"In any moment of decision, the best thing you can do is the right thing. The worst thing you can do is nothing.” Theodore Roosevelt
September 10, 2014
By: Linda Case Gibbons
Which end is up? No one knows anymore.
Makes you wish for the good old days when shame was a natural part of life.
Sounds crazy, but being ashamed, when appropriate, has its place. It means you know the difference between right and wrong, between good and evil.
Used to be that if your kid was torturing and killing small animals, you knew you had a psycho in the family.
No more.
Michael Vick abused dogs in ways that no one who is normal does. He trained innocent animals to fight and kill. Starved them and hurt them.
No one normal does that.
But he’s still playing football, still being interviewed at half time.
Ray Rice clocks his girlfriend, drags her unconscious body out of an elevator and dumps her like a bag of garbage on a casino lobby floor. And people are conflicted.
Is it a bad thing, they ask? And they honestly do not know if it is or it isn’t.
Not anymore.
The media? Well, they journalistically stepped over the victim the way her fiancé-now-husband did and focused on the trivial, the inconsequential.
How long will Rice be suspended? Did the NFL commissioner know about the video, if so when, if so how, if so, huh?
Maybe his career is over? Geez! Do I have to throw out my jersey with his name on it?
A former Ravens coach even crawled out of the woodwork to wax poetically about "second chances.”
Second chances.
No Truth, Justice, No American Way. And No Shame. We see it in sports, in Hollywood and, of course, Washington, D.C. How did America become this way?
It starts at the top and trickles down through the "role models.”
Lies are commonplace and it begins with our highest officials. They lie to grand juries, to us and to their wives.
They target groups that threaten them and try to silence opposing voices.
They make statements, then deny the statements, thinking no one will notice.
Endless spin is the name of their game.
Is it shocking? It should be, but in a world where a U.S. president is able to get over the beheadings of two Americans and go golfing minutes later, I suppose anything goes.
That’s how stupid our world has become.
We can’t handle the truth any more. We’ve been taught not to by the best.
So when Wrong is held up as Right, look to the top. It’s where the bad behavior starts. And then it goes mainstream.
The "powerful” get a pass while you and I play by the rules.
We do the heavy lifting and show up for work. We tell the truth and then get to watch the liars and the cowards take over our country.
We get to have them tell us what to do while they don’t do their job.
So Right and Wrong? Good and Evil? Who knows? The ability to tell the difference between them is fast disappearing.
In his poll-driven ISIS speech this week, the president flipped, then flopped, so in the end no one knew what the heck he was talking about.
And, ironically all he got for his trouble were polls that said he was "Weak and Indecisive.”
Spin isn’t working so well for Obama anymore, not with ISIS knocking at our back door.
Nope. The world is laughing at the ridiculous word games the president and our government officials play when war is just around the corner.
Because of the president’s dithering, our country is now considered a silly little country and a prime target for jihad.
So what do you think ISIS thinks about the president speeches?
Spilling the beans, saying what he won’t do, explicitly saying what he will do and then appointing a retired general, Gen. John Allen, to lead the non-war.
What do you think ISIS thinks about these speeches? I think they’re glued to their laptops, feverishly taking notes, in between guffaws.
So do you believe him? Our allies don’t. He could only round up about nine to stand with him. Nobody trusts him. Nobody trusts us.
Do you trust him to protect us? Or do you keep thinking about our open borders?
How are you feeling about "trusting” nowadays? If we like our country, do you think we’ll be able to keep our country?
And how did you feel when he hauled out National Security Advisor Susan "Benghazi” Rice to parrot the wrong talking points again? Did you say, "He’s gotta’ be kidding?”
For the first act, she and Press Secretary Josh Earnest and Secretary of State Kerry said this isn’t war.
They called "ISIS” "ISIL,” bowing to the terrorists’ whimsical desire to change their name, the way your kid Anthony tells you he now wants to be called Ace.
They aimed to distract. But we weren’t distracted and neither was ISIS.
Using the same exact words, Kerry and Rice told us, "What we are doing is engaging in a very significant counter-terrorism operation and it’s going to go on for some period of time.
"If somebody wants to think about it as being a war with ISIS, they can do so,” Kerry said. "I don’t think people need to get into war fever on this.”
Then we got the latest word from the White House and the Pentagon: Now it is war after all, but with a caveat: It is war "in the same way that we are at war with al-Qaeda and its affiliates,” so says Press Secretary Josh Earnest.
So "War?” What is it good for? Absolutely nothing.
Same for "Victory.” Earnest couldn’t say what "victory” would look like when asked, because he said he "didn’t have his Webster’s dictionary with him.”
Funny.
So there’s no "War,” no "Victory,” ISIS is ISIL, and according to Obama, the "Islamic State of Iraq and Syria” isn’t Islamic.
The hour is late and the only thing the president is clear about is he refuses to say or believe anything negative about Islam.
He cannot and will not bring himself to say the words "Islamic terrorists.” And he is angry that he is being forced to do just that from the corner he has painted himself into.
He’s always been protective of Muslims. He scrubbed all negative mention of Islam from our country’s language, and more significantly, from the FBI’s Counter Terrorism Training Literature.
Could this be why FBI agents failed to recognize Islamic terrorists in the Boston Marathon bombing? You betcha’!
It’s time. Time for the semantics game to be over. The president is playing with the big boys now and the stakes are high.
It’s time for him to put a face on our enemy.
And it’s time for him to admit publicly that Islamic terrorists want to eradicate us Infidels, that Islamic terrorists want to establish a worldwide caliphate.
But he won’t.
Did he really think we didn’t know that he was pulled kicking and screaming back to the podium this week?
Did he think he could fool everyone by saying, oh, yeah, "I was layering my strategy,” days after he said he had none?
There is one thing we can agree with him on, though, when he said the world is "Messy.”
And he’s right. It is messy. You have only to ask Jim Foley’s and Steven Sotloff’s "folks” to know just how messy it really is.
So let me ask you. Do you trust Obama to make our world less messy? Or will politics get in the way?
One more time?
Hold the line, America.