Dear Readers,

A few weeks ago I noticed that Creators Syndicate, with whom I was under contract for a weekly column, was allowing its liberal columnists to use the homosexual slang, “tea baggers” and “tea bagging,” in clear reference to American citizens protesting unconstitutional overreach and out-of-control spending of taxpayers’ hard-earned money.  I lodged a formal complaint with the top editors and demanded that the practice stop.  I said that I would disengage with the Syndicate if the practice continued.

When the editors refused to even entertain a discussion on the merits of my complaint, and instead showed me the door, I apologized for my hastiness and tried to save the prestigious contract.  This is the thing which I, of course, regret.  Words either matter — or they don’t.  If they do not matter, then we are all clinging to a quickly sinking civilizational ship.

I am putting my final letter to Creators here in its entirety for my readers to judge.  I’ll still be around and I’ll still be writing from my own research, my gut and my lifetime of real-world experience.  I hope there will remain a few who’ll give me the time to consider my opinions.  Thank God and the USA for the internet!  Without it, thousands of valid voices would go silent.

Here is my concluding letter to Creators Syndicate:

Mr. Rick Newcomb, President
Creators Syndicate
5777 W. Century Blvd., Suite 700
Los Angeles, CA 90045

Dear Mr. Newcomb:

I respectfully accept your decision to release me from my contract with Creators Syndicate. I would appreciate your forwarding written confirmation of the release as soon as possible. My attorney has requested this so as to avoid any future involvement between myself and Creators.

Now that I have had time for reflection, I realize that my effort to reconcile with you after lodging my formal complaint was against both my conscience and my own best interests. The tantalizing lure of keeping the national-syndication prestige indeed got the momentary better of me. I was wrong to recant for asking you to prohibit the sexual slurs, “tea-bagger” and “tea-bagging,” from your published columns.

Not to worry, though, I’ve already gone to confession!

While I respect all of the people with whom I’ve worked at Creators, I stand by my belief that words do indeed matter a great deal and that, as a leader in the public discourse, you bear a burden of responsibility to both your subscribers and to your readers. Permitting the use of guttersnipe sexual slurring seems irresponsible and unbefitting an organization of Creators’ stature.

I have been reading newspapers for 50 years. I have never read a syndicated column anywhere in these United States - in all that time! — which made use of heterosexual slang in the way that the homosexual terms, “tea-bagger” and “tea-bagging,” are now being used in Creators columns to refer to American citizens, who are protesting profligate government spending and unconstitutional overreach.

Reputable authors certainly employ self-restraint regarding heterosexual epithets and it’s doubtful that columnists ever submit work to your editors, using words such as “cocksucker” or “pussy” or “dick-brain,” as clear references to political adversaries. If they did submit work with these types of sexual slurs, I do not - for even one minute - believe that your editors would give them a pass.

Hiding homosexual slurs behind the ignorance of a 95% heterosexual adult population is the kind of thing one would expect from middle-schoolers on an unsupervised playground. It is not acceptable behavior from presumably civilized adults.

In fact, it is the equivalent of a person shouting vile insults in English at a foreigner, while standing upon the assumption that the person being slimed doesn’t know the language and is therefore an easy target for unbridled scorn and ridicule. Such childish, contemptible behavior ought to, at the very least, have some sort of boundary. This is not, as your editor suggested, censorship. It’s just plain decency and ordinary common sense.

Now, perhaps my failure to produce the sales you anticipated, after a mere two months of syndication, was indeed the only reason you decided to release me so prematurely from my contract. The fact that your telephone call was timed immediately after my lodging this complaint, however, leaves me skeptical on that point. Speaking with other Creators columnists about the number of years they’ve written for you and the paltry numbers of sales they have, adds greatly to my skepticism. But you are a businessman of seemingly good judgment and have certainly acted within your rights in making the decision to release me. I have no quarrel whatsoever on that count.

I do sincerely hope, however, that you and your editorial board will seriously consider the nature of my complaint. As editors, and as ladies and gentlemen, you do have a responsibility to uphold decent standards of public civil discourse. In that, I believe, you are falling far short in your duty and if I failed to say so, I would not be abiding my own conscience. If one’s moral conscience does not supercede self-interest, then what’s a civilization for?

Now, that’s my two cents, honey, and I’m sticking to it. It was also my penance for trying to back down, and now I’m off the hook with the Big Guy, the only One I ever have to answer to.

Thank you for your attention. Please forward a written and unconditional contract release at your earliest convenience.

Sincerely yours,

Kyle-Anne Shiver
Independent — 100% Liberated — Author

If I were the parent or spouse of one of those killed in the terrorist attack at Fort Hood last week, I would begin raising utter hell in the public arena the minute my loved one was buried and my tears dried up. Not only did outrageous political correctness convince otherwise rational people in authority to put our soldiers in unnecessary danger, but since 1993, there has been a gun-ban in place on our army bases.

Here we have soldiers, expertly trained in the safe and efficient use of guns, yet they are prevented by a cockamamie Clinton ruling from carrying handguns on their bases. From reports of the Ft. Hood terrorist attack, the Islamic radical enemy within was allowed a full 10 minutes of completely protected firing at soldiers before someone with a gun arrived on the scene to fire back.

From the report on Fox News:

“Beginning in March 1993, under the Clinton administration, the army forbids military personnel from carrying their own personal firearms and mandates that “a credible and specific threat against [Department of the Army] personnel [exist] in that region” before military personnel “may be authorized to carry firearms for personal protection.” Indeed, most military bases have relatively few military police as they are in heavy demand to serve in Iraq and Afghanistan.

“The unarmed soldiers could do little more than cower as Major Nidal Malik Hasan stood on a desk and shot down into the cubicles in which his victims were trapped. Some behaved heroically, such as private first class Marquest Smith who repeatedly risked his life removing five soldiers and a civilian from the carnage. But, being unarmed, these soldiers were unable to stop Hasan’s attack.”

At this rate, we will be extremely fortunate to have men and women in the entire United States willing to sign up for military service. Not only should this horrendous terror attack never have happened because all the red flags were there, but it would also seem quite certain that the gun ban resulted in more inexcusable loss of life.

As the Fox News report says, statistics are pretty clear on the additional loss of life in public shootings where gun bans are in force:

“Research shows that allowing individuals to defend themselves dramatically reduces the rates of multiple victim public shootings. Even if attacks still occur, having civilians with permitted concealed handguns limits the damage. A major factor in determining how many people are harmed by these killers is the amount of time that elapses between when the attack starts and someone is able to arrive on the scene with a gun. Ten minutes must have seemed like an eternity to those trapped in the attack at Ft. Hood. All the multiple victim public shootings in the U.S. — in which more than three people have been killed — have all occurred in places where concealed handguns have been banned.”

Now, it’s not hard to understand that draft-dodging, war protester, Bill Clinton, thought this base gun ban was a good idea. But we might want to ask ourselves why on earth the ban was not lifted by President Bush immediately after 9/11. Intelligence and law enforcement agencies have been churning out reports and analyses of the homegrown terror threat for at least a decade and yet we remain a nation seemingly bent on national suicide.

This is disgusting.

Rarely do I give a flying flip about what the first lady wears.  I’m not that shallow or flighty.  I don’t read fashion magazines; I have a real life to live.  I don’t spend time with women who are so into such things they don’t have time for genuinely important things.  But when dressing for a memorial service, anyone over the age of 12 ought to know that discretion, respect and good manners call for wearing inconspicuous clothing, generally black.

The idea is twofold.  Black is the long-standing, across many cultures, color for expressing mourning and greif.  Second, the important statement one makes when choosing clothing for a memorial service — especially a national memorial for one’s fallen soldiers! –  is to be unobtrusive.  The important dressing quality for such an occasion is the express that YOU are not the center of attention and you wish to do all you can in dressing yourself to show your humility and not draw unnecessary attention to yourself.

So, have a look at Michelle Obama’s disgraceful, turquoise outfit worn at the national memorial for Veterans Day yesterday at Arlington Memorial Cemetary.  Ask yourself this:  when a woman has 23 attendants and assistants on the taxpayers’ payroll, and none apparently can tell her something this basic, what is wrong?  Michelle Obama is starting to resemble Imelda Marcos, and that can’t be a good sign.

What’s wrong with this picture?

Last Friday, in the immediate aftermath of the Fort Hood terror attack, President Obama was no-doubt conducting focus group surveys to determine the possible political fallout as a result of the first terror attack on our soil since 9/11, while former President George W. Bush and his wife, Laura, went in secret to personally console the victims’ families.

As Fox News reported the next day, their visit was without any press coverage at President Bush’s instruction.  The former first couple traveled from their ranch in Crawford, Texas a couple of hours away from Fort Hood to meet for hours with the grieving families of Hasan’s victims.

This action was in keeping with the scores of letters I’ve received over the past three years from service members and their families telling of private incidents where President Bush gave personal comfort and a heartfelt hearing to their grief, their problems and their stories of valor in the field.  Not much news was ever made of any of this.  No public credit was ever given that I’m aware of, but isn’t that the mark of a truly humble man with a good heart?  I think it is.

I’m frequently reminded of an anecdote related by Indira Ghandi about her grandfather.  She said that he had once told her:  There are two kinds of people in this world, those who do the work and those who try to grab the credit.  Always try to be in the first group, he told his granddaughter.  There’s far less competition.

George W. Bush was generally a man who stood in the first group, doing the work we paid him to do, putting America’s interests first and standing firm in his oath to protect our citizens from all enemies foreign and domestic.  Yet, for eight years, he was constantly berated in print and in front of cameras for beastly qualities.  When he went to NYC right after the 9/11 attacks and with a simple bullhorn in hand, rallied a startled, grieving nation, not flinching in his sworn duty, he was a real class act.  And he continued to do his job, never perfectly, but always with diligence and deep, abiding love for our Country.

As this secret humanitarian visit to Fort Hood once again proves, both he and Laura are still a class act.  And every day, more Americans wake up to how foolishly they were taken for granted by so many.

The old saying goes, you never know what you have until you lose it.

It took President Obama of the empty suit to make Bush’s star shine.  Unfortunately, that says a lot more about us as a people than it says about either man.

Hopefully, we’re learning how to better judge character and to put character before celebrity glitz.  When one is in a fight for survival, as we definitelya are, character actually counts while celebrities just get in the way and get innocent people killed.

A Muslim fanatic with an Internet site [1] praising Islamic suicide bombers as defenders of their comrades is a Major in the U.S. Army with access to military intelligence and lethal weaponry. And it’s not as though the army didn’t know that he was a Muslim fanatic and supporter of the Islamic jihad [2] against the West. He was under investigation for six months because of his anti-American [3], jihadist rantings. He did not want to be deployed. He wanted to be discharged.
But despite his identification with America’s enemies, the army kept him in its officer corps. How in God’s name was this possible? But it was. And so, after calling America the “aggressor” in Afghanistan and Iraq, this Muslim jihadist traitor army officer picks up his semi-automatic weapons and heads for the center at Ft. Hood where soldiers are being deployed to fight the jihadists in Afghanistan to conduct his massacre. Yet this morning the Fox News Channel chiron says “Investigators search for a motive in the Ft. Hood killings.” Is everybody out of their mind?
The Ft. Hood killings are the chickens of the left coming home to roost. Already the chief political correspondent of The Nation [4] has decried even mention of the fact that the jihadist killer Hasan is a Palestinian Muslim. [5]According to The Nation this is “Islamophobia.” This fatuous attempt to protect America’s enemies carries on The Nation’s 60-year tradition as the leading fifth column collaborator with America’s enemies [6] - defender of the Rosenbergs, defender of Hiss [7], defender of their boss Stalin [8], defender of Mao [9], defender of Castro [10] and now defender of Islamic terrorists. But The Nation is only the tip of an iceberg. The fifth column formed out of the unholy alliance between radical Islam and the American left is now entrenched in the White House and throughout our government. And in matters like the Muslim jihadist Major Hasan our military is its captive.
The Fort Hood massacre is the first of the preventable atrocities we have been warning about on our [11] websites [12] since 9/11 - the atrocities which are apparently necessary for Americans to wake up to the threat that confronts us. We have a vast internal threat in this country in the form of this unholy alliance between the anti-American Left and radical Islam [13]- whose Muslim Brotherhood [14]network extends through our universities [15], our government and our military. It is “politically incorrect” [16] to recognize this fact. You can be barred - as I have been - from speaking at universities for even talking about it. The embargo of discussion of the Islamo-fascist [17] threat puts every American (including the infidel collaborators) at risk. Hasan had semi-automatic weapons. But they weren’t nuclear. That possibility is just around the corner unless we undergo a sea change in our attitudes and marshal the intelligence and the courage to recognize the threat.

THIS ENTRY FROM FRONT PAGE MAGAZINE; REPRINTED WITH PERMISSION.

http://frontpagemag.com/2009/11/06/our-brain-dead-country-by-david-horowitz/print/