Israel's War Separates Decent Left From Indecent Left

By Dennis Prager

I believe the Left has been wrong on virtually every great moral issue in the last 30 years.

During that period, it was wrong on the Cold War -- it devoted far more energy to fighting anti-communism than to fighting communism.

It was wrong for attacking Israel for its destruction of Saddam Hussein's nuclear reactor.

It was wrong on welfare.

It was wrong in its demanding less morally and intellectually from black Americans than from all other Americans.

It was wrong in advocating bilingual education for children of immigrants.

It was wrong in generally holding American society rather than violent criminals responsible for violent crime.

It was wrong in imposing its view on abortion on America through the courts rather than through the democratic process.

It was wrong in teaching a generation of men and women that men and women differ because of socialization not because of innate sex differences.

It was wrong...

[excerpt]

read the full article.

ACLU and U.N. Hate America

Crossposted from Stop the ACLU

ACLU Website:

GENEVA, SWITZERLAND -- A United Nations human rights body expressed grave concerns today about the record of human rights in the United States. The American Civil Liberties Union with a delegation of 10 and working with a broad coalition of other groups is in Geneva to monitor the examination of the United States the U.N. Human Rights Committee (HRC).


In a two-day session that concluded today, the committee members pressured the United States for answers on the following issues:


The sentencing of children to life without parole and the disproportionate incarceration of minorities;
The militarization of the border;
The failure to prevent human rights violations and respond in a non discriminatory manner to Hurricane Katrina;
The failure to end racial profiling practices, specifically the profiling of South Asian convenience store employees in Georgia;
Warrantless spying on ordinary Americans;
The abuse of women in prison; and
The indefinite detention, rendition and torture of non-citizens.

“The U.S. should be ashamed of itself,” said Ann Beeson, Director of the ACLU’s Human Rights Program. “The review by the Human Rights Committee was a stark and all too accurate condemnation of the state of rights in America.”

No, the ACLU should be ashamed of itself. The review by the Human Rights Committee which includes member states Cuba, Saudi Arabia and China ,and ensures that violaters are included, is a joke and nowhere near accurate.

Jim Hoft has covered this well.

Religious persecutors, Womens Rights violators, Communist Regimes, and illegal organ harvesters will make up the new UN Human Rights Council.

And this is the organization that the ACLU want to hold the U.S. accountable to? The ACLU, and the U.N. are the two most dangerous organizations in the world. They are both seeking to destroy America’s credibility and soverignty. The U.N. are a corrupt joke when it comes to human rights, and they have absolutely zero credibility to make any judgement on America in that area.

The ACLU, who provided the list called "Dimming the Beacon of Freedom", to this corrupt organization that can't even clean up its own human rights violations are an embarrassement to this great nation. It is shameful that their list included our efforts to spy on the enemy, protect our borders, and several other accusations without evidence. I also wonder if their accusation to "abuse" of women in prison would be not providing them with abortions at the expense of taxpayers.

Besides the issues within our own judicial system and its decay, the ACLU is also turning to international sources to undermine our nation's sovereignty and national security.

For instance, the ACLU filed a formal complaint with the United Nations Working Group on Arbitrary Detention against the United States, stating that the United States violated international law when it detained 765 Arab Americans and Muslims for security reasons after the September 11, 2001, terrorist attack on our nation. Eventually, 478 were deported. ACLU Executive Director Anthony Romero said, "With today's action, we are sending a strong message of solidarity to advocates in other countries who have decried the impact of U.S. policies on the human rights of their citizens. We are filing this complaint before the United Nations to ensure that U.S. policies and practices reflect not just domestic constitutional standards, but accepted international human rights principles regarding liberty and its deprivations." Source

Romero, of course, makes the United States sound like some rogue nation with no regard for human rights, not the beacon of liberty that so many have come to escaping from tyranny and the bonds of oppression.


All of this should concern you. You may think that it doesn't directly affect you in your everyday life, but it will eventually. The ACLU's embrace of international law seeks to hypocritically do the opposite of what the ACLU claim to protect, and the Constitution forbids; prohibit the free exercise of religion.

In spring 2003, a group from the United Nations Human Rights Commission, of which former ACLU officials Paul Hoffman and John Shattuck are a part, met and discussed a resolution to add "sexual orientation" to the UNHRC's discrimination list. Homosexual activists at the meeting called for a "showdown with religion," clearly intending to use international law to silence religious speech that does not affirm homosexual behavior. Source

The ACLU's actions are a direct threat to our very freedom of speech, religious exercise, security, and soverignity. In some countries, laws are being pushed, and in some cases, enacted that essentially criminalize forms of religious speech and activity that does not affirm homosexual behavior.

If we are going to turn the interpretation of our laws to international jurisprudence, and decisions of foreign courts, judges, and legislatures, the question begs...why did we fight a war of independence? If the ACLU are successful in their agenda for international law, the Declaration of Independence and the U.S. Constitution will eventually become irrelevant documents. More and more of America's freedoms, and our very soverignty will be sacrificed for international law. Our freedoms will vanish. The ACLU's vision of freedom that includes the public sale of child pornography, the silencing of churchs and ministries, and unlimited abortion and euthanasia will replace them. To many Americans, these sound more like human rights violations than anything on the ACLU's list.

On October 27, 1787, Alexander Hamilton predicted that a “dangerous ambition” would one day tyrannize the gangling young American Republic, all the while lurking “behind the specious mask of zeal for the rights of the people.” It could almost be said that Hamilton had a prophecy of the ACLU.

This was a production of Stop The ACLU Blogburst. If you would like to join us, please email Jay or Gribbit. You will be added to our mailing list and blogroll. Over 200 blogs already on-board.

American Criminal Liberties Union

I am going to assume that most people can agree that America's population is found across a vast political spectrum. From libertarians and liberals to moderates and conservatives we find each other across a broad field on ideas and issues. Many times we can all agree that certain things are problems within society yet be on the opposite extremes on how to solve that problem. One of the problems of society that most people can agree on is that of crime. The solution to reducing this problem most likely is found somewhere in the middle and not the extremes.

One of the purposes of the Constitution is to ensure domestic tranquility. Due process, the Fifth Amendment right, is a procedural right, one that defines the methods that can properly be used to ensure domestic tranquility. Without both, there can be no liberty. Domestic tranquility can easily be achieved without respect for due process, as dictatorships throughout history have shown. It is also quite possible to have a society where due process is respected-even considered sacrosanct-and still lack for domestic tranquility. The latter predicament more closely resembles the situation in the United States today.Source

The ACLU in its extreme ideals of society unravels due process from the reasons it was created to serve. The ACLU maintains that it is their purpose to ensure due process and the police to tend to domestic tranquility. I agree that the roles should be separate. I think the opposite would be an invitation to disaster. The ACLU's sincerity in their statement might be more believable if, as we shall show, they were not so often in opposition of law enforcement. It is generally accepted that domestic tranquility is absolutely necessary to the process of liberty. What is often less understood is how the exclusive concern for due process can also be damaging to liberty.

I think we can all agree on how important domestic tranquility is to maintaining liberty. What good are all of our freedoms if we are afraid to practice them? The only liberties worth having are ones that we can enjoy without fear. This simply can't be done if a society is filled with crime and violence.

The ACLU do not share these moderate views on society. They have a much more extreme viewpoint.

"According to the ACLU," writes Jeffrey Leeds, "there is no right to live in a quiet or pleasant society, but there is a right to speak, to seek to persuade, to have unpopular or even stupid views. Moreover, there is no right even to live in a safe society. The ACLU will work to vindicate a convicted criminal's rights to due process, even if it means setting a killer free."Source

Leeds isn't exaggerating. One ACLU official Dorothy Ehrlich can be quoted as saying, "the citizens' need to be 'free from criminal activity'....is not, in the legal sense, a 'right' at all (and thus is nowhere mentioned in the Bill of Rights) but, rather, an essential social good, like fire prevention, or adequate medical care, or the prevention of famine." Source

Funny that an official from the ACLU is stating that if a right isn't mentioned in the Constitution then it isn't a right at all. After all, this is the organization that defends abortion on demand, and the sale of child porn. These are not mentioned in the Constitution either.

The ACLU's skewed views toward crime can also be seen in its approach toward crime victims. The ACLU has shown very little interest in the rights of crime victims. When it comes down to it, the rights of criminals seem to always override the rights of the victims. For example, the ACLU opposes the use of a crime victim impact statement in capital sentencing because it "unconstitutionally requires consideration of factors which have no bearing on the defendant's responsibility or guilt." Of course the courts have ruled otherwise.

While the ACLU says they have our liberty as its mission, its policies in the area of criminal justice have only aggravated and accelerated the already terrible problems of maintaining domestic tranquility. Their opposition to the death penalty doesn't bother me by itself. It is the ACLU general attitude toward criminal justice as a whole that I deem dangerous. Throughout its history it has fought many court battles to:

Eliminate all prison sentencing from criminal judicial procedure except in a few "extreme" cases of utter incorrigibility-and only then as the penalty of last resort.Source

Let me briefly interrupt my list for a little perspective on this particular policy.

In conjunction with their opposition to the death penalty in all cases this particular policy is quite disturbing to me. It would seem that the ACLU wants rehabilitation and probation to be the primary means of preventing crime in all but the most extreme cases.

"Deprivation of an individual's physical freedom is one of the most severe interferences with liberty that the state can impose. Moreover, imprisonment is harsh, frequently counterproductive, and costly." This explains why the ACLU holds that "a suspended sentence with probation should be the preferred sentence, to be chosen generally unless the circumstances plainly call for greater severity." The Union favors alternative sentencing and lists the reintegration of the offender into the community as "the most appropriate correctional approach." Here's the clincher: "probation should be authorized by the legislature in every case and exceptions to the principle are not favored." Prior to 1991, when this policy was revised, the Union said that only such serious crimes as "murder or treason" should qualify as exceptions. The explicit referencing of those two crimes was deleted because of the public embarrassment it caused the organization.Source

Let us continue with the list:

Disallow capital punishment in any and all situations as a violation of the constitution's "cruel and unusual punishment" clause;

Discredit deterrence as a basis for incarceration;

Oppose rehabilitative confinement;

Block all sentencing guidelines that seek restitution to the victims of criminal behavior;

Mandate suspended sentences with probation as the primary form of "treatment" for criminal offenders;

Restrict all court sentencing discretion through the legislative process or direct judicial intervention in trial proceedings-thus severely crippling the principle of trial by jury;

Eliminate all mandatory sentencing laws;

Facilitate mandatory early parole and release programs;

And, oppose new construction or expansion of jails, prisons, and detention centers. Source

In addition the ACLU is also involved in limiting the power of law enforcement to maintain domestic tranquility:

Severely restrict search and arrest procedures even when evidence of guilt is available;

Hinder protective or corrective police action at crime scenes;

Invalidate airport bomb detectors, drunk driving checkpoints, periodic or random drug screening, and other preventative security measures;

Prohibit the free exchange of criminal records between law enforcement agencies;

Limit even the most sound and non-prejudicial police interrogation and investigation techniques;

Institute national or regional bureaucratic control over law enforcement agencies-thus effectively, removing local accountability;

Severely restrict riot control, swat team, and antiterrorist activities and efforts;

Make most surveillance operations, stakeout procedures, and community crackdowns illegal;

Prohibit the eviction of drug dealers and other incorrigibles from public housing projects;

Deregulate and decriminalize all "victimless crimes"-such as prostitution, drug use and abuse, gambling, sodomy, or the production , exhibition, and sale of vile and obscene materials-despite the proven link between such vices and serious crime.Source

There is one recommendation that the ACLU makes on how to stem crime: strong gun control legislation. It adopted its first gun-control policy in the late sixties which was actually pretty reasonable. For the sake of brevity on such a broad topic I will not quote it. Suffice it to say that most of today's liberals would not agree with it.

However...

In 1971 the Union took the position that the ownership of guns, any guns, aside from guns owned by the militia, was not constitutionally protected.Source

The ACLU's policy towards the second amendment is:

"The ACLU agrees with the Supreme Court's long-standing interpretation of the Second Amendment [as set forth in the 1939 case, U.S. v. Miller] that the individual's right to bear arms applies only to the preservation or efficiency of a well-regulated militia. Except for lawful police and military purposes, the possession of weapons by individuals is not constitutionally protected. Therefore, there is no constitutional impediment to the regulation of firearms."

It is strange for the ACLU to use such a dated ruling as precedent, when many more recent cases have ruled otherwise.

The ACLU's approach to crime, its prevention, and punishment clearly are not in the mainstream opinion of most Americans. The organization has consistently been an adversary of law enforcement. The Union's perspective is almost entirely focused on the criminal which makes many people conclude that rather being a defender of civil liberties, the ACLU is actually the champion of criminal liberties.

Roger Baldwin once actually admitted that he could not in good conscience serve on a jury because he simply "would never take part in convicting anyone." When asked how society could possibly continue to exist without some sort of penal justice system, eh tersely snapped, "That's your problem."Source

The ACLU's pandering to criminals, lack of interest in true victims, and opposition to law enforcement are not solutions to society's burden with crime. I advise everyone to use common sense, and not to follow the extreme positions of the ACLU when it comes to preventing and punishing crime.

This was a production of Stop The ACLU Blogburst. If you would like to join us, please email Jay or Gribbit. You will be added to our mailing list and blogroll. Over 200 blogs already on-board.

Linked at Stop The ACLU

Hizbullah Attacks in the North; Two IDF Soldiers Missing

IDF sources state that seven soldiers are dead and two missing along the Lebanese border in the wake of a multi-pronged attack by Hizbullah terrorists on IDF positions Wednesday morning.

Lebanon's Al-Manar television station claimed that the two soldiers were taken captive by the Hizbullah attackers. Al-Manar is the on-air mouthpiece for the Lebanese terrorist group. Qatar-based Al-Jazeera also reported that Hizbullah attackers struck Israeli military outposts, taking captive two IDF soldiers at around 8:30 Wednesday morning. An IDF spokesperson later confirmed the reports.

With information of the missing soldiers, air force planes took to the air, striking bridges and escape routes in southern Lebanon in an effort to prevent the Hizbullah kidnappers from taking their Israeli captives deeper into enemy territory.



IDF Chief of Staff Dan Halutz stated that "the period of quiet" has ended for Hizbullah in Lebanon. Military sources said that the Israeli retaliation to the Hizbullah attack and apparent kidnapping of IDF soldiers will be extremely strong.

Prime Minister Ehud Olmert said, "These are difficult days for Israel and its citizens," adding that there are forces trying to test Israel's resolve. "They will fail and will pay a heavy price for their deeds," said the prime minister. He spoke to reporters Wednesday morning, as he hosted Japanese Prime Minister Junichiro Koizumi, who is visiting the region.

Obviously the "Roadmap to Peace" is history.

Olmert is being tested and I am willing to bet he does an about face and does some serious butt kicking all around.

UPDATE: Per CNN
Israeli troops enter Lebanon

Israeli troops entered southern Lebanon today after reports that Hezbollah guerrillas had abducted two Israeli soldiers along the border with Lebanon, according to the Israel Defense Forces. Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Olmert declared the attack "an act of war," and vowed that the Israeli response "will be very, very, very painful."


"This morning there was an attack on civilians and soldiers in the north. At this moment there are Israeli security forces operating inside Lebanon," Olmert told reporters.

"The government will convene this evening for a special cabinet meeting. I want to make clear that the events this morning are not a terror attack but an operation of a sovereign state without any reason or provocation."

The Israeli Cabinet is scheduled to meet at 7 p.m. (noon ET), according to Olmert's office.

From an Iowa Town to Marine Corps Legend

Still holding his 9mm Beretta, a seriously injured First Sgt. Brad Kasal is helped
from a Fallujah house on Nov. 13, 2004, after killing several Iraqi insurgents and
with his own body shielding a fellow Marine from a grenade blast (Photo by Lucian Read/WorldPictureNews).


By Nathaniel R. Helms



U.S. Marine Corps First Sergeant Brad Kasal is an American hero. His story is a remarkable tale of bravery, sacrifice and savagery that adds another page to the great book of American military lore.

Kasal may never join the pantheon of Marine Corps legends with colorful names like “Manila John” Basilone, or “Ol’ Gimlet Eye” Smedley Darlington Butler, who won two Medals of Honor, or Master Gunnery Sergeant Leland “Lou” Diamond, who sported a non-regulation goatee and once raised chickens behind his barracks. But he is every bit in their league.



During his three tours of duty in Iraq and Kuwait, Kasal has been wounded multiple times, including being shot seven times, peppered with grenade fragments on several occasions, and wounded by shrapnel during the Iraqi invasion in 2003 and again last August during the Marines’ deadly street fights against Iraqi insurgents in the Sunni Triangle.



According to highly placed Marine Corps sources, Kasal and another Marine who was killed in action at Fallujah, may become the first Marine Corps recipients of the Medal of Honor since the Vietnam War. Kasal declined any comment on the report and Capt. Daniel J. McSweeney, a spokesman at Marine Corps headquarters in Washington, D.C., said the Corps’ policy is to not comment on such matters before they happen. The other potential recipient is the late Sgt. Rafael Peralta, who was killed after using his wounded body to shield his comrades from an exploding hand grenade thrown by an insurgent.



“I appreciate your interest in this issue and that the story and photo speak volumes about the courage and commitment of our deployed Marines,” McSweeney said Thursday. “I'm sorry to reinforce that CMC (Commandant, Marine Corps) and other members of HQMC do not offer comments of any kind on awards that are working their way through the system.”



Kasal joined the Marine Corps in 1984 from rural Afton, Iowa - population 941 - when he was fresh out of East Union High School and fresh off the family farm. Nineteen years later, he was a Marine first sergeant leading a hard-pressed company of infantrymen in a desperate fight for an Iraqi city named Fallujah, a place as foreign to most Americans as Iwo Jima was sixty years ago.



“I always wanted to be a Marine, to see the world and make a difference,” Kasal said in an interview this week.



Linda Haner, the deputy city clerk of Afton and someone who watched Kasal and his family grow up, remembers him as a nice boy who did well on the high school wrestling team. “He was quite athletic,” she said.



Haner said the whole town is proud of Kasal and all his brothers who served in the armed forces. Brother Jeff is a retired Army paratrooper who fought in Desert Storm with the 82nd Airborne and now works in Iraq for Halliburton; Kelly, who was in the Army four years and Kevin, who served four years as a Marine, are all known and respected around the Iowa town.



“If you could see all the yellow ribbons and all the red, white and blue ribbons you would understand about this place. People around here are proud of the boys in the service and what they are doing,” Haner added.


Currently Kasal isn’t doing too much except recovering. The 38-year-old bachelor is confined to a wheelchair while he endures a painful medical procedure to put his right leg back together. His lower leg is connected to a metal device called a halo brace that is full of pins and screws that doctors manipulate each day to stretch his battered lower leg a millimeter at a time, trying to extend it to the length it used to be before an insurgent blew it in half with a Kalashnikov assault rifle.



“They turn the screws so many notches a day,” he explained matter-of-factly from his home in Oceanside, Calif. “It would be easier if I had someone to take care of me, but I have lots of friends and they help.”



Despite his terrible wounds, Kasal has no regrets. He has seen plenty of the world and made a world of difference to a lot of young Marines placed in his charge during three combat tours in the Middle East as First Sergeant of Kilo Company, and then Weapons Company, 3rd Battalion, 1st Marines. If he has his way he will be doing it again as soon as he heals.



“I believe in leading from the front,” Kasal explained. “It eases their [young Marines] minds and concerns to see me up their with them. That is where I belong.”



His father Gerald, a retired farmer and six-year veteran of the Iowa Army National Guard in the 1950s and early 1960s, said Brad was a great kid who never posed any problems except his propensity for fighting the boys from an adjacent town who seemed to take a pleasure in beating up the boys from Afton – a practice that came to an abrupt end when Brad and his brothers beat the hell out of some of them.



“After Brad and his brothers showed up a few times, they quit thinking they could beat up the boys from Afton,” Gerald Kasal remembered. “Brad’s oldest brother used to be a bully and pick on his younger brothers and I guess Brad just decided nobody was going to pick on him anymore.”



Whatever the reason for his bravery and resolve, Kasal displayed it in the proudest tradition of the Marine Corps on Nov. 13, 2004 during Operation Phantom Fury, the American attack on Fallujah that began five days earlier with the mission of destroying the insurgents’ stronghold in what was considered the center of their territory in Iraq.



“We were moving down the street, clearing buildings,” Kasal recounted. “A Marine came out wounded from a building and said there were three more wounded Marines trapped in there with a bunch of bad guys (insurgents). As we entered, we noticed several dead Iraqis on the floor and one of our wounded.”

Kasal said there was no question of what to do. “If I was a general I would still think my job was to get the wounded Marines out of there,” he said. “So we went in to get them.”



As soon as he entered the two-story stucco and brick building, Kasal found himself in mortal combat. It was fighting to the death, and there was no quarter expected or given, Kasal said.



“An Iraqi pointed an AK-47 at me and I moved back. He fired and missed. I shot and killed him. I put my barrel up against his chest and pulled the trigger over and over until he went down. Then I looked around the wall and put two into his forehead to make sure he was dead.”



While Kasal and a young Pfc. Alexander Nicoll were taking out the insurgent behind the wall, another one with an AK hiding on the stairs to the second floor began firing at the Marines on full automatic. “That’s when I went down, along with one of my Marines (Nicoll). Then I noticed the hand grenade.”



It was a green pineapple grenade, Kasal said. It flew into the room out of nowhere and landed near the two downed men. Kasal now believes that other Marines who were watching their back left the room for reasons he still doesn’t know and an insurgent was able to somehow get behind him.



Kasal said his first instinct was to protect the young Marine lying bloody beside him. He covered the young man with his body and took the full brunt of shrapnel to his back when the grenade exploded. Kasal’s body armor and helmet protected his vital organs but the shrapnel penetrated the exposed portions of his shoulders, back, and legs, causing him to bleed profusely.



“I took my pressure bandage and put it on his leg,” Kasal remembered. “Then I tried to put Nicoll’s pressure bandage on a wound on his chest but it is very hard to get a flak jacket off a wounded man and I was bleeding and fading in and out.”



Nicoll survived the grenade blast and his previous bullet wounds but lost his right leg. “An artery was cut and they had to amputate his leg,” Kasal said. “I have seen him and talked to him several times since we got back to the States. He is doing OK.”



The grenade blast stunned Kasal. He floated in and out of consciousness. But in the back of his mind a voice kept telling him he had to stay alert or the Iraqis were going to come back and finish him and Nicoll off. “They weren’t going to let us live if they knew we were alive. It was kill or be killed,” he said.



Kasal wrestled his 9mm automatic out of its holster and lay on the floor waiting for help. It was thirty or forty minutes before other Marines arrived.



“That’s when I got shot in the butt,” Kasal recalled. “It was the shootout at the OK Corral – point-blank range. I was lying there shooting and somebody shot me through both cheeks. It smarted a bit.”


Kasal did not know the exact extent of his wounds until much later; all he knew was that he was badly hurt. He was floating in and out of consciousness, ultimately losing 60 percent of his blood before he was rescued. After first aid, Kasal and Nicoll were transported to a field hospital in Iraq, then flown to Landstuhl, Germany, where Kasal was hospitalized for a week before arriving at the National Naval Medical Center in Bethesda, Md.

“I took seven rounds; five in my right leg, one in my foot and one to the buttocks area. When the grenade went off I got 30 to 40 pieces of shrapnel in my back,” Kasal said he later discovered.

Doctors are still fighting to save his leg, Kasal said. By the time this story appears, he will be back at Bethesda for more treatment, but the doctors won’t know for six months whether the Marine will every be 100 percent again. “I know I will walk again, but I don’t know if I will fully recover.”



Meanwhile Kasal experiences almost constant pain.



“I'm missing four and a half inches of the fibula and tibia bones,” he said. “They put that halo brace on my leg to try and make the bone grow together. But there’s no guarantee that will work.”



Despite everything that has happened to him, Kasal still believes America’s mission is Iraq is both important and terribly misconstrued. He harbors special venom for the so-called “mainstream” media reporters who portray the war as a failure and American policy as a gross mistake. He says he has heard reporters say their job is to make President George W. Bush and his policies seem a failure.



“The insurgents are oppressing normal people,” Kasal said. “The press never reports the good things. When we open a school or fix a sewer, the things that make normal Iraqis happy, they never report it. There are plenty of Iraqis, thousands of them, who want to live normal lives. If we can help them it will be all right. The people just want peace and freedom.”



Contributing Editor Nathaniel R. “Nat” Helms is a Vietnam veteran, former police officer, long-time journalist and war correspondent living in Missouri. He is the author of two books, Numba One – Numba Ten and Journey Into Madness: A Hitchhiker’s Account of the Bosnian Civil War, both available at www.ebooks-online.com. He can be reached at natshouse1@charter.net Send Feedback responses to­ dwfeedback@yahoo.com.

I Pledge Allegiance...

Red Skelton:

I - - Me; an individual; a committee of one.

Pledge - - Dedicate all of my worldly goods to give without self-pity.

Allegiance - - My love and my devotion.

To the Flag - - Our standard; Old Glory ; a symbol of Freedom; wherever she waves there is respect, because your loyalty has given her a dignity that shouts, Freedom is everybody's job.

United - - That means that we have all come together.

States - - Individual communities that have united into forty-eight great states. Forty-eight individual communities with pride and dignity and purpose. All divided with imaginary boundaries, yet united to a common purpose, and that is love for country.

And to the Republic - - Republic--a state in which sovereign power is invested in representatives chosen by the people to govern. And government is the people; and it's from the people to the leaders, not from the leaders to the people.

For which it stands One Nation - - One Nation--meaning, so blessed by God.

Indivisible - - Incapable of being divided.

With Liberty - - Which is Freedom; the right of power to live one's own life, without threats, fear, or some sort of retaliation.

And Justice - - The principle, or qualities, of dealing fairly with others.

For All - - For All--which means, boys and girls, it's as much your country as it is mine.

And now, boys and girls, let me hear you recite the Pledge of Allegiance:

I pledge allegiance to the Flag of the United States of America, and to the Republic, for which it stands; one nation, indivisible, with liberty and justice for all.

Since I was a small boy, two states have been added to our country, and two words have been added to the Pledge of Allegiance: Under God. Wouldn't it be a pity if someone said that is a prayer, and that would be eliminated from schools, too?


I hope Jay, Matthew(Zaph), Gribbit, Kathy, Kender, Cao, Justin, radar, highboy, Kuiper and all FREEDOM-loving Americans, enjoy a great Independence Day!