And the stats just kept on coming. The “brain room” found out that the Department of Veterans Affairs provides 150,000 beds each evening of the year for vets who need shelter. Agency workers will even pick up the vets and take them to facilities. Finally, the U.S. government is now spending a record amount of money on health programs for vets in all areas.
After I made all of those facts known, Edwards went on David Letterman’s program and, in the ensuing discussion, agreed with Dave that I was lying about the vets. The candidate insisted yet again that the economy was forcing vets to live on the streets, and Dave, being the committed liberal that he is, enthusiastically agreed. Well, the whole controversy soon became moot for Edwards. A few days after his Letterman appearance, he dropped out of the presidential sweepstakes and returned to his $6-million, approximately thirty-thousand-square-foot home on a hundred and two North Carolina acres.
“Two Americas,” indeed.
So you tell me, is it not difficult to respect the false premises that left-wing loons like Edwards put out there? Or am I wrong? By the way, for all the yammering on the left about increased government spending on social programs for the poor, studies show that conservative religious people give far more to charity per capita than secular-progressives.
The truth hurts, right, progressive people?
Might Makes Right
Staunch conservatives often are resistant to change, by definition. In 1960s Levittown, skepticism greeted most new trends, until, of course, they reached critical mass. I’d say we were generally at least a year behind what was happening socially in California, and some things have never caught on. Like gelato.
Now, sometimes failing to change for the sake of change is good. Caution is not a bad thing. But sometimes conservatives, like their left-wing counterparts, can be terribly wrong.
Here’s a good example. In 1986, President Ronald Reagan, by far the most admired conservative in the country right now, allowed about three million illegal aliens amnesty, and then did little to stop millions of other foreign nationals from entering the United States illegally in the wake of his beneficent citizenship action. Subsequently, Presidents Bush, Clinton, and Bush the younger all followed Reagan’s lead and avoided confronting the illegal-alien issue. Of course, disaster ensued. Estimates are that there could be as many as 15 million people living in the United States illegally, causing financial and social chaos in many parts of the country.
In addition, five of the nineteen 9/11 killers were in this country illegally, and, despite that, it is still relatively easy to sneak into America for whatever purpose.
Now, you would think conservative leaders would have aggressively tried to control the illegal immigration situation, but they obviously did not. Big business wanted cheap labor, and so the right did the wrong thing: they acquiesced to business and failed to act.
Likewise on oil. My father worked for Chevron (the parent corp. of Caltex) and told me in the 1960s that the Arabs had the USA over a barrel (sorry). Anybody with a brain knew that cheap foreign oil was a powder keg. That’s one of the reasons why Japan started World War II, to secure oil supplies in Southeast Asia. But conservative presidents from Eisenhower to Bush the younger did little to develop alternative fuel or encourage conservation and better fuel standards for American automobiles. Now all of us are paying big-time for that sellout.
And while we’re on the subject, one of the reasons that Al Gore has never agreed to be interviewed by me is that he knows I would ask him why he didn’t push alternative fuel and conservation in the eight years he was vice president. The record shows that the Clinton administration was abysmal in this area. What say you, Mr. Gore?
Maybe ol’ Al had an epiphany after he left office; his global warming quest might have changed his perspective. Fine. But Clinton-Gore had plenty of time to pound the alternative fuel drum and did not.
And speaking of global warming, some conservatives are nitwits on this subject, are they not? My take again is simple: only the Deity knows if the current warming trend on earth is man-made or part of a long-term natural cycle. To debate the cause of global warming is a complete waste of time. Again, NO ONE KNOWS why; we just know the earth’s temperature is up. Are you hearing me?
But what all sane people should know is that clean air and water are good things, right? Eating fish contaminated with mercury is not my idea of fine dining. So shouldn’t we all be demanding that governments clean up their countries and stop the madness? Why is pollution control an ideological issue?
Okay, let’s transition into more ideological idiocy. Crazed ideologues on the right who laugh off environmental concerns are just as stupid as crazed ideologues on the left who have somehow determined that human life in the womb is expendable.
Just as with global warming, no one knows exactly when life begins. Only the Deity knows. You can believe anything you want, but you DON’T KNOW. We do know one thing, however: scientists have proven that upon conception, human DNA is present. Get it? The fetus already has the codes in place from its biological mother and father. So the “mass of nonhuman cells” argument goes right out the window if you’re an honest person.
In my opinion, the “compassionate” liberal cadre that supports abortion on demand—for any reason at any time—is guilty of gross human-rights violations. Worshiping at the altar of “reproductive rights” is wrong. Abortion should be rare, regulated, and discouraged. Human dignity demands it.
So you can see that the bold, fresh guy has some problems with both sides of the ideological spectrum. But unlike Judy Collins, who sang about not knowing life at all, I am more confident in my views. Independent thought based upon greater good, realism, and, yes, compassion drives my agenda and dictate my analysis.
Two more things. Some conservatives are moralists; that is, they frame their opinions within the concept of “sin.” That’s a loser all day long, despite the fact that Sister Lurana would have pummeled me for saying it.
Let’s go back to the out-of-wedlock birth rate. I’ve heard right-wing commentators condemn this situation on moral grounds, saying the people in this situation are guilty of sinful behavior. But why bother with that line of thinking when secular-progressives, who are loath to make moral judgments, are not likely to listen?
Instead, why not continually point to poverty? Virtually every study ever done on the poor in America says that homes run by single mothers have a much higher chance of being destitute than homes with a mom and a dad. This is undeniable and crushes all liberal arguments against the traditional family unit.
When the living-together and babies-out-of-wedlock trend began to challenge traditional marriage in the late sixties, few liberals foresaw the decline of the family that subsequently has led to enormous social problems. And right there is the big problem with committed liberal thought: the quest for individual gratification, for self-expression above responsibility to others, often has huge unintended consequences.
“If it makes you feel good” sounded great coming from Janis Joplin, remember?
She died at age twenty-seven from a drug overdose. I bet it would feel a lot better to be alive today.
HEROES AND ZEROS
No man is justified in doing evil on the ground of expediency.
—THEODORE ROOSEVELT
Closing in on age eleven in the summer of 1960, I became a more creative hell-raiser (Summerhill would be proud). Using my organizational skills, my gang gathered for nighttime raids that included kicking over full garbage cans and swimming in people’s pools under the cover of darkness. We did it purely for fun and it was harmless. Annoying, but harmless.
The big pop hit that summer was Brian Hyland’s “Itsy Bitsy Teenie Weenie Yellow Polka-Dot Bikini,” which blared daily from the loudspeakers at the Carmen Avenue swimming pool. WABC radio, the big New York rock station, spun the bikini song every hour on the hour, driving more than a few parents underwater. But I liked the song very much, especially the finale:
From the
locker to the blanket,
From the blanket to the shore,
From the shore to the water,
Guess there isn’t any more.
Is that poetry or what?
In the cinema, there was an Alfred Hitchcock movie called Psycho that my parents would not let me see. This was disturbing. It couldn’t be any worse than Not of This Earth, could it? Besides, the ads said that the theater had a nurse standing by in case anybody passed out from fright (I’m not making this up), but my folks would not give in. They might already have one junior psycho on their hands; they didn’t need Hitchcock to further the situation.
Many days that summer, we played stickball on the hot pavement of Levittown’s Patience Lane, because a ton of kids lived on the poorly named street. You see, some adults residing on Patience Lane had absolutely no patience whatsoever, and in early July, an interesting little skirmish broke out.
At issue was the little ball itself. Often, it was being hit onto lawns. That required fielders to leave the public street and chase the ball onto private property. Many adults on Patience Lane ignored the trespass, but some did not. The worst offender was Mr. D., a tall, balding guy with a dour disposition.
If you can believe it, that guy actually confiscated the ball when it rolled onto his lawn. Let me repeat that: The guy took the ball!
Of course, that could not stand.
As mentioned earlier, our balls, called spaldeens, were small and bouncy and cost about ten cents each. By taking the ball, Mr. D. was costing us money, but that wasn’t the big issue. No, the major point of contention concerned a unilateral hostile action against us kids. It was the principle involved. Even though we were not quite clear why, my gang was big on principle.
So Mr. D. had to pay.
Now, you might be asking why we didn’t go to our parents and have them negotiate with Mr. D. for the return of the ball. A perfectly logical, but naive question. Back then, parents stuck together. Rarely, if ever, would a parent side with a kid against an adult. It was some kind of demented antikid code. Plus, technically, Mr. D. was correct: my stickball teammates and I had no legal right to trample his lawn. So we deemed parental intervention to be a loser and never even considered it. Instead, vigilante justice, widely admired among my set, was put into motion. (Kids today, of course, could read my recent book about the rights of children, Kids Are Americans Too, and come up with a smarter approach. But that summer, we were on our own.)
Because the Mr. D. revenge operation was a nighttime play, let me set the tactical scene. My bedroom was the only one upstairs in the O’Reilly house. My sister and parents slept on the ground floor. Often in the summer, it was ungodly hot upstairs. Air-conditioning? Are you kidding me? Only rich people could afford that. To stop my whining, my father did eventually buy me a small fan, but when I pointed out that it simply blew the humid air into my face that much quicker, he replied in his usual pithy way, “So don’t use it.”
Okay.
Back then, most everybody in Levittown left all the doors and windows open in the summertime, hoping that an occasional breeze would waft in through the screens. That made it easy for me to silently walk down the stairs and exit undetected through the back door of my house at any time during the night. Piece of cake.
This tactical advantage was key to Operation Mr. D., and here’s how it went down: I had an old alarm clock in my room that rang so loudly dogs would file charges. The hellish thing was so annoying, I never used it. Not only was it loud, but the ringing also went on forever. This was a perfect nocturnal weapon.
I believe it was a Thursday night, but I could be wrong about that. I also believe four of us met up at Sheila’s house at around one in the morning, but that too might be a misty watercolored memory, as Barbra Streisand once sang. But no matter, it was late on a week-night when little Dave, the most agile climber, scooted up the tree outside Mr. D.’s upstairs bedroom and taped the alarm clock to a branch just a few feet away from his open window.
The alarm was set to go off fifteen minutes after Dave began his climb.
Mission accomplished, Dave scampered down, and we all hid in the bushes outside of Sheila’s house, which was almost directly across the street from Mr. D.’s place. We absolutely had to watch our plan play out. I remember those waiting moments were very, very long until, finally, the alarm rang…and rang…and RANG!
Lights snapped on not only in Mr. D.’s house, but also inside a number of other homes on the block. Suddenly, adults appeared outside. They looked annoyed. We were thrilled.
Because it was dark, no one could pinpoint the shrieking alarm that made the Energizer Bunny look comatose. As it continued ringing, we stifled laughter in our hideout. Then, suddenly, we heard increasingly loud voices.
“Someone call the police!”
Uh-oh.
That was our cue to slither out of the bushes and run quickly to our respective homes. I made it to mine in record time, a mass of perspiration covering my entire body. Ever so quietly, I ascended the stairs, pulled off my sweaty, dirty clothes, hid them in the crawl space in the attic abutting my room, and climbed into bed.
Just in time to hear sirens.
From what we heard the next day, the cops showed up shortly after the alarm clock died. Their powerful flashlights located it, prompting one simple question: who could have done this?
Hi.
But there was no proof; even better, there were at least a dozen stickball-playing suspects. Bottom line: we were never apprehended.
Of course, Mr. D. suspected who the culprits were and took his case to our parents, but we vigorously denied any and all wrongdoing, thereby committing a series of sins that I confessed to Father Ellard a few days later. However, with evidence scarce, the caper soon died, even though my father thought the clock that Mr. D. showed him looked familiar.
I was thankful my dad didn’t pursue the matter—mainly, I believe, because he thought Mr. D. was a doofus.
Now, I am telling you this story because it epitomizes my attitude about heroes and villains. I was always much more interested in bringing the villains down than in celebrating the heroes. To this day, that is my attitude.
It’s not that I don’t respect and admire heroes; I do. Abraham Lincoln, Franklin Roosevelt, Bobby Kennedy, Winston Churchill, George Washington, Mother Teresa, Bono, and hundreds of others are an important part of my personal history. I’ve taken the time to learn about them and, in various situations, I try to emulate their courage and foresight. But I am obsessed with hammering villains.
Maybe it’s because of the excitement factor. I mean, Saint Francis of Assisi was a great guy with the animals, birds, and such. But Saint Michael the Archangel was really impressive, wielding that big sword to chase the demons back into hell, where they certainly belonged.
In fact, I took Michael as my confirmation name. (This is a Catholic ritual in which you choose an additional name for yourself that reconfirms your baptism into the faith as an infant. The theory is that babies can’t choose to be Catholic, but twelve-year-olds can. Especially with a menacing nun in proximity.)
All my early heroes were villain bashers: Davy Crockett righting those wrongs on the frontier and at the Alamo. Wyatt Earp taking no garbage from those Tombstone bad guys. Eliot Ness chasing down Al Capone, a very mean guy whose nasty facial scar just reinforced the point. The list was very long. To this day, I identify with and support folks who fight against evildoers.
But there is one small problem with my attitude: You’d better be sure you know who really deserves a bit of retribution, because if you make a mistake major damage can result. This is real life, not a Charles Bronson Death Wish movie. I take the chasing villains deal very seriously, and always have.
Back in the day, Mr. D. certainly deserved the jazz we gave him. I have no problem with that caper. The man got what he deserved in a creative, relatively harmless manner. By the way, after we disturbed his slumber, Mr. D. kept a much lower profile in the neighborhood. He didn’t
interrupt any more stickball games.
If you watch the Factor these days, you know that we often “ambush” bad guys: that is, we arrive with cameras rolling and confront them with tough questions. Remember Michael Nifong, that irresponsible North Carolina prosecutor? We confronted him on the air months before he was convicted of railroading those Duke lacrosse players in a phony rape beef.
Also, we nailed Rosie O’Donnell on her nutty 9/11 conspiracy theory that bombs located inside the structure destroyed one of the World Trade Center buildings. A study by engineers at Purdue University blew O’Donnell out of the water, and I made sure everybody knew about it.
And, in a great piece of reporting, we hammered NBC News/ Washington Post analyst William Arkin after this pinhead guy called American troops serving in Iraq “mercenaries.” We confronted the guy in Massachusetts, and he ran like the coward he is.
To some, a TV ambush is a controversial technique, but I believe it is absolutely necessary. We live in a time when powerful people can hide behind hired spinners and concrete walls, evading scrutiny for evil deeds. Villains can easily say “no comment” and avoid explaining their destructive actions. This is not okay.
For example, let’s take judges who sentence convicted child molesters to probation, no prison time. That was going on to a disturbing degree in Vermont, as I documented in Culture Warrior. Well, we confronted two of those judges, the most reprehensible of the lot, and the entire country saw them run away rather than explain their irresponsible sentences. Good.
But be assured: my staff vigilantly researched those men before we traveled to Vermont to confront them in person. We examined their sentencing histories; we gave them every chance to explain themselves. They passed, so we paid them a visit.
We have done that scores of times over the years, and guess what? Dozens of prosecutors have written to me saying that formerly lenient judges have changed their, well, points of view. In fact, after we exposed those Vermont judges, the lenient sentences for child abusers pretty much stopped in the Green Mountain State.
A Bold Fresh Piece of Humanity Page 13