"On my honor, I will do my best, to do my duty to God and my country and to obey the scout law;  to help other people at all times and to keep myself physically strong, mentally awake, and morally straight." - Boy Scout Oath

He has honor if he holds himself to an ideal of conduct though it is inconvenient, unprofitable, or dangerous to do so.”  Walter Lippmann

"Reputation is what other people know about you. Honor is what you know about yourself.  The friction tends to arise when the two are not the same. There is no more hollow feeling than to stand with your honor shattered at your feet while soaring public reputation wraps you in rewards. That’s soul-destroying. The other way around is merely very, very irritating.” - Lois Bujold

When our nation was founded, no one would have found the words above to be unusual or even worthy of comment.  We were founded on the Puritan ethic where a failure of honor was a failure before God.  In the Christian religion, God is the synonymous of truth.  The sins of lying, cheating, and stealing are 3 of the 10 commandments.  In addition, the base religion that founded this nation spoke of duty to God as well as duty to man.  This tradition and these teachings led directly to the words of the scout oath.  It enjoins scouts to do their duty to God and to their nation.  In that tradition, personal wants are not only not emphasized, but they are even called the Cardinal sins of lust, gluttony, greed, envy, sloth, pride, and wrath.  Each of these is a sin because it is giving in to the base animal instincts and rejecting those duties set upon us by God.
 
As time has passed, our society has changed.  The national elites reject religion and mock the virtues that founded our nation.  In place of those, we are told "be true to yourself" and "if it feels good, do it."  This simply exalts the Cardinal sins of the past into the secular virtues of the present.

And this is where we are today.  On the right, we have those who see duty to God and country.  This is the reason that charitable civic organizations, the military, and fundamentalist religious groups are overwhelmingly conservative.  It is the reason that the intelligentsia, atheists, "feel good" churches, and people with non-standard sexuality are overwhelmingly on the left.

In his most recent blog, Brian R discusses how our politicians lie to us, and betray the will of the people.  This is what prompted this essay, but it is part and parcel of the same subject.  Politicians do this because they gain, with their power, the belief that what they want and need supersedes their duty to God and Country.  They fight important programs that would help the country to stop opponents from gaining an advantage.  They take bribes and abuse their offices.  They ignore the will of the people and substitute the good of themselves and their party.  And this is not exclusive to the left.  The ones on the right are corrupted by the power as well.

Lippmann wrote that honor demands us to act even when it is inconvenient, unprofitable, or dangerous.  Ask yourself the last time that any major politician has acted in one of these cases.  The only one that had major position and took major risk is Joe Lieberman.  Others try and are destroyed or cave before the destruction happens.  As a class, the political elite duck and cover and try to spin their way around such problems..  I voted for it before I voted against it...  It depends on what the definition of is is...  And so many many more.

Again, we have to look at the difference between the left and right here.  What happens on the right when there is a scandal?  The politician is hounded out of town.  There is no sanctuary for a Republican sinner.  And the left?  They are defended with "who does it hurt", and "everyone does it", and "look at him, he is just as bad."

But let us not simply point at the politicians.  Cheating is rampant.  There are whole web sites dedicated to providing term papers and theses for people to lazy to do the work themselves.  Our military academies have cheating and sex scandals.  The media glorifies those who act for their own aggrandizement and ignores those who sacrifice for others.  See our brave soldiers as opposed to Paris Hilton and her ilk.

Even the Lord Of The Rings, a set of books that focused on duty and honor had to have the characters act out of self interest.  I have heard that it was because the powers that be thought that acting out of honor would be unrealistic.  Thus Theoden acted out of fear rather than his duty to fulfil oaths made.  Faramir took Frodo almost home to gain the ring instead of recognizing the evil of the ring and forswearing it and it's dark power.  Even Arwen Evenstar (Thanks Scottie) almost forswore her oath to Aaragorn and left for the West until she saw what she would lose (her child).

Our nation can go one of three ways.  It can continue it's decline in lock step with Europe and be replaced by the emerging peoples of Asia and the Middle East.  Conversely, we could have a massive catastrophe that overshadows anything from 9-11 with millions and tens of millions dead.  This could rally those who take the easy way and ignore duty.

The final choice would be bloody revolution followed by a dictatorship of the right or the left.  In this case, duty will be congruent with self interest.  If the dictator says do it, I will or I will die....

Regardless, change is coming.  The world does not stay stable for anyone.  Nations change over the year as Rome did from a Republic to a theocratic dictatorship, to finally a decadent decayed nation.  Britain ruled the world and is now a second or third class power.  China was the splendor of the orient, then a colonial empire, and now resurgent.  What possible reason is there to believe that we are immune?

God save the USA.

I have been considering a number of issues over the past year.  Who will run, who will win, and why have been high on my radar.  I have come to the conclusion that policies, positions, and political parties are close to meaningless.

Sure, they matter to the 70% of the population who are staunch Republicans or Democrats, but those folks matter very little in the general election.  After all, most of us would rather be boiled in oil than vote for Hillabeast or Osama Obama.  And most Move On types feel the same about all of our candidates.  It is that 30% in the middle who are not paying any attention to politics till shortly before the election who really matter.

So, what buys them?  Everyone has good sound bytes.  Everyone has their attack ads.  Everyone has their talking heads pumping them up.  So that is kind of a wash.  So what is it?  My contention is that it is personal charisma and the ability of the candidate to make the public trust and like them.

Of the candidates this year, I see only two that have that type of Hollywood personality, and those are Obama and Thompson.

Lets take a look at the elections since Nixon left in disgrace and see what we find.

Jerry Ford pardoned Nixon and was an uninspiring speaker.  He was easy to stick with the label of being clumsy (even though he was an athlete) because of his quiet, almost goofy personality.  Fortunately for him, the race was close because Jimma was pretty dull too.  That one turned on the simple factor of the pardon.

The next race was Ronaldus Maximus against a second term for Jimma.  Reagan was considered by the pundits to be a lightweight with no gravatus.  A second class thinker and not able to match Jimma in the brains department.  But what did the people see?  They saw a self assured, capable communicator.  So much that he got the nickname of "the great communicator".  People heard him and when he went over the heads of the congress and asked the people to support him, he got it.  This against the (once again) dull Carter.  Who won?  If you can't answer that, get off this site NOW!  Reagan by 20% of the popular vote and 90% to 10% in the electorial college.

Once again Reagan ran.  This time against Walter (the tank) Mondale.  Such an inspiring candidate.  Such charisma.  Such..... snore......  And the result?  A bigger landslide than before.

Now we come to Pappa Bush vs. little Duckie Dukakis.  Bush had been the VP and promised a 3rd term for Reagan policies.   Again, both pretty dry and boring candidates, but with the love of Reagan, Pappa got in with a respectable margin.  But his communications skills destroyed him and dropped his 90% approval ratings into the cellar.

An anomaly happened the next year.  Billy ran against Pappa with Ross (black helicopter) Perot.  Pappa stayed boring while Billy the Music Man smoozed the people and took the Democrats and a lot of the independents.  Those independents who were looking for straight talk and no lies could not pick Billy, but those went to the wild and crazy H. Ross dooming Pappa to failure.

Now we get close to today.  Billy the snake charmer against a man who needed viagra to give him enough oomph to make us believe he was not comatose.  Again, Billy won, even picking up most of the independents who had gone for Perot.

Finally, we get to our current glorious leader.  He has had to face two towers of mush in Albert (wooden man) Gore and + John (I am not a coward, or a traitor) Kerry.   In both cases, it was razor close.  None of the three candidates set the world on fire, and against Gore, it truly was a toss up.  Against Kerry, the events of 9/11 and the war were still fresh and he got that boost.

As I said earlier, I see the two candidates who have the charisma needed to win being Thompson and Obama.  So, why will Thompson win?  Simply because he will not be facing Obama.  He will be facing the Hillabeast.  Remember, I am talking about the uninterested masses.  They move, but the base does not.  And Hillary has the machine and the ability to destroy her competition.  She also has the will and dishonesty to use whatever means are necessary to win.  That coupled with Obama's lack of experience means that this is Hillary's nomination to lose.

If the election is Thompson vs. Obama, all bets are off.  But if it is a very wooden and scripted Hillary against a great speaker and actor who exudes trust, I call it a landslide for Thompson.

There is a cliche about in the world that is applied to everything from staffing your business, to programming your computers, to military operations.  That cliche is "Stop the Bleeding".  It comes from the emergency room and from first responders where the first duty when reacting to a medical crisis is to stabilize the patient so they don't die and don't continue to get into worse shape than they already were.  This is an important concept.

As I said, it applies to many different things.  In running a business, if you are losing customers, the first priority is NOT to build a new product or to come up with a comprehensive plan to make your company double in revenues.  No, the first priority is to find out why the customers are leaving and to come up with a plan to stop their departure.  Other things can follow, but if you don't take the first step, all other steps are meaningless because you are out of business.

This applies to the immigration debate as well.  Our border is bleeding illegals to the tune of tens and hundreds of thousands a week.  And Congress wants that comprehensive plan to solve all problems and give sunshine and light to the world.  Never mind stopping the bleeding, lets figure out a long term strategy.

My proposal is simple.  First, with the money already allocated and the permission already granted, we need to close off the southern border.  I know that it will not be perfect and that some will get through, but we don't enforce laws against rape, robbery, and murder because they will be perfect and no one will ever again be the victim of a crime, we do it because it is the law.  This is the first step of stopping the bleeding.

At the same time, I believe that we should pass a law that says by January 1, 2008 we must have a photograph of each person holding a social security number on file and that anyone who hires a worker or independent contractor is responsible for looking at the name, age, and photo of each employee in their employ to confirm their identity.  After January 1, 2008 the head of any company that hires an illegal shall be subject to 1 day in jail per illegal employee.  Thus, if you are the CEO of a lawn firm who hires 20 illegals, you will be subject to 20 days in jail.  If you are the CEO of Armor Meat and have 10,000 employees, you are subject to 10,000 days (27+ years) in jail.

We have seen what happened when Sarbanes-Oxley came into law.  CEOs suddenly had focus on knowing details of the accounting operations and millions of man hours were spent.  The same would happen with this.

With these two occurrences, we would see the desire to cross the border be reduced and we would see the ability to cross the border decreased.  The only people crossing would be criminals running drugs or people trying to get to family in the US.  This is a much smaller and more workable number than what we have now.  In addition, many of those in the US would go home as the jobs dry up, further eliminating the folks who are not here to become citizens but just for the money.

Once the patient is stabilized, we can consider all of the things that the Immigration bill contains.  Guest worker provisions, increased ability to become citizens, etc.  I know... I know that my legislators tell me that the border security is in the bill.  But it has been there before and it has all been lies.  HEY WASHINGTON!  WE DON'T TRUST YOU!  Prove that the border is secure and we will entertain other ideas and plans.  But your promises get no traction any more.