When Did You Take A Walk Off The Map, Andy?
I grew up in a household of Democrats. One could describe them as somewhat apolitical. Politics was rarely if ever discussed in our household. The general consensus was that they were mostly crooks anyway so why bother. My family was a good union family, though. They paid their dues, went on strike in the blistering sun, went to union meetings and voted for Andy Jacobs as their federal rep religiously. Like most Hoosiers, they tended to choose Republicans for local office, but Andy and Birch Bayh were the anointed as far as they were concerned.
What was perhaps most disappointing, and likely what began the turn of my young mind from thinking of the Democrats as noble champions of the little guy, was watching the unions repeatedly fail my family. I watched the unions make backroom deals and become more corrupt, union reps getting into bed with the managers and owners (sometimes literally) they ostensibly were aligned against. Strikes became rituals. Benefits decreased. Wages stagnated and new employees came in at much lower pay. Looking back, this is how those companies survived. The ones with stronger unions are gone, but it still didn’t help those who believed in that system or the betrayal, for nothing really, of their devotion.
These same unions funded the Democrats, especially the local campaigns, and we would hear the Dems railing against this or that social injustice against this union or that minority only to see them do less than nothing when they got in office. Funny, that was exactly what they said the Republicans did as they gave fiery campaign speeches. So, we had two parties of a whole lot of nothing we were paying to make our lives better, we thought. Maybe that’s another reason politics wasn’t discussed in my house. It was too bitter a pill to swallow.
Above this all, though, there were still folks like Andy Jacobs. He seemed a man of integrity and a man of compassion. Sometimes, you think, regardless of if he believes this way or that on certain issues, he’s still a good person and still intentioned to do right. Then just about the time I was having a serious crisis of faith regarding the Democrat Party as a young adult, Jacobs went completely off the deep end and cast the deciding vote in the joke of piece of gun control legislation, the Brady Bill.
He retired immediately after, possibly afraid of the backlash of all us working class who’d voted him in, watching him betray a right we counted on to help us protect our homes from the encroaching criminal element he’d helped to do nothing about. Of course, I thought his replacement, Julia Carson, who might’ve made Lenin blush with her over-the-top socialist principles, who he endorsed wholeheartedly, was completely unlike him. I thought, perhaps, he had made some fatal miscalculation with the Brady Bill, but I wasn’t going to let that tarnish what I thought was a good, moderate Democrat (when there used to be moderates).
I’ve found in the following years that Jacobs was showing us a glimpse of who he truly was when he cast that vote or who all those years in Washington had helped him become. He’s spent the last few years violently railing against “neo-cons” and right-wingers, sounding like your typical second-year poly sci student more than a retired veteran and “moderate” Congressman. Take this latest quip he wrote for our weekly Lefty mag, NUVO:
Neo-con job artists are right. The Constitution does not give “due process” to a terrorist; doesn’t give it to a murderer or rapist either. “Due process” is for finding out whether a person is a terrorist, murderer or rapist. Loyal Americans call this “liberty and justice for all”.
Considering those terrorists captured were captured in no uniform in a combat situation firing on our troops, they were lucky they weren’t summarily stood up and shot. Perhaps we all would’ve been better served if they were. The important thing that should also be considered, and I would’ve expected Mr. Jacobs might have realized this, is they are not U.S. citizens. We have never given U.S. rights or civil liberties to prisoners of war. In World War II, Axis prisoners were tried in military courts and often executed in similar situations. That’s war! It wasn’t like we picked these guys up speeding down I-70 doing 90 in a 70. We caught them in combat situations taking arms against the United States. That they dressed like civilians rather than take a uniform speaks more of subterfuge and guerilla action, something not protected by the much-vaunted and often misunderstood Geneva Convention (and when exactly did they sign it, oh, never mind).
U.S. courts have never had jurisdiction here and it is folly to assume that somehow they now do. The Left has seen terrorists as a law enforcement problem since the beginning and I can assure you that approach has failed. Did it stop the African embassy bombings, Khobar Towers, hostage takings or the bombing of the Cole or 9/11? No. Only killing them dead seems to remove them permanently.
I have to wonder where Jacobs really stepped off the train and became such a screaming Lefty. This, of course, isn’t my sole evidence. Merely the first and last piece I have. There is much in between and it is easily researched. Perhaps he always was, and the role of a politician in a different climate than today required he be more discreet. One thing’s for sure. The man my folks thought was serving them in Congress is not the same man who voted for the Brady Bill or who has since taken every opportunity to skewer anyone with a slightly different than far-left point of view and likely he never was.
Maybe it’s true what Reagan said. He didn’t leave the Democrat Party. The Democrat Party left him, and apparently most of us working-class poor who still clung naively to the hope that they really were looking out for us. It makes you reevaluate much of what we know of our modern political scene and much of what has happened that changed the course of the way this country had done business for over 150 years to something completely different, and completely unprecedented (and not for the better) in the last fifty.
I grew up in a household of Democrats. One could describe them as somewhat apolitical. Politics was rarely if ever discussed in our household. The general consensus was that they were mostly crooks anyway so why bother. My family was a good union family, though. They paid their dues, went on strike in the blistering sun, went to union meetings and voted for Andy Jacobs as their federal rep religiously. Like most Hoosiers, they tended to choose Republicans for local office, but Andy and Birch Bayh were the anointed as far as they were concerned.
What was perhaps most disappointing, and likely what began the turn of my young mind from thinking of the Democrats as noble champions of the little guy, was watching the unions repeatedly fail my family. I watched the unions make backroom deals and become more corrupt, union reps getting into bed with the managers and owners (sometimes literally) they ostensibly were aligned against. Strikes became rituals. Benefits decreased. Wages stagnated and new employees came in at much lower pay. Looking back, this is how those companies survived. The ones with stronger unions are gone, but it still didn’t help those who believed in that system or the betrayal, for nothing really, of their devotion.
These same unions funded the Democrats, especially the local campaigns, and we would hear the Dems railing against this or that social injustice against this union or that minority only to see them do less than nothing when they got in office. Funny, that was exactly what they said the Republicans did as they gave fiery campaign speeches. So, we had two parties of a whole lot of nothing we were paying to make our lives better, we thought. Maybe that’s another reason politics wasn’t discussed in my house. It was too bitter a pill to swallow.
Above this all, though, there were still folks like Andy Jacobs. He seemed a man of integrity and a man of compassion. Sometimes, you think, regardless of if he believes this way or that on certain issues, he’s still a good person and still intentioned to do right. Then just about the time I was having a serious crisis of faith regarding the Democrat Party as a young adult, Jacobs went completely off the deep end and cast the deciding vote in the joke of piece of gun control legislation, the Brady Bill.
He retired immediately after, possibly afraid of the backlash of all us working class who’d voted him in, watching him betray a right we counted on to help us protect our homes from the encroaching criminal element he’d helped to do nothing about. Of course, I thought his replacement, Julia Carson, who might’ve made Lenin blush with her over-the-top socialist principles, who he endorsed wholeheartedly, was completely unlike him. I thought, perhaps, he had made some fatal miscalculation with the Brady Bill, but I wasn’t going to let that tarnish what I thought was a good, moderate Democrat (when there used to be moderates).
I’ve found in the following years that Jacobs was showing us a glimpse of who he truly was when he cast that vote or who all those years in Washington had helped him become. He’s spent the last few years violently railing against “neo-cons” and right-wingers, sounding like your typical second-year poly sci student more than a retired veteran and “moderate” Congressman. Take this latest quip he wrote for our weekly Lefty mag, NUVO:
Neo-con job artists are right. The Constitution does not give “due process” to a terrorist; doesn’t give it to a murderer or rapist either. “Due process” is for finding out whether a person is a terrorist, murderer or rapist. Loyal Americans call this “liberty and justice for all”.
Considering those terrorists captured were captured in no uniform in a combat situation firing on our troops, they were lucky they weren’t summarily stood up and shot. Perhaps we all would’ve been better served if they were. The important thing that should also be considered, and I would’ve expected Mr. Jacobs might have realized this, is they are not U.S. citizens. We have never given U.S. rights or civil liberties to prisoners of war. In World War II, Axis prisoners were tried in military courts and often executed in similar situations. That’s war! It wasn’t like we picked these guys up speeding down I-70 doing 90 in a 70. We caught them in combat situations taking arms against the United States. That they dressed like civilians rather than take a uniform speaks more of subterfuge and guerilla action, something not protected by the much-vaunted and often misunderstood Geneva Convention (and when exactly did they sign it, oh, never mind).
U.S. courts have never had jurisdiction here and it is folly to assume that somehow they now do. The Left has seen terrorists as a law enforcement problem since the beginning and I can assure you that approach has failed. Did it stop the African embassy bombings, Khobar Towers, hostage takings or the bombing of the Cole or 9/11? No. Only killing them dead seems to remove them permanently.
I have to wonder where Jacobs really stepped off the train and became such a screaming Lefty. This, of course, isn’t my sole evidence. Merely the first and last piece I have. There is much in between and it is easily researched. Perhaps he always was, and the role of a politician in a different climate than today required he be more discreet. One thing’s for sure. The man my folks thought was serving them in Congress is not the same man who voted for the Brady Bill or who has since taken every opportunity to skewer anyone with a slightly different than far-left point of view and likely he never was.
Maybe it’s true what Reagan said. He didn’t leave the Democrat Party. The Democrat Party left him, and apparently most of us working-class poor who still clung naively to the hope that they really were looking out for us. It makes you reevaluate much of what we know of our modern political scene and much of what has happened that changed the course of the way this country had done business for over 150 years to something completely different, and completely unprecedented (and not for the better) in the last fifty.
posted by Rob Beck | 9:40 PM
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