Defining American Greatness

[From article]
The key question before us is determining what we mean by greatness. There are those who associate greatness with bigness, power, or quantity. Thus, America is great because of her vast size, massive economic production or unmatched military might. These can truly be characteristics of great nations but they are not what make a nation great.
There are others who believe the foundation of our greatness is based on the many opportunities to enjoy life in America. They point to our American way of life in which people are encouraged to enjoy life to its fullest. Still others interpret greatness as the freedom to do whatever one pleases. All these goals often reflect legitimate self-interest, but do not necessarily confer greatness upon a nation.
If our greatness is measured by money, pleasure or self-aggrandizement, then our striving for greatness, no matter how vigorous, will inevitably fall short. For the greatness of nations is not found in things, quantities, or delights, but in the character of its people.
Indeed, true greatness -- that which endures the test of time -- is born of a willingness to go beyond the common and ordinary. It calls us to excel, to take heroic action and to serve causes that take us beyond ourselves. It asks us to resist the temptation to sink into soft mediocrity.
America is great because there have always been, and still are, those who are willing to take up the challenges of going beyond the easy and comfortable. As long as such Americans may be found at all levels in society, we will continue to be great.
And so I believe America is great because there still exists dedicated fathers and loving mothers who sacrifice together to give their children strong character and instill in them the difference between right and wrong.
[. . .]
As long as honor holds a place in our hearts, we will produce heroes with the courage to fight for what we know to be true and right. We will even have those who will make the sublime sacrifice of offering their lives for their country.
America will be great as long as we strive to be truly good. True goodness means placing God in the center of society, holding to His commandments as the rule of life and defending this higher law in the public square. We can be great -- and expect God’s blessing -- only if we remain faithful to a God that is almighty and great.
[. . .]



However, the number of these Americans is fast dwindling as everything is being swept away by the frenetic intemperance of a society that thrives on instant gratification and spectacle. They are replaced by gaggles of shallow people, devoid of honor and character, who seek only to turn life into a huge carnival of fun and delights.
In these perilous times, many caricatures of greatness appear. The rule of honor is usurped by the rule of money. Greatness comes to signify vulgar displays of wealth, pleasure and power. A “great” person is one who does whatever it takes to keep the grand party going. Tragically, it can even mean severing our link with God when it obstructs the easy pursuit of whatever.
[. . .]
The questions that need to be addressed today are not those of taxes, jobs, economy or benefits. Although they are all important issues, they can more easily be resolved when sanity returns to the nation. We now enter a critical time when we must choose the path of true greatness over false, honor over money, God over the world. If we ardently desire a return to order, then we must be convinced that America can only be great if she is good and Godly. What will decide America’s future will be what has always decide her future -- the character of her people.

http://www.americanthinker.com/articles/2016/03/what_it_means_for_america_to_be_great.html

April 3, 2016
What It Means for America to Be Great
By John Horvat II

Too Late To Stop Trump. Elite Cannot Risk The Alternatives

[From article]
Should the Donald fall short of the delegates needed to win on the first ballot, 1,237, there is growing certitude that he will be stopped. First by Ted Cruz; then, perhaps, by someone acceptable to the establishment, which always likes to have two of its own in the race.
But this city of self-delusion should realize there is no going back for America. For, whatever his stumbles of the last two weeks, Trump has helped to unleash the mightiest force of the 21st century: nationalism.
Transnationalism and globalism are moribund.
[. . .]
Republican candidates who failed to parrot Trump on illegal immigration were among the first casualties.
For that is where America is, and that is where the West is.
Consider Europe. Four months ago, Angela Merkel was Time’s Person of the Year for throwing open the gates to the “huddled masses” of the Middle and Near East.
Merkel’s Germany is now leading the EU in amassing a huge bribe to the Turks to please take them back, and keep them away from the Greek islands that are now Islam’s Ellis Island into Europe.
[. . .]
If immigration is the first issue where Trump connected with the people, the second is trade.
Republicans are at last learning that trade deficits do matter, that free trade is not free. The cost comes in dead factories, lost jobs, dying towns and the rising rage of an abandoned Middle America whose country this is and whose wages have stagnated for decades.
[. . .]
Production comes before consumption. Who owns the orchard is more essential than who eats the apples. We have exported the economic independence that Hamilton taught was indispensable to our political independence. We have forgotten what made us great.
China, Japan, Germany — the second, third and fourth largest economies on earth — all owe their prosperity to trade surpluses run for decades at the expense of the Americans.
A third casualty of Trumpism is the post-Cold War foreign policy consensus among liberal interventionists and neoconservatives.
Trump subjects U.S. commitments to a cost-benefit analysis, as seen from the standpoint of cold national interest.
[. . .]
American hawks talk of facing down Beijing in the South and East China Seas while U.S. companies import so much in Chinese-made goods they are fully subsidizing Beijing’s military budget.
Does this make sense?
[. . .]
If, through rules changes, subterfuge and faithless delegates, party elites swindle him out of the nomination, do they think that the millions who came out to vote for Trump will go home and say: We lost it fair and square?
[. . .]
Whatever happens to Trump, the country has spoken. And if the establishment refuses to heed its voice, and returns to the policies the people have repudiated, it should take heed of John F. Kennedy’s warning:
“Those who make peaceful revolution impossible, make violent revolution inevitable.”

http://buchanan.org/blog/what-trump-has-wrought-125088

What Trump Has Wrought
Monday - April 4, 2016 at 10:45 pm
Patrick J. Buchanan

Donald Trump In Context Of Contemporary Culture, Politics

[From article]
What good does it do to insist on one’s rights as a citizen, when in fact mere citizenship has lost its meaning? Americans have no rights officials in Washington feel bound to recognize. Both Republicans and Democrats overrule majority opinion as a matter of course. They do not doubt for a moment that they are the best and brightest, and that our voting franchise is merely an antiquated inconvenience. My elected representatives represent no one but themselves. They make war on my culture, my faith, and my security-- then they insult me in front of the elitist media on TV. The executive branch, the congress, and most of the judiciary have no more respect for me as a human being than colonial empires had for the most backward and primitive of their subjects. The elites that live inside the beltway and in the bubble of academia should try living in Ohio or Missouri for a few years. “White privilege” isn’t doing all that well in rural West Virginia.
[. . .]
It is all too obvious that our most unrepresentative of representative governments neither knows us nor respects us. They despise us. It is too much to ask us not to despise them in return.
I am tired of being told by Barack Obama on the one hand, and Bill O’Reilly on the other, what my American values are or ought to be. I can work those out for myself. I am tired of living in the dumping ground for whatever group of hostile immigrants the social engineers in Washington import to ease their guilty consciences. Let them move their Mexican underclass and angry Syrian colonists to Martha’s Vineyard or Marin County north of San Francisco.Maybe this would help our legislators and “opinion makers” alleviate a bit of their never-ending narcissistic angst.
[. . .]
lecturing me about tolerance and individual rights. Where is their tolerance of my culture? Where is their respect for my rights? Where is the brotherly concern shown to my neighbors? I am tired of living in an ill-planned social experiment. Of taboo words and taboo ideas. I am tired of being called a racist by people who are, themselves, the worst of racists -- and who have denuded the word itself of any meaning.
To be quite honest, I have no particular love for Donald Trump -- but he is what we have. He doesn’t speak well. I don’t think he has any idea what a republic is. Then again, his last two predecessors didn’t really understand the concept of a republic either. No doubt it’s not a word they use at Harvard. Although I may not especially like the erratic, often juvenile Mr. Trump, it isn’t lost on me that he at least doesn’t hold me in contempt. He may make war on illegal immigration and Muslim fundamentalism, but most of the alternatives are making war on me.
[. . .]
You will forgive me, too, if I stop ignoring fourteen centuries of Islamic history, the stark brutality of Islamic scripture, and the barbarism of contemporary Islamic states. Give me a gated, crime-free community to live in, and maybe I can have the luxury of worrying about the planet’s weather.
I would prefer to have a genuine conservative candidate to vote for, and will probably vote for Cruz if he looks viable enough. But if Donald Trump is what it has come to -- I will happily take the risk and check the box next to his name. Republican, independent, or Bull Moose party -- I could not care less.
[. . .]
Better Trump than the Democrats' mad rush to national Hara-Kiri. And better Trump than the Republican establishment’s facilitation of the same national Hara-Kiri, plus the now intolerable old lie that “it’s the best that we could do.” It has never been impossible to build 700 miles of security fence. Eisenhower built most of the interstate highway system in under a decade. It has never been impossible to balance the budget.
[. . .]
Ivy league “experts” who fail, then get congratulated for their failures by the Ivy League talking heads, do not impress me more than Trump. For all of his ratings appeal and flamboyance, he did at least accomplish something in his lifetime other than being popular and being famous.
[. . .]
Donald Trump, for all of his flaws, must do. He speaks his mind. He understands and acknowledges at least the plainly obvious. Most of all, so far, he doesn’t scare.

http://www.americanthinker.com/articles/2015/12/it_has_come_to_this.html

December 30, 2015
It Has Come to This
By E.M. Cadwaladr

White House Is Not Who We Are

[From article]
The Washington Free Beacon has put together a video montage of Obama using his catchphrase, “it’s not who we are” 46 times.
The video editor, David Rutz, observes:
Not unlike his warning to political opponents that they may be on the “wrong side of history,” the expression is useful in its ability to shut down conversation and seize a moral high ground, however imaginary.
Obama has deployed the term to convince the country of his rightness on immigration, Obamacare, education, national security and not voting for Mitt Romney, among other important issues to his presidency.

https://youtu.be/gouAcayDwLM

Since there is little flexibility in his thinking, “not who we are” is likely to be used even more to delegitimize his opponents as his term in office runs down, his popularity sinks, and he becomes ever more desperate to stifle mounting criticism.
[. . .]
Undoubtedly, Obama’s claim that this or that is not who “we are”, depends on the meaning of “we.” Maybe some smart journalist can ask him.

http://www.americanthinker.com/articles/2015/12/obama_is_not_who_we_are.html

December 13, 2015
Obama Is Not Who We Are
By Clarice Feldman

Where Did Joe DiMaggio Go?

The Late Great Joe DiMaggio

[From article]
DiMaggio did it all with such perfection and class. You didn't have to love baseball to admire what the man was doing. He even played double-headers because he respected the fan who had paid to watch him play.
DiMaggio was so American, the son of Italian immigrants who fully integrated into U.S. culture. I'm sure that he never expected for voting ballots to be in Italian.
DiMaggio's world was not perfect, from segregation to the world war that the country would be drawn into a few months after the baseball season. Nevertheless, there was a certain order and predictability to that world that I yearn for today.
Once in a while, I close my eyes and imagine what the world was like when men wore pinstriped suits and ladies were always elegant.

http://www.americanthinker.com/blog/2015/07/do_you_feel_like_singing_where_have_you_gone_joe_dimaggio.html

July 18, 2015
Do you feel like singing 'Where have you gone, Joe DiMaggio'?
By Silvio Canto, Jr.

Basic Challenges To Immigration Policies

[From article]

“Obama is trying to absolutely change America by bringing in people who have no sympathy with what Americans believe,” she declared. “They have no concept of limited government, of constitutional government, of rule of law, et cetera. There’s no reason we should let in people who don’t even like America.”
[. . .]
“For the most part, our immigration system runs on autopilot, with the acquiescence of both parties,” Camarota said. “It’s just not right to think of this – of mass legal immigration, refugees, family immigration – as being attributable to Obama.
“What I do think you could criticize this administration for, but it’s not clear that other administrations were very different, is incredible foolishness when thinking about these questions.”
[. . .]
“There’s a cultural affinity there,” he said. “They would be nearby; then they’d be much more likely to return to their homes once the war’s over, rather than coming to the other side of the world here in America.”
It will cost money to help refugees settle overseas, Camarota admitted, but it won’t cost as much as it would to resettle them in the U.S. and hook them on welfare. The research director said refugees have greater access to the American welfare system when they first arrive than ordinary immigrants do.
[. . .]
Camarota concerns himself mostly with the economic questions surrounding immigration, but he said the U.S. government doesn’t do a good job of weaving new arrivals into the social fabric.
“We don’t have any policy for how we successfully integrate and assimilate people into our country,” he said.
Schlafly, as always, is chiefly concerned with how immigrants will fit into the American social fabric.
“Anybody who comes in should have to renounce allegiance to his former country and accept the American way of life,” she declared.

http://www.wnd.com/2015/05/schlafly-obama-is-waging-war-on-america/

SCHLAFLY: OBAMA IS 'WAGING WAR ON AMERICA'
Conservative icon says immigrants and refugees are the foot soldiers
May 30, 2015

By Paul Bremmer

America Divided

[From article]
Ronald Reagan said, a nation that cannot control its borders isn’t really a nation anymore.
In Federalist No. 2, John Jay wrote, “Providence has been pleased to give this one connected country to one united people – a people descended from the same ancestors, speaking the same language, professing the same religion, attached to the same principles of government, very similar in their manners and customs. … ”



He called Americans a “band of brethren, united to each other by the strongest ties.” The republic of the founders for whom Jay spoke did not give a fig for diversity. They cherished our unity, commonality and sameness of ancestry, culture, faith and traditions.
We were not a nation of immigrants in 1789.
They came later. From 1845-1849, the Irish fleeing the famine. From 1890-1920, the Germans. Then the Italians, Poles, Jews and other Eastern Europeans. Then, immigration was suspended in 1924.

[. . .]

From 1925 to 1965, the children and grandchildren of those immigrants were assimilated, Americanized. In strong public schools, they were taught our language, literature and history, and celebrated our holidays and heroes. We endured together through the Depression and sacrificed together in World War II and the Cold War.
By 1960, we had become truly one nation and one people.
[. . .]

And though the civil rights movement had just begun, nowhere did black peoples enjoy the freedom and prosperity of African-Americans.

http://www.wnd.com/2014/07/america-no-longer-1-nation-1-people/

AMERICA: NO LONGER 1 NATION, 1 PEOPLE
Pat Buchanan cites ways 'diversity' has harmed United States

Patrick J. Buchanan
July 15, 2014

TOP-10 " Only In America "

TOP-10 " Only In America " Observations ~ by a Canadian:

1) Only in America, could politicians talk about the greed of the rich
at a $35,000.00 a plate campaign fund-raising event.



2) Only in America, could people claim that the government still
discriminates against black Americans when they have a black
President, a black Attorney General, and roughly 18% of the federal
workforce is black while only 12% of the population is black.



3) Only in America, could they have had the two people most
responsible for our tax code , Timothy Geithner, the head of the
Treasury Department and Charles Rangel who once ran the Ways and Means
Committee, BOTH turn out to be tax cheats who are in favor of higher
taxes.



4) Only in America, can they have terrorists kill people in the name
of Allah and have the media primarily react by fretting that Muslims
might be harmed by the backlash.



5) Only in America, would they make people who want to legally become
American citizens wait for years in their home countries and pay tens
of thousands of dollars for the privilege while we discuss letting
anyone who sneaks into the country illegally just 'magically' become
American citizens.



6) Only in America, could the people who believe in balancing the
budget and sticking by the country's Constitution be thought of as
"extremists."



7) Only in America, could you need to present a driver's license to
cash a check or buy alcohol , but not to vote .



8) Only in America, could people demand the government investigate
whether oil companies are gouging the public because the price of gas
went up when the return on equity invested in a major U.S. oil company
(Marathon Oil) is less than half of a company making tennis shoes
(Nike).



9) Only in America, could the government collect more tax dollars from
the people than any nation in recorded history , still spend a
Trillion dollars more than it has per year - for total spending of
$7-Million PER MINUTE , and complain that it doesn't have nearly
enough money.



10) Only in America, could the rich people - who pay 86% of all income
taxes - be accused of not paying their "fair share" by people who
don't pay any income taxes at all.

Palin and Contemporary Culture

http://bighollywood.breitbart.com/gloudon/2010/12/25/star-power-palin-takes-hollywood/

Star Power: Palin Takes Hollywood … And the Culture
by Dr. Gina Loudon
BigHollywood.com
December 25, 2010

Muslims React to US Culture


"The only exception that’s made for a wife or daughter to disobey her husband or father is if he forces her to do something that’s un-Islamic."

“In the privacy of their home, Muslim parents will call every American woman a prostitute, every man corrupt,”

http://www.nypost.com/p/news/opinion/opedcolumnists/muslim_unrest_hits_us_homes_swfI0VrpBFYtz0nsxzOpoJ

Muslim unrest hits US homes
Honor killings are on the rise
by MAUREEN CALLAHAN
New York Post
Last Updated: 4:33 AM, November 1, 2009
Posted: 12:27 AM, November 1, 2009