REALITIES

There were an unusual number of traffic accidents around town this weekend, something like six. Luckily, I heard of no serious injuries.

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It didn’t surprise me that Bill O’Reilly, even after bragging that he would ask really tough questions to GOP presidential candidate Rick Perry during last night’s TV interview, asked him about tuition for Texas illegals.
A true, traditional conservative should have had no trouble answering. Perry did a little soft shoe, and O’Reilly failed to ask anything about a fence on the Texas border. Very disappointing, and added nothing to my understanding of Perry’s conservative qualifications. No doubt Perry is a good guy, and a solid, traditional Christian conservative (especially on pro-life issues) but he doesn’t seem to have a clue about just how bad and dangerous our southern border is. The highest of tech equipment will only tell us where current invasion points are, so our border guards can hightail it over to head them off at the pass – while other streams open up elsewhere. Something like trying to plug holes in a sieve with one hand. Illegals from 70 countries have been caught crossing, many from terrorist areas. We need a fence-wall like Israel – plus high tech stuff, and state and federal troops. For this reason alone I could not vote for Perry – and O’Reilly is just a little too “balanced”.

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I rarely recommend or give books away these days. I’ve found most are never read. But, once in a while one comes along that changes my mind, like Pat Buchanan’s latest “SUICIDE of a SUPERPOWER”. For anyone wishing to understand the world today, and the consequences of the recent past, this is a superb book.

Copious notes, brilliant writing, and indisputable conclusions will refresh memories and inform the reader of our future by showing our past. This will, no doubt, be Pat’s seventh New York Times best seller. I can’t remember when I last would wake up an hour early to continue reading a book.
From the Preface: “What happened to the country we grew up in?”

Like Death of the West, a decade ago, this book seeks to answer that question. But Suicide of a Superpower is being published in another time in another America. When Death of the West came out on New Year’s 2002, the nation was united and resolved. America had just swept to a bloodless victory over the Taliban and a triumphant George W. Bush had the approval of nine in ten of his countrymen....

This book is published after ten years of war in Afghanistan, eight in Iraq, the worst recession and debt crisis America has faced since the 1930s, with the nation divided and seemingly everywhere in retreat. We have entered an era of austerity and retrenchment unlike any this generation has ever known. But not only is it in the realm of economics and politics that America appears in a downward spiral. Socially, culturally, morally, America has taken on the aspect of a decadent society and a declining nation....”

“...When the faith dies, the culture dies, the civilization dies, the people die. That is the progression. And as the faith that gave birth to the West is dying in the West, peoples of European descent from the steppes of Russia to the coast of California have begun to die out, as the Third World treks north to claim the estate. The last decade provided corroborating if not conclusive proof that we are in the Indian summer of our civilization. Historian Arnold Toynbee wrote, “Civilizations die from suicide, not by murder.” And so it is. We are the Prodigal Sons who squandered their inheritance; but, unlike the Prodigal Son, we can’t go home again.”
Pat provides a sweeping study of what America is today and how we got that way. There is still time to fix things, but very little.