Wow! That was my response to president Obama's 'explanation' of why he illegally fired the inspector general of Americorp just recently.  The law, just passed last year, requires the administration to give a 30 day notice and a publicly stated reason for the dismissal before terminating any inspector general (the inspectors general at the various federal agencies are there to ensure that public funds are being properly and legally spent). The Obama administration did neither when they summarily dismissed Mr. Walpin (IG of Americorp) the other day. Coincidentally, Walpin had been preventing a personal friend of the president's (a man who had been corruptly misusing government funds in the past) from receiving some of the TARP funds. Today, in response to media pressure, the president's staff came out with the alleged reason for firing the man. I was quite interested to hear what they might say, since there were no apparent non-corrupt reasons for wanting this man dismissed! ...They now claim that Walpin had been acting "confused and disoriented" and "unable to answer questions" at a recent board meeting, so that they could no longer have "confidence in his judgement". That's odd, because having carefully watched recent television interviews with Mr. Walpin, he struck me as being, if anything, unusually well- oriented and conspicuously unconfused! He not only answered the questions put to him by the T.V. interviewer (in one case I believe it was Glenn Beck), but answered them very clearly and very rationally!  His primary concern appeared to be not his own termination, but the questionable ethics of what the administration was trying to do with some of the taxpayer's money (some of the TARP funds, in this case). But when I heard these sorts of  accusations being made against the inspector general alarm bells immediately began going off in my head , because I am old enough to remember other government leaders who used to routinely make strikingly similar allegations in order to dispense with their own critics or political opponents (i.e., anyone who was inconvenient to them). ...That's right, I suddenly recalled, they were the leaders of the old Soviet Union !  Is that the direction our own government is now headed in?! Given that we do have good reason to believe that Mr. Walpin's ethical objections were proving inconvenient to the administration's current plans, do have reason to believe that some of those objections were well-founded, do know that his dismissal was not appropriately handled, in a transparent way, in accordance with the law, and do NOT have any good reason to believe the administration's claim that the inspector general has recently been "confused" or "disoriented" at all, it certainly does appear that way!   And one final note: No American of good will wants to believe that our own government leaders are actually capable of behaving like fascists, or communist dictators, but if our Founders were right when they famously warned that "eternal vigilance" is the price we must pay for our liberty, then keeping a keen eye on government actions and statements such as these is a price that ALL Americans should be more than willing to pay. After all, it is just possible that it isn't Mr. Walpin but his superiors in the White House who have actually gotten "confused and disoriented". It could be that they have fallen prey to the delusion that the American taxpayer's money actually belongs to them, or have forgotten that "we, the people" can and will hold them to account for what they choose to do with it!

President Obama and his ideological cohorts deny that we are a Christian nation, yet still want to talk about our 'common values and ideals'. Here is my response:  Until and unless the pinhead liberals and 'progressives' like Obama wake up to the fact that our 'common values and ideals' have ALWAYS been CHRISTIAN values and ideals, and to the fact that truth is by its very NATURE exclusive (e.g. if 2+2=4, then it does NOT equal 5,6,7,8, or whatever we might WANT it to equal!), their is little hope of preventing their senseless slide into subjectivism and the tyranny of 'tolerance' (i.e., the tyrannical demand that ALL views must be regarded as somehow EQUALLY true lest some be seen as FALSE, and therefore INFERIOR!).  My only hope is that they don't drag the REST of us ( those of us who have NOT yet abandoned REASON for the sake of 'togetherness' or 'sensitivity' or 'diversity') down into the quicksand of relativism WITH them!

Throughout American history the United States has been feared, envied, respected, admired, or condemned by many other countries, and for fairly obvious reasons. But now, for perhaps the first time in all of American history, our President and his cabinet members and officials are eliciting an altogether different sort of response on the world stage:  laughter, scorn, and ridicule! A few days ago the Treasury Secretary of the United States, addressing a large group of economics students in China, attempted to assure the students that Chinese investments and assets in the United States remained safe and 'secure'. The Chinese (appropriately, some would say!) responded with laughter and derision!  Shortly after that, in a speech given overseas, President Obama assured the world that the country of Iran has "legitimate energy concerns" which might, he seemed to imply, somehow justify that nation's allegedly 'peaceful' pursuit of nuclear 'power'. Since every educated person in the world is well aware of the fact that the nation of Iran is practically floating on a sea of oil and natural gas, that comment must have given a lot of people around the world (including the Iranian leaders themselves) a pretty good chuckle!  And now some accomodating agency of our federal government, no doubt with our president's approval, decided to prepare a detailed list of our own nuclear facilities and stockpiles and present it to the IAEA, which instead ("oops!") somehow ended up being posted on the Internet instead! (Very amusing for some people, wouldn't you say?). And what was our government's rationale for doing this, you ask?  Get this: they say it was an attempt to 'lead by example', and to 'encourage' rogue states like Iran and North Korea to do the same!  (Yes, that makes perfect sense. Of course we should reveal our secrets and vulnerabilities to the world! That way the lunatic fanatics running countries like Iran and North Korea will see our fine, upstanding example and be so impressed that they will want to voluntarily emulate our behavior!). ...The Iranian and North Korean leaders (not to mention the Russians and Chinese) must be getting a real belly laugh over U.S. actions of this sort!  ...I could be wrong, Mr. President, but I was under the impression that we were supposed to be trying to deter America's enemies (and potential enemies), rather than trying to keep them amused?  ...Was I wrong?

  The idea that all fairminded and reasonable Americans should pretend to ignore the fact that homosexuality is, quite obviously, a disgusting and unnatural perversion and misuse of our human sexual impulses ( as though our reproductive organs do not exist in order to enable us to reproduce!), or else be labelled 'homophobic', 'intolerant', 'judgmental', or 'puritannical bigots', is an idea which is, in an audacious display of the most blatant hypocrisy, routinely championed by those very liberals and 'gay' activists who publicly boast of their own fairmindedness, charity, and 'tolerance'!  ...But the truth is that it is an idea which, for the sake of rational discourse, moral consistency, and, yes, fairmindedness, should be immediately consigned to the trash heap of history, along with a whole host of other self-serving and hedonistic modern biases.  ...And, just in case some of those 'tolerant' and 'fairminded' liberals and 'gays' who might happen to read this cannot resist the impulse to start calling me disparaging names, I suppose I ought to thank such people in advance for helping to prove my point!  But one final note to all of the 'gays' and liberals out there who might feel 'offended' by something I have said:  I bear you no ill will on a personal level. I desire only what is truly best for you. My sole purpose in writing such essays is, as always, merely to attempt to address certain important social, moral, political, and religious issues as honestly, rationally, and forthrightly as I can.

The very term 'gay marriage' is essentially an oxymoron. Taken literally it would mean 'a homosexual union between a man and a woman'! That the term 'marriage' (or some foreign language equivalent of it) properly refers to a special type of union between a man and a woman is NOT merely MY opinion or MY belief; it is the virtually universal understanding of people of ALL cultures throughout ALL of human history. And just as you cannot change a dog into a cat just by calling it one, you cannot change a homosexual relationship (or any other relationship) into a marriage just by calling it one either! Marriage customs have of course varied somewhat from culture to culture and at different periods of history, but marriage has never been understood by any major world culture to refer to any sort of a relationship between people of the same sex! The homosexual activists ( and the courts!) can say whatever they want, but there will never be any such thing as a 'gay marriage', because that would refer to a homosexual union between a man and a woman, which is clearly impossible!  And if the homosexual activists take the view that it is okay to arbitrarily redefine words to serve their own controversial purposes, why don't we who oppose them change the word 'gay' back to its original meaning of 'happy and frolicsome'? Given that definition of the word I heartily approve of gay marriages, but have lot of reservations about gay homosexuals! And one final point: the oft repeated claim that homosexuals are somehow 'discriminated against' or denied their 'equal rights' in this country because they are not allowed to get married is misleading at best, because the truth is that a homosexual man in the United States, like any other single man in the United States, is legally free to marry any woman he chooses, so long as she herself is of age, is single, and is willing to give her consent! And the same of course applies to homosexual women: If they choose to stop practicing homosexuality and to marry some eligible young man, no law will prevent them from doing so! So it is plain to see that, as a matter of law, homosexuals already have the same marriage rights as anyone else in the country does! The fact that the types of peculiar and unnatural relationships which they seem to prefer are not commonly referred to as 'marriages' is properly an issue of custom and semantics rather than one of law, since, as I have already pointed out, arbitrarily (or even legally) changing the meaning of a word does NOT  change the nature of the thing referred to, otherwise some court could change a dog into a cat simply by changing the legal definitions of the words! ...But a more slippery slope could scarcely even be imagined than to start allowing courts to arbitrarily change the meanings of well understood and universally accepted words! Given that degree of authority the courts may well someday choose to arbitrarily redefine the words 'life, liberty, and happiness' to be legally synonymous with the words 'death', 'slavery', and 'misery'! (Wouldn't that be nice!?).  No, we must INSIST, as though our lives, our liberties, and our abilities to meaningfully communicate depended upon it, that at least certain very important words (like the word 'MARRIAGE') retain their fixed and traditional meanings.  Why? ...Because our lives, our liberties, and our abilities to meaningfully communicate with each other DO depend upon it!