Visit Europe While It Lasts

All roads lead to Rome and that’s where I’m going in a couple of weeks with my wife and grandson. I booked the trip before my son died in June, and part of me is sorry I did because I don’t have as much enthusiasm for it since he passed. This grieving process is sapping my strength. Hopefully that enthusiasm will return when we all get there. The trip is paid for and I’ll make the best of it.

Our 14-year-old grandson, Riley, already knows quite a lot about Rome and he’ll be fun to have along with the eternal city and its environs being so saturated in history. I also know that Italy is changing fast and it may not exist in its present form much longer. All of Europe is being transformed by a Muslim invasion and by decades of socialism, so much so that many refer to it as “post-Christian.” Many churches, for example, are being sold off and reopened as mosques. The Eurozone is paralyzed by welfare states full of dependents and pensioners they can no longer afford.

Hagia Sophia became the Blue Mosque

For months I’ve tried to book a personal guide. Several were recommended by friends who have been to Rome and given me contact information for them, but they don’t get back to me. Last week I contacted the Lewiston, Maine travel agency that booked our Israel trip to see if it would give me a contact. A woman there said she’s not surprised at the lack of response because “that’s how they are in Italy; they procrastinate.” I’ve given up on a personal guide so now I’m booking small-group tours of the Sistine Chapel, St. Peter’s, the Coliseum, the Forum, and so forth.

One of Rome's hop on/hop off busses

Happily, I saw on Trip Advisor that Rome has a “hop-on, hop-off” bus system. When visiting Dublin, that was a great way to spend the first day — on the open upper deck listening to the bus driver wittily describe what we were seeing as we passed by. Unhappily however, I read reviews of Rome’s “hop-on, hop-off” busses and they were dismal. “Stay away!” and “Don’t bother!” and “You’re better off walking!” said virtually all commenters who had happily used them in other European cities. Rome is different, they said. Employees are rude; the busses are dirty and disorganized. Forty-five-minute waits at bus stops are the norm.

Dark clouds over Rome, again?

A July article in the UK Telegraph said: “The Eternal City is facing crisis, with its administration engulfed in corruption scandals and debt, its roads scarred by pot-holes, the main airport partially closed and a growing immigration crisis… ‘Rome is on the verge of collapse,’ Giancarlo Cremonesi, the president of the Rome Chamber of Commerce, told Reuters. ‘It is unacceptable that a major city which calls itself developed can find itself in such a state of decay.’”

My wife Roseann at her grandfather's house in Greece

Last year my wife and I toured Greece with her family. While her grandfather’s village in the Peloponnese seemed in fine shape, the rest of the country looked like a basket case teetering on bankruptcy. In Athens, graffiti covered nearly every vertical surface reachable by a vandal with a spray can. Across the countryside, abandoned construction projects were everywhere. After we left, Greeks elected a left-wing government which said to the EU: We don’t plan to pay back the billions you’ve already lent us, and we demand you lend us more! Italy and Spain, also on the brink, watched to see if the EU [European Union] would cave in to Greek demands. It did. How long can countries in southern Europe spend beyond their means? How long will northern Europe keep bailing them out?

Where it stops, nobody knows

We plan to spend most of our time touring sites in the city, but I rented a car and we will go into the Italian countryside for at least a couple of days. I want to get a feel for the country and the only way to do that is to go off the beaten track. So-called refugees from Africa and the Middle East are flocking into Italy, which is trying to get other European countries to take them. Pope Francis is asking every Catholic parish to accept a family, but there seems to be few of them — 80% of the wave of “migrants” making news lately are young men in their 20s and 30s. There are very few women and children or elderly. Hungary, Poland, Slovakia and the Czech Republic are suspicious. Most are said to be of “fighting age” and ISIS said its fighters were among them. Many rejected food aid because it came in boxes with Red Crosses.

I’ll be asking ordinary Italians their opinions. I suspect they’re much like ordinary Americans concerning illegal immigrants here: They don’t agree with the elites.

Agents Too Busy

The FBI is embarrassed. They investigated three terrorists and decided they weren’t dangerous. Then Nidal Hasan and the Tsarnaev brothers went on to kill and maim hundreds of Americans right here in the USA.

We shouldn’t be so hard on them though. They were busy doing other things at the instruction of their superiors. Like what you may ask? Well, for one thing, they were investigating Catherine Engelbrecht, the kind of person designated to be more dangerous than the Tsarnaev brothers who blew up the Boston Marathon. Obama Administration policy is to go easy on Muslims and scrutinize conservatives when investigating terrorism. That extends to tax policy too.

According to a Wall Street Journal column by Peggy Noonan, Catherine Engelbrecht personally founded two conservative groups for which she requested tax-exempt status from the IRS. One she called the “King Street Patriots.” For this, Engelbrecht received a visit from the FBI in December, 2010 to ask about someone who had attended a King Street Patriots function. They came back the next month with more questions while the IRS sent auditors to look over her business tax returns. Throughout 2011 came more visits from the FBI, OSHA, and the ATF. She has a small manufacturing business and is a licensed gun dealer. Clearly, the Obama Administration considers this woman dangerous to have gotten so much attention from so many federal agents.

Meanwhile, Tamerlan Tsarnaev was visiting Muslim terrorists in Chechnya and Dagestan during 2011 and Russian intelligence several times warned the FBI of this, but they just didn’t have time to follow up being so busy with that cagey Catherine Engelbrecht. Maybe Tsarnaev was getting lessons in bombmaking from Radical Muslims, but Engelbrecht was organizing a group called “True the Vote” that would prevent dead Americans from voting Democrat. If all those federal agents hadn’t slowed her down, Engelbrecht and her ilk might have gone on to pressure our government to take welfare benefits away from immigrant terrorists like Tsarnaev.

Homeland Security chief, Janet Napolitano spent $12,000,000 last year to study what kinds of people the FBI should be keeping an eye on. Those would be “people who are reverent of individual liberty” and “suspicious of centralized federal authority.” People like that could very possibly be “extreme right-wing terrorists.” The guys who wrote our Constitution - people like Thomas Jefferson and James Madison - were like that. If they were alive today, would the FBI and the IRS scrutinize them too? Back in 2009, Napolitano warned Americans that prolife groups, Iraq War veterans and people defending gun rights might be terrorists. We can see that the IRS has been very busy with those groups the past three years. Did the FBI investigate them too?

Law enforcement in the United Kingdom is similarly stretched. Some think it took them too long 20 minutes - to show up when a British soldier was run down by a car and beheaded by two Muslim terrorists on a London street. Bystanders had time to get a lesson in Islam from the Muslims who explained why they chopped the soldier’s head off. “We are forced by the Koran, in Sura al-Tawba, through many ayah in the Koran, we must fight them as they fight us.” said Michael Adebolajo. Passersby were asked to film this and post it on Youtube, which they did.

So, why did it take police twenty minutes you may ask? They’re busy fighting Islamophobia and other forms of bigotry and insensitivity. They even watch what people are Tweeting in the UK. According to the Daily Telegraph, a teenager was arrested for hurting the feelings of an olympic diver who didn’t win a medal by tweeting: “You let your father down!” Mustn’t let him go around writing stuff like that.

After the public beheading, an 85-year-old woman hurt the feelings of other Muslim immigrants while she was waiting for a bus near their mosque. “Go back to your own country!” she yelled. Immediately, police put her in handcuffs and took her away. People like her might prevent other British people from celebrating multiculturalism.

The left here and in the UK continue to insist these explosions, shootings or beheadings have nothing to do with Islam, the “religion of peace.” Just last Thursday, President Obama said these are just misguided individuals misinterpreting that great religion. Just because a million people march in  the streets of Iran chant “Death To America!” and thousands in Lebanon chant: “Death to America!” people get the wrong idea that there’s some large, Islamic movement against our country out there. Nothing could be further from the truth, Obama assures us.

As for journalists who may question the president’s wisdom? Federal agents have been busy investigating them too. I've always been curious why the FBI was never able to figure out what Mohammed Atta was doing in South Portland, Maine on the morning of September 11, 2001. Now I have a clue.

Left-Wing Tyranny: Here's What It Looks Like

It’s chilling. As the curtain lifts, a little here, a little there, we see the tyrannical left cementing itself in big government - and it gives me shivers. The most leftist administration in American history has been using the Internal Revenue Service to harass conservatives. It’s been lying about radical Muslim terrorism, and spying on the press. What else is it doing? Based just on what we know already, there are bound to be serious consequences. As more is learned, we may be looking at a sea change.

What kinds of consequences? Drastically-increasing polarization of left and right at all levels is a given, and that could take many forms. In government, Republicans will push for a special prosecutor to investigate the IRS and that has the most serious implications for the Obama Administration. Nixon talked about it using the IRS to harass enemies, but didn’t do it. The Obama Administration has been actually doing it for at least two years, but there's no evidence yet that he talked about it. It’s too early to speculate about impeachment, but if evidence of White House involvement pops up, it’s not unthinkable. What’s concerning now is reaction at the grass roots. Americans are rapidly losing faith in government.

Gun and ammunition purchases rose when Obama was elected and have been absolutely skyrocketing with his renewed gun control push. Legislation has been stopped so far, but there aren’t enough guns or ammunition anymore for people who want them. That raises suspicion for Americans who increasingly fear government. They see a president who slandered them as “bitterly clinging to their guns and religion," then rammed Obamacare down their throats. Obamacare spawned the Tea Party which elected a group of representatives to Congress in 2010 to block Obama’s left-wing agenda. And now they’ve been singled out for harassment by the by the enormous powers of the IRS? This is serious - very serious. They’re convinced Obama violated their rights to get himself reelected.

Labeled “racist” and “bigoted” by Democrats, the Tea Party staged peaceful, law-abiding demonstrations and even cleaned up after themselves, unlike their “Occupy” counterparts on the left which trashed cities around the country, conspired to blow up a bridge in Ohio, then rioted in Seattle, San Francisco and elsewhere on May 1st of 2012 and 2013. Obama officials and their allies in Congress have made clear which side they support - and it’s not the Tea Party. Now we’re expected to believe that nobody in the White House knew anything about IRS harassment. How stupid do they think we are?

Occupy suspects arrested planning to blow up bridge

When Bloomberg News’ Juliana Goldman asked him last Thursday afternoon: “Can you assure the American people that nobody in the White House knew about the [IRS] agency’s actions before your White House’s counsel’s office found out on April 22?”

Last Thursday's press conference

“Let me make sure I answer your specific question,” Obama said - and then he dodged it: “I can assure you that I certainly did not know anything about the IG report before the IG report had been leaked through the press,” he answered, saying nothing about any White House knowledge about which is what she asked.

He thinks we’re all fools out here.

At Thanksgiving dinners and Fourth of July picnics, have you heard relatives say they distrust government so much that they stock up on guns and ammunition? Maybe you thought they were over-reacting. Did they complain that the Department of Homeland Security was buying up more than a billion rounds of ammunition and thousands of light-armored tanks? Maybe you thought they were paranoid, but they were your relatives and so you tried to change the subject or you turned on a football game.

After the admission by the IRS about Tea Party groups, after accusations that they harassed pro-life Catholics, harassed groups opposing homosexual “marriage” or teaching the Constitution, harassed pro-Israel Jews, harassed Evangelical Protestants, harassed journalists who ask Obama tough questions, searched phone records and emails of other journalists and harassed many other conservatives with audits and intrusive, voluminous questionnaires - do you still think they’re over-reacting? Maybe you’re starting to wonder: Did the IRS really ask conservatives what candidates they support? What books they read? What they said in their prayers? Did they actually require pro-life groups to promote abortion? Yes, they did.

Now consider this: Sarah Ingram, the IRS lady who oversaw the harassment of conservatives got over $100,000 in bonuses, and now she’s been promoted and charged with implementing Obamacare. Who will she put in charge of determining how much medical care conservatives get? Michael Moore? Bill Ayers? Will they be on her death panels?

Philadelphia Eagles lineman says "Audit this!"

This trio of scandals offers an ugly view of left-wing tyranny perpetrated by the Democrats running our federal government. It’s the biggest threat to freedom Americans have faced since I can’t remember when. It must be stopped.

As Peggy Noonan put it: “If it’s not stopped now, it will never stop.”

Talk Is Cheap

Things ordinary people learn growing up in the neighborhood help to understand international relations. It’s obvious now that President Obama was bluffing when he warned Syria not to use chemical weapons, and the world knows it too. Syria called his bluff - crossed his red line. As the late Margaret Thatcher would put it - the president is going wobbly - and in doing so, making the world more dangerous. It would have been better if he’d kept his mouth shut, but talking is all he knows how to do.

Growing up we learned the toughest people didn’t talk much, whereas those who talked a lot tended to be the ones who wimped out at crunch time. Talkers lacked inner strength and were afraid others would detect that, so they chattered on about how tough they were. These are basic lessons men learn about other men. Those who come to power apply them.

Can you remember a president who talks as much as Obama does? When the only tool you have is a hammer, every problem is a nail. Early in his presidency, Obama want on an apology tour of Europe and the Middle East making speeches about how he was different from other presidents. His foreign policy was to show Muslims how nice he was, that he wasn’t like those other guys. Then he really expected Muslim leaders would all want to make nice. It hasn’t worked out that way of course, and now our president doesn’t know what to do next. He has no other tools in his toolbox.

When a bully goes into a bar, he’s not going to pick on the toughest-looking guy in the place. But if he suspects the toughest-looking guy is really a wuss, the bully will definitely poke at him to see what reaction he gets. When he discovers the guy has a jelly spine he’ll pile on the humiliation. Just so, when the bullies and crazies of the world think superpower America has a wimp in command, they’ll keep pushing to see what they can get away with. It’s their nature. North Korea is doing it. Iran is doing it. The radicals in Benghazi were doing it. Now Syria is doing it.

It’s not going to stop.

A connection ties Benghazi, Syria and Iran and Obama together. First, Obama denied the Benghazi attack was terrorism, made up a story about it being caused by a mysterious movie few ever heard of, and ordered his officials to push the lie. His Mainstream Media lapdogs went with it and refused to look into it any further. Other sources offer explanations for what Ambassador Stevens was really doing in Benghazi: running weapons from radical Muslim rebels there to other radical Muslim rebels in Syria via Turkey. We know Iran has boots on the ground in Syria to support fellow dictator Bashir Assad and they knew what Ambassador Stevens was doing.

Now back to Obama’s bluffing: The day after the Benghazi attack Obama said: “And make no mistake, we will work with the Libyan government to bring to justice the killers who attacked our people.” On October 26th, he said: “[M]y biggest priority now is bringing those folks to justice and I think the American people have seen that’s a commitment I'll always keep.”

Umm, no, Mr. President, we haven’t seen that. It’s been seven months and nobody has been arrested or captured or “brought to justice” as you keep promising. All we’ve seen are lies, cover-ups, and evasions by you and others in your administration.

Regarding Iran’s efforts to build nuclear weapons he told the world: “Make no mistake . . .” the US will “do what we must” to prevent it, and “all options are on the table.” But was Iran dissuaded? Obviously not. They continue on their merry way with assistance from North Korea, China, and Russia - none of whom take Obama seriously either.

He’s commander-in-chief of the strongest military the world has ever seen, but he has little idea how to use it. It’s as if Obama is the remote control device for an awesome military machine but he has no batteries inside him - no courage - and now the world knows it.

And don’t tell me about how “brave” Obama was to authorize the hit on Osama Bin Laden. The SEALS who carried out the mission were the brave ones. Insider accounts describe the president as indecisive and dithering until then-Secretary of Defense Leon Panetta took control of the situation because the Obama and his closest confidant,Valerie Jarrett, kept postponing the decision.

And the “tough” drone strikes? To community organizer president, watching intelligence videos of al Qaeda leaders hiding in Pakistan or Yemen and then shooting them with Hellfire Missiles is like playing video games with the "Choom Gang" back in Hawaii.

The worst thing is, truly brave American soldiers under his command know all this too. Why can’t the president tell us what really happened in Benghazi? “The FBI is investigating,” he says. Of course, the FBI investigated Major Hasan the Fort Hood shooter and the Boston Marathon bombers too and cleared them both. Will Obama do something about Syrians using chemical weapons? Nope. Monday he told us he wants more investigation. As the LA Times put it: “Obama’s Red Line on Syria Grows Softer.”

It's The Religion, Stupid

It amazes me what lengths to which the left will go to avoid mentioning terrorism and Islam in the same sentence. During the days between the bombing Monday and identifying the two bombers early Thursday, the left desperately wished they would be American white guys. Leftist Salon.com ran the headline: “Let’s hope the Boston Marathon Bomber is a white American.” Writer David Sirotta invoked the leftist creed of so-called White Privilege “There is a double standard: White terrorists are dealt with as lone wolves, Islamists are existential threats.”

Caucasian Terrorists

US Representative Peter King (R-NY) has tried to investigate links between Radical Islamists in the US and terrorism, but he’s accused of bigotry for his efforts. He proposed it again on Fox News Sunday with Senator Diane Feinstein (D-Cal) when she said: “I — I don’t think all of this is very helpful.  . . . I don’t think we need to go and develop some real disdain and hatred on television about it.”

Would this help?

Three years ago, Radical Muslim Major Nidal Hasan shot forty-five soldiers and killed thirteen at Fort Hood while chanting “Allahu Akbar!” (God is great), but our officials in Washington still refuse to call the incident terrorism. The Pentagon’s 86-page report on the shooting refused to mention Islam as a motive! Texas Congressman John Carter whose district includes Fort Hood was appalled. “People are afraid to speak out and label someone because they’ll be accused of being a racist or accused of profiling or being prejudiced against a certain religion or race of people,” Carter told POLITICO. “But in a time of national crisis, which I believe we are in, all identifiers must be discussed.”

How about this?

An officer in the US Army, Hasan publicly identified himself as a “Soldier of Allah” on Army documents, yet the army’s top officer - General George Casey said of the mass murder: “as horrific as this tragedy was, if our diversity becomes a casualty, I think that’s worse."

So General, political correctness is more important than the very lives of soldiers under your command?

Unbelievable.

Uh-duh!

Our leftist commander-in-chief suffers from the same willful blindness. “Why did young men who grew up and studied here as part of our communities and country resort to such violence?” asked President Obama last Saturday.

It’s the religion, stupid.

Obama’s Mini-Me - Massachusetts Governor Deval Patrick - said on Good Morning America last Sunday that he had no idea why the Tsarnaev brothers would do such a thing.

Uh-duh!

It’s the religion, stupid.

Former Maine Governor John Baldacci, a very liberal Democrat, played down Muslim association when he hosted a Saturday morning “Inside Maine” radio talk show last Saturday. He claimed poverty was the major factor in motivating the Tsarnaev brothers to bomb the Boston Marathon. Fellow liberal Ken Altshuler was Baldacci’s obsequious parrot and strongly supported this foolish contention.

They drove BMWs Governor

It's the religion, stupid.

MSNBC has been trying desperately to disassociate Islam from the Boston bombings. Before the Tsarnaev brothers were identified, its guests tried to blame the Tea Party. After they were identified as Muslims, another MSNBC guest insisted the Chechen Muslim backgrounds of the brothers “had nothing to do” with the bombings.

So, why does the left so desperately want to portray the Tsarnaev brothers as domestic terrorists? Because it would play into their world view of conservatives as redneck, cretin Neanderthals who “get bitter [and] cling to guns or religion or antipathy toward people who aren't like them” as President Obama described them.

Bitter clingers won’t vote for progressive elitists and they have guns. Progressive elitists would disarm them by ramping up gun control and dilute their influence during elections by granting amnesty to millions of illegal aliens who’ll vote Democrat. Gun control and amnesty were before Congress when the bombs went off. That riveted America’s attention and unraveled carefully-crafted, progressive spin. Already skyrocketing, gun and ammunition sales increased even more as more Americans were suspected their elected leaders were either fools or worse - they were covering up something.

They’re wondering, as I am:

*If the Tsarnaevs needed asylum from Chechnya, why did the parents move back?

*If they all feared for their lives, why did Tamerlan Tsarnaev go back to visit for six months?

*What were the chances that a Saudi national with relatives in Gitmo being at the finish line and close enough to be wounded by the blast?

*Why did President Obama and Secretary of State Kerry have emergency meetings with the Saudi Foreign Minister while the Saudi national was held in the hospital as a “person of interest”?

*Why was the Wednesday FBI press conference postponed again and again during all this?

*Why was the Saudi national living in Revere, Mass. when his student visa was for a college in Ohio?

*Why does Janet Napolitano profile terrorists as pro-life demonstrators, pro-gun activists, and Iraq veterans - but not radical Muslims?

How Will Leftist Loons in Cambridge and Boston Reconcile This?

Watching this unfold in the locked-down city of Boston, it makes me wonder if this is just one of many sleeper cells ready to activate when given orders to do so by whomsoever in Teheran, Pakistan, Gaza, Lebanon, some cave in Afghanistan or wherever jihadists hang out.

Who activated them? They've been in the country for a decade or more. They blend in easily. Were they recently recruited? Were they groomed by their parents? How connected are Hezbollah, al Qaida, Chechen radical Muslims? We'll know more in the coming hours and days.

Do the FBI and Dept of Homeland Security, etc. know there are scores or even hundreds of sleeper cells ready to disrupt our day-to-day life when activated? I suspect so, even as they simultaneously play down references to Islam in their anti-terrorist training and instead play up Pro-life demonstrators, pro-gun activists, and recently - Catholics.

How does leftist loon and Salon writer David Sirota feel now? He wished the Boston Marathon bomber would be a white American, and it seems like he got his wish, but then he wasn't expecting these heterosexual white Americans to be radical Muslims was he? He's dismayed I'm sure. I'm not. My hope is that at least some leftist loons in that very loony leftist region of Massachusetts will realize who the bigger enemy is. They've felt an affinity for Radical Muslims because they hate what America has traditionally stood for just as the jihadists do, under the concept of "The enemy or my enemy is my friend." It's an unlikely alliance, but it's very real. Will they wake up now that their lives have been disrupted?

Or, if not, what rationales will they concoct to reconcile these events in their liberal La-La-Land?

Romney Needs A Booster

Mitt Romney needs a shot of testosterone. Those of you reading this column in the newspapers on Thursday will have seen the Wednesday evening debates and will know if he’s gotten one. Up to now Romney has been passive - allowing the Obama campaign and it’s Mainstream Media Minions to define him. I observed him up close at least six times and interviewed him once during the 2008 election cycle, and my impression has been that Romney is a smart guy, but that’s not enough. He’s a good administrator, manager and he’s well informed, but that’s not enough either. He’s a nice guy as well, but one thing always nagged at me when I’ve been the room with him and that is: He lacks chutzpah. He knows what the country needs, but I don’t get the impression that he feels it in his gut. I haven’t sensed fire in his belly.

I wonder if he’s ever been in a physical fight and I sense that he hasn’t. When you’re punching it out with someone, rolling around in the dirt trying to hit the other guy, you know how he’s feeling. You know how much fight is in him and you know if it’s greater than or less than how much you feel in yourself. I want Romney to win, but I know he has to man up if he’s going to thrash his opponent.

He should have known the Mainstream Media would be protecting Obama and would be gunning for him - but rather than fight them, he has allowed the media to control him and his message. He’s reacted to them rather than emphasize his own vision. For example: when Radical Muslim Arabs attacked the US Embassy in Cairo, burned the American flag and raised the al Qaeda flag, our staff there kissed up and apologized for an obscure film trailer on Youtube that had only 300 hits worldwide. Mitt Romney rightly criticized the Obama State Department for groveling, but when Obama’s media lapdogs jumped on Romney, he should have responded to them saying: “Hey. Why are you all following me around? Enemy flags are flying over our embassies! Go ask the president why his Middle East policy is disintegrating! Do your job! When I get into the White House, I’ll fix it but until January you have to ask Obama what’s going on instead of kissing his butt. He’s supposed to be in charge here!”

"Hey! Do your job!" he said. I wish.

Can you picture Romney doing that? I can’t. I could picture Newt Gingrich doing it, but not the Romney I’ve known so far.

When Obama’s media minions asked Romney about his 47% remarks, he should have said something like: “Well, when half the country doesn’t pay federal income tax, they don’t have any skin in the game. They can vote for a congress and president who would tax money out of other people’s pockets and into theirs. That’s the Democrat Party’s base. We need to close down the IRS and institute a flat tax so everybody pays the same percentage. The rich still pay the most, but if you vote in people who raise taxes yours will go up too.”

He could follow up by pointing out that less than 2% of Americans do the fighting for all the rest of us. During WWII, Korea, and Vietnam, all males were subject to the draft and would have to fight when our nation went to war. That made our involvement in any war much more vital. If we still had a draft, would people tolerate half-assed wars like we’re fighting in Afghanistan? Would they put up with it when our wussy commander-in-chief gives a pull-out deadline whether we’ve won or not? He defines ‘victory’ as training the Afghans to fight for their own country, but the people we’re training are killing our own soldiers! Romney should say, “Either we smoke out and kill the Taliban, or let’s just get out of their right now!”

And, while he’s at it, Romney could bring up the $450 million we’re sending to an Egypt ruled by the Muslim Brotherhood.

He could tell the Mainstream Media to go ask their hero why gas prices more than doubled during his presidency, or why the national debt has gone up by 50% in the past four years, or why unemployment stays above 8% for more than three years after spending nearly a trillion dollars to prevent it from even reaching 8%! Or how about asking him why he has no plan to address looming bankruptcies in Medicare and Social Security?

During the debates, Romney could point out that liberal biographer David Maraniss found 38 fabrications in Obama’s memoir “Dreams From My Father.” As Investor’s Business Daily recommends, Romney could ask Obama: “If readers can't trust you to be honest in your autobiography, why should voters trust you with another term?”

 If Romney can do all that, he’ll win in November.

Dublin's Fair City

All my ancestors come from Ireland, but that doesn’t make me Irish. I’m thoroughly American, but my ancestry has influenced me in many ways. I’ve traveled there twice with my wife to see the farms two of my ancestors left from in County Donegal and County Mayo. Along the way, I’ve had interesting discussions around history and politics at pubs and B&Bs. My wife, though, is apolitical. She’d wait politely for a short while before sending me signals that she wanted us to be on our way. After several such episodes, she said, “Why don’t you come back by yourself sometime when you can talk with whomever you want for as long as you want about whatever you want?”
Well, that time has come. Last spring, an offer came up: ‘round trip airfare and hotel for four nights in Dublin for $500. With taxes and fees, it came to more than advertised, but I booked it anyway. I’d spent a day in Dublin on our first trip and I wanted to go back. My plan was to figure out what pubs political types frequented, then drop by and see what developed. In August, however, I was fortunate enough to meet two political science professors from the University of Notre Dame on their way to their Office of International Studies facility in Dublin. They suggested I visit there when I was in town and told me of three pubs where I should find conversation. I won’t, however, fill my time with only academics and government types. If they’re anything like they are over here, they’ll be somewhat out of touch, so I’ll visit blue-collar pubs as well.Ireland has gone from rags to riches to rags again over just the last twenty-five or thirty years. Their economy was hurting badly when we visited with my elderly mother and uncle in the spring of 2009. Everywhere I looked there were unfinished building projects growing weeds and President Obama had just been inaugurated. Just as in America, many Irish pinned their hopes on him. Eating in pubs from Kerry to Mayo, locals noticed we were Americans and asked if our new president was going to straighten out the economy. Uncle Joe is a retired economics professor and a liberal who reads The Boston Globe every day and believes it. He assured them that Obama would make things right while I shook my head. The Irish hoped a rejuvenated US economy would pull them up but, as we all know, that recovery hasn’t materialized. Now Ireland is in danger of default. Things are very bad there, as they are in Italy, Spain, Portugal, and Greece. The EU and the Euro are declining fast while the dollar drags too.

There have been other changes in Ireland as well. The country could be called “post-Catholic” or soon to become so. As Tom Hundley writes in the Chicago Tribune: “As recently as the 1970s, 90 percent of the Irish identified themselves as Catholic and almost the same number went to mass at least once a week; now the figure for mass attendance is closer to 25 percent.” That’s a profound change in a very short time and there are several reasons for it. The Irish church offended people much the way the American church did. As homosexual priests preyed on boys, bishops covered up and transferred them, just as they did in Boston and in other American cities. One Irish priest fathered children and paid hush money to their mother with church funds. Some say their brief affluence steered the Irish away from religious faith as well. Whatever the reasons, shortly after his appointment, Dublin’s Archbishop Diarmuid Martin asked, “Will Ireland be Christian in 2030?”Europe itself is called “post-Christian” as churches are sold to burgeoning Muslim immigrant populations and converted to mosques. Its great cathedrals are virtually empty. Percentage-wise, there are fewer Muslim immigrants in Ireland than in the UK and the rest of Europe, but their numbers are increasing rapidly. Islam is now the third-largest faith in Ireland.

Meanwhile, our State Department has issued warnings to Americans traveling in Europe: “[Radical Muslim] terrorists may elect to use a variety of means and weapons . . . to attack public transportation systems and other tourist infrastructure. U.S. citizens should take every precaution to be aware of their surroundings and to adopt appropriate safety measures to protect themselves when traveling,” they say.

Hmm.

“Adopt appropriate safety measures to protect themselves.” That’s funny. I won’t have any weapons, of course - not even my little pocket knife. Guess I could give them dirty looks. If that doesn’t work, I could bite them or hit them with my camera.

Assuming I arrive safely, I’m going to feel the country of my ancestors again, and try to get an idea about where people there think the world is going. It’s good to get out of my own country once in a while and look back at it through other eyes.