Good Thursday Morning and good riddens 2015!
1. Question – R U as glad as me that 2015 is gone?
So what will I do in 2016? Perhaps I will Laugh –
Think – and Cry every day? That’s one heck of
a day if I can do all of that. And I think I’ll
spend more time on Family, God & the ______ ______
______! (See video for answers) Please watch video.
4. AND: From Thomas Sowell – Insight December 29,
2015 Editorial – The year of the lie!
How shall we remember 2015? Or shall we try to forget
it?
It is always hard to know when a turning point has been
reached, and usually it is long afterwards before we
recognize it. However, if 2015 has been a turning point,
it may well have marked a turn in a downward direction
for America and for Western civilization.
This was the year when we essentially let the world know
that we were giving up any effort to try to stop Iran —
the world’s leading sponsor of international
terrorism — from getting a nuclear bomb. Surely it does
not take much imagination to foresee what lies at the
end of that road.
It will not matter if we have more nuclear bombs than
they have, if they are willing to die and we are not.
That can determine who surrenders. And ISIS and other
terrorists have given us grisly demonstrations of what
surrender would mean.
Putting aside, for the moment, the fateful question
whether 2015 is a turning point, what do we see when we
look back instead of looking forward? What characterizes
the year that is now ending?
More than anything else, 2015 has been the year of the
big lie. There have been lies in other years, and some
of them pretty big, but even so 2015 has set new highs —
or new lows.
This is the year when we learned, from Hillary
Clinton’s own e-mails, after three long years of
stalling, stone-walling and evasions, that Secretary of
State Clinton lied, and so did President Barack Obama
and others under him, when they all told us in 2012 that
the terrorist attack in Benghazi that killed the
American ambassador and three other Americans was not a
terrorist attack, but a protest demonstration that got
out of hand.
“What difference, at this point, does it
make?” as Mrs. Clinton later melodramatically
cried out, at a Congressional committee hearing
investigating that episode.
First of all, it made enough of a difference for some of
the highest officials of American government to concoct
a false story that they knew at the time was false.
It mattered enough that, if the truth had come out, on
the eve of a presidential election, it could have
destroyed Barack Obama’s happy tale of how he had
dealt a crippling blow to terrorists by killing Usama
bin Laden (with an assist from the Navy’s SEALS).
Had Obama’s lies about his triumph over terrorism
been exposed on the eve of the election, that could have
ended his stay in the White House. And that could have
spared us and the world many of Obama’s disasters
in the Middle East and elsewhere around the world. That
is why it matters, and will continue to matter in the
future.
Lying, by itself, is obviously not new. What is new is
the growing acceptance of lying as “no big
deal” by smug sophisticates, so long as these are
lies that advance their political causes. Many in the
media greeted the exposure of Hillary Clinton’s
lies by admiring how well she handled herself.
Lies are a wall between us and reality — and being
walled off from reality is the biggest deal of all.
Reality does not disappear because we don’t see
it. It just hits us like a ton of bricks when we least
expect it.
The biggest lie of 2014 — “Hands up, don’t
shoot” — had its repercussions in 2015, with the
open advocacy of the killing of policemen, in marches
across the country. But the ambush killings of policemen
that followed aroused no such outrage in the media as
any police use of force against thugs.
Nor has there been the same outrage as the murder rate
shot up when the police pulled back, as they have in the
past, in the wake of being scapegoated by politicians
and the media. Most of the people murdered have been
black. But apparently these particular black lives
don’t matter much to activists and the media.
No one expects that lies will disappear from political
rhetoric. If you took all the lies out of politics, how
much would be left?
If there is anything that is bipartisan in Washington,
it is lying. The most recent budget deal showed that
Congressional Republicans lied wholesale when they said
that they would defund Obamacare, Planned Parenthood,
and other pet projects of the Democrats.
As for 2015, good riddance. We can only hope that people
who vote in 2016 will have learned something from
2015’s disasters.
Thomas Sowell, a National Humanities Medal winner, is an
American economist, social theorist, political
philosopher and author. He is currently Senior Fellow at
the Hoover Institution, Stanford University.
Read more at
http://jewishworldreview.com/cols/sowell122915.php3#1vAJKQgBRCWKbIZc.99
Good Bye 2015! Thanks folks – you have
inspired me to continue. 2016 will be 18th year of
thoughts! Please read and honor God with your
gifts next year!
AND – Laugh – Think & Go Steelers!
