Posted on 05/03/2011 4:46:53 AM PDT by Huck
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.
Respectfully,
Huck
I still think that Obama is a Central African variant of Osama.
This is a fake? Really?
Now with the constant conspiracy theories thrown out on this site it has brought the absurdity level to new heights.
People like Buckhead and Beckwith really made this site something to be proud of. I am afraid freerepublic has sunken to the D.U. level of giving a loud voice to the crazies in this world. The level of discourse and the personnel attacks on fellow freepers is appalling.
The best days of freerepublic are in the past I'm afraid. I would say yesterday's posts reached a new low. I don't post as much as I use to, I don't lurk as much either. Big news day yesterday, I came to this site to read what people were observing. What I mostly read was a bunch of birther talk transformed now to deathers. Nothing but throwing mud to see what sticks. Obama derangement syndrome I call it.
It is sad to see what this place has become knowing what it once was like here.
To the birthers and deathers, what is it like being wrong all the time?
Well said and completely agree...
short and sweet, I like that about you. :)
What you say is true. Anyone who questions the government gets named and defamed. Birthers, troofers. You complain, we got a name...to label you.
We also have the deniers. Those are the people who do not believe global warming is true.
I guess they win either way, right?
History will prove how easily we fall for this tactic.
When it is too late, well, the joke is all on us.
I would never think that 0bama would use the military to do it. He wouldn’t trust them. He would use one of his STUPID marxist stooges to do it. And THEY would be stupid enough to fail.
And the proof is in the fact that they had to take down the original file which had layers in it and replace it on the White House site with one that didn’t have layers.
Q.E.D
No offense whatsoever to you or the military. I’m not saying that the govt isn’t *capable* of doing a good job. Mine is just a more critical analysis specifically of 0bama and how marxists work, a group of people that *I* have over 30 years of experience with.
I understand, sort of, what you are feeling, but I can't understand it all because it was something on TV.
Thanks for telling us all what it is like for you these days. I needed to hear it.
FReegards.
I’ve only been here since 2005, but I can see what Scythian, Huck and other “old timers” are talking about.
They must feel like a lot of conservatives feel about the Republican Party. They didn’t leave the Party. The Party left them.
And just as some of FR’s veterans who have been around for 10 years and longer, I too feel there has been a change in the heart and soul of FR.
For one, there are tens of thousands more FReepers than ever before. Too hard to keep up with.
But more than anything - this is a political site. And thanks to the politics of Obama, the Democrats and a whole lot of Republicans, we FReepers are left with bitterness over our political, moral and economic cultures. And it is reflected in our threads and in our replies.
See my tagline. I just added it yesterday. It stands as a testimony to what Obama has brought us to. We can’t even celebrate a victory over bin Laden’s death due to the chicanery of Obama’s twisted political grandstanding.
How sad.
So. You miss the Free Republic of ten years ago? Great. So do I. (And I wasn’t even here 10 years ago).
But there’s no use crying about that now. As I told you Scythian on your semi-opus thread; 1) you will be back before the 2012 elections (see, I was right), and 2) You get too agitated about __________ (fill in the bank) threads? Fine. Stay off them. Focus on threads that are good for you.
I think this is misdirected. I don’t remember ever comparing FDR and anybody.
Well said.
I too have noticed that the tone of FR has changed. I use to come to see the ideas, to learn, and felt more or less easy about recommending FR.
Now trash talk, innuendos and the lack of reasoned comments have made me fade out.
Yet so many must need FR as a place to spew their venom - much like all the comment sections all over the news sites.
The seals aren’t allowed to talk about it. All we have is the word of the higher-ups, who owe their jobs to Obama.
I do believe that Osama is dead. Something happened, and there are photos that are supportive that it was a raid of a compound in Pakistan. Whether there could have been a double for Osama like they had for Saddam, I don’t know.
What this whole thing is showing, I think, is that people HAVE learned that people in government and media are willing to tell tall tales, or to go along with whatever story is in vogue without actually checking the facts. And Obama is a notorious liar, which makes him dangerously non-credible. He seems to think that because he lives in the White House we have to believe and trust him. But trust is earned, and you don’t earn people’s trust by flipping them off whenever they ask for verification of the claims you make.
Well said, Huck.
I, too, was hoping for an apolitical moment of celebration, but the conspiracy theories started showing up almost immediately. I despise 0bama to the core of my being, but this was one rare, fleeting moment that — regardless of who sits in the White House — we.. AMERICA.. got that evil bastard bin Laden.
It strikes me that the politics are far more important than the revenge because they are about the future and our political enemies are bent on flying this nation into the ground screaming Obama Akbar! For them, a socialist paradise awaits beyond our utter destruction.
Proverbs 21:31
The horse is prepared against the day of battle: but safety is of the LORD.
Well said.
I too have noticed that the tone of FR has changed. I use to come to see the ideas, to learn, and felt more or less easy about recommending FR.
Now trash talk, innuendos and the lack of reasoned comments have made me fade out.
Yet so many must need FR as a place to spew their venom - much like all the comment sections all over the news sites.
Thoughtful people do not celebrate an execution and make no mistake, that is what this was, a very necessary and well deserved execution. Thoughtful people take satisfaction from the knowledge that long over due justice has finally been served and offer thanks and a salute to our military men and women who have been fighting the war on terror on our behalf, but we are not barbarians like the Palestinians, who we see celebrating in the streets, passing sweets and taking pleasure in the death of their enemies.
Osama bin Laden is dead, may he never rest in peace.
I don’t trust them until I examine them myself. I haven’t gone through the verify part yet, you see.
There is no problem on my part living with uncertainty. You seem to have a problem with it, though. You appear to need to jump to a conclusion to feel comfortable or settled or something.
Comparing FDR and 0bama is utterly ridiculous.
1. FDR was proud of his country and would never have gone around the world apologizing for America.
2. True, FDR was a socialist supported crony capitalism. However, socialism was still relatively untested on a macro level in the early 20th century and its flaws were not obvious until that later half of the 20th century. This does not excuse FDR for his flawed economic experiment, but it does show that 0bama has a wanton disregard for history.
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