Washington Rebel

Worst President Ever?

They are not to do anything they please to provide for the general welfare.... [G]iving a distinct and independent power to do any act they please which may be good for the Union, would render all the preceding and subsequent enumerations of power completely useless. It would reduce the whole instrument to a single phrase, that of instituting a Congress with power to do whatever would be for the good of the United States; and as they sole judges of the good or evil, it would be also a power to do whatever evil they please. -- Thomas Jefferson

We've Been Warned:

Barack Obama’s deep bow to the emperor of Japan and earlier bow to the Saudi Arabian king is so deeply offensive to America’s history and traditions that it cannot and most not be explained away in any fashion.

This President simply does not care what Americans want. He does not “represent” Americans and cannot even manage to salute properly when the national anthem is played, though he did stage a photo opportunity to be seen saluting the returning war dead from Afghanistan.

This President may not even be “a natural born citizen” of the United States as required by the Constitution. He may have been born in Kenya. He may have been a citizen of Indonesia as a child and young man. We have no verifiable, authentic records of his early life, even as a college student. The Worst President Ever

The Rebel's Post of the Day:

Our Subjugation is in Proportion to Our Ignorance

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Faith

Truth & Consequences

It did not matter, or it somehow escaped their otherwise sharpened intellects, that all men and all worlds dwell within a miracle and a mystery so deep and so far beyond the understanding of the human mind that we simply lack the senses to perceive it -- except through the ancient embedded sense of faith alone. Indeed, relying on the fact that "faith" is not obviously tied to any single sense organ, they would deny that it is a sense at all. And the more you deny the sense of faith in yourself, the weaker and more vestigial it becomes.

Had they looked closely at the infinitely little that is now known at the outward edges of cosmology and quantum physics they might have dimly sensed that the exercise of the power called "faith" was actually the only exercise that would allow them even a glimpse of the glory behind the material manifestation. But the worship of the Self not only obscures all dimensions outside of it, it demands their obliteration.

. . . . And the things that myth, wisdom, and faith pointed towards and revealed were all foolish because at their center they denied the primacy of the Self; reduced the Self to a small clot of cells, a few insignificant cubic centimeters of brain matter. This diminution cannot be tolerated because the Self is the most jealous and wrathful of all the gods. The Religion of the Self, preaching toleration as a central tenet, cannot tolerate faith.

. . . .[W]hat faith does, among many other things as it reshapes a human life, is the reduction of self to its proper scale; to remove forever the capitalization of self, and render it as it is in the vaster scheme of things as they are. This reduction also means the diminution of all that the self holds dear, the sense of "I" above all, of Ego Uber Alles. Faith silences the infernal music of "Me" that the grace notes of existence can at last be heard.  Gerard VanDerLeun, The Religion of the Left

The Veiled Image: An Evening with Constantine Maximus

I finally got the opportunity to interview the most taciturn of our contributors -- "the big cat", Cicero called him -- Constantine Maximus.  I was a little afraid of him, but . . . hey.  He had Russian tea cakes.  We sat in a sea of books and sucked down some nasty coffee in between guffaws and hoo-hahs. Excerpts follow.

Spiritual Sanctuary: Growing Up in the Hoh Rain Forest

 

Hoh River Boy (r) and His Friend Gary "Makkor" Cox (l) in 1976 at the Hoh Ranger Station -- Photo by Mary Lou Hanify

Washington Rebel is lucky to have as one of its contributors Hoh River Boy, author of WR's first two articles, Remembering Bud Hanify and The Speech of the Grail -- as well as the bloke who interviewed me!  I was able to corner him at one of his favorite haunts the other day.  Over 20 or 30 cups of real black coffee, we had a leisurely conversation, the Pacific Northwest way.  I had lots of questions.

IC  What's your book about?

HRB  It's about being "born" in the Hoh Rain Forest in the 1970s.  A variety of forces conspired to drop my family into the center of rain-shrouded isolation, armed only with books, and an Irish love of conversation.  No television; very infrequent radio reception, and then only late at night, when the cloud cover was just right.  Something came alive inside me within the container of that isolation, that darkness, a something that has instructed me throughout my life.  It's about spiritual sanctuary, and how badly sanctuary is needed in our crazed modern environment.  It's also about my older self trying to make his way back to the "hearth."  I guess you could say the book is about locating that sanctuary in the topography of the soul.

IC  I know the "hearth" is at the center of the story.  But first, tell me about writing

HRB  Not much to tell.  I was always more a reader than a writer.  My mother was a writer; her grandfather Morehead bought and sold newspapers his entire professional life, from Colorado to Washington.  Writing was all I ever heard about from my mother, but it was a madness that has never fully possessed me, even now.  I worked on the school newspaper at Forks High School and took journalism courses in college, but I really didn't work very hard at writing.  It wasn't until 1979 that I wrote my first logging story.

Liberty Peak Lodge Exclusive! An Evening with Irish Cicero

    

Cuddly

Reprint from June 24, 2008

It is with great pleasure that I met up with the witty and prolific founder of Liberty Peak Lodge, Irish Cicero.  He is, as you would expect, a character, given to guffaws and irreverent hoo-ahs.  A large fella, he slapped my arm so much I feared I might need medical attention, but we got through the interview without loss of life.  I'm posting  a good chunk of his responses here.  I'll put the rest up later, when my arm works better.

HRB  Where did the name, "Liberty Peak Lodge", come from?

IC  A friend of mine.  He tossed it off jokingly, and I caught it.

HRB  Was he a Tosser?

IC  He was.

HRB  What's Liberty Peak Lodge all about?

IC  Well, there's a perception out there -- particularly among the Huffington-Kos Left -- that all Conservatives are a bunch of whacko-Christian-Hypocrites -- as if that was in itself bad, no further discussion necessary.  Who are they to judge?  They throw out these ad hominem labels without discussion.  If you try to engage a "liberal" in a discussion of what they mean, they shut you down.  You're "uninformed."  The assumption is we all take our orders from Rush Limbaugh and FOX News.  Aside from being wildly ignorant about America and American history and American people generally, their assumption is childishly arrogant.  The mind that sports such prejudice is no different from a racist or homophobic mind.  Hence, I typically refer to liberals as "liberal", because there's very little about them that's liberal!