Monthly Archives: September 2021

by

Daily Broadside | Six Practical Things All of Us Can Do to Prepare for What’s Coming

Daily Verse | Hosea 7:2
But they do not realize
    that I remember all their evil deeds.
Their sins engulf them;
    they are always before me.

Happy Thursday, Broadsiders! Since being beset in ice suggests our Bahamas cruise went off course, won’t you join me for a jog on the Promenade deck to keep warm?

I’m painfully aware that most of my blogging simply breaks down the news of the moment, peppered with disbelief and some sass. What I don’t offer much of is answers, which frustrates me because I often complain to my computer screen that the commentary I’m reading does a great job analyzing and diagnosing the problem, but doesn’t offer any solution.

I’ve discovered that’s hard to do, because we live in a dynamic and ever-changing world, and culture doesn’t change over night. What can you do when one party steals an election? What can you do when one party demonizes your half of the national population? What can you do when one party acts unconstitutionally as a standard practice? When one party seeks to turn us into a socialist state?

There aren’t any easy answers. Nevertheless I’m sometimes asked, “So what do we do?”

My first response is, “Pray.” I think our society as a whole ignores the efficacy of prayer, myself included.

Look to the Lord and his strength; seek his face always. (1 Chronicles 16:11)

Most of us are looking for some kind of direct action to take that will effectively slow or stop the infrastructure from any further rot. We want immediate results and prayer requires faith, discipline and patience. But God will not be rushed.

The Lord is not slow in keeping his promise, as some understand slowness. Instead he is patient with you, not wanting anyone to perish, but everyone to come to repentance. (2 Peter 3:9)

Unfortunately, there isn’t a quick fix to the situation we find ourselves in. Even if the Orange Savior, Donald J. Trump, were to make a comeback in 2024 (Save America!), he only has one four-year term available. I’m not saying that it wouldn’t help to have him in office again — it most likely would — but we can’t unwind 80 years of decay in just four.

Doug Wilson, whose blog I’ve recommended before, wrote something the other day that I thought would be very helpful for all of us to consider. Seven Ways to Prepare Your Family for What’s Coming is a thoughtful post on some things that Christians (and those who are beginning to see that the foxhole only provides so much protection) can do.

I will briefly list them here with a partial quote from his description of each one. I encourage you to click through to read the entire post. (Please note that although Wilson’s title says “Seven Ways,” I find only six.)

  1. Deal With Personal Sin. “Learn to confess your sins to God, honestly and forthrightly. He sees down to the sludge layers at the bottom of your heart anyway, so there is no sense trying to blow sunshine at Him. Simply acknowledge it. Ask Him to deal with it as only He can deal with it. You know He wants to.”
  2. Minimize Encumbrances. “In ordinary times, it is good and proper to use up all your available bandwidth with various projects, challenges, commitments, and so on. But now may be the time to streamline … you are freeing up available bandwidth so that you can protect your family more effectively.”
  3. Stock Up On the Word. “Now is the time to become serious about storing up the Scriptures in your heart and mind … In addition, you should be a regular, diligent, focused Bible reader.”
  4. Meet Regularly With God’s Umasked People to Worship Him. “Ironically, the willingness of countless pastors and elders to shut down worship, restrict numbers coming to worship, require masks (and/or vaccinations) in order to worship, has been a true unveiling.”
  5. Do Nothing That Feeds Your Fears. “It would be better to go into a time of trouble with a true evangelical confidence, and no freeze dried food, than to have a basement full of freeze dried food that represented, in a rather tangible way, the sum total of all your fears.”
  6. Assume the Posture of Victors. “We should be preparing in our hearts for that glorious moment—after fierce fighting—when we raise our flag on the top of a spiritual Iwo Jima.”

What can we do? Start with these six activities. Add to them prayer, as I mention above. And, as Wilson says in a couple of other posts, “don’t take the bait.”

I would also buy ammo. Really — not kidding. I’ve got some other things in mind that we can do, but those are for another post another time.

For now, consider these seven things a good place to start.

by

Daily Broadside | New Book Says Milley Usurped Trump’s Authority

Daily Verse | Daniel 12:3
“Those who are wise will shine like the brightness of the heavens, and those who lead many to righteousness, like the stars for ever and ever.”

Happy mid-week my friends. The gnome in my garden won’t give me back my copy of The Hobbit.

We live in an increasingly lawless land, led by men and women who not only overstep the boundaries of their constitutional roles, but actively undermine duly elected leaders. It is not too much to say that the United States cannot function as designed if some “leaders” disregard the rule of law and other “leaders” let them get away with doing so. Not only can our nation not function, it will fall apart and land most heavily on innocent civilians who are considered the “out group” — namely, anyone who questions or resists what the party in power is doing.

The latest troubling example of this lawlessness is a claim in a new book that US Army General Mark Milley-Vanillie, Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, secretly reassured the Chinese that he would warn them if President Donald J. Trump planned to attack them.

Milley, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, “was certain that Trump had gone into a serious mental decline in the aftermath of the election,” authors Bob Woodward and Robert Costa of the Washington Post write in their forthcoming book, “Peril,” set for release on September 21.

For the record, I think Woodward is a hack. But if this is true, it’s big. Milley, an Army general, plays psychologist and takes matters into his own hands.

These reports suggest that Milley may have over-stepped his role as the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, a role that advises the president and defense secretary but is not part of the chain of command for operational decisions like the launching of nuclear weapons.

He “may have” overstepped his role? Ya think? A role that “advises” the Commander in Chief and his defense secretary, but isn’t “part of the chain of command” goes behind his Commander’s back and conducts diplomacy without anyone’s knowledge based on his lone psychological assessment of a sitting president?

Milley was so concerned that Trump might start a war with China, he privately called his Chinese counterpart twice to assure him that the US would not strike, per the book.

Who’s running the country? Not Milley — he wasn’t elected. He went rogue. He doesn’t have the authority to be making policy. This is treasonous behavior. He actually interfered with the military action Trump could take as president.

But hey, why not? The Deep State had wrapped itself around Trump’s ankles for five years.

This is the same guy who “advised” the dementia patient currently in the White House about Afghanistan and I don’t hear him fretting by saying he is certain that Biden has “gone into a serious mental decline,” even though everyone else and the family dog can see it.

And get a load of this further reporting by CNN (with my emphasis):

Milley’s fear that Trump could do something unpredictable came from experience. Right after Trump lost the election, Milley discovered the President had signed a military order to withdraw all troops from Afghanistan by January 15, 2021, before he left the White House.

The memo had been secretly drafted by two Trump loyalists. No one on the national security team knew about it, according to the book. The memo was eventually nullified, but Milley could not forget that Trump had done an end run around his top military advisers.

“Trump had done an end run around his top military advisers.” Can’t have the duly elected president and COMMANDER IN CHIEF making decisions about troop movements!

Pulling the troops out between November and January 15 may not have been smart military strategy, but that’s not for an “adviser” to decide! It’s certainly not an “end run,” as though the president needed their approval to proceed — it’s the president’s authority and responsibility as the military commander!

Here is the key graph: “The authors write, ‘Milley was overseeing the mobilization of America’s national security state without the knowledge of the American people or the rest of the world.'” And, I might add, the President!

This is frightening. Who, exactly, is in charge? How do we know? If we have military brass operating on their own, outside the chain of command (and definitely outside the scope of the U.S. Constitution), then we can’t ever be sure that there won’t be a coup next time a Republican is in office because some general decides that the president is in “mental decline” according to his own personal observations.

We are heading pell mell into a world of hurt right now.

Brace yourselves for impact.

by

Daily Broadside | Bush 43’s Appalling Comparison is Revealing

Daily Verse | Daniel 6:23b
And when Daniel was lifted from the den, no wound was found on him, because he had trusted in his God.

It’s Tuesday my friends. I’ve had enough of kumquats in the fruit salad.

I wasn’t always interested in politics. In many ways, I was your typical naïve citizen who believed that all of our presidents and congressmen were good men and women who sought the best for the country, revered our founding documents, and were worthy of the office.

It wasn’t until later that I discovered that many of them were scoundrels who played dirty out of sight of the public. President Lyndon B. Johnson signed historic civil right legislation but predicted that, by doing so, he would “have those n*ggers voting Democratic for the next 200 years.” Then there was Richard M. Nixon, who infamously lied about what and when he knew about the Watergate break-in and eventually resigned in disgrace as he faced certain impeachment and removal from office.

Still later, as I matured in my political knowledge and understanding of how our government operates, I began to see that even Republicans — the party of Lincoln! — and, ostensibly I thought, the keepers of tradition and conservative values — weren’t “conservative” as a whole. There were conservatives, of course, in the Republican Party, but there were also moderates and liberal Republicans — even libertarians!

And then I began to see a frustrating pattern. Democrats would be shredding the Constitution, our traditions, our morals, and the Republicans would make a lot of noise opposing the Democrats — but nothing would change. Republicans just sit there and act as if they’re powerless to do anything.

In other words, it slowly dawned on me that many Republicans were part of the “establishment” just as the Democrats were. And that awareness left me feeling politically homeless.

I write all of that to set up what has been a further disappointment coming out of the 20th anniversary of September 11. Former president George W. Bush gave a short speech at the 9/11 memorial service for Flight 93 in Pennsylvania on Saturday. Bush was president when the Islamic jihadist terrorist attacks were carried out, and he helped set the tone and the direction for the nation in the immediate aftermath of the devastation. He was generally lauded for his leadership then.

But now this speech.

In his brief comments, Bush likened the American citizens who breached Capitol Hill on January 6 to the radical Islamic jihadists who flew suicide missions on September 11, killing nearly 3,000 innocent people.

There is little cultural overlap between violent extremists abroad and violent extremists at home. But in their disdain for pluralism, in their disregard for human life, in their determination to defile national symbols, they are children of the same foul spirit and it is our continuing duty to confront them.

That’s right. George W. Bush compared American citizens protesting a clearly questionable election result to Islamic extremists. The only people to die that day were two of the protestors, with one being shot by a Capitol Hill officer and the other possibly being killed by Capitol Hill police using “a highly noxious gas on protesters.”

The protestors had no guns, didn’t kill anyone (not even the officers who subsequently died of other causes!) and most simply wandered through the building like lost tourists. Those that did cause damage should be charged and held accountable, as many are.

But it wasn’t an insurrection.

That didn’t stop Bush, whose comparison was appalling. While he didn’t specifically mention January 6, his words implied who he had in mind by leading with “their disdain for pluralism.” He didn’t mention BLM or Antifa, either, and we know those two movements, which celebrate “pluralism” and disdain whites, have been more destructive to our national bonds than anything that happened in January.

Bush is part of the swamp and his comments demonstrate a frightening fact: it’s not just the Democrats who despise conservatives — it’s the entire ruling class that they’re a part of, including men like George W. Bush.

Our political machine is rotten through and through, and those fighting against it from the inside, like Donald J. Trump was, are the exception.

“So interesting to watch former President Bush, who is responsible for getting us into the quicksand of the Middle East (and then not winning!), as he lectures us that terrorists on the ‘right’ are a bigger problem than those from foreign countries that hate America, and that are pouring into our Country right now,” Trump said in a statement distributed by Save America PAC.

[…]

“He shouldn’t be lecturing anybody!” Trump added.

George W. Bush agrees with the illegitimate junta that America’s greatest threat are patriots who dispute the last presidential election and are therefore “domestic terrorists” or, as some have called them, “the American Taliban.”

We are under the illusion that there are two main political parties fighting each other for power and influence, but when you get right down to it, they are all part of the same untouchable elite who disdain “Normal” Americans.

It’s deeply disappointing, but instructive.

by

Daily Broadside | “You’re Going to be Happy” With Who’s Running in 2024

Daily Verse | Daniel 2:43
“And just as you saw the iron mixed with the baked clay, so the people will be a mixture and will not remain united, any more than iron mixes with clay.”

Happy Monday, Broadsiders! Sawgrass is not a musical genre for southern carpenters.

As I’ve written before, I voted for Donald J. Trump in 2020, although I opposed him in 2016. Since then, I’ve had mixed feelings about him, although mostly positive because of his America First policies. Like many people, I think he could use more verbal discipline but, at the same time, I admire him for his willingness to fight back against the anti-Americans spread throughout our nation — including the Deep State, the not-so-deep state like Nancy Pelosi, Chuck Schumer, Bernie Sanders, Adam Schiff and the current occupant of the White House, and the national media.

Given the choice, I’d rather have Trump in office right now. Give me gas at a $1.87 and I’ll tolerate the mean tweets, rather than watching Biden shred what’s left of the constitutional order as he restores our “norms.”

Everybody is liking the return to our norms, right?

As I watch Trump in exile, it seems to me that he’s engaging in a parallel presidency. Traditionally, once a president exits office, they keep a very low profile, refrain from criticizing their successors, write their memoires and maybe engage in some kind of volunteer public service. Jimmy Carter is best known for his work with Habitat for Humanity after his one term. George W. Bush is known for his work with U.S. military veterans since leaving the White House.

Trump, as is typical with him, has defied the traditions associated with former presidents. He and his organization have released powerful videos defining how awful Joe Biden is, Trump has given interviews in which he comments on current affairs, he still holds rallies with thousands in attendance, endorses political candidates, marked 9/11 by visiting first responders and published his own videotaped remarks; offers remarks during events like Sean Feucht’s “Let Us Worship” on the National Mall yesterday; and commentated on the Evander Holyfield-Vitor Belfort novelty boxing match. Plus, Trump merchandise is still selling like crazy.

Of course, he doesn’t have the executive powers of the presidency he once held, so his role is necessarily constrained. But he’s the de facto head of the Republican Party with millions of people still supporting him and wanting to see him run again.

I don’t think it’s a secret that millions of us believe that the 2020 presidential election was illegally tampered with and that Biden was wrongfully installed in the White House. (Even if you don’t believe that, you can’t deny that Biden is the absolute worst person to occupy the Oval Office in the history of the United States. Well, you can deny it, but no reasonable person does.) It’s also no secret that Trump has been teasing his plans to run in 2024, and during his visit to the police precinct in New York City on Saturday, he probably provided the clearest hint yet that he plans to run (my emphasis):

Asked by a police officer if he plans to launch a comeback in 2024, or perhaps run for New York City mayor, Trump responded “that’s a tough question.”

But then he said “actually, for me, it’s an easy question. I mean, I know what I’m going to do, but I’m not supposed to be talking about it yet from the standpoint of campaign finance laws, which, frankly, are ridiculous.”

And the former president, as he’s said numerous times already this year of his potential campaign decision, added that “I think you’re going to be happy.”

Put that together with the ads he’s running, the appearances he’s making and the way he’s staying connected to his supporters — and I think without a doubt he’s going to run in 2024.

Is that a good thing?

On balance, I think Trump is good for our politics. He represents an old-school barroom brawler that has been lost in the political machine of today that pumps out soft men and women who sit on the collective butts and collect paychecks from taxpayers but don’t deliver more freedom and more prosperity for the nation. They, in fact, do all they can to gum up our freedoms, pay political favors to keep themselves in power, and take more of our money through taxes to enrich themselves and other nations.

I don’t relish the prospect of the Deep State going after Trump again and Nancy Pelosi siccing her rabid party on him through impeachment charades.

But one has to wonder: if it wasn’t Trump and instead was, say, Ron DeSantis — what’s to prevent the Deep State from doing the same to him? Now that the Deep State understands its power and knows it can harass and hobble a president for the entire length of his term, why wouldn’t it mess with any Republican’s presidency?

On the other hand, “F Biden” is trending on Twitter, whole stadiums of students are chanting “F*** Joe Biden,” his poll numbers are disastrous, and Democrat strategist Douglas Schoen is sounding the alarm about the 2022 midterm elections.

It doesn’t mean Trump is a shoe-in. But at this point, I’d vote for Trump if he is the candidate.

Trump needs to make better choices regarding whom he surrounds himself with if he wins the White House again, but we need someone who can fight the enemy within. Trump has proven he can and will do that.

To quote Lincoln about Grant, “I can’t spare this man. He fights!”

by

Daily Broadside | Never Forget 9-11-2001

Daily Verse | Ezekiel 43:12
This is the law of the temple: All the surrounding area on top of the mountain will be most holy. Such is the law of the temple.

It’s Friday, September 10. Since I do not write on the weekends, I am posting my annual tribute to those who lost their lives in the terrorist attack of September 11, 2001. May we never forget.

And please pray for our nation, which is led by unserious men and women who don’t understand the nature of the threat that is still there, leaving all of us less safe and more vulnerable than we were just one month ago.

by

Daily Broadside | You’re Not the Result of Time + Chance

Daily Verse | Ezekiel 37:26
I will make a covenant of peace with them; it will be an everlasting covenant.

It’s Thursday and I want you to know that guy over there in the shades wants you to play pickleball with him.

Let’s take a break from the political world and the ongoing disaster that is the Biden administration, and look at the question of how we got here, with “we” meaning human beings. I don’t assume that all of you who read this blog believe in God or, conversely, that you all believe in the theory of evolution.

Frankly, I don’t know what you believe.

I suppose that for a lot of people, the question of where “life” came from, and specifically human life, might not even find its way to the forefront in their thinking. We just “are” and we muddle along as best we can. But lots of people wonder about it; even NASA is wondering if “life” once existed on Mars and, if so, how it got there.

I don’t dabble much in apologetics on this blog, which has a much tighter focus on politics, but it does have a relationship to what I write about. I believe that almost everything we see happening in our culture today is the result of an abandonment of the centrality of God — and, specifically, of Jesus Christ — by our society.

I say that this blog is an examination of the intersection of faith, culture and politics. If you read my brief “About” page, you’ll see that I believe that culture is a reflection of faith, and politics is a reflection of culture.

I follow Jesus Christ and come at life as an evangelical Christian. It’s from that perspective that I comment on national politics and American culture. If politics is downstream from culture (as Andrew Breitbart believed), then culture is downstream from faith. In fact, said Richard John Neuhaus, “Culture is the root of politics, and religion is the root of culture.”

So if culture reflects the faith (or lack thereof) in a society, then it’s important to understand the reasons for why a society either embraces or rejects faith. And that’s the connection to apologetics, which is not about saying, “sorry,” but about defending the Christian faith with reason, facts and logic.

Are there solid reasons to believe in the God of the Bible?

Biblically-grounded Christians believe that God created the whole universe ex nihilo, out of nothing, including human beings, as Genesis 1:27 testifies:

So God created mankind in his own image,
    in the image of God he created them;
    male and female he created them.

If true, that means there is a personal, powerful and creative Being who designed men and women and the environment they inhabit. Also, if true, it seems like we should expect to see evidence of design in the creation.

On the other hand, the secular alternative to the Creation narrative is that life spontaneously arose out of nothing. Life is the result of pure chance over billions of years with no Designer involved or even necessary.

One of the factors to consider as we try to determine whether the biblical account is truthful or whether the evolutionists are correct is the complexity of what we see around us. Is it rational or logical to think that the incredible intricacies and complexity we find in our world is the result of random mutations and impersonal chance over time? Or is it more rational to see that there must have been an intelligence behind the creation?

Mark Tapscott over at HillFaith.org posted an interesting link to an article in Quanta Magazine that discusses the complexity of just a single neuron. Three researchers at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem trained an artificial neural network to imitate a biological neuron. They were shocked at their findings.

[The researchers] trained an artificial deep neural network to mimic the computations of a simulated biological neuron. They showed that a deep neural network requires between five and eight layers of interconnected “neurons” to represent the complexity of one single biological neuron.

Even the authors did not anticipate such complexity. “I thought it would be simpler and smaller,” said Beniaguev. He expected that three or four layers would be enough to capture the computations performed within the cell.

Like Tapscott, I’m no scientist and don’t pretend to be one. But I can read, and what this tells me is that the sheer complexity of a single neuron far surpasses what even some of our smartest scientists assumed about them.

Tapscott goes on to suggest that “one tentative conclusion suggested by the Quanta Magazine piece and the study it describes might be expressed with something like this: Greater complexity reduces the probability of a chance explanation for the existence of a single biological cell and increases the necessity for intelligent design as the explanation.“

Intelligent Design theory posits that there must be an intelligence behind all that we see, but does not specifically name the Christian God as that intelligence (although it’s inferred). The Intelligent Design movement is led by luminaries such as Michael J. Behe (Darwin’s Black Box) and William A. Dembski (The Design Revolution).

Tapscott goes on to quote retired mathematics lecturer Julie Hannah:

In general, there is a problem with the popular belief that infinity renders anything possible. For example, monkeys typing for an infinite length of time are supposed to eventually type out any given text, but if there are 50 keys, the probability of producing just one given five-letter word is

Julie Hannah equation

This is a tremendously low probability, and it decreases exponentially when letters are added. A computer program that simulated random typing once produced nineteen consecutive letters and characters that appear in a line of a Shakespearean play, but this result took 42,162,500,000 billion years to achieve!

In other words, the probability that such complexity as we see in our universe is the result of chance + time is essentially zero “in any operational sense.”

This is not just true about a single biological neuron, but about the universe as a whole. “The physicist Lee Smolin has calculated that the odds of life-compatible numbers coming up by chance is 1 in 10229.” That number is nearly incomprehensible (1 followed by 229 zeroes):

10,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000.

Even in the face of odds like that, some people refuse to concede that it’s possible there’s a Designer. So they persist in their claims that they just haven’t discovered the incontrovertible evidence that is necessary to “prove” that the universe was formed by chance.

Back to my earlier questions: Is it rational or logical to think that the incredible intricacies and complexity we find in our world is the result of random mutations and impersonal chance over time? Or is it more rational to see that there must have been an intelligence behind the creation?

When we abandon reason and logic (one chance in 10229 means, for all intents and purposes, impossible) in favor of ideological presumptions (there is no god), we become untethered from fact and veer into conjecture. From there we begin to draw assumptions about the meaning of life that align with our worldview. If our existence is the result of random mutations and chance, then there is no god and no reason to adhere to biblical principles or consider them superior to any other set of life principles.

While over-simplified, that’s how we got to where we are today as a society and a culture. It’s the wholesale rejection of Jesus Christ at the center of our lives.

What do you think? Agree or disagree?

by

Daily Broadside | Joe Biden and the Demise of the Presidency

Daily Verse | Ezekiel 36:26
I will give you a new heart and put a new spirit in you; I will remove from you your heart of stone and give you a heart of flesh.

Happy Wednesday, my friends! As Ross Perot would say, “I’m all ears.”

That tweet from David Burge is a nearly perfect summation of what happens when the Left infiltrates any number of respected institutions. Colleges, sports, jurisprudence, the military, religion, medicine and, of course, our government. Whatever the institution is, it goes woke and the traditional, historical import is overrun.

I say “nearly perfect” because there’s another factor at work in the process of killing an institution that isn’t listed but is a significant part of the degradation: coasting on the fumes of the institution’s previously earned reputation.

Maybe it’s an extension of number four. Once you’ve cloaked yourself in the “skin suit” of the target institution, it’s the institution’s reputation upon which you base your demand for respect, not your reputation. The killer rides the earned reputation for as long as he can while consolidating power.

For example, do you go to Harvard? That’s top shelf; only the best students get an Ivy League education.

Founded on basic Christian ethics, the United States of America prospered as a nation that recognized God as the ultimate Arbiter before whom even kings and nobles must bow. Those traditional ethics have been replaced by secular ethics and a cult of victimization which, when defined, is angry self-righteous envy. Lefties are coasting on the fumes of what’s left of the grand American experiment — and there’s not a gas station in sight. Once they’ve stomped out all vestiges of historic, traditional American exceptionalism, the super structure may stand for a moment, but it will inevitably come crashing down.

I’ve spent a lot of time criticizing Joseph Robinette Biden since he was installed back in January, and it got me thinking about the office of the President of the United States of America. I think the same thing has happened to that office.

Think of men like George Washington, Thomas Jefferson, John Adams, James Madison, Andrew Jackson and Abraham Lincoln. These were giants on the national stage. They were knowledgeable, diplomatic, wise and principled, true statesmen. When we think of the president of the United States, these were the men who imbued that office with its eminence and reputation.

Over the 245 years that we’ve been a nation, that office has commanded respect from the people, and the men who occupy it are often referred to in modern times as “the most powerful man in the world.” But in the last few decades, we’ve come to see that the office has been hollowed out by some of the men who have occupied it, the latest examples being Donald Trump and Joseph Biden. Neither of them are particularly dignified, as befitting of that office. Donald Trump was brash and egotistical, but very effective in driving U.S. policy. Joe Biden is a disgraceful and inept man who is merely occupying the office because he’s not Donald Trump.

If I had to put a time stamp on when the office began to lose its luster, it would be with Lyndon Johnson, followed closely by Richard Nixon and eroded further by William Jefferson Clinton and his wife.

I remember when then-president Bill Clinton visited the Leadership Summit at Willow Creek Community Church outside of Chicago. At one point before Clinton arrived, Pastor Bill Hybels requested that attendees at least respect the office of the president, even if they couldn’t respect the man.

I think most people here and around the world have viewed the office of the president of the United States as being in the mold of the first presidents we had. But that’s no longer the case; it’s an institution that has been killed, gutted and is now being worn as a skin suit by a man who isn’t worthy of it. Joe Biden—and others before him—were merely coasting on the previously earned reputation of the office and demanding respect that they didn’t command.

That creates a tension in us. We instinctively want to respect the office but its reputation is not what it was. I don’t know about you, but I hope that some of that distinction can be recovered some day, but it all depends on the character of the man or woman who holds the office.

Our recent crop of candidates doesn’t hold out much hope for that to happen.

This doesn’t bode well for us as a country. Where do you go to get a reputation back? And if the office is no longer respected, to whom does the country look for leadership?

by

Daily Broadside | Labor Day Break Didn’t End the National Nightmare That is Afghanistan

Daily Verse | Ezekiel 30:10-11
“This is what the Sovereign Lord says:
“‘I will put an end to the hordes of Egypt
by the hands of Nebuchadnezzar king of Babylon.
He and his army—the most ruthless of nations—
will be brought in to destroy the land.'”

Happy Tuesday my friends. I may already have asked this, but it bears repeating: why are packages of bacon not resealable?

The day after a holiday feels like picking up a novel that I had put down and asking, “Where was I?”

Oh right. The demented, sour old man in the White House and his junta who are ruining this country. Joey “The Befuddled” Biden, Resident until January 2025 or until the Adderall has lost its effectiveness and his handlers can no longer hide the extent of his dementia. Check that; we can see how bad it is already and have known since his campaign that he had no legs for this role.

The appalling fallout of the Kabuki in Kabul continues, now in the form of Americans effectively being held hostage by either the Taliban or our own government — or both — as they sit on six different planes at the Mazar-i-Sharif International Airport.

“We have six airplanes at Mazar-i-Sharif airport, six airplanes, with American citizens on them as I speak, also with these interpreters, and the Taliban is holding them hostage for demands right now,” he said on Fox News Sunday morning. “State has cleared these flights, and the Taliban will not let them leave the airport.”

McCaul added that the Taliban “are not clearing the airplanes to depart” and that the people trying to flee have “sat at the airport for the last couple of days,” in part because “the Taliban want something in exchange.”

Apparently the State Dept. caused the initial delays that kept the flights from immediately leaving Afghanistan.

The White House and U.S. State Department are holding up charter planes at an airport in Afghanistan’s Mazar-i-Sharif that would transport 19 Americans and 40 SIV holders to Albania, David Rohde, the executive editor at NewYorker.com said in an interview Monday.

“I want to repeat that,” he said. “It is the State Department and the White House” holding up the planes. He said the civilian effort has been “far more ambitious, far more dynamic and far more successful than what the administration has been doing.”

On Sunday, Rep. Mike McCaul, R-Texas, told Fox News that the Taliban has blocked Americans aboard six planes at Mazar-i-Sharif International Airport. Three Americans involved in the private evacuation of those still in the country also blasted the State Department for preventing the evacuation flights from leaving the country.

Three different operators of private groups trying to evacuate Americans have said the same thing: it was the State Dept. that was making it difficult to get out.

Rick Clay, who operates the private rescue group “PlanB,” told Fox News that the State Department is preventing the flights from leaving Afghanistan. Clay has roughly 4,500 names on his manifest, 800 of which have been turned over to the U.S. State Department for vetting.

Two other American individuals separately involved in evacuation efforts made similar claims that the State Department is the sole entity preventing their charter flights from leaving Afghanistan. Fox News declined to name the two other people to avoid jeopardizing ongoing rescue efforts.

“This is zero place to be negotiating with American lives. Those are our people standing on the tarmac and all it takes is a f****ing phone call,” one of those individuals told Fox News.

What could possibly be the State Department’s reason for delaying the flights and for not allowing them to land in neighboring countries that have agreed to take in the refugees? Maybe this: “Biden doesn’t want Americans at home to know how many people he abandoned and is now directing the State Department to force countries to block private rescue flights from landing.”

If true, it’s callous and traitorous, a putrid mix of pride and power that puts his own reputation over that of the lives of fellow Americans. But as I’ve said before, this is an anti-American junta.

Even though the State Dept. eventually cleared the flights, it’s now reportedly the Taliban who are refusing to allow the flights to leave.

According to video released by CBS the Taliban will not clear the airplanes for takeoff full of American citizens and green card holders. There are a total of eleven planes being held captive and eight of them were chartered by conservative radio host Glenn Beck.

The State Department told CBS News the flights will be allowed to land in Qatar “if and when the Taliban agrees to takeoff.” A senior congressional source told CBS News that the Taliban is “basically holding them hostage to get more out of the Americans.”

This is one of the most jacked-up political failures in modern memory. Joey “The Buffoon” Biden already has blood on his hands and we all know if this had been Trump who spectacularly failed like this, Pelosi, Schumer and Schiff would be calling for impeachment (or worse).

Their silence is deafening, which just proves how relentlessly partisan they are.

by

Daily Broadside | Labor Day Edition 2021

Daily Verse | Ezekiel 28:15
You were blameless in your ways
from the day you were created
till wickedness was found in you.

Happy Monday and Happy Labor Day, 2021.

Last year I shared what I had discovered about the origins of Labor Day. Briefly, Peter J. McGuire, a carpenter and labor union leader, is credited with suggesting the idea for Labor Day in early 1882. The first Labor Day was held on September 5 that same year in New York City, with some 10,000 workers marching in a parade held at Union Square in Manhattan. Congress passed an act in 1894 recognizing the first Monday in September as Labor Day. We’ve celebrated Labor Day ever since.

So welcome to the 127th celebration of Labor Day.

What do workers gain from their toil? I have seen the burden God has laid on the human race. He has made everything beautiful in its time. He has also set eternity in the human heart; yet no one can fathom what God has done from beginning to end. I know that there is nothing better for people than to be happy and to do good while they live. That each of them may eat and drink, and find satisfaction in all their toil—this is the gift of God.

— Ecclesiastes 3:9-13

May your day be filled with the enjoyment of the fruit of your labors.

[Image credit: Austrian National Library]

by

Daily Broadside | High School Teacher: “I Have 180 Days To Turn You Into Revolutionaries”

Daily Verse | Ezekiel 18:23
“Do I take any pleasure in the death of the wicked? declares the Sovereign Lord. Rather, am I not pleased when they turn from their ways and live?”

Happy Friday, my friends! I’m thinking of opening a shop in Wyoming called “Spur of the Moment” for impulsive cowboys.

After firing Broadside after Broadside about the disaster in Afghanistan over the last couple of weeks, I’m sure you’re probably wondering if I know that other things are happening in the world. I do, but the appalling and unnecessary (but intentional) failure in Afghanistan is so beyond the pale that it warranted the emphasis.

C.S. Lewis defined integrity as “doing the right thing, even when no one is watching.” Unfortunately, you can’t trust cultural Marxists to do the right thing when no one is looking — you have to set up a sting to catch them. Project Veritas is phenomenal at setting up stings to reveal what the people in positions of power are doing behind the scenes.

Their latest example is of a high school teacher “boasting about politically indoctrinating his students at Inderkum High School.” Gabriel Gipe, who teaches an Advanced Placement Government class, told the interviewer, “I have 180 days to turn [students] into revolutionaries.”

Watch for yourself on the Project Veritas site.

I encourage you to watch the whole thing, which will be troubling for any parent who entrusts their impressionable children to the public school system. In particular, listen to two things that the overly tattooed Antifa Marxist says.

“I have an Antifa flag on my [classroom] wall and a student complained about that — he said it made him feel uncomfortable. Well, this [flag] is meant to make fascists feel uncomfortable, so if you feel uncomfortable, I don’t really know what to tell you. Maybe you shouldn’t be aligning with the values that this [flag] is antithetical to.”

See what he did there?

He replaced what we would consider a culture norm, i.e. “the values” the Antifa flag opposes (such as capitalism, hard work, personal responsibility and traditional morality and faith) with the values that the Antifa flag stands for (such as socialism, diversity, equity and “just do it” atheism). In other words, he’s telling the student that Antifa values are the norm, and if the student is uncomfortable with that, the student should think about changing his values. It’s the student who is off, not the teacher.

This is clearly indoctrination and the guy has no business whatsoever indoctrinating the kids he has in his classroom into his personal ideology. That’s not what he’s getting paid with taxpayer dollars to do.

The second thing to pay attention to is when he says, “There are three other teachers in my department that I did my credential program with — and they’re rad. They’re great people. They’re definitely on the same page.“

The school is infested with teachers who think like Mr. Gipe does.

That probably shouldn’t surprise us, but it does because we still don’t understand that the Left has been infiltrating our cultural institutions for decades, and now their “long march” is bearing its poisonous fruit. We’re naïve to think that the public schools are still teaching reading, writing and arithmetic or that teachers like Mr. Gipes are the exception.

They’re not. For instance, watch this.

Of course there are good teachers out there and of course kids are still learning some of the basics. But you only have to look at international educational surveys to see how far down the list the U.S. has fallen.

Back to Mr. Gipe. He has been placed on unpaid leave as a precursor to being terminated by the school. The Project Veritas video created an uproar in the community.

Sacramento Parents Demand Prosecution of AP History Teacher who Admits Communist Indoctrination of Students

At the intense Natomas Unified School Board meeting Wednesday evening, parents showed up in droves demanding justice for their children, demanding the teacher be fired, and even demanding criminal prosecution.

Video of furious parents at the Natomas school board meeting is available, before the board took a recess during the meeting, came back, took another recess, and then disappeared out the back door before the meeting ended, according to several parents.

It was apparent the school board did not have control over the emotional board meeting.

They didn’t have control? Good, it’s about time they didn’t have control. And it’s about time parents got involved in the school districts, replacing these woke and weasely school boards with parents who will fight the junior commies.

Another parent told the board, “this does not begin and end with him… this went on for years. Complaints were filed and nothing was done.” The parent asked for a full investigation to root this out, not just at Inderkum High School, but in the entire district. “Without warning, my daughters Constitutional Law class was changed to a Social Justice class,” he added.

“Complaints were filed and nothing was done.” That about sums up our entire educational and political institutions. Parents and concerned citizens have to be willing to step up and begin going on the offensive against the radical Left to eject them from their positions of influence.

That’s the only way that we can trust teachers and politicians to do the right thing when no one is looking.

We are a people under siege in our own country, led by a cabal of overt Marxists who hate the United States of America as envisioned by our Founders and are doing everything they can to wrest power away from We the People and hoard it unto themselves.

We need to wrest it back.

Have a good weekend.