In 2010 Republicans took the House with an historic majority.  The Speaker of the House lamented, "we are only one branch of the government." Instead of using the power of the purse to curb a runaway administration, they used the power of the continuing resolution, in effect giving Barack Obama, Harry Reid and Nancy Pelosi as much money as they needed to ram progressive policies down our throats.

In 2014, thanks to a conservative backlash and the TEA Party, Republicans had an historic majority in the House AND the Senate.  Despite overwhelming protests from the people who put them in office, the members of the House voted for Speaker Boehner, AGAIN! What followed was Cromnibus, Amnesty, No Child Left Behind - Part II, more Common Core, decimation of our military, no response to ISIS and the war on terror.  Not a word about Planned Parenthood.  Not a word about repealing Obamacare.  Not a word about 200 trillion in unfunded liabilities and 20+ trillion in debt.  Scandal after scandal involved the EPA, DEP, IRS, DOS, DOD and the debacle of arming Iran with nuclear weapons and giving them hundreds of billions of dollars to make sure they could sustain their proxy terror wars.

In April of this year, David Boaz of the CATO Institute wrote an article entitled “Venezuela Reaches the Final Stage of Socialism: No Toilet Paper.”  He writes: “Venezuela’s product shortages have become so severe that some hotels in that country are asking guests to bring their own toilet paper and soap....”  Xinia Camacho, owner of a 20-room boutique hotel in the foothills of the Sierra Nevada national park said, “For over a year we haven’t had toilet paper, soap, any kind of milk, coffee or sugar. So we have to tell our guests to come prepared.” In Venezuela, toilet paper is a valuable as paper money!                                  

We are also headed toward socialism (read ‘communism’), where shortages will eventually become a reality.  Toilet paper will become as valuable to us as our fiat, paper currency.

What to do, since most of our incumbent officials are progressives - both Republicans and Democrats?

Here's a suggestion:  When our non-representing representatives send us a plea for campaign funds we should respond.  However, instead of sending paper money, let us send four sheets of potentially valuable toilet paper.  Included with our “donation” could be a note: “Use this contribution to clean up the mess you have made of this country and all the crap you have dumped on us.  After you've done that, you may then contact us for some fiat PAPER money.”

It would be well worth the cost of a stamp and would send a very clear message.

Sincerely,

Bruce S. Paskoff

Montrose, PA

Henry Ford said, “History is more or less bunk. It's tradition.” As we shall see it is, indeed, more tradition than truth, more fable than fact.

The Gettysburg Address. It is beyond question one of the most moving speeches ever given by an American politician. In English 101, it would be studied for its eloquence, evocative imagery, and enduring phrases. In History 101, it would be studied to show how history is written to ennoble the victor and defame the loser.

We'll begin at the end. The Battle of Gettysburg was the decisive battle of the Civil War. Like Stalingrad for the Germans and Midway for the Japanese, Gettysburg sealed the fate of the South.

It's difficult to appreciate the scale of this crucial clash near a small town in Pennsylvania. About the same number died in this three-day battle as did the number of KIA during the 20-year war in Vietnam. Even more so, we cannot fully grasp the magnitude of the war in its entirety.

The number of Civil War dead is 1,972 per 100,000. The number of Americans KIA during WW II is 308 per 100,000. The Civil War had proportionately six times as many battlefield deaths as did WW II.

In total, the war claimed 620,000---some historians say 750,000---lives. But for what noble cause did so many die?

Lincoln's famed 272-word address answers, “. . . that this nation, under God, shall have a new birth of freedom . . . . “ They died for freedom? Really? But this “new birth of freedom,” that half the nation fought so tenaciously against, was achieved at the end of a bloody bayonet.

The end of the four-year struggle was followed by 12 years of what was euphemistically called the Reconstruction Era.

The South was occupied by 40,000 Union troops. Former Confederate states were divided into five military districts, each commanded by a Union general to enforce this “new birth of freedom.”

But, paradoxically, it was the South that fought for freedom while Lincoln's army opposed it.

The Civil War was not a civil war. It was not a fight to wrest control of the US government, as in a true civil war; the South wanted only to be free of Washington. It was a war for independence, like one fought 85 years earlier in 1776 by the 13 colonies against English rule.

In the Declaration of Independence, Thomas Jefferson wrote that when governments become “destructive of these ends, it is the Right of the People . . . to institute a new Government.”

That's what was done in the Revolutionary War and that's what the South attempted to do in the Civil War.

The Revolutionary War officially ended with the Treaty of Paris in 1783. The Treaty listed ten articles to which the colonies and England agreed. “Article 1: Acknowledging the thirteen colonies as free sovereign and independent states.”

Further, the Constitution of the United States of America was never understood to be a mafia-like contract in which withdrawal was the kiss of death. Sovereignty of the states and secession from the Union were time-honored and legally recognized rights since the Treaty of Paris.

Lincoln disagreed. He turned the nation's army against itself and started a Constitutionally undeclared, illegal war against his own countrymen.

In the end, might triumphed over right by establishing an all-powerful central government in Washington. The newly empowered national government planted a hobnailed boot on state sovereignty and secession, crushing them forever. It was the end of one United States and the beginning of another but very different union.

Now all reminders of that gallant southern foe are to be erased from history, cast into an Orwellian memory hole.

The South's Battle flags torn down. Washington and Jefferson, slavers erased from history. Monuments to Confederate generals Lee, Jackson, and Forrest, demolished. A carving on the side of a mountain in Georgia bigger than a football field depicting Confederate luminaries, dynamited.

History, itself, rewritten to conform to the new paradigm.

And when all this is done, it will only be the beginning of the beginning. Like China's cultural revolution under Mao, it will be an unending mutiny against ourselves.

But there remains a question.

After all these revisions, real, planned and hoped for, will we be better off, or will we have achieved the opposite of what was intended: a dystopia in constant conflict with the ghosts of our past?

Sincerely,

Bob Scroggins

New Milford, PA