On The Wind

Scent affects my consciousness more lately than it ever did, perhaps because my other senses are getting less acute to the point where I need tri-focals and I say “What?” a lot. Smells affect my mood and I’m allowing them to. They resurrect old feelings, vaguely pleasant ones mostly, and when there’s been time to indulge them, I do. They’re taking me places, like daydreams do, places in my memory when I’m a boy and the world is new. They remind me that each day is new at every stage in our lives. Anything can happen.

Sometimes images come with the scents in which I’m walking or riding along on a bicycle or in a car with the window open. Or, I’m standing, tilting my head up to smell something in the breeze as I’ve seen animals do. I’m a child who has just stepped out and closed the door behind me and I’m smelling what’s in the wind, looking for a clue about what the day may bring.

My wife offered good advice when I decided to retire from my primary profession - teaching. “Don’t take on anything new for a year,” she suggested. “Try to relax and see what happens. Then decide what you want to do.” There were two other jobs I continued with: one is writing this column each week. The other is managing property. Schedules for both are flexible. Each day unfolds as I design it, or allow it. Not everything is subject to my control, of course, but many days a lot of things are. If I want to smell what’s on the wind, I usually take the time. Often I’m alone in beautiful settings, especially this time of year. Autumn in New England has its own fragrances and they take me back to many dozens of previous falls I’ve walked through and smelled. Thoughts and feelings come and go as I stroll through crispy leaves under skeletal ashes and maples. Life is good.

One never knows what the day will present, however. We may encounter something or hear bits of news that augur profound changes ahead. Some days are spent absorbing the news and adapting to it. Sometimes it’s good, sometimes not, but always interesting. I simply cannot remember the last day I was bored.

Claire, Lila, Henry, Luke

Every Tuesday but one since last July I’ve spent with grandchildren - helping daughter Ann deal with new twin boys, Luke and Henry. Mostly, I’m with their sisters: Claire, who is four now, and Lila, who will be three on New Year’s Eve. Ann takes care of the twins, now almost eight months old and growing fast. Tuesdays, I’m a grandfather all day.

Claire

Claire is deep. She watches me arrive each week, but doesn’t interact until she’s ready. She observes. Sometimes, later on, she’ll tell me her thoughts. Her little sister, Lila, lights up immediately - always spontaneous, always in the moment. One afternoon Lila walked over to me, put her arms up and said, “I want to give you a hug and a kiss.” Those are always welcome, of course, but her timing was a little out of the ordinary. Picking her up, I asked her why she got that urge.

Lila

“Because you don’t have a Mommy,” she said.

I savored the hug and kiss, put her down and said, “Thanks, but I do have a Mommy, you know.”
  

“No you don’t,” said Lila.

Ma

“Yes, I do, and her name is Ma,” I said and then paused. “You know Ma, right? She comes over and helps your Mommy sometimes.” My mother is a spritely, eighty-nine-year-old who drives over and still gets down on the floor to play with her great-grandchildren.

“Ma’s not your mommy,” said Lila.

“She is my mommy,” I said, “and she gives me hugs and kisses. But I like to get them from you too.”

Claire

Claire was observing and listening to all this in her typical, quiet way, and it seemed a good time to teach about family relationships. “Ma is my mother and I’m her son,” I began.

Lila still looked skeptical.

“I’m your Mommy’s father,” I continued, going over to Ann and hugging her.

 “Grampy is my Dada,” Ann said.

“Ann is my daughter,” I said with my arm around her. “You are my granddaughter.”

Lila and Claire

“I’m not your granddaughter,” said Lila.

“Okay,” I said. “What are you then?”

She paused for a second, looked at me and and said: “I’m your Barnabas.”

“My Barnabas?” I said, wondering where in the world that came from. “I never had a Barnabas before. Hmm.” A few months before she told me she had a rhinoceros and a hippopotamus in her little pink backpack - real ones.

Ta-Da!

“Okay. Enough lessons for today,” I said. We went outside to roll over logs and look for salamanders in the woods.

Those scents, too, took me back to my own childhood.

Time To Pare Back Government

Been spending a lot of time up on a ladder lately, scraping and painting. State and federal regulations dictate that only the homeowner may scrape, repair and paint over any house built before 1978 unless he’s willing to fork over lots of money to a government-licensed contractor. That contractor would have to take needlessly-extensive, government-required measures which drive up costs enormously because our South Portland house was built in 1920 and could, therefore, have lead paint on it. It’s covered with aluminum siding except for window frames and soffits, but it has a hip roof and a two-foot overhang all around that I don’t think had been painted for thirty years. There was a lot of scraping to do.

When I told my wife that I’d be doing it she pressured me to hire someone. “You’re too old to be going up that high,” she said. “You should get my brother to do it.” When I pointed out that her brother is three years older than me she said, “Yeah, but he does it all the time.” Still, he’s a painting contractor without the special license the feds require and he’d be liable to a huge fine if he were caught working on our house. So, I did it myself.

It’s mindless work, and I spent several days high up there to think about how much I resented our huge, intrusive government. Then I used my iPod to listen to talk radio, specifically Rush Limbaugh and Howie Carr on the local WGAN AM. On Sundays they broadcast audio from NBC’s “Meet The Press” followed by ABC’s “This Week,” both of which parroted Democrat spin on why the federal government was shutting down. I’d listened to Limbaugh and Carr excoriate Democrats and praise Senator Ted Cruz as he railed against our huge federal bureaucracy. The more I listened, the angrier I got. Trouble is, the streaming signal cut out every ten minutes or so. I couldn’t reset it without reaching into my pocket and manipulating the iPod and my hands were full. One held the scraper or paintbrush and the other held tight to the ladder twenty-five feet up.

So, I switched to downloaded audiobooks which didn’t cut out. I listened to a biography of Saint Paul, then “Intellectuals and Society” by Thomas Sowell, and finally David Stewart’s “Summer of 1787,” this last about the men who gathered in Philadelphia and created our government. Stewart relied on James Madison’s accounts of how state delegates took special pains to limit federal government power. Here it was 226 years later and federal power was out of control. That’s why I was up on the ladder.

The more I listened, the more pissed I got. Delegates agreed that all money bills had to begin in the House, which most closely represented the people - more than the Senate. They called it “The People’s House” and intended that it check and balance the power of both the Senate and the President. If those entities wanted something to pass the House, they had to negotiate. Under Harry Reid and Barack Obama, however, they were refusing. The Mainstream Media - especially David Gregory and George Stephanopoulos - were either ignorant of how the Constitution came to be, or they were willfully misrepresenting the shutdown by repeating Democrat talking points.

Mount Chocorua in the White Mountain National Forest

I finally finished the job and last Saturday my wife wanted to explore a smokey quartz mine on New Hampshire’s Moat Mountain. Driving over there, it occurred to me that it was in the White Mountain National Forest and the National Park Service had been shutting down access to parks. They had barricaded the World War II Memorial in Washington, DC - an open-access facility that previously anyone could walk into 24-7. They closed highway pull-offs from which people could view Mount Rushmore. They even tried to close off access to the ocean in Florida. All this to follow an Obama Administration directive that they make the shutdown as painful as possible for ordinary citizens. And closing the National Mall to citizens and then opening it up to illegal aliens to demonstrate? That's going to piss off a lot of Americans. So I’m thinking: what if we get over there and they tell me the National Forest is closed? Well, I decided, then there’s going to be some civil disobedience perpetrated by your’s truly.

But it wasn’t necessary. Going up an access road, I noticed a ranger’s SUV behind me so I stopped in the middle of the road, walked back, and asked him if the mine was nearby. The uniformed young man behind the wheel smiled and said, “You’re headed in the right direction.” Then he told me to take a left at the next fork which would take me to the trailhead. A nice kid.

After hearing about those WWII vets that went through government barricades in Washington, DC last week, I was ready to do something similar. Something is brewing out there. Can you feel it?

Time To Arm Teachers

School has been back in session for a month and there hasn’t been a mass shooting - yet.

Will there be one this year? Most likely. Where? When? By whom? We can’t answer the first two, but we can place a fairly safe bet on the third. If the past is any guide, it will most likely be a mentally and emotionally-disturbed, teenaged, white boy. He’ll enter the school’s formerly gun-free zone with at least one gun, and possibly several. He’ll know that he’ll be the only armed person in the school for at least several minutes until police arrive - plenty of time to kill many, many children as well as any adults who try to stop him because they’ll all be defenseless.

When did our schools become gun-free zones? After the “Gun Free School Zones Act” passed in 1990. It was modeled after the “Drug Free Zones” established around schools - and both were intended to increase penalties against students who brought drugs or guns into schools, and against gang members who might shoot at each other. It wasn't designed to prevent teachers or other responsible adults from carrying concealed firearms. That, however, was an unintended side-effect of the act, and it’s leaving our schools vulnerable to the mentally-unhinged and/or evil individuals who like to kill.

Can anything be done to prevent school killings? If some adults in a school were armed and trained to confront intruders with guns, killings could be dramatically reduced. Take the Newtown murders for example. If the people in the office had been armed, twenty children would likely have been saved. The principal, a psychologist, and a teacher rushed out to meet the shooter, Adam Lanza, when they heard him shoot the door open. Defenseless, all three were shot. The rest of the people in the school school could only cower and hope police would come before he could get to them. What would Lanza have done if someone were shooting back at him? He wouldn’t have been free to shoot so many children if here were busy defending himself, would he?

It’s bad enough that our schools became gun-free zones, but it’s absurd that now our military bases are as well. Remember when we used to call the military the “Armed Services”? Well, now they’re the unarmed services thanks to President Clinton. One of the first things he did after being inaugurated in 1993 was to disarm our military personnel while they’re on base. That’s why Radical Muslim Major Nidal Hasan was able to shoot forty-two soldiers at Fort Hood before being shot himself by a civilian police officer who came onto the base. The wife of one of the wounded was asked after the shooting how she felt about her husband’s pending deployment to Afghanistan. “At least he’s safe there and he can fire back, right?” she responded.

Aaron Alexis was able to kill twelve people at the Navy Yard in Washington DC a couple of weeks ago. There were Marines stationed on base with guns who could have stopped him, but they had no bullets thanks to President Clinton.

Evil jihadists like Major Hasan as well as the mentally ill like Adam Lanza and Aaron Alexis seek out soft targets to play out their malicious schemes. That’s why a group of jihadists targeted a shopping mall in Nairobi, Kenya a couple of weeks ago. However, two armed men - an army ranger from Ireland and a British soldier - were able to rescue two hundred terrified shoppers by shooting back at the jihadists. Otherwise, the death toll there would have been much higher.

Major Nidal Hasan

As the NRA’s Wayne LaPierre put it: “The only thing that stops a bad guy with a gun is a good guy with a gun.” Haven't we learned by now that "Gun Free Zone" signs don't work?

Shortly before I retired, our school went into lockdown because of a gun threat. I followed protocol and cowered in my classroom until the all-clear and I wrote about how helpless I felt without a gun. It would make so much sense to train volunteer teachers at each school in how to deal with an armed intruder. Give them an extra stipend for their extra duty as if they were coaching a sport. I would gladly have taken the training. It would be cheaper than paying a policeman at each school. Children at daycare centers in our federal buildings have armed guards to protect them ever since the Oklahoma Federal Building was attacked. Those guards are trained for only a few weeks. Why not give public school personnel the same training? Are children in our public schools any less valuable than children in federal daycare centers?

The Past Is Always With Us

The old man sat alone on a bench with a cane propped against one leg. We rode past on bicycles and he said something I didn’t understand. I stopped and pedaled back to tell him I didn’t hear him right.

“He’s afraid of losing you. He keeps looking over his shoulder,” the old man explained as he looked toward my six-year-old grandson, Alex, who’d been pedaling furiously in front of me. The old man’s battered cap visor shaded intelligent eyes surrounded by wrinkles. “Pearl Harbor 1941” was sewn in gold thread above the worn visor.

“You were at Pearl Harbor?” I asked.

Alex at his great-grandfather's funeral last December
 Arlington National Cemetery

“Yes,” he answered.

“You must be in your nineties now.”

“Ninety-four.”

Turning to Alex, I asked, “Do you know what happened at Pearl Harbor?”

He shrugged, so I explained that the largest war in history began for the United States when the Japanese attacked the US Navy there back in 1941, ten years before I was born. “This man was there when it happened.”

Suddenly shy, Alex only stared at the old man with wide eyes. The old man’s eyes silently conveyed that he understood how Alex was feeling and seemed grateful for our attention during our short interaction.

Tankers offload at dusk in South Portland Maine

The bicycle trail we’d been riding on was laid out along the Portland Pipeline right-of-way that stretched from where we stood straddling our bikes all the way to Montreal, Canada. There was a huge, ocean-going tanker tied up about three hundred yards from where we were talking as it offloaded crude oil from some other part of the world. Behind us were huge, cylindrical tanks that stored the oil until it could be pumped northwest to refineries in Montreal.

It occurred to me that the pipeline had been completed in1941, just before the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor. Yet it was Canadian involvement in World War II - which pre-dated US involvement - that caused the pipeline to be built. War had broken out in Europe when England and her empire, along with France and its empire declared war on Germany in 1939 following the German invasion of Poland. German submarines had been attacking Canadian shipping in the Gulf of St. Lawrence and Canada needed a more secure method of delivering crude oil to Montreal refineries.

We said good-bye to the old man and pedaled the short distance to the waterfront where there was a  full-size model of a “Liberty Ship” bow a few yards from the bow of that big tanker. We turned our bikes into an outdoor display in which there were photographs of what is now “Bug Light Park” as it looked during World War II. The War Department had seized and torn down a residential neighborhood and constructed enormous shipyards on the site to build hundreds of Liberty Ships. These hastily-built, cargo vessels kept the enormous Allied war effort in Europe and North Africa supplied. Tens of thousands of men and women from all over New England worked there. Each woman was a “Rosie the Riveter” in the parlance of the day. They built the ships that would keep their fathers, brothers, husbands, and sons equipped with whatever they needed to fight the Nazi war machine.

We looked at the old photos and I explained as much as I could for as long as I had Alex’s attention. Six-year-old boys, and especially Alex, like to keep moving on sunny, September afternoons, so we soon continued our pedaling along the waterfront toward a huge cruise ship tied up to the International terminal across the harbor in Portland. It dwarfed everything around it.

Portland Pipeline Pier at sunrise last month

As we pedaled back toward our South Portland house through what had been sprawling shipyards, I recalled reading the thousands of interviews I assigned my students to do over the decades I taught history. I’d send students out each year to interview someone over seventy years old. Most interviewed grandmothers and great-grandmothers, many of whom were women who had worked at the South Portland shipyard. On that windy Saturday afternoon though, huge kites flew over large expanses of green grass overlooking Casco Bay on what had been an enormous industrial site. I imagined being there seventy years before. Our bikes glided over old railroad tracks, barely poking up through asphalt here and there, remains of what had been.

Moonset over Portland from Bug Light Park last week

History teachers know the past is always with us, especially retired ones like me. Driving back toward our Lovell house in the western Maine mountains, my wife and I pass by other sections of the Portland Pipeline’s 236-mile route to Montreal. Images of men digging it went through my mind along with images of women whose lives were being transformed by their experiences doing what had been exclusively men’s work in the huge shipyard where the pipeline began. Most of them were underground now, like the pipeline, like the old man would be fairly soon, like all of us will be sooner or later.

Today, however, sun is shining. Let’s see what the day brings.

Can't Go On Like This

Something’s in the air - a foreboding. People sense it, and when I ask them to describe it they bite their lips, look away and look back to say something like, “I don’t know. It just can’t keep going on like this. Something’s going to break.” Some think another financial meltdown is coming, but a bigger one, much bigger. Others think it will manifest as a breakdown of law and order. No one I’ve talked to thinks their lives or their children’s lives are going to improve in the foreseeable future. They think about just holding on. They see decline all around them and are bracing for more. They expect the slide to accelerate.

Former Senator John Morse

Two things occurring last week seemed reflective of this:

1. A couple of state senators were recalled in Colorado after they voted for gun control. The most surprising thing was that these were two very blue Democrat senate districts that went for Obama by a wide margin. It was a blue-collar revolt organized by a couple of plumbers who were outspent by progressive Democrats six to one!

2. Nationwide, senators and congressmen on both sides of the aisle were bombarded by constituents telling them to stay out of Syria. Here in Maine, left-wing Congresswoman Chellie Pingree said her calls were running 98% against. Those are astounding numbers! President Obama was shocked to realize that if the vote he asked for went ahead, he would have the rug pulled out from under him in front of the whole world.

Chellie Pingree

Are these the same voters who reelected Obama and the Democrats with 52% of the vote just ten months ago? Maybe they’re people who stayed home last November because they didn’t like any of the choices on the ballot, Democrat or Republican. Maybe they’re people only now getting fired up because they know what they don’t want - a government they don’t trust trying to take their guns, and a president they don’t trust trying to act tough.

Something is afoot and political pundits are flabbergasted. These are grass-roots uprisings and they portend a possible sea-change. Ordinary citizens are saying “Stop!” to government. The Colorado plumbers and other ordinary citizens told government not to mess with people’s guns. The rest of America told government not to use military action in Syria if it’s only to save a vain, incompetent commander-in-chief from embarrassment, especially one who has no plan for what to do afterward.

Are people losing faith in government? Unions are worried about losing the forty-hour work week and their subsidized health insurance under Obamacare. Citizens are learning that their doctors will be asking them for details about their sex lives - and it won’t necessarily be the doctors they’ve always gone to either. Obama’s assurances that “you can keep you doctor” under Obamacare are going by the wayside. So are the guarantees that “you can keep your policy,” as colleges, businesses, and other organizations think about dropping health care coverage for employees. Meanwhile, senators and congressmen who gave us Obamacare are exempting themselves from it. They don’t want to go into health-care exchanges into which they’re forcing the rest of America.

The number of working age Americans out of the workforce is approaching 100 million. That’s not reflected in unemployment statistics, which are really far worse that those being reported. There are more people collecting government assistance than there are taxpayers in many places, including my state of Maine. The United States was born in 1776 and came to be the most powerful, most prosperous nation in history by the end of World War II in 1945. Now, in 2013, the United States is the most indebted nation in history. We owe $17 trillion on the books already and that doesn’t count promises government made for Social Security and Medicare which could amount to $100 trillion more unless they’re cut back.

“Rags to rags in three generations.” Ever heard the saying? The context is usually family, but it can apply to a nation. The first generation makes money and goes from rags to riches. The second generation holds it. The third squanders it and goes back to rags. In a country that prizes the “pursuit of happiness” by preserving equal opportunity, rags to riches stories are common. They happen in totalitarian countries too, but the process is usually criminal or violent, or both. Here, people can pull themselves up legitimately by starting businesses which together build an economy that pulls others up with it. We can, that is, unless government regulates business to death or confiscates income through excessive taxation. Government can preserve equal opportunity, but cannot produce equal results.

Half the country seems content to sit back and let government do more and more for them, while the other half realizes, as economist Herb Stein did, that “if something cannot go on forever, it will stop.”

Sea Glass

We both walk slowly along, eyes on the ground. My wife looks for sea glass at low tide, bending over frequently to pick up a piece and pocket it. I do too because she likes to. She picks up all she finds, filling her pocket and whatever container she brought with her to overflowing. I’m more selective. Down the beach another woman does the same thing, just the three of us on a cool, sunny, September afternoon.

Sea glass and older, ceramic fragments are ubiquitous on old city beaches near our South Portland neighborhood. We found a small beach recently on what had been working waterfront. Rather than smooth sand, small stones dominated, interspersed with large ones sticking up here and there. Scattered about were remnants of piers long abandoned. People didn’t sunbathe there. Few swam either. Some would come to let their dogs run and swim. Others like ourselves came to see what presented itself after the tide.

Houses a block or two back are old too, modest and built close together. A few still have lobster traps stacked around and not many are neglected anymore. Buyers fix them up now, especially along the harbor edge - people who like to look at the water rather than work in it. There’s a Coast Guard Station, a restaurant, clusters of condominiums, single-family homes here and there, and a yacht club slowly taking over an old boatyard.

It occurred to me that ugliness could, over time, turn to beauty. Sea glass is like that. When I asked the other woman on the beach to show me her collection, she said, “Every piece has a story.” I imagined people in the long ago smashing empty liquor bottles in anger, or out of carelessness, laziness, drunkenness or some combination, and I could almost hear the tinkling. They left dangerous shards to cut whatever person or animal might pass by before waves and sand and time dulled sharp edges. I imagined the waterfront as it used to be with small shipyards building wooden vessels. The decrepit remains of some still stood nearby with old ways disappearing into the water over which new boats used to slip in until they too rotted away. In my mind’s eye I saw fishing boats under sail and men returning with their catch, or without one, empty. I saw sad, broken men leaving their broken bottles behind and staggering home to scatter emotional debris over spouses and children.

Alcoholism is like that, leaving emotional and spiritual detritus - often for generations. It, too, manifests in many colors, sizes and shapes and can cut deeply, drawing blood. Wounds fester, or they can heal, dulling pain, leaving scars - even turning beautiful sometimes, like the glass, like the pieces my wife and I collect.

In a church meeting room up the street people wounded by alcoholism in loved ones gathered and talked the following morning. I was one. Some were in pain. Others had also been wounded, but after many waves of grief their pain was sanded down and had lost sharpness. They had become like vintage pieces of glass diffusing light in their subtle, pleasingly-serene manner. Newcomers living with active alcoholics, in whom pain was acute, marveled at the serenity they sensed in the old-timers. They saw that others had felt distress like theirs and transcended it. Drawing hope, they bathed in their reflected light to soothe their wounds and find healing.

My ancestors were all Irish immigrants among whom alcoholism was too common. Great-grandfather John Fitzgerald was one. He came over to St. John, New Brunswick in the late 1800s and, like many other Irish-off-the-boat, he walked down to Boston, stopping here and there to work. He sang and played a piano and he was a charmer, they say. I never knew him as he died of the drink in his early forties. Did he stay for a time along Portland harbor and contribute to the sea glass to be found there? I don’t know, but he married Kate Carney and started a family near the docks in Boston. My grandmother, Mary Fitzgerald, was his first-born in 1894. Then, unbeknownst to them, he started another family in New York City - going back and forth between the two for as long as he could before his charm wore off. Mary Fitzgerald Haggerty lived with us a while when I was a boy and I sensed her pain. Only now do I understand what some of its likely causes were.

These things I pondered as we walked slowly along, eyes on the ground.

Too Much Power in Washington

At a dinner party last week a friend said, “I’m going to say one word and I’d like you to answer in one word.”

“Okay.”

“Snowden.”

I had to think for several seconds. “Ambivalence,” was my response.

Edward J. Snowden shocked me with revelations of the extent to which government spies on us. It upset me and forced me to readjust my understanding of the threat to our Constitution government surveillance has become.

The Constitution limits government; that’s its primary purpose. Our Founding Fathers considered government a necessary evil to be constrained as a threat to liberty. As originally ratified, our Constitution says government may have only these powers and no others. Two years later, the Bill of Rights was added to spell out constraints more specifically.

Snowden showed me that’s all at risk now. The Fourth Amendment is violated when government collects all our phone calls and all our emails. We’re assured government won’t read them unless we’re communicating with a foreign terrorist.

Do I believe that? No. Do you? The Obama Administration uses the IRS to harass conservatives. Can we trust it not to read our emails or listen to our calls? Who would doubt it will continue to spy on - and leak information about - its political adversaries?

So now what? The federal government knows more about us than I ever would have believed and I’m a fairly well-informed person. I was relatively confident of my ability to sniff out paranoid conspiracy theories about secret cabals like the Trilateral Commission, or Bilderberg, or the Illuminati controlling the world. However, other things I’ve learned this year are worrying me more than they did when I first heard about them - all because of Edward J. Snowden.

What things? Department of Homeland Security buying 2700 mine-resistant, armor-protected vehicles and 1.6 billion rounds of ammunition for one. Inserting an “indefinite detention” proviso in the National Defense Authorization Act (NDAA) allowing government to suspend our right to due process is another. Then there’s defining people reverent of individual liberty as terrorists, and that definition would include this writer. All this had the support of Republican congressional leaders as well. Where then, are the constitutional checks and balances designed by our Founding Fathers?

When Obama ignored the War Powers Act, thereby violating Congress’s constitutional authority to declare war in his attack on Libya, he was assisting rebels linked to al Qaeda. After they killed Ghaddafi, those rebels killed our Ambassador and three other Americans in Benghazi. Though President Obama promised repeatedly to get to the bottom of what happened, all his efforts have been to cover it up. Republicans in Congress with the power to subpoena witnesses, have so far let him get away with all this. Are they complicit? Tacitly so, at least.

 There are reports here and here and here and elsewhere that Obama’s CIA was shipping weapons such as Gaddafi’s shoulder-fired, surface-to-air missiles to Syrian rebels from Benghazi at the time of the attack. There are reports by his own former justice minister that Gaddafi also had sarin nerve gas. There reports that sarin gas was used - not by Basher Assad - but by al Qaeda-affiliated rebels in Syria last May to kill innocent civilians. In June, Syrian rebels were caught with sarin over the border in Turkey.

President Obama and then-Secretary of State Clinton both lied repeatedly about what caused the Benghazi attack. They claimed to be repeating the best intelligence available at the time, but no intelligence about an obscure movie ever existed. Both knew that.

Having squandered credibility, President Obama painted himself into a corner in Syria with his “red line.” American and world opinion has forced him to defer to congress for constitutional authorization. American citizens now must wade through misinformation and fashion at least a tentative understanding with which to lobby our congressmen and senators as they debate a military strike. I recommend: "When our enemies are killing each other, don't interfere."

Four-plus years of Obama foreign policy shows me that our president is both incompetent and deceitful. Snowden’s revelations show me that neither Democrats nor Republicans have lived up to the oath they took to “preserve, protect, and defend the Constitution of the United States” when they were sworn in. All, however, are reflections of the citizens who elected them. Us. Again, I must quote Pogo, who said: “We have met the enemy, and he is us.”

We’re bad enough, but there are greater enemies out there. Edward J. Snowden has shown us what we need to see, but he has also betrayed his country - our country - to those greater enemies who wish to destroy us. What’s nagging at me now is columnist Mark Steyn’s often-repeated question: “[Have we become] too stupid to survive?”

The Tenth Amendment states: “The powers not delegated to the United States by the Constitution, nor prohibited by it to the states, are reserved to the states respectively, or to the people,” but Congress and the White House act as if it didn’t exist. It needs to be taken out of mothballs and applied vigorously. The federal government must be scaled back drastically.