Yesterday was a sad day for Free Republic

Yesterday should have been a glorious day around here. There should have been fireworks and celebration. There should have been somber remembrances. There should have been patriotic tributes. There should have been shared joy at the news that our guys had finally gotten Bin Laden.

Instead, when I visited the site, what I found was a lot of carping. I found people focused more on the political spin than on the great news. I found people transferring their birther mentality onto this event, talking about Obama faking this news, photoshopping information, etc. It wasn't everybody, but it was a LOT of people. It made me sick.

Yesterday Free Republic seemed like DU. It makes me wonder what the hell is going on. Are Freepers getting younger? I always assume that DU is so pathetically immature because they must be younger. Free Republic has always been a place dominated by great class, and wit, and decency. Not this time. What I saw yesterday was a pathetic embarrassment and totally unworthy of this great forum.

As some of you may know, I was in lower Manhattan on 9-11. I was just across the street from the WTC when the first plane hit. I still remember the beautiful clear blue sky that day. I remember walking in between the towers just a minute or so before 8:46am, on my normal route to work. I remember my co-workers screaming in panic when they watched from an office window as the second plane hit the south tower. I remember women crying and screaming hysterically. I remember not being able to contact my wife to tell her I was OK. I remember people jumping to their deaths. I remember seeing the north tower go down with my own eyes, hearing it with my own ears. I remember fleeing Manhattan. I remember it was a Tuesday.

I remember returning to work the following Monday, riding the ferry passed the site, noxious smoke still billowing from the wreckage. I remember armed troops on the sidewalks. I remember wearing a breathing mask inside my building because the foul odor was seeping in through the ventilation system. I remember thinking we'd really gotten kicked in the teeth. They had killed innocent people, they had traumatized our women and children, and I really wanted revenge. I hung a picture on my wall of the American eagle sharpening his talons.

It has been a long time since that day. It's hard to believe how fast time flies. Then again, if you lost your loved one, I imagine time hasn't gone so fast. I love my wife so much, I can empathize with anyone who has lost the one they love. I can't imagine how that would be, and don't want to know, but I can cry for those people because I know what it is like to find your one true love.

I'm not an Obama fan. I hate socialism. But I am so happy that Bin Laden is killed, and that we have exacted some real revenge. It's about time. The politics don't even play into it for me. I still have the little flag, now tattered, that I flew on my car antenna after 9-11. I want to take it out of storage and put it on my car. I want to see American flags on cars like we saw back then. But it's not going to happen, and partially because the normally patriotic conservatives such as the ones here on Free Republic are instead focused on the politics and the fact that a socialist Democrat was president and will get some of the credit.

I guess you all would have been pissed on D-Day too. FDR was as big a socialist as anyone. I guess VE day and VJ day would have chapped your hides, since Truman was a DEM. I don't mean to paint with a broad brush. I know it wasn't every Freeper acting this way. But when I went on the board, that was the general impression, and it was really disappointing. It should have been a great day here. Instead, I saw a lack of patriotism and a lack of class. Free Republic should be better than this. If conservatives lose their patriotism and class, then what will happen to those virtues? I hope we can get them back soon. In the meantime, thanks for reading.

Agreement Bump!

The way I see it, as our circumstances get more dire, and the threat to our country, our culture, and our way of life increases exponentially, there are a large number of Freepers who want to pretend that it is business as usual, that the politics of today are just like they were in the old days, where Democrat vs. Republican was just chess match between gentlemen and the outcome would not make or break us.

However, what is of more concern is not the number of FReepers that wish to cling to "business as usual," but the fact that the vast majority of the nation that refuses to accept reality. They are a very large part of why we have arrived at the point that we are.

Well, we have quite literally come to a moment where the outcome of all the political efforts will either destroy us, or, at best, limp us back toward safe ground. There is no safe status quo anymore. We are up against ideologies that want to destroy this country and everything it stands for and has ever stood for, and adherents to those ideologies are now the majority in our government at all levels.

Bingo. And the sad fact is that we didn't arrive here merely as a result of the current administration. The attack from within on this nation has been going on for several decades, sometimes slowly, other times more abruptly. IMO what we see happening under the current administration is the haste to get to the end game. (One of the only hopes that I hang on to is that their haste is premature and will end up garnering much more of a push-back than they have imagined.)

I found that reading posts here on FR was the only place that I had any level of comfort yesterday (as is the case mostly everyday). The TV coverage was disgusting, any talk radio that I sampled was almost as disgusting, it even bled into the sports talk radio around here (NYC metro). Years ago I would have figured that hearing the "news" about OBL's death would have been a welcome and cheerful event. As my wife and I sat through the coverage on Sunday night, neither of us experienced anything like it. There are many reasons for that, among them is the fact that OBL has not been anything but a figurehead for many years, there was certainly no tactical victory in his removal. I recognize for some (especially those that were affected in a profoundly personal way on 9/11) that the desire to see him "punished" brought some satisfaction; for them I am glad that his death may provide that, and maybe some degree of "closure" on their personal loss. But in the larger scope of things, his death was pretty much a non-event at this point.

We actually stayed up to watch the usurper's "speech." (Funny thing is that my wife actually had to ask me "Are you really going to watch this? Not 'mute' the sound?") I wanted to see how disgusting his presentation would be; and of course it was everything that I expected. It is a very sad fact that this "event" will actually cause more harm to our country to the extent that the propaganda arm of the regime will use it every way possible over the next year or so as a tool for re-election. Seeing those ginned up flash mobs of teenagers and 20-somethings with their brand new American flags and T-shirts was just another sad reminder of how the sheeple can be so easily stirred up and manipulated.

And perhaps one of the most disturbing aspects of the "event" (even more so than the preening and obscene credit-taking) was that it was yet another opportunity for them to blatantly lie about EVIL cult of islam (and distort the truth about the real WOT). So yeah, there really wasn't a whole to get excited about from my perspective.

Last night my wife and (adult) son and I shared our experiences of the day. Most folks that we interacted with (from across a broad spectrum) had expressed somewhat muted "cheer" and expressed more doubt and less credulity than we expected. I said that it was indeed a very sad fact that we have arrived at this point as a nation: less and less people believe much of what the "government" states as fact. It is indeed sad, but it is certainly understandable (considering the abject evil that has been perpetrated on our nation by our "government" for decades). However, as sad as it is, it is actually encouraging; for without this growing recognition by more and more of our fellow citizens, our chances of survival get closer to nil each day.

The idea that Obama, with the resources of the CIA behind him, forged a birth certificate from a state controlled by democrats in such a clumsy manner that someone downloading it off the Internet could prove it a forgery in minutes...is insane.

Some things are too stupid to merit detailed dismissal.

That is an example of how conspiracy freaks discredit the conservative movement.

It is like the folks claiming we didn’t kill Osama...no amount of evidence will convince them. Evidence doesn’t matter. A SEAL team could have carried Osama Bin Laden into every home in the USA, and the conspiracy nuts would claim a mortician faked it.

And meanwhile, those of us who want the government drastically reduced, who support the military, who opposed the homosexual agenda, who want the 2nd Amendment to be followed, who want the never-ending government handouts stopped - we all get tarred with the same lunatic brush!

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