ENCHANTÉ – Hurricane Hillary
This is going to be a rather personal essay. Matthew has left after much destruction. Now Hurricane Hillary is brewing that could be much worse.
All my followers know by now that I am a World War II kid who was liberated by the US in 1945. Boy, were we impressed by those GIs, driving their tanks and trucks, and rolling up those hated Nazis. The fun we had when the sun broke out, and we could walk freely on the streets again.
Ever since then we looked up at the US. Oh yes, there was always criticism about overpowering Washington and the CIA. But we felt safe. In the US, people believed in freedom and Christianity. They had great universities, the envy of many students in Europe.
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Then the great Eisenhower became president in 1953, just after Truman had completed the Korean war. I was in boarding school then. We still remember the stories about the “yellow danger” (China) and “the Russians are coming.” Would we have a World War III? Somehow, Truman had stopped McArthur from defeating aggressive North Korea, because the US did not want war with China, which supported North Korea. I think this was one of the biggest mistakes the US made at that time. Now North Korea has metastasized into a nuclear madman.
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As off John Kennedy, the US has been slipping. We stood sort of on the wayside, still thinking the US was invincible, its people utter strong, its military overpowering, its science unmatched. But with the Bay of Pigs, we began to see the first fissures in the almighty US. All right, Kennedy stared down Kroutchev to remove his nuclear stockpile in communist Cuba, but the Pigs thing was not forgotten. Nonetheless, everybody remembers where they were when they heard when Kennedy was assassinated: I had just started my first job in Holland and when I visited a friend he came down the stairs to tell me the horrible news.
Then Johnson followed with his expensive Great Society and his losing battle of Vietnam, mainly because the US lost popular support due to a growing leftist anti-war movement, headed by Jane Fonda alias Hanoi Jane. Johnson knew he would not be reelected.
The era of Nixon finished in disgrace, again pushed to a large extent by that growing leftist movement. By then I had landed in the US for a job with the World Bank in Washington D.C. I remember talking to a foreign service friend at our regular dinners in town – we were both still bachelors – arguing about the pros and cons of Nixon’s Administration. We were both conservative guys, but I couldn’t support the destruction of justice. To me, that was one of the greatest assets of the US: law and order. I was mightily impressed with the Saturday Night Massacre when the Attorney General and his Deputy resigned when Nixon fired the Watergate Special Prosecutor. Somehow, the principles of justice were upheld, but it left a bitter aftertaste. Now we look at an even greater destruction of justice: Hillary’s private e-mail server in service of her pay-for-play at the State Department, thousands of e-mails destroyed that would prove her criminal intent. A White House, Department of Justice and the FBI all in sync to deny it, all led by the Democrat Party. Who was worse, Nixon or Hillary? And they want her to be President?
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As a foreigner in the US with World War II still in the back of my mind, I wanted it to remain strong and principled. But something happened along the way. There was a tendency towards socialism that I had found one of the most dangerous fissures in European society. When Carter followed Ford with his fireside chats, I began to wonder. When I had to pay 14% interest on a mortgage, I wondered even more. Was this still my admired USA? Then Reagan came and proved the best President in a long time, bringing sanity back to economic management and military strength.
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Unfortunately, things changed for the worse again when the Clintons appeared on TV.
My wife and I, both “resident aliens” and guests of the US, looked at that couple’s eyes. You know a lot about people when you look in their eyes. Those watery, slippery untrustworthy eyes of Bill and that false smile with those hard eyes of his wife, Hillary. Frankly, if that weird Perot had not messed up the reelection of the older Bush, that Bonny and Clyde couple would never have made it to the White House. But history wanted otherwise. You all know what happened then. The impeachment was no surprise to us. The stories about assaulted women being threatened by Hillary weren’ t either. The media played along in many ways. While Nixon resigned, Bill did not: the Senate prevented that, despite the Kenn Starr report. All Democrats voted “not guilty.” They always do when their own kin is endangered. Republicans throw their own kin under the bus as soon as somebody gets smeared by the left and its media.
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The US became more and more divided. The media became more and more partisan. We did not understand that. We used to watch CBS with Walter Cronkite. Then Dan Rather came on, and we felt an immediate bias to the left. When he faltered with his blank screen, we turned to ABC. We liked David Brinkley and Peter Jennings. But then Peter Jennings started his leftist tunes. We switched to Tom Brokaw at NBC, but he also seemed absorbed by the leftist body snatchers. What was happening to the Great USA? What did these so-called “liberals” want? Why undermine what was once a great nation? We could not figure it.
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Abroad on missions, I had no other access to US news but CNN. Soon, those guys were no better. Everything had a leftist tweet. They called it the Clinton News Network. I watched TV 5 in France instead.
Then George Bush came after the chad election with Al Gore who had invented the Internet. 9/11, the dot.com drama, the Iraq invasion and then Katrina. I had never seen so much biased media reporting in my life in one presidency. What the hell was happening? We watched Fox News, at least you got some fair and balanced information, although it always seems that the guys or gals “on the left” are paid to be on the left, and the ones on the right just the same. It’s a boring game. When Juan Williams comes on, I mute. We’re no longer watching Miss Megan Kelly’s show. We find her pedantic, condescending, and arrogant. Her first primary debate with Bret Beyer was a disgrace.
And then we got the Obama phenomenon. Again, my wife and I sat in front of the TV, watching this Senator guy talking everybody under the table. He said to Reid he had this “little gift.” The pied piper, we said. We have nothing against “black.” We are a mixed-race couple, me a Caucasian European, she of East-Indian descent. But he had been a collaborator with Saul Alinsky and Bill Ayers, both socialist statist and communist uprooters, sat in the pew with that freaking Reverend Jeremiah Wright with his chickens are coming home to roost, and wanted to fundamentally change America. Even our kids voted for the guy. What for? Because McCain was a fuddy-duddy. Now they regret that vote. You vote for a platform, and its incoming administration, not for a celebrity smile.
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We found Obama dangerous and could not understand these Obama girls and all these other people falling for him. Eight years of no economic progress, utmost partisan corruption in government, a broken national health system, the Fast and Fury weapons smuggle leading to the death of an immigration officer, a suicidal immigration policy, and a dismal racial divide. A reckless failed foreign policy that weakened the US tremendously and has put the world at risk. And so forth. You call that a “legacy?”
Nowadays, we are just shaking our heads. So many people seem to support Hurricane Hillary after all her obvious misdeeds for which anyone else would have been bigly incarcerated. Outsider Trump is vilified because of lewd remarks he made a decade ago when in the entertainment world and not even a “politician,” while he enunciates exactly the policies that the US needs to get back on its feet. But the only thing that the stupid media wants to talk about is sex (sex sells) while the ship is burning, and the major issues of immigration, security, economic revival and racial harmony are not even raised. Even his party jumps ship. What has happened to this once great USA?
It is no longer the land of the brave but has become the land of the knaves. Millionaire football players don’t want to stand for the National Anthem anymore. Bleu lives don’t matter. Catholics need to get rid of their medieval religious structure. Hey, what about those radical Islamists and their horrific horrible medieval killings?
Hurricane Hillary would destroy whatever is left of this great USA if you let her make landfall. You won’t recognize it anymore once she has passed. It’s too bad we don’t have a vote. Not that it would matter much. The ignoramuses of this country prefer to live in national decline and misery, as long as they get their goodies. Meanwhile, Bonny and Clyde would rent out the Lincoln Bedroom again. In competition with the Trump hotel around the corner on Pennsylvania Avenue. Trump builds things. Obama-Clinton do not build anything. Only profit from public service and taxpayer money and get rich with it. And that’s the view of a foreigner guest of the maligned USA.
You know for whom we would vote. We hope you would vote for the US revival ticket. Don’t think it’s in the bag for Hurricane Hillary, as the media want you to believe. There is that silent majority that never gets polled. They have been awakened.
Cheers,
John
Enchanting The Swan: http://amzn.to/1LPFw5o. Grad students and musicians Paul and Fiona fall in love when they perform The Swan and agree to marry, but paternal evil blocks their love. Will they play the Swan again?
Some Women I Have Known: http://amzn.to/1QIL94B. Piano John confuses playing sheet music with playing between the sheets. Will his anchors in life, Lady D and Audrey Hepburn, save him from self-destruction?
A Naughty Romance: http://amzn.to/2epkuTj. A piano affair leads to a surprising twist.
ENCHANTÉ – Matthew and his Mother Nature
Mother Nature at work again. This time, it’s son Matthew. Ever wondered why it is Mother Nature? Why not Father Nature? The question has been raised ample times with as many answers and explanations. I believe it’s because mothers are fickle. You never know what these storms’ plans are. Fathers are stern, may be rude sometimes, but usually you know what’s coming. In French, fickle means “inconstant”; fickleness is “inconstance,” which is feminine; another indication why it is Mother Nature. You never know what’s she is doing; one day nice, the next day all hell breaks loose. The French synonym of “inconstance” is “infidélité.” Interesting, to bring up infidelity in this context.
It’s amazing how TV gets inebriated with these storms. Gals and guys out there in wind and rain, weathering the weather. You rarely see the poor cameraman trying to keep the rain away from his focus. Katrina, Sandy, Wilma, it’s always the same pictures. And then the politicians join in ad nauseum with their global warming or climate change sound bites.
Well, everyone knows that there have always been huge hurricanes throughout the ages. It doesn’t have much to do with climate change. You’re wrong, the climate changers will tell you: they’re more frequent and bigger now because of climate change. You never win an argument with these guys.
I remember as the day of yesterday when northern Europe was hit by one of it fiercest North Sea storms (we don’t have hurricanes there but the storms can be as bad) on a weekend in February 1953.
I was 16 and at boarding school in the center of Holland. We woke up with the bell ringing in the dorm – always far too early – and heard the wind howling. The sky was dark and thick black clouds were rushing low over the buildings. In those days there was no TV. Only days after we heard that some 2000 people had died in the southwestern Dutch islands of Zeeland and some 500 more in Belgium, England, and Scotland. The damage was enormous. Whole villages were wiped off the earth and thousands of cattle died. Later in the week we saw pictures of our Queen Juliana wading through the blubber in rubber boots, viewing the destruction. It led to the huge project of the Delta Works, which took many years to complete. But then nobody ever talked about “climate change.” (Now they do!) Because climate changes all the time and this was just another example of Mother Nature’s force and fickleness.
Delta Works in the Netherlands.
But precisely because climate changes all the time, there is little room for complacency. There have been warmer and colder periods affecting “Mother” Earth, regardless of CO2. And why do these two Mothers not sit together and iron out their differences, like in a PTA meeting?
During Katrina and other New Orleans floods the Dutch were often consulted on how to deal with the storm surges coming in from the Gulf of Mexico or threatening Manhattan. Plans were made but I understand not executed to the level it was needed because of lack of substantial funds. Until we get another flood and the then president is accused of bad management. And so it goes, kicking the ball down the road. Let’s hope Matthew does not wreck the US playground and beach resorts along its East Coast.
Betsy, which flooded New Orleans in 1965, led to the Lake Pontchartrain and Vicinity Hurricane Protection Project – Public Law 89-298. It would protect the region against a storm that would only occur once every 200 years, but by the time Katrina roared over the region, the standards proved hugely outdated: more than 50 levies broke and 1,500 people died. According to Dutch sources, the US approach is directed more at disaster relief management than at disaster avoidance.
One advantage of Matthew is that we are not “flooded” with the continual flow of political analysis about who “won” the debate, where Hillary is “hiding” to prepare for the debate (to learn how to deflect attacks on her lies with more lies), and about why The Donald does more campaigning to avoid preparing and missing out on opportunities to beat the hell out of Hillary. By Sunday, October 9, Matthew has hopefully left the East coast to spook further up north on the Atlantic. And Monday, we’ll be back to the unrelenting TV politics about who won, should have won, who lost but still won, who won but still lost, without getting one step closer to solving the wrongs of the US. Until the perfect storm on November 8. And then what.
Cheers!
John
Enchanting The Swan: love story where playing music leads to a kiss and what awful things happen then…http://amzn.to/1LPFw5o
Some Women I have Known: where Piano John confuses playing sheet music with playing between the sheets... http://amzn.to/1QIL94B