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Let’s Stop Pretending. America Is In Peril.
Townhall.com ^ | September 13, 2021 | Will Alexander

Posted on 09/13/2021 5:34:31 AM PDT by Kaslin

Like untold millions, Russell Conwell, author of the famous little book “Acres Of Diamonds” revered Abraham Lincoln, a man he served under as a captain in the 46th Massachusetts Infantry Regiment during the Civil War.

But unlike many, he met the man face to face … twice.

In the book, Conwell wrote about visiting Lincoln at the White House to plead for the life of one of his young soldiers who had been sentenced to death.

“I had been on fields of battle, where the shells did sometimes shriek and the bullets did sometimes hit me,” he wrote. “I never was so afraid when the shells came around us at Antietam as I was when I went into that room that day.”

After assuring him that the soldier, 17, would not be hanged, Lincoln asked Conwell how things were going in the field.

“We sometimes get discouraged,” he admitted.

“It is all right,” said Lincoln. “We are going to win.”

Conwell then stumbled on Lincoln’s soft spot. After learning that the young captain grew up on a farm, he relaxed a bit, threw his leg up on the edge of his chair, and talked about farming. He became, as Conwell wrote, “so everyday, so farm-like.”

“No man ought to wish to be President of the United States,” Lincoln said. “And I will be glad when I get through. Then Tad and I are going out to Springfield, Illinois. I have bought a farm out there and I don’t care if I again earn only twenty-five cents a day. Tad has a mule team, and we are going to plant onions.”

Suddenly, Lincoln took up another roll of paper and said, “Good morning.” Conwell took the hint and left.

Days later, Conwell saw Lincoln again. He was inside a coffin in the East Room.

“When I looked at the upturned face of the murdered President,” he wrote, “I felt then that the man I had seen such a short time before, who, so simple a man, so plain a man, was one of the greatest men that God ever raised up to lead a nation on to ultimate liberty.”

Lincoln, like all us, longed for a life of peace – to buy a farm, corral the mules, and plant onions with Tad.

But it had to wait. Peril came.

On entering office, Lincoln described his task as being “greater than that which rested upon Washington” during the Revolution – a time when soldiers were so starved that they ate their pets and their shoes to survive. Lincoln didn’t seek the peril. It came. Leaders before him failed to make the hard decisions. For decades, they coddled cancerous problems hoping they’d just go away someday. Instead, they all piled up on Lincoln’s shoulders.

Slaveholders, dead set on tearing the country apart, forced Lincoln to choose an excruciating, but nobler, peace. “… it may be necessary to put the foot down firmly,” he said.

And he did.

I would’ve been easier to avoid war, said Teddy Roosevelt in The Strenuous Life (1899). “Moreover, besides saving all the blood and treasure we then lavished, we would have prevented the heartbreak of many women, the dissolution of many homes, and we would have spared the country those months of doom and shame when it seemed as if our armies marched only to defeat.

“We could have avoided all this suffering simply by shrinking from strife,” he wrote.

Today, America is in the greatest peril of all its history. A task rests on us greater than that which rested on Washington and Lincoln combined. We feel it. Good times have produced leaders who shrink from making the hard decisions that tough times demand.

I thought Lincoln as I watched the 9/11 remembrances on Saturday. In 20 years, this look-back was the strangest of them all. Amid the sights and sounds of name-reading and survivors’ stories, it was impossible to block out the sights and sounds of Biden’s botched Afghanistan pullout – the crowning catastrophe of all of his disasters.

The most infuriating sight, for me, was to see three presidents – Clinton, Obama and Biden – basking in the somber glory of the day. These men, more than anyone, could’ve spared America the shame, disgrace, and peril we now feel. At critical junctures, they chose to coddle the cancer. They still are.

Lt.Col. Robert “Buzz” Patterson, who carried the nuclear codes for Clinton, detailed in Dereliction Of Duty (2003) how Clinton, who was golfing, squandered a “golden opportunity” to kill bin Laden when the military tracked him down, had him in their sites, and awaited his orders. They never came.

“In eight years in office, President Clinton’s military response to the terrorist threats was negligible and did nothing to seriously address the problem,” Patterson wrote, “instead following a de facto course of drift, which allowed the terrorist network to grow in size and strength.”

Obama, in eight years, reduced the “War On Terror” to a “man-caused disaster”; reduced “Islamic” extremism to “extremism”; labeled terrorist Nidal Hassan’s killings at Fort Hood as “workplace violence”; softened the rules of engagement in favor of the enemy; created a vacuum in Iraq for ISIS; and used America’s resources to travel the Muslim world apologizing for America’s supposed historic arrogance.

And Biden? He botched the pullout. Botched the border. Botched policing. Botched race relations. Botched the voting system. Botched the COVID response. And is botching the economy.

If Lincoln asked me today, “How’s it going in the field?” I, like Conwell would admit, “I sometimes get discouraged.” But we can’t afford to be discouraged. In my 20 years as a Marine, I learned that war tends to make its own course as it unfolds. It is a test of wills. Whoever loses the will to win, loses the war.

We did not lose this war. The war is not over. We lost a monumental battle. These maniacs, drunk on the liquor of their victory, will not stop. Biden’s botched pullout created historic vulnerabilities that have made our enemies stronger than they were 20 years ago.

We can’t wish this stuff away. The foreign and domestic perils are happening. We have no choice. This came to us. We cannot allow our children and grandchildren to live in the world these people are aggressively working to create, without us “firing a shot.”

Like Lincoln, we must face the peril – postpone our “onion-planting” – and while in the middle disaster say, “We are going to win.”

As long as we have this mindset, the how will come.


TOPICS: Culture/Society; Editorial; Foreign Affairs; War on Terror
KEYWORDS: 0bamabiden; abrahamlincoln; afghanistan; aghanistanwar; barack0bama; billclinton; bloggers; osamabinladen
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1 posted on 09/13/2021 5:34:31 AM PDT by Kaslin
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To: Kaslin

Only the foreign exchange market can restore federal financial management.

The votes have been counted, sometimes twice, and sometimes more often.


2 posted on 09/13/2021 5:40:06 AM PDT by Brian Griffin ( )
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To: Kaslin

Bookmark


3 posted on 09/13/2021 5:40:23 AM PDT by Southside_Chicago_Republican (The more I learn about people, the more I like my dog. )
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To: Kaslin

Way past being in peril.


4 posted on 09/13/2021 5:43:23 AM PDT by Solson (DeSantis/Hawley 2024!)
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To: Kaslin
Lincoln was a butcher. Mr. Lincoln's War
5 posted on 09/13/2021 5:45:22 AM PDT by central_va (I won't be reconstructed and I do not give a damn...)
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To: Kaslin

“Slaveholders, dead set on tearing the country apart, forced Lincoln “

Bold-faced LIE.


6 posted on 09/13/2021 5:45:47 AM PDT by Arlis
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To: Kaslin

Weak men make bad times; bad times make strong men.


7 posted on 09/13/2021 5:47:14 AM PDT by Spok (Those who can compel you to believe absurdities can compel you to commit atrocities.f)
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To: central_va

Keep listening to the deep state leftist.


8 posted on 09/13/2021 5:53:49 AM PDT by Olog-hai ("No Republican, no matter how liberal, is going to woo a Democratic vote." -- Ronald Reagan, 1960)
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To: Kaslin

The most infuriating sight, for me, was to see three presidents – Clinton, Obama and Biden – basking in the somber glory of the day. These men, more than anyone, could’ve spared America the shame, disgrace, and peril we now feel. At critical junctures, they chose to coddle the cancer. They still are.


9 posted on 09/13/2021 5:59:45 AM PDT by MarvinStinson
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To: Kaslin

“We sometimes get discouraged."


10 posted on 09/13/2021 6:00:26 AM PDT by rarestia (Repeal the 17th Amendment and ratify Article the First to give the power back to the people!)
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To: Olog-hai
We Americans celebrate Abraham Lincoln’s Gettysburg Address, but H.L. Mencken correctly evaluated the speech: “It is poetry, not logic; beauty, not sense.” Lincoln said the soldiers sacrificed their lives “to the cause of self-determination — that government of the people, by the people, for the people should not perish from the earth.” Mencken said: “It is difficult to imagine anything more untrue. The Union soldiers in the battle actually fought against self-determination; it was the Confederates who fought for the right of people to govern themselves.”

The War of 1861 brutally established that states could not secede. We are still living with its effects. Because states cannot secede, the federal government can run roughshod over the U.S. Constitution’s limitations of the Ninth and 10th Amendments. States have little or no response.

--Walter E. Williams is a professor of economics at George Mason University.


11 posted on 09/13/2021 6:03:11 AM PDT by central_va (I won't be reconstructed and I do not give a damn...)
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To: central_va

Walter Williams was a great man.


12 posted on 09/13/2021 6:07:13 AM PDT by ClearCase_guy (China is like the Third Reich. We are Mussolini's Italy. A weaker, Jr partner, good at losing wars.)
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To: central_va
To every Union Republic is reserved the right freely to secede from the USSR.

— 1936 USSR Constitution, Article 17

Each Union Republic shall retain the right freely to secede from the USSR.

— 1977 USSR constitution, Article 72
Aside from this being a red herring, no new amendment or law following the American civil war was established explicitly forbidding secession and no power existed to run roughshod over states’ rights until the 16th and 17th Amendments (specifically Marxist in nature) came to be; and if any subjugated nation tried to leave the USSR when that entity was strong, a brutal crackdown would ensue—like what happened to Hungary.
13 posted on 09/13/2021 6:15:22 AM PDT by Olog-hai ("No Republican, no matter how liberal, is going to woo a Democratic vote." -- Ronald Reagan, 1960)
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To: central_va

And you are an idiot!!!


14 posted on 09/13/2021 6:26:25 AM PDT by Kaslin (Joe Biden will never be my President, and neither will Kamala Harris)
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To: Kaslin
As long as we have this mindset, the how will come.

Come on, man. Liberals have not had that mindset for a very long time.

15 posted on 09/13/2021 6:28:05 AM PDT by libertylover (Our biggest problem, by far, is that most of the media is hate & agenda driven, not truth driven.)
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To: Olog-hai

he obviously does.


16 posted on 09/13/2021 6:28:25 AM PDT by Kaslin (Joe Biden will never be my President, and neither will Kamala Harris)
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To: Kaslin

This seems as good a thread as any to stick this new report from a longtime JFK shooting researcher in re: JFKJ and his plane crash:

https://twitter.com/RealGeorgeWebb1/status/1436501247817879553

https://twitter.com/RealGeorgeWebb1/status/1436503163327156227


17 posted on 09/13/2021 6:32:12 AM PDT by 9YearLurker
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To: Arlis
Let me fix it, then...

democratsSlaveholders, dead set on tearing the country apart, forced Lincoln to choose an excruciating, but nobler, peace.

18 posted on 09/13/2021 6:45:43 AM PDT by Alas Babylon! ("You, the American people, are my only special interest." --President Donald J. Trump)
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To: Kaslin
Biden’s botched Afghanistan pullout – the crowning catastrophe of all of his disasters.

So far, that is. Xiden is not done yet.

19 posted on 09/13/2021 6:59:44 AM PDT by NonValueAdded (Claiming Racism, the antidote to personal responsibility)
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To: central_va

That settles it. If I’m opposite the views of Pat Buchanan, I know I’m right!


20 posted on 09/13/2021 7:13:41 AM PDT by SoCal Pubbie
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