenza kills between 35,000-65,000 Americans every year.
Apparently, you can lead a mule to water, but you can’t make it toddle over to the drug store and get vaccinated.
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