To Protect & Serve?
I fear that one of the long-term dangers of the prolonged lockdowns is that people will permanently lose their trust in the police.
That is the motto of the LAPD, and probably many other police departments around the country. But, more and more often, we see them protecting and serving the politicians and not the people whose taxes pay their salaries.
I fear that one of the long-term dangers of the prolonged lockdowns is that people will permanently lose their trust in the police. Understand, I’m not referring to the thugs and Marxists in Antifa and Black Lives Matter who are always trying, as President Obama did, to inflate every isolated incident into an indictment of all cops and every police department into evidence of deeply-rooted racism.
Rather, my concern is that as a result of the cops enforcing unconstitutional edicts, law-abiding citizens may find ourselves regarding police officers to be nothing more than mindless, well-armed, robots, ready to carry out the illegal whims of unprincipled mayors.
As I see it, it’s not that big a step to go from citing people for celebrating a wedding or a birth and arresting ministers and congregants for holding and attending church services to clubbing freedom lovers in Hong Kong and rounding up Uighurs in Peking and shipping them off to concentration camps.
In The New American, I read about Officer Greg Anderson of the Port of Seattle Police Department who posted similar thoughts in an Instagram video post addressed to his fellow officers around the country. He was fired for his efforts to sound the alarm by appealing to the consciences of his colleagues.
Cops who defend themselves by saying “I was just following orders” should be reminded that was also Adolf Eichmann’s defense for his abominable actions when carrying out Hitler’s instructions to exterminate the Jews. He was hanged by the Israelis after he was tried and found guilty.
Following orders can never be a rationale for committing illegal, immoral and unconstitutional acts.
That would be little different from a guy arrested for robbing a bank defending himself by saying he really needed the money. If the price of doing the job right is losing the job, so be it. There are always other jobs. You only get one shot at having a clear conscience.
Just because the ops don’t make the rules doesn’t excuse them from the responsibility of discerning between those that are legal and those that aren’t. Aiding and abetting in a criminal action is also a crime.
Now that President Trump and President Netanyahu have shown the Arab and Muslim world that Allah doesn’t introduce locusts and plague to those nations that see the advantage of making peace with Israel, Sudan is the latest country to extend peaceful overtures to the Jewish state.
It wouldn’t be out of place to refer to Trump as the miracle worker.
At the presidential debate, Joseph Robinette Biden, Jr., claimed he doesn’t see blue and red states, only the United States. Obama, as you probably recall, said the same thing. It suggests that Biden remains a plagiarist at heart. But it should also remind us that after making that unifying remark, Obama, once elected, told John McCain and his fellow Republicans to “sit down, shut up and get out of the way.” Could anyone expect any less from Biden, who has fallen into the habit of taking his marching orders from the likes of Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, Nancy Pelosi and Bernie Sanders, who has apparently been promised he’d be the Commissar of Labor (aka Secretary of Labor) in a Biden administration?
There is one way in which Biden would differ from Obama. Whereas Biden definitely sees America divided between the Red and the Blue, Obama saw it divided between the Black and the White, and he never left in doubt which one he preferred.
Anyone who tells you that the Democrats won’t be cheating on Election Day is playing you for a patsy. It has already begun. In Pennsylvania, the state’s supreme court has already ruled that just because the signature on the mail-in ballot doesn’t even resemble the one on the voter’s registration form is no reason not to count it.
Although it is hard to imagine that there is anyone holding public office who could be even dumber than Hawaii’s Mazie Hirono, she may have met her match in Dar'shun Kendrick, a state legislator in Georgia. She took offense when President Trump referred to coyotes sneaking across the border.
Kendrick, who not only boasts a name containing an apostrophe, but a law degree (perhaps from the Amos ‘n’ Andy School of Law and Cosmetology) apparently had no idea that coyotes is the term for smugglers of drugs and adults and even children, often to supply the sex trade. That would explain why Ms. Kendrick tweeted “How the hell does a coyote bring a whole human across the border?”
If she meant that a coyote would no doubt stop along the way to nosh on a leg or an arm, that would be one thing. But that’s not what she meant. The real tip-off is that apostrophe. It makes a person wonder if she insists her first name is pronounced Darapostropheshun.
During the debate, Biden made a big deal of the 545 kids caught at the border who remain separated from their parents.
What he neglected to mention is that most of their parents have been tracked down, not in our country but in their own. What’s more, these residents of Honduras, El Salvador and Guatemala, don’t want the kids returned to them. They paid or otherwise arranged to have the kids sent north so they could have better lives growing up in the U.S.
Whether you consider their sacrifice as kind or callous, it has nothing to do with President Trump’s immigration policies. He did not split up these families. The parents did.
Over the course of 24 hours, I was amused to hear Joe Biden call Rudy Giuliani “Rudy Genie” and Sen. Ron Johnson call Tony Bobulinski “Tony Bublivitch.” I confess, stuff like that cracks me up.
But when it comes to people having problems with foreign names, nobody can compare with my eighth grade woodshop teacher, Mr. Bailey. He spent the entire semester calling me Vashinsky.
For my part, I concentrated on not referring to him by his cruel nickname “Fingers,” so called because he had lost several of his over the years. He was the reason I concentrated on sanding and never even got close to the bandsaw.
Every time I turn on the news and see the chaos in our streets and in Congress, I find myself increasingly upset over the Civil War. How tragic that over 700,000 young Americans died, not because of slavery, but because the federal government insisted that the states remain united.
If the 50 states got together in 2020, as the 13 original ones gathered in Philadelphia to form a nation, they would barely get past the calling of the roll before the fist fights would break out.
We would not only not be able to form a more perfect union, we wouldn’t even be able to get two-thirds (34) of the states to agree to the First or Second Amendment.
After my most recent love letter addressed to dogs, I heard from Ralph Barnett. He passed along an anecdote allegedly shared by a veterinarian.
It seems he was asked to exam an old Irish wolfhound named Becker. The owners and their little girl, Annie, were hoping for a miracle. But the vet discovered the dog was dying of cancer and needed to be euthanized.
The parents thought it would be good for Annie to observe the procedure and see that Becker’s end would be painless. So all three of them were present when Becker slipped peacefully away. The little girl seemed to accept his death more calmly than anyone might have expected.
When the parents and the vet bemoaned the sad fact that dogs’ lives are so much shorter than our own, Annie piped up “I know why.”
When her mother asked her to explain, Annie said: “People are born so they can learn how to live a good life by loving and being nice to everyone, right? Well, dogs know how to do that already, so they don’t have to stay around as long.”
Along the same line was a cartoon submitted by Penny Alfonso. It showed a newly haloed angel standing, looking befuddled, before the throne of God. Seated on the throne is a dog, saying: “You mean the joyful, loving, eternally-forgiving nature of dogs never tipped you off?!”
