I suppose the time is right for me to add my voice to the cacophony of debate surrounding the results of the 2006 mid-term elections.

One of the purposes of this blog was to NOT respond to the daily knee-jerk reaction-ism of today’s political scene. There are plenty of people doing that now, and they are much better at it than I am.

As I watched the election results coming in on that Fateful Tuesday, I began to have a feeling similar to the one I had back in 1996:

America, what ARE YOU DOING?”

The feeling didn’t last long, though, because I remembered that things were different back then. The bill of goods we were being sold told us that we were enjoying the “peace dividend”.  The Gingrich Revolution had only begun and was  trying to recover from its Waterloo—the Shutdown of the Government over a balanced budget.

Sure there were good results from that time period, but the public’s perception of Congress (read: Republicans) took a hit that it would not recover from until George Bush stood on a pile of rubble in New York and told the world that “the people who did this are gonna hear from you.”

Perception becomes reality oftentimes for the American electorate. Which brings me to Fateful Tuesday.

Rather than get bogged down in statistics, I prefer to look at the Midterms through a wider-angle lens.

America, you have been sold a bill of goods.  You have been taken for fools.

This is not due to the stupidity of the American electorate, but rather it is the result of the cunning craftiness of the liberal leadership of the Democratic Party.

Without articulating a solid agenda, Democrats were able to capitalize on Republican laziness.

The liberals were able to actually frame the debate by focusing on scandal, corruption and even the media-distorted portrayal of the War on Terror in Iraq.

In short, Republicans thought they could win this election without the principles that brought them to the dance: the principles of Conservatism.

By abandoning, through their own legislation, the principles of limited government, border security, free-market capitalism, and time-tested moral values, Republicans silenced the True Voices in their own ranks and tried to campaign from a position that can best be described as “Democrat-Lite”.

(By the way, how does a former President commit adultery, while in office, and get to keep his job, yet a Congressman who sends ribald IM’s to a Congressional Page—and never touches him—has to resign???)

The Democrats saw this and fielded candidates that co-opted everything the GOP put forth.  The results should have been predictable.

Without saying what they are FOR, Democrats managed to keep everyone looking in disgust at what the GOP was (and wasn’t) doing.

Now, as the 110^th Congress prepares to convene in January of 2007,they will have to actually DO something with their newfound power.

They have said that they can do better.

OK, prove it.

They said that we need a new direction in Iraq.

OK, prove it.

They said they could make America stronger.

OK, prove it.

As the Democrats will soon find out, it is harder to actually BE THE LEADER than to constantly second-guess the leader.

After spending time doing some introspection, I have decided to give the Democrats some rope.

If they can take that rope and do something positive for America, then they will have earned my respect.

If they take that rope and proceed to hang themselves, then I will be among those that will hold them to account for their actions.

If they botch the War on Terror in Iraq, it will have happened on THEIR WATCH.

If they tank the economy, it will have happened on THEIR WATCH.

If they give us investigations instead of leadership, it will have happened on THEIR WATCH.

If they give us gridlock, it will have happened on THEIR WATCH.

If they fail to secure the borders, it will have happened on THEIR WATCH.

If gas prices go up due to windfall profits taxes, it will have happened on THEIR WATCH.

If terrorists hit this nation again, it will have happened on THEIR WATCH.

If any or all of these things happen in the next two years, be it known to ALL MEMBERS OF THE 110^TH Congress:

            YOUR SEAT WILL NOT BE SAFE.

From every corner of America they will come. From every walk of life they will come.  In every polling place, in every district, in every township, in every hamlet their voices—and their votes—will be heard.

They same people who voted their disgust with the GOP on Fateful Tuesday will see that they have been duped by the Democrats, and THEY WILL BE ANGRY.

I call upon all those who dare to call themselves conservatives to stand up NOW.

Channel your anger into positive action. Harness that anger so that it does not become rage or hatred, but rather, a steely resolve that what happened on November 7, 2006 does not happen again.

Republicans lost on Fateful Tuesday, Conservatism did not.

I continue to have faith in the Greatness of America.

However, it is a sad day when the Greatness of America cannot be found in the corridors of power. It cannot be found in the halls of this nation’s leadership.

This greatness is not determined by the size of one’s paycheck. It is not defined by the title of one’s office. Greatness, however, is to be found all across this land.

It can be found:

-in the hearts of men and women who VOLUNTEER to join the military and defend this nation’s future.

-in the workers who put their shoulder to the wheel every day and make our economy strong.

-in the parents who are raising their children to become solid American citizens.

-in our teachers who work to make a difference in the lives or our children.

-in the farmer who provides food, not just for this country, but also for the world.

The person who would dare to lead us will have to recognize this greatness as well as EMBODY this greatness.

In short, that person will have to lead a MOVEMENT.

The Conservative American Ideology, properly and consistently articulated, will win the elections of 2008.

Failure to do so will seal the fate of a once-great movement.

It will be as you will, America.

The choice is yours.

As part of our Guest Essay series, I asked Joseph Shahda to write for us on the topic of translating Sadaam Hussien's captured documents.

Mr. Shahda, who goes by the screen name "jveritas" on FreeRepublic.com, has had a article written about him in the Boston Globe:
( http://www.boston.com/business/articles/2006/03/18/us_puts_iraqi_documents_on_the_web/ )

"Joseph Shahda earns his living as an engineer. But in his spare time, he's an intelligence agent, working to ferret out the truth about the regime of deposed Iraqi dictator Saddam Hussein.

When the US government on Thursday began publishing captured Iraqi government documents on the Internet, Shahda eagerly began to translate the files into English and publish them on a conservative website.

''I feel a sense of duty," said Shahda, a native of Lebanon who supports President Bush's decision to invade Iraq. ''I think it's a duty for people who know Arabic to translate the documents."

Without further ado, here is the "jveritas" essay for Heart of America:

“Since March 2006 the Pentagon has released thousands of documents captured in Iraq and that belongs to different departments and apparatus in Saddam regime, like the Iraq intelligence services, the Iraqi military institutions, Saddam Presidential secretariat, etc…

Some of documents that were released so far contain some very important information about Saddam's very strong connections to terrorism, and some prove that the Saddam regime has kept secret programs related to WMD and the precursors required to make WMD.

There are ample evidences from some of the documents that Saddam's relation to terrorism was much stronger than what most analysts believed before the start of the war. For example one document talks about a meeting between the Iraqi Intelligence Service and Osama Bin Laden in 1995 under the authorization of Saddam Hussein himself.

Other documents talk about training the Arabs Fedaeyeens, who are the non-Iraqi Arab terrorists since the year 2000, training them to be suicide bombers, and an order from Saddam Hussein himself to treat these Arabs Feedayeens the same as treating the Iraqi Special Forces in salaries and preferences.

These are the same Arabs Feedayeens who constituted later on the base of the “Foreign Terrorists Insurgency” in Iraq that caused the death of thousands of innocent Iraqis. One particular document dated March 2001, talks about the Iraqi Air Force recruiting people from their own ranks to conduct “suicide missions” against Israel and US interests. Also one document shows an order from Saddam Hussein to pay $ 25,000 for the family of each Palestinian who conducts a suicide terrorist act against Israel.

On the WMD front, there are some documents that clearly show the Saddam regime's violations of the UN resolutions regarding WMD. For example one document dated September 1998 talks about “secret” research programs related to WMD and a warning from Hussam Muhamad Amin, the person in charge of the “Iraqi National Monitoring Directory (NMD)”, to be very careful that these secret research programs related to WMD will not be caught by the UN inspectors.

Ironically the NMD was set up by Saddam in coordination with the UN as a self-monitoring agency in Iraq to prevent any programs related to WMD or acquisition of WMD. Some documents talk about the production of prohibited materials that can be used as precursors to make Chemical Weapons.

Other documents talk about how the Iraqi were always hiding evidence related to WMD, one of them talks about orders to remove all the information related to WMD from computers, put the information on disks and hide it from the UN inspectors or the hiding and destruction of WMD documents and archives as late as August 2002 shortly before the UN inspectors were scheduled to come back to Iraq.

One particular document dated 2002 talks about the production of Mobile laboratories. The issue of the mobile laboratories has been highly debated since the start of the war and although the intelligence assessment tends to believe that the mobile labs were not meant as part of WMD program, there is no final conclusion on that. In fact the 2002 date of this document may contradict some of the intelligence finding that the mobile labs were part of seed purification plants and that these mobile lab productions ended in the year 1997.

 Besides that are many other documents that talk about Saddam's forces doing extensive training exercises and maneuvers all the way to the year 2003 on how to deal with WMD attacks in particular Chemical attacks from countries like Iran or Israel. These documents show that the regime was very obsessed with these types of training and it is hard to imagine that such an obsession was purely for defensive purposes without the regime's capability to attack as well.

Let us not forget that Saddam's regime survived the Iran-Iraq war by hitting the Iranians very hard with Chemical weapons. An extremely paranoid regime like Saddam's  knows it cannot be just on the defensive when it comes to Chemical weapons.

Unfortunately these Iraqi documents received very little coverage from the media. One reason for this is that the main stream media, who are staunch opponents of the war in Iraq and President Bush, will not be interested in showing Iraqi documents that contradict their mantra about Iraq WMD or Saddam's connections to terrorism.

The media has been telling the American public for many years now that there was no WMD in Iraq or program related to WMD, and at the same time they have greatly underestimated Saddam's relation to terrorism, or in many cases they think that Saddam had very little relation to terrorism.

In the rare occasions when the main stream media, which is largely left wing, handled the issue of the Iraqi documents in the first few weeks of its release back in March 2006, it was mostly about dismissing these documents for not containing anything of importance.

The Iraqi documents must be given more importance by the media and by the politicians because from the few thousand documents released so far, out of an estimated 2 million, there is already plenty of evidence of Saddam's strong relation to terrorism and that Saddam never fully abode by the UN resolutions regarding WMD, at least the regime intent to keep doing secret research related to WMD, or producing precursors to be used for WMD, all the while waiting for the opportune moment to go into a large scale of WMD production.

These documents prove to us that after 9/11, and our fight in this general war on terror, a regime like Saddam Hussein's could not be tolerated and thus his removal from power was a great thing for us and the world.”

That's right, True Believers, it's time for the premiere installment of "Did You Hear What They Said?"

For readers and fans of The Perspective, you will remember that this is the series that shows you what people in the news ARE ACTUALLY SAYING.

Remember, it's not a cease-fire agreement, THEY ACTUALLY SAID IT!

A WORD FROM A FOUNDER

"Happily for America, happily, we trust, for the whole human race,they pursued a new and more noble course. They accomplished arevolution which has no parallel in the annals of human society." -- James Madison (Federalist No. 14, 20 November 1787)

ISRAEL

"When international pressure limits Israel's response to aggression, the terrorists win."--Mark Alexander

SO MUCH FOR UNITY....

"Don't be bamboozled. Don't buy into it." —Sen. Barack Obama on President Bush's speech to the NAACP

EVOLUTION

"There is a terrible lot of us who don't think that we come from a monkey, but if there are some people who think that they do, why, it's not our business to rob them of what little pleasure they might get out of imagining it." —Will Rogers
 
PUT HER ON THE NEXT PLANE TO MOSCOW

 "[Russian President Vladimir Putin is] the only one of those leaders who goes in there with a commanding popularity among his own people, because he is perceived to be an effective dictator. What we have in this country is a dictator who's ineffective." —Newsweek's Eleanor Clift

FINALLY, THE TRUTH

"In our attempt to make everybody happy, we make nobody happy, "said Democratic activist Janice Griffin. "And we lose elections."

"I have a very hard time with this word 'non-violence', because I don't believe that I am non-violent. Right now, I would love to kill George Bush. I don't know how I ever got a Nobel Peace Prize..." —former Nobel Peace Prize recipient, Betty Williams

NETWORK NEWS DEFINED

"The whole aim of practical politics is to keep the populace alarmed (and hence clamorous to be led to safety) by menacing it with an endless series of hobgoblins, all of them imaginary." —H. L. Mencken

"The Western press -- usually so careful to condemn hate speech -- is utterly silent about Arab racism."--Victor Davis Hanson

DEMOCRATS DEFINED

"Democrats won't acknowledge the existence of 'an imminent threat' anyplace in the world until a nuclear missile is 12 minutes from New York. And then we'll never have the satisfaction of saying 'I told you so' because we'll all be dead." —Ann Coulter
 
THE U.N.
"This is a real test for the UN. If it cannot—or will not—distinguish between terrorists who target civilians and a democracy that seeks to stop the terrorism while minimizing civilian casualties, it has become part of the problem, rather than part of the solution." —Alan Dershowitz

SAGE ADVICE

"There is only one hope for pulling black America out of oblivion: Re-instilling a sense of absolutes, of right and wrong, and doing this from the grass roots up, one person at a time. Anyone who thinks there is an alternative is kidding himself."--Star Parker

THIS WEEK'S "BIG PICTURE" AWARD

"Everything our leaders do must be judged by whether it helps or hurts us in defeating terrorists and their state sponsors." —Newt Gingrich

DUDE, YOU NAILED IT!

The left is always quick to argue that it is Bush's failure to reach out with understanding and compassion to the Islamofascists that has got us into this mess.

Why, under the last two Democratic presidents, who had such effective foreign policies, there was no Islamofascist threat.

Well, except for the Iran hostage crisis.

And the first attempt to bring down the World Trade Center with explosives.

 And the 1993 conspiracy to blow up the Holland and Lincoln Tunnels, the George Washington Bridge, and the New York FBI office in lower Manhattan.

And the conspiracy to assassinate former President Bush during his visit to Kuwait.

And the Manila plot to destroy 12 US jumbo airliners in flight.

And the Khobar Towers debacle. And the bombing of the US embassy in Nairobi, Kenya.

And the bombing of the the US embassy in Dar es Salaam, Tanzania.

And the conspiracy to blow up LAX Airport. And the plot to blow up the USS Sullivans in port at Aden, Yemen.

And the bombing of the USS Cole . . . .

posted on 08/10/2006 7:40:25 AM CDT by JCEccles, on FreeRepublic.com

HAVE A GREAT DAY!

Today's Journal entry is the first of our "Guest Essays" Series.

"MNJohnnie" has been a member of FreeRepublic.com since February 18, 2004. He is a former Army Infantryman who descirbes himself as "political junkie and passionate George W. Bush Supporter."

From my online discussions with him, MNJohnnie consistently stakes out his positions and backs them up with facts. I have seen him take considerable heat for some of his positions, but he has always maintained an unswerving dedication to the truth.

MNJohnnie seems to have a firm grasp of the "Big Picture" in the Middle East and was gracious enough to submit the following: 

Winning the Long Game in Lebanon
From MNJohnnie 08/05/2006 8:20:47 AM CDT new

There is a great deal of misplaced angst in Conservative circles about the the Israeli operations in
Lebanon. In the first days of the war, Ralph Peters was all ready moaning, “ISRAEL is losing this war. For a lifelong Israel supporter, that's a painful thing to write “ This week Charles Krauthammer exclaimed Olmert’s “search for victory on the cheap has jeopardized not just the Lebanon operation but America's confidence in Israel as well” To quote Lady Thatcher, “This is no time to go wobbly” Conservatives!

The problem with these admiribable men’s analyses is they are trying to force a Conventional Warfare paradigm onto an Asymmetrical warfare problem. That simply will not work.

Start with our Revolution, Napoleon in Spain, Spain in South American, the US in Vietnam, Various European powers all over the world, the Nazis in Eastern Europe, the French then the Americans in Vietnam, the Russians in Afghanistan. A Conventional Warfare doctrine applied to an Asymmetrical problem always ends in the eventual bloody defeat for the Conventional Force.

Think of Israel as a boxer punching a sand bag. No matter how hard they hit, they cannot hold their fist to the bag forever. Thus as soon as they pull their fist back the weight of the sand forces the bag back to the same old shape. This time Israel, with the backing of the Bush Administration, is trying to find a way to empty the sand OUT of the bag so that when Israel's fist is removed, the bag does not simply revert to the same old form.

It's not as dramatic or made for TV sexy but it DOES have the virtue of possible achieving a workable longer-term strategic change for Israel. Israel is going for the long game, a solution to a decade long cancer NOT a drama-queen, ego-feeding headline-grabbing military blitz.

It would be utterly stupid for Israel to settle for just pruning back Hizbolla when they could possibly completely uproot it.

All the various "armchair Patton's" plans would accomplish is a lot of dead Jews for a short term. Hizbolla would simply bleed the Israelis while pulling back into sanctuary areas in Syria and northern Lebanon. Then when the Israelis could no longer stand the blood and treasure long term occupation was costing them, Hizbolla would simply flow back into the same positions they hold now. And in a few years from now the Israelis would face the same crises in Lebanon

Like the US in Iraq, Israel seems to be trying for a long term FIX that uproots Hizbolla and creates a viable Lebanese government that can police its own territory. That is why the Israelis are interested in a NATO force to do in Lebanon what it is currently doing in Afghanistan. The UN has showed it simply is too corrupt and ineffective to manage peacekeeping duties. Israel, and the world, need a force that can keep out the Terrorists while the Lebanese build a viable nation-state that can provide long term stability. Thus the Israel and the US should be looking with interest to the French.

The French are the ideal choice because of their history with Lebanon. They have good troops with lots of peace keeping experience (Its their politics that are messed up, not their military). Being Lefties the Media will pretty much ignore the head cracking they need to do as peace keepers. They do not trigger the knee jerk hysteria British, American or Jewish troops would in the Arabs. For domestic consumption, the French can spin this mission as one to protect the Muslims, stopping the Israelis.

My love affair with the internet waned a bit because of the symphony of political myopia that is so pervasive out there.

That, coupled with that crazy little thing called LIFE, happened.

Days without posting became weeks, then months and the next thing you know, I became a bit detached from it all.

In the process, I was able to see that almost all of the media has become obsessed with short-term political gain instead of seeing The Big Picture of The Future.

It really shouldn't matter which label a politician wears, but rather, the content of their soul. It is THAT content that will determine what kind of a leader they will be.

Yes, there ARE moral absolutes. Yes, there ARE values to which we must cling.

That is what you will find here at Heart of America.

There will be things that I write that will anger some readers, embolden others.

But the bottom line is that it will come FROM THE HEART.

As with the former blog, The Perspective, this site will always be a work-in-progress.

Please be patient. Please be courteous. Please feel free to share....from the heart.