Reflections of An Uncommon Common Man

    When Ronald Reagan ran for president in 1980 I was a Democrat. I was a conservative Democrat and somewhat independent because I voted for Nixon in 1972. McGovern was just too far to the left for me then and for many Americans. After Watergate, however; I wanted honesty and integrity to return to the White House, if it had ever been there at all. Jimmy Carter passed himself off as a moderate and a Christian. I was excited about the prospect of what I thought would be a moderate Southern Democrat as opposed to a northeastern liberal Democrat being in the White House. In addition, a moderate Democrat, who was not a racist or segregationist. Gerald Ford was a good man but I couldn't forgive him for pardoning Nixon. In retrospect Nixon looks like a saint now compared to the corrupt Clinton and Obama administrations but my eyes are wide open now and they weren't in 1976. It seemed like the country was in a funk during the 1970's. We had been defeated in Vietnam. The military ...

 The weirdest thing that happened during that time was a series of supernatural occurrences in our house and where Steve lived next door. Unfortunately, there was nothing we could do legally to make Steve move right at first. Luckily for us he moved after a couple of months I believe. The supernatural things occurred over a two year period. From right after Misty was molested until about late 1982 or early 1983. Debbie claimed that she heard footsteps in our house at night when the kids were asleep and I was at work. She told me about the footsteps but I just blew it off. Late one Saturday night I was studying my Sunday school lesson for the next morning. Debbie was sound asleep and I had my feet next to her head with my head at the foot of the bed as I lay there reading with the bedroom light on. All of a sudden I became aware of how quiet the house was. It was so quiet that you could hear a pin drop.   It kind of unsettled me and I raised my head in anticipation of hear...

 Karl Marx was a racist who cast freely with choice epithets aimed at blacks and even at Jews----ironic given that Marx was an ethnic Jew. Jonathan Sperber notes that Marx's correspondence is "filled with contemptuous remarks about Jews" Even his admiring biographer Francis Wheen, who habitually defends the worst in Marx, admits that he "sprayed anti-Semitic insults at his enemies with savage glee." Of one contemporary Marx blasted his "cynical, oily-obtrusive, phony-Baronial Jew-manners." His fellow German socialist and labor organizer Ferdinand Lassalle, Marx referred to as a "greasy Jew" "the little Kike", "water-polack Jew", "Jew Braun", "Yid", "Izzy", "Wily Ephraim", "Baron Itzig", and "the Jewish N*gger", Referring to Lassalle in a July 30, 1862 letter to Engels, Marx discerned with a sense of confident pride, "It is now perfectly clear to me that, as t...

    Toward the end of Jimmy Carters's term of office Vice President Mondale landed at the Nashville airport on two separate occasions. One of these times was to watch his daughter perform in a horse show at M.T.S.U. Whenever Air Force One, or Air Force Two, landed in Nashville the planes were parked on the Air National Guard side of the airport. We were tasked to guard both planes, along with augmenting the Secret Service and local law enforcement. There was only one problem. We were carrying empty weapons. National Guard troops had shot 13 Kent State University students, killing four of them, during an anti-war riot on May 4, 1970 while I was home leave before going to Turkey. The state of Ohio did not insure their Guard troops and they were held personally liable in civil court. Since Tennessee also did not insure it's troops against personal liability we were not allowed to carry loaded weapons after the Kent State fiasco. Regardless, our commander wanted us to carry empty ...