Citizenship

 

A person not a citizen of the United States by birth or inheritance must obtain citizenship via naturalization.   The process for becoming a naturalized citizen involves an oath of allegiance:

"I hereby declare, on oath, that I absolutely and entirely renounce and abjure all allegiance and fidelity to any foreign prince, potentate, state, or sovereignty, of whom or which I have heretofore been a subject or citizen; that I will support and defend the Constitution and laws of the United States of America against all enemies, foreign and domestic; that I will bear true faith and allegiance to the same; that I will bear arms on behalf of the United States when required by the law; that I will perform noncombatant service in the Armed Forces of the United States when required by the law; that I will perform work of national importance under civilian direction when required by the law; and that I take this obligation freely, without any mental reservation or purpose of evasion; so help me God."

A Muslim, whether practicing or not, must be presumed to be unable to "swear this oath" as that term of art is typically understood.   Why is this so?

Islam has as a basic tenet that there can be no other allegiances superior to Islam.   It is analogous to the First Commandment of Judeo-Christianity.   But the oath asserts that the person swearing the oath will "support and defend the Constitution and laws of the United States of America against all enemies, foreign and domestic", and "bear true faith and allegiance to the same".   No Muslim can do this, since it (potentially) places Islam in an inferior position relative to the Constitution.

But many Muslims do swear this oath.   Have they committed perjury?   To non-Muslim eyes, the perjury is clear, but to Muslims (whose first and only duty is to Islam) the issue is not-so-clear.   The Koran, the 'holy book of Islam', carves out an escape clause: taqiyya.   Taqiyya, simply put, allows a Muslim to lie to an infidel (any non-Muslim) if doing so advances the cause of Islam.

Further, they cannot "take this obligation freely, without any mental reservation or purpose of evasion", since evasion is exactly the purpose of obtaining citizenship.   Obtaining U.S. citizenship is seen as a necessary first step toward the primary goal of Islam: establishing a world-wide caliphate governed by Sharia law.   Taqiyya is permissible.

Summarizing:   Muslims who take the Oath of Allegiance to the United States can only do so by resorting to taqiyya, an action that otherwise constitutes perjury and invalidates the oath ab initio.

No Muslim should be offered United States citizenship under any circumstances.   Muslims who have been granted citizenship via naturalization should be immediately de-naturalized.   Muslim citizens-by-inheritance should be considered national security risks.

 

Preemptive Pardons

 

On his way out the door of the White House, President Joseph R. Biden Jr. used his Constitutional pardon power to issue a series of "preemptive blanket pardons" to multiple persons who might have had places on Donald Trump's rumored "enemies list" (if such there be).  Can a President do that?  Really??

The Constitutional powers of the President include

...and he shall have Power to Grant Reprieves and Pardons for Offenses against the United States, except in Cases of Impeachment.

Because the wording is so broad, it would seem to allow the President to grant pardons for offenses against the United States even if those offenses have not yet been charged, or even 'known'.  That interpretation, however, has a poison pill hiding within it.

If we allow uncharged offenses to be preemptively pardoned, what's to prevent a President having his underlings commit crimes, assassinations, Constitutional violations, and then simply preemptively pardoning the malefactors?  We have just given that President the powers of a King, exactly what the left has been warning us Donald Trump wants to become.

To avoid that lethal scenario, it must be true that the President may only pardon offenses that have been (at a minimum) charged, although even that is subject to some abuse:  "Harry just assassinated the Speaker of the House on my orders.  Quick, indict him for it so I can pardon him."  That's exactly where "preemptive pardons" have placed us.

We'll need a Supreme Court opinion on this one, and we need it pronto.  Charge Bennie Thompson with obstructing justice by destroying evidence collected by his J6 committee, loser appeals, loser appeals, until it reaches SCOTUS.  The result — I've got my fingers crossed — will be that, no, a President cannot issue a pardon without stating what offense is being pardoned.

...And then platoons of DC denizens will all move to non-extradition countries.

 

Can we really reform the Justice Department? Really?

 

Over at The Price Of Liberty, Nathan Barton suggests that the answer is a categorical 'no'.  I find it impossible to argue against that.

 

A Small Difference of Opinion

 

I have come to understand — somewhat reluctantly — that Mike Vanderboegh was more right than he could imagine when he opined that Americans are now two distinct people occupying the same territory.  The implications of this are ominous.  They almost guarantee that the United States will eventually — maybe soon — disunite, probably via a civil war, perhaps via a shooting civil war.

It has been obvious for some time, certainly since Donald Trump beat Hillary Clinton, that Democrats as a class are unprincipled and mendacious, with minds closed to any idea that does not fit the narrative set by the demagogues by whom they are pleased to be ruled, and violently opposed to all who question their accepted dogma.  In this sense, they are largely indistinguishable from Muslims who are perfectly accepting of the notion that the only good unbeliever is a headless unbeliever.  The rise of "cancel culture" (that oddly seems to affect only conservatives) provides adequate proof.

The things they believe can only be believed by turning a blind eye to uncomfortable facts, while simultaneously declining to fact-check their own sources.  For instance, we have the glaring example of Adam Schiff who, almost weekly for the entirety of the Trump presidency, proclaimed that he had "seen clear and convincing evidence" that Trump and his team colluded with the Russians to steal the election from Hillary Clinton.  Of course, Robert Mueller at the head of two dozen highly-paid and Democratically-aligned A-list attorneys couldn't find anything prosecutable despite spending two years and 30 million dollars.  When asked directly whether he, Mueller, had inquired into the Clinton campaign's documented connection to the Steele dossier, Mueller demurred because "that was not within my purview".  That is, in lawyer-speak, an admission that Mueller was charged with finding wrongdoing by Trump and his team to the exclusion of everyone else.  As a consequence, the $30 million resulted in a few minor 1001's and very little else.  The persecution of General Michael Flynn never rose to the level that any Democrat would have been bothered by the complete absence of due process because, you see, Flynn was a Republican and thus unworthy of fair treatment.

Since Second Amendment issues are always high on my priority list, most discussions zero in on that pretty quickly.  "I'm not trying to take your guns!" she loudly proclaims.  Well, no, you aren't, but the people you voted for are.  That's where anything resembling "a discussion" usually ends.  No Democrat wants to have to fight that battle under any conditions that might lead them to have to change their mind.  The facts are not on their side, so they argue emotion.  As soon as one party forces the debate back onto a factual base, they execute a strategic withdrawal.

Big Tech and Big Media have together conspired to make a Trump re-election unlikely if not out-and-out impossible.  The treatment of Hunter Biden is illustrative.  Hunter sent his laptop in for repair and then apparently forgot about it.  When the laptop repairman exercised a workman's lien and began peering deep into the innards of the device, he discovered evidence of potentially criminal activity on Hunter's part.  He made a safety back-up copy of the laptop's contents before turning it over to the FBI which (presumably) is still looking into it.  When The New York Post ran a front-page article based on that "safety copy", FaceBook and Twitter shut down NYPost access to their platforms.  No Democrat raised an eyebrow.  The existence of evidence that Hunter Biden may have engaged in criminal activity remained (and remains) unknown to the bulk of the American people.  Had Hunter been linked to anything Republican, he would now be in federal prison awaiting trial.

The onset of the Covid-19 pandemic provides a wealth of confirming data for the overarching premise.  Mario Cuomo, the Democratic governor of New York, issued an order early in the course of the pandemic that forced NY nursing homes to re-admit Covid-positive patients back among their untested populations.  That this resulted in the deaths of a number of elderly patients that might otherwise have survived the experience is undisputed.  Trump (a Republican) dispatched a Navy hospital ship to NY harbor to help the (Democratic) mayor isolate Covid patients.  When the ship was finally recalled to regular duty some weeks later, they had handled exactly ZERO patients.  It just wouldn't do for any Democrat to place themselves into a position from which they would have to give credit to a Republican for doing something good, even if citizens have to die to prevent it.  Despite this, the governor won an Emmy for his daily press briefings!

Despite widespread lockdowns that crushed their economies, NY, NJ, CT, and CA have experienced high case rates, high hospitalization rates, and high death rates from the virus.  States that rejected hard lockdowns, FL and TX prime among them, have recorded lower rates for hospitalizations and deaths.  Even so, those "free states" are routinely panned in Big Media as being hotbeds of infection.  Only among so-called right-wing media is there speculation that lockdowns might not have been as effective as we were promised.  NY, with very high death rates, even insisted that travelers from "hotbed states" like FL quarantine for two weeks on arrival.  Recently, CBS' "60 Minutes" so blatantly misquoted Florida Governor Ron DeSantis regarding his response to Covid-19 that the (Democratic) mayor of Palm Beach County felt obligated to go public in defense of his (Republican) governor.

In short, Democrats believe many things that are provably false and disbelieve many things that are provably true, and insist that everyone who doesn't believe as they do is a traitor, a terrorist, an insurrectionist, a conspiracy-theorist, or some combination of those.  Given their propensity to destroy the economy and their compatriots' wealth in the process, the only real traitors seem to be the ones with a "D" next to their names.

 

Are We Headed For Another Civil War?

 

Some years back, I wrote a book, 'Tipping Point', that laid out a possible scenario in which The United States suffered a second civil war.  I deliberately made it very 'not pretty' with atrocities being committed by both sides, because civil wars are like that — recall Sherman's March To The Sea that needlessly destroyed civilian croplands and, in the fullness of time, the civilians who relied upon them.  'Tipping Point' hypothesized an assault on the Second Amendment, the right of the people to keep and bear arms, as the casus belli, but near the end of the book I had one of the characters recall that "...guns were merely a convenient symbol...".  That is, I think, important to keep in mind going forward.  If we are lurching toward a second civil war, it may not be 'guns' that gets us there.

Little more than a year ago, a group of Republican congressmen was ambushed while playing softball — by a disgruntled supporter of Bernie Sanders.  Many of the comments attached to news reports of the incident expressed disappointment that so few deaths resulted.  Within the month, two officials of the Trump administration have been the targets of mobs demanding they not be served at public restaurants.  Within the week, a Democrat congresswoman, Maxine Waters, has publicly issued a call for more of the same.  Whether you call them 'Democrats' or 'the left' or 'progressives' (all of which are marginally inaccurate), there is one segment of society that seems to be actively soliciting our next civil war, and their targets, whether you call them 'Republicans' or 'the right' or 'conservatives' (all of which are marginally inaccurate), are meekly suffering the slings and arrows.

Meanwhile, it's becoming increasingly clear that the FBI and the Department of Justice have, together, badly perverted what's left of our system of justice, and Congress seems reluctant to actually throw somebody into prison, perhaps because they fear turnabout should the next election place them in an exposed position.  This is not a good situation to be in.  This is not a safe place from which to watch somebody else get involved in a civil war.

One hundred million (maybe 120 million) Americans own 350 million (or more) guns and 200 billion rounds of ammunition.  If you look at the map showing electoral districts won by Trump and Clinton in the last Presidential election, it's a startling sight: the blue (Clinton) districts are all relatively tiny (high population density; big cities and metro areas; serious electoral clout) while the red (Trump) districts define the vast bulk of the country's land area (low population density; rural areas; thin electoral power).  It goes without saying, I suppose, that almost all of those guns and gun-owners are in red districts.  What in heaven's name are those Democrats thinking?  They're deliberately trying to anger a population that's better-armed than any WW-II maquis unit, possibly under the assumption that they're so law-abiding they would never turn violent.  What if they're wrong?

If there is another civil war, this one between the Reds and the Blues, the outcome is easy to predict:

1. the Reds are going win.  It's not even theoretically possible for small enclaved cities to overwhelm the heartland, but it is possible for the heartland to cut the cities off from food, water, and electricity.  Game over.
2. the heartland is going to want to secede.  They'll cut the blue districts loose because conquering them is counter-productive.
3. Blue America will turn into a third-world country.  Red America will strictly control its border with Blue America.  There will not be an 'illegal immigrant problem'.
4. Within a few years at most, those blue areas will bid to be annexed simply because the government model they use is unsustainable without inexpensive supplies coming in from red areas.  The blue model requires the red model far more than the red requires the blue.

In short, what the Democrats are doing is so severely against their self-interest it's fair to wonder whether they have thought this problem through to its logical conclusion.  This might be an opportune time for them to correct that lest they accidentally turn 'Tipping Point' from 'fiction' to 'documentary'.

 

Sweet Dreams Are Made Of This

 

I didn't vote for Donald Trump and I have a fairly low opinion of those who did.  I have a fairly low opinion of those who voted for Clinton also, but that's neither here nor there.

That said, there's something very wrong with people, primarily Democrats, who are calling for the Electoral College to be either (a) abolished altogether or failing that (b) subverted by subborning the electors to vote for someone other than to whom they are pledged.  If you look at the map of electoral districts won by the major candidates (nobody else, not even Gary Johnson, won any) you'll see that Trump won "flyover country" and Clinton won the major metropolitan areas and almost nothing else for either.  If each elector voted for the candidate that won the elector's district rather than the elector's state, it wouldn't have been 278-to-257.  It would have been 460-to-75.  Clinton's political career would have been over.  If you're a Democrat and you hate the Electoral College, I think that might be why.

People are asserting that the purpose of the Electoral College is to prevent a demagogue taking over.  No, the purpose of the Electoral College is to prevent cities taking over.  It's working.

Let's talk about "Russian hacking" and its effect on the election.  First, there's a difference between 'hacking' and 'leaking'.  Hacking implies gaining illicit entry to a computer and damaging it or stealing information.  If this happened, we don't know for sure who did it.  Leaking implies giving information to someone who isn't otherwise privy to it.  That did happen, no argument from anybody.  Do we have evidence that the Russians stole data from DNC computers and leaked it via WikiLeaks?  I haven't seen any, and if the FBI or CIA or NSA has such information, the President of the United States (to whom they all report) would have ordered them to make it public.  He hasn't.  What does that suggest to you?  It suggests to me that such 'evidence' does not exist.  Russia did not hack anybody's computer; Russia did not leak the DNC emails.  If they did, it would already have found its way to the International Criminal Court — and it hasn't.

Well, somebody did.  Who?  Who had motive and opportunity?  NSA certainly has and had all those emails.  That's what they do for a living: collect data.  CIA almost certainly has and had copies.  It's NSA's job to supply CIA with information they need — and information they just want.  Maybe CIA is as pissed off as the American Right at Secretary Clinton abandoning some of their 'assets' in Benghazi.  It makes more sense that CIA is the leak than that Russia is the leak, but please continue to blame Putin.  He's convenient if nothing else.

The thing that worries me the most, however, is the insistence by some that the electors should be 'briefed' on what the current administration 'believes' even if such belief has no basis in reality.  If that happens and enough electors decide Hillary Clinton reallyreally deserves to be the next President regardless of the fact that the vast majority of electoral districts chose someone else, there's going to be a backlash from the group that is most able to lash back.  Of the hundred million gun owners in this country, all but a tiny sliver live in red districts.  Of the 350 million (est.) guns they own, almost none of them are in blue districts.  Of the 800,000 police/sheriffs in this country, what percentage do you suppose would agree that Clinton should be chosen by the Electoral College on the basis of her winning all the big cities?

We could be looking down the barrel of the next civil war.

Sweet dreams, children.

 

Jane Fonda as Traitor (sic)

 

On FB someone posted the old “Jane Fonda is a traitor” crap and I asked how much of a traitor she could have been given the NVN wasn’t enough of an enemy for Congress to declare war upon.  This brought a not-entirely-unexpected reaction from someone whose brother never came home.  I pointed out that people like Lyndon Johnson and Robert McNamara knew (McNamara said so in his autobiography) VN was a lost cause from day-one but they still sent American soldiers to fight and die in order not to be seen as “soft on Communism”.

At the time, I was a supporter of Barry Goldwater, “Mr. Conservative”, who thought it was a good idea to defoliate all of VN to deny the Viet Cong greencover.  The defoliant was called “Agent Orange”.  I, with Barry, supported raining ecological armageddon down upon all of Southeast Asia in order to “win” (whatever that means).

So, here we are, 42 years and 58,000 dead American soldiers later, and VietNam is one of our trading partners.  Does anyone think the situation would be different had we not sent all those young men over there with their M-16s?  Can anyone actually say those 58,000 deaths served some purpose?  True, they did get John McStain into Congress, but I’m not sure that should be seen as ‘a good thing’.

What we need to learn from places like VietNam, Iraq, Afghanistan, and others, is that soldiers are little more than blocks of wood.  They will be thrown into the sacrificial fire whenever and wherever our elite masters in Washington deem it expedient.  There is no honor in being firewood, and we need to stop playing the game that says ‘s/he’s a hero because s/he got paid out of the Pentagon budget’.  There is no honor in ‘just following orders’.  After WW-II we hung generals and privates for doing just that.  There is no honor in dropping a Hellfire missile from a drone onto a wedding party just because someone in Washington thinks there might be a bad guy or two among the ushers.  That sort of behavior eventually makes people crazy – crazy enough to fly airplanes into office buildings.  If you don’t think that’s true, imagine how we’d feel if Italy were doing it to us.

It’s time – it’s well past time – we demand answers to difficult questions before we send our children abroad with orders to kill.  We need to ask – and get believable answers to – questions like

• What do we hope to accomplish?
• How will we know when we’re done?
• What repercussions should we expect?
• Is it lawful?
• Is it moral?
• Is it just?
• Is it practical?
• How much is this going to cost?

We don’t ask any of these questions now.  We charge in “to free the oppressed people of West Wheresoever”, we free them, and almost always we make the situation worse than it was before we butted in to other nations’ business.  And, we empty the Treasury to do it.  Where does all that money go?  To Lockheed-Martin, to Halliburton, to Kellogg-Brown&Root, to thousands of charter members of the military-industrial complex.  Where does all that money come from?

Why, my dear, it comes from you.  It’s the price you pay for the privilege of having your sons and daughters, aunts and uncles, cousins, friends, and acquaintances buried at Arlington with full military honors (sic).

 

Searching For Truth

 

Every true thing was first believed by one person, then hundreds, then millions, then everyone.  Once upon a time, it was obvious to everyone that the stars were mere holes in the crystal sphere of the night sky, that if you were poor or sick it was because God wasn't pleased with you, that the Sun wheeled around the unmoving Earth, and that the Earth was flat.  Today, anyone who tries to convince you that the Earth is stationary is most likely to be judged a dangerous lunatic.

Today we are asked to believe just as many things whose truth is suspect:

• People who vacation in Paris are stupid because the French hate Americans.
• The Moslem world hates us because we're so good and so free.
• Julian Assange and Bradley Manning are traitors who want to see the Western democracies destroyed.
• Ron Paul is an isolationist who can't possibly beat Barack Obama.
• Sometimes you just have to hold your nose and vote for the lesser of two evils.
• Bullshit doesn't stink and is actually quite tasty and nourishing.

In fact, none of that is true.