Sec of State Clinton Testifies Before Congress

Secretary of State Hillary Clinton testified before congress today at long last.  She stated that there have been embassy killings over the past 35 years where 65 ambassadors have lost their lives.  Her voice broke up when she described the families of those who died.  Of course those on the right had accused her of “being stone faced as the coffins came by and would not even look at the bereaved relatives in the eye.  Of course the Right will lie about anything.  Rand Paul said “I don’t think you are malicious in what you did; you were just incompetent and if I were president I would have fired you.  There was talk about “not intercepting the proper communiqués”.  There are those stories about how the President sat for hours watching the action in Bengazi unfold on television but stopped our government from taking action.  Hillary reminded us that- - our embassies have suffered attacks all over the Mideast and that she has urged to step up security- - but Republicans put a “hold’ on the funds, just like the Republicans put a “hold’ on various cabinet appointments.  I listened to the last few minutes of Hillary live and then switched to a house debate on the debt ceiling and then they had the nine AM EST stuff cued up ready to go and I watched that till twenty to eleven, when I switched to the Ed Schultz show on that Monterey radio station listening to those critiques.  The Republicans may have wanted footage they could use in the 2016 campaign, but nothing from today will ever see the light of day because Hillary made fools of them all.  Hillary said that we STILL don’t know all of the facts and that it was WEEKS before we could even look at some tape footage.  There are few people who have been better at their job than Hillary Clinton.  She can look back on her carrier as first lady, twice, and as a New York senator, and now a stellar carrier as Obama’s secretary of state.  Hillary said her approach was not “talking points” and she had nothing to say about Susan Rice appearing before all those media press shows that weekend.

Sec of Defense Leon Penetta today gave the OK to women serving in combat in the military.  While feminists hail the move, David Cruise is opposed to it, and for a lot of good reasons.  There are physical considerations such as lack of upper body strength and men having to constantly “cover for the women” with their protective instinct.  Women might not be able to for example, drag a two hundred pound comrade from a burning building or tote a sixty pound back pack, or whatever.  They might not be able to hurl a grenade out of blast range.  Women don’t have the same aerobic endurance as men.  Besides this there is the whole sexual angle and women have suffered increased sexual assaults in the military and these would only rise now.  And what if they were fighting Moslems and the women were captured and forced to become one of someone elses’ wives in another part of the country?   There is the whole thing about women just not being “suited” to full combat, and also the fact that we see them as our mothers, our daughters, and the mother of our children.  In Israel they gave up on women in combat because it “just didn’t work out” to a large extent because casualties on the front line went up where women were involved, so that they are a bad military risk, pure and simple.  These are not sexist observations; they are just stating the obvious, and in the military it’s security and preparedness and going with the best odds of winning that counts.  Think about it.  The reason why Penetta did it is because our troops have become so depleted from all the wars we have fought in lately is that the Army needs “fresh meat”.  This term “fresh meat” means new recruits to join the infantry and be sent to the Front, where they will be the first ones to be killed.

People would hope that we are in a new era now, politically but the pure and simple fact of it is that we aren’t out of the woods yet.  There is still a large resevuar of bigotry resident in what is euphamisticly known as “America’s heartland”.  There is a lot of racial ignorance and prejudice out there- even in the Midwest, in places like Indiana.  A lot of these cities still have signs on their city limits reading “Nigger – Don’t let the sun set on you in this town”.  And there are stories about townspeople burning down black encampments on the edge of town.  In fact Negroes used to live in Midwestern cities but as the decades passed they were driven out because the White people didn’t want to be around them.  Many property deeds have clauses in them of “Sell only to White people”.  Jews have suffered similar exclusion – even in parts of the posh Palm Beach Fla.  The governments are riddled with this tea party rot, from the state legislative level down to county board members.  Republican state governors still jerrymander local districts to insure that Republicans will maintain a permanent foothold.  Of course jerrymandering is kind of a whammy boomerang because by the very nature of it it’s like buying stock on margin where should you suffer reverses, it goes twice as bad for you.  This economic truth carries on of course in the area of energy speculation, and personally I wouldn’t worry about it.  Only to the extent that people will quite a price as an isolated statistic.  And Congress must be very happy with the “snapshot’ they were able to take of the country when it came time to redistrict in 2010, denying Democrats leadership despite more democratic votes being cast.  Other obious laws have been passed and are continuing to be passed in this ongoing tea party hysteria we are in.

I want to come back to this whole idea of “Daring to tempt God” that is so big among so many evangelists now.  There are very few sayings of the Lord Jesus Christ that I overtly disagree with but this is one of them, ie when he says “Thow shalt not test the Lord thy God”.  No offense but Jesus has this quote ass-backwards.  And I’ll tell you why.  Suppose I’m walking around this place bragging to anyone who will listen that I can score in excess of 130 on any IQ test.  And finally one day somebody gets tired of hearing it and decides to call me on it.  He says that no way am I able to do such a thing and to just shut my yap.  I may then allude to other intelligence tests I have scored high on, and he’s all the more insistent I’m full of it.  Finally I get mad and say “OK then I’ll tell you what.  You go get me an IQ test and I’ll take it right now and show you”.  He may say, feeling perhaps cornered “You don’t have to do that, you know” and I will insist.  Because suddenly he’s got me mad and I feel challenged.  I wasn’t really going to, but now I’m willing to do it.  The thing is with God or any other “thing”, that “thing” is true to its own nature, it remains what it is independent of whether or not it is being “tested’ or observed by another.  It’s like you take a dog to a vet and it hops on the  examining table.  And everybody says “yeah, it looks like a dog to me’.  But one nay say sayer says “I don’t know- - I’m not sure that is really a dog you’ve got there”.  So another person in the room says, “Well, lets run a few tests and then we’ll know for sure”.  And the guy who first made the statement now says “Well we can’t do THAT because- - it would be “an affront to the dog’s sovereignty” or something.  That makes no sense.  Things are what they are.  Like if someone gets in an argument with Neil Savedra over a point of theology- - and Neil is a problem- - the caller may well decide to quite the Bible, and many callers have quoted the Bible quite adeptly to prove their respective points.  But this is a problem with the right because they have no objective standard or yardstick outside themselves.  It’s just like that guy in Romney’s campaign last summer saying “We are not going to allow ourselves to be hampered by such things as fact checkers”.  Perhaps in answer to Rush Limbaugh’s question - - perhaps the reason why there is no library section that goes “Great Moderates of American History” is because moderates rely on facts and circumstances- - and objective perception.  It’s as though there was a category of “Great Sane People in American History”.  The fact would appear axiomatic, unless there were a reason to know differently.  I would not vote for a socialist - - as the Right Wing claims.  In fact, as has been stated by many people- - these days because of the political winds- - there aren’t really any truly Liberals left.