Page 14 THE VILLADOM TIMES II • August 10, 2011 way to save money! The objective of the vertical take-off fighter, we are told, is to have something that can deftly drop non-nuclear bombs that won’t hurt the oil wells on countries in the Middle East. General Smedley Butler was also a U.S. Marine. He won the Congressional Medal of Honor twice. He wrote a book called “War Is a Racket.” I urge all patriotic Americans to read it. I urge all service personnel not to get caught with a copy in a duffel bag or foot locker. The few cuts that we actually made tended to impact, at least indirectly, on the employed middle class rather than on the dependent poor or the independently wealthy. One operation that took a hit is the National Park Service. When my wife and I visited our daughter, son-inlaw, and new granddaughter in California last month, the first thing I wanted my wife to see was Muir Woods. The women had plans to shop first. We got to Muir Woods so late that there was no parking and we had to circle the parking lot like Bruce the Shark waiting for someone to leave. We were ready to leave when a young couple pulled out. We parked in their space, and made the most of the circumstances. The sense of beauty and awe that we all felt in gazing at the magnificent redwoods was abundant. Even my granddaughter, who was seven months old, seemed to revel in them. This is what John Muir intended: Americans should find nature to be an inspiration for prayer, meditation, and reverence. His dream became a reality through the private donation of a very rich man – a U.S. Senator – who insisted that the woods be named after Muir. When we could take our eyes off the magnificent trees, the people we observed included Chinese, Japanese, Koreans, Asian Indians, Mexicans, Germans, Greeks, and Italians. They were here in America. They were spending money voluntarily. The National Park Service probably contributes to the generation of more revenue than most of the giveaway job programs that hire people to sit around. National Park Service rangers are trim, informed, and intelligent, and the program is one of the worst possible places to make a federal budget cut. When my son and his bride were posing for photographs on the step of the mint in Philadelphia, three Chinese girls showed up with their cameras. I motioned to them to go ahead and take all the photographs they wanted. Everybody liked them. They were polite and they were spending money in a depressed area. The National Park Service helped out there, too. The “cuts” should be a limit on wages paid to all public employees, which would solve our problems far better than making it harder for Americans and foreign guests to appreciate America’s historic greatness and natural beauty. The curve ball here is that consistent fraudulence when dealing with the public is a bad habit. After a while, people refuse to be taken in and don’t respond any more, except to cover themselves. Lies sell well in the corridors beneath the arena, but tend to wither once confronted with the sun and the sand. A few months ago, we encountered a flurry of statements from Lost Cause advocates that “slavery had nothing to do with starting the Civil War.” Responsible historians quickly issued verbatim texts of the secession documents of South Carolina and a number of other southern states that explicitly mention the need to preserve slavery as the reason that their state legislature was voting to leave the Union. More American prisoners died in the hands of the Confederates than in the hands of the Japanese in World War II, and black federal soldiers were often executed as they were captured, while white federal soldiers starved in the middle of farm country. That’s American history, folks. The moonlight and magnolia stuff is propaganda. People who didn’t like me were able to shut down two websites with defamatory comments about my book, “Custer Survivor,” because they just hated the idea that the Little Bighorn was actually a sneak attack on an Indian village thought to be empty of warriors and full of women and children. Every serious student of the battle knows this, but if you dare to expose it to a wider public you are considered subversive and unpatriotic. Try honest. Speaking of sneak attacks, people who were surprised by Pearl Harbor must not have been great newspaper readers. Banner front-page headlines had been predicting a war between the United States and Japan starting Dec. 1, a week before the attack. The headlines said things like “Far East Crisis Grave” and “Action Likely in Pacific.” Stories reported that the Japanese said that U.S. demands were unacceptable. Did anybody read the newspapers? How many U.S. ships were hit during the Gulf of Tonkin incident that led us into Vietnam? Try none. That war cost the lives of 58,000 Americans and two million Asians. It started based on a false pretext. How many “weapons of mass destruction” turned up in Iraq? Try none. The score in Iraq and Afghanistan is now 6,000 dead Americans and a number of local people said to be around 200,000. That’s plenty bad enough, but taken together, our various Asian adventures have killed more civilians than the Holocaust. We are not loved for these exploits, and when our economy tanks, we may hear about it. Let’s try something new. Let’s try honesty. Let’s admit that we should take care of our wounded veterans and the minorities who had no choice but to be here before we make up pretexts to kill people in other countries and control the world. That won’t get the average American anything but high taxes, hatred overseas, and, if he or she is really unlucky, a body bag. Let’s go back to being the Land of Lincoln and quit being the Land of Liars. Next time Washington offers us a circus, let’s ask for the tigers. Dissolute Romans used to say the mob didn’t care about the needs or troubles of the state, but would be satisfied with “bread and circuses.” That’s what Washington offered us last week: a circus about whether we were going to lose our bread. From what I can tell, most Americans yawned. Have you met anybody who took this circus seriously? I haven’t. We all knew the fakers in both parties would come up with a solution at the last minute, and of course they did. Democratic heroes saved Social Security and Medicare and the teachers unions from the wicked Republicans. Republicans saved the crooked corporations and the inherited money of the rich from the wicked Democrats. Obama signed with pained reluctance, straddling the fence with great caution because it hurts when you slip. No one took the possibility of a default seriously, except the electronic press, whose facility with generating headlines that don’t match the stories has now reached neartabloid levels. The climax was sort of classic Hollywood. At the last minute, the good guys rode to the rescue, the cavalry chased the Indians away from the wagon train, and the clean-living cowboy in the white hat shot the dirty-living cowboy. We all expected it, and achieved the sort of satisfaction you get from a home-cooked meal at the end of a tedious day at work, or hearing a favorite old song. You can fool some of the people all of the time, and you can fool all of the people some of the time. Without cutting Abraham Lincoln’s quote in a disrespectful manner – he was one of the few politicians worthy of respect – those are very good odds. In the end, the politicians of both parties fooled only themselves, because they didn’t fool most Americans. Politicians and electronic and print news jackals pretended to believe there would be a default, because the concept had readers interested, if less than terrified. Nancy Pelosi compensated for failure to tax private wealth out of existence – which we all knew wasn’t going to happen, since most people in Congress are wealthy – with the battle cry of “jobs, jobs, jobs.” Translated into words of more than one syllable, that means using more tax money to pay unfortunate people to do meaningless labor for low wages. The two-syllable translation would be “hand-outs, hand-outs, hand-outs.” This will not save the economy. The United States government cannot create useful jobs, except in defense contracting. It can, however, tax productive businesses into bankruptcy to pay for nonsense like subsidized college for illegal immigrants while people who have paid taxes and served in the armed forces for two, three, or four generations get to pay for their own children’s college. Illustrating one boon to employment, the U.S. Marine Corps wants mega-bucks for a new vertical take-off jet fighter so it doesn’t have to share carrier space with the Navy, just as the Army operates its own small boats, amphibious craft, and helicopters. Essentially we’ve got three armies, three navies, and four air forces. There’s a It’s time to return to the Land of Lincoln Area The Valley Hospital has received the 2011 American Heart Association/American Stroke Association’s Get with the Guidelines® Stroke Gold Plus Performance Achievement Award. The award recognizes Valley’s commitment and success in implementing excellent care for stroke patients, according to evidence-based guidelines. To receive the award, The Valley Hospital achieved of 85 percent or higher adherence to all Get with the Guidelines-Stroke Performance Achievement indicators for two or more consecutive 12-month intervals and achieved 75 percent or higher compliance with six of 10 Get with the Guidelines-Stroke Quality Measures, which are reporting initiatives to measure quality of care. These measures include aggressive use of medications, such as tPA, antithrombotics, anticoagulation therapy, DVT prophylaxis, cholesterol reducing drugs, and smoking cessation, all aimed at reducing death and disability and improving the lives of stroke patients. “With a stroke, time lost is brain lost. This recognition demonstrates Valley’s commitment to being one of Valley receives achievement award the top hospitals in the country for providing aggressive, proven stroke care,” said neurologist Kenneth A. Levin, MD, director of The Valley Hospital Stoke Center. “Valley is to be commended for its commitment to implementing standards of care and protocols for treating stroke patients,” said Lee H. Schwamm, M.D., chair of the Get with the Guidelines National Steering Committee and director of the TeleStroke and Acute Stroke Services at Massachusetts General Hospital in Boston. “The full implementation of acute care and secondary prevention recommendations and guidelines is a critical step in saving the lives and improving outcomes of stroke patients.” According to the American Heart Association/American Stroke Association, stroke is the third leading cause of death in the United States and a leading cause of serious, long-term disability. On average, someone suffers a stroke every 45 seconds, someone dies of a stroke every three minutes, and 795,000 people suffer a new or recurrent stroke each year.