Tuesday, March 25, 2008

Remember, Awaken & Repent

I can’t READ books. My eyes make it necessary for me to LISTEN to books, and this usually is a great gift that keeps on giving—for me, anyway.

Because I really believe I miss less. It is very difficult to go back on a cassette or CD and “bookmark” a paragraph or page or phrase. This means conscious concentration, similar to effort years ago at Emory (the last two years, anyway). And, at UNF in 1980.

This week I ran across something that completely changed my mind. Up until I “read” this material in a mostly historical tome, I was temperamentally concerned about Senator John McCain. I have been known to refer to him as "a nutty old coot who doesn’t know who or what he is angry about--who does not care about free speech or secure national borders."

Being an old coot myself and seen as nutty on occasion by my grandchildren and great grandchildren (when I am prankish) I can cut the Naval Person a teeny bit of slack when I am pointedly reminded of his basic, tough, implacable love for our Nation.

Some of you may need to be reminded that when Ronald Reagan proposed that American scientists could fashion a "shield" against H-Bomb missiles and shoot them down as they were launched, a boozy Senator Teddy Kennedy scornfully derided the idea as "Star Wars" fiction.

The Strategic Defense Initiative is no longer called "Star Wars" by the extinct dinosaur media. It is now universally referred to as The Missile Shield.

Because it works. It’s "radar eyes" will be installed in Poland and the Czech Republic, and Russia’s Putin and his lapdog Medvedev are hissy mad. (Parenthetically, why should they be, if they mean no ill?)

The point of this screed is to recollect how that when Reagan made the daring suggestion, Kennedy and some fellow left liberal senators called for a hearing.

And, mirable dictu, who did they gather up as witness major against what they called "Star Wars"?

Carl Sagan. You will remember him as the fellow who was wont to stand in front of "the sky at night" and drivel on and on about the "bill-yuns and bill-yuns" of stars bigger than our sun. He allegedly taught atheism in his college classes, too.

Well, in this hearing, John McCain dismembered him. He forcefully took Sagan into realms of scientific mechanics and warfare and disassembled his mind, exposing him as a pretentious, clueless blowhard. Further, his questioning of the prophet Richard Perle (the great American whose "baby" the SDI Shield was) was intelligent and effective.

Since the SDI Shield research and development broke the back of the Communist Soviets, freed Eastern Europe (with help from Pope John-Paul II) we should all be forever grateful to Senator McCain.

So I, for one, am. I admit my childish error in attitude, and salute hum.

But I STILL wonder, now that he is a viable candidate for president, does he really believe it should be illegal for ANYONE (or some SPECIAL ONE) to donate money to a political cause of his choice ? As in McCain-Feingold, I mean ?

But that’s another story.....