John Burtis

I just can’t believe it’s going on in America

Principal King- I have been given this e-mail in good faith, believing that it belongs to the principal in charge of the school, whose youtube video I viewed today, wherein a teacher was teaching a class of children to sing a song praising President Barack Obama.

We do not win wars by faith alone

I grow weary of the furious hand wringing by those who worry about the appearance of our actions in world arenas like those held in the feckless UN, fear the telephoned repercussions from murderous dictators, or abhor the background nattering of the effete European chattering class, whenever the United States or one of its agents pours a bit of water down some mass murderers gullet until he starts a round of coughing.

National Socialism IV - The cost of the Hippocratic Oath

The order for the Final Solution was given sometime between October of 1941, when the German troops in front of Moscow first began to run out of their summer steam, and January 20,1942, when the infamous Wansee Conference was held in the mansion by the same name outside Berlin, where Himmler's second in command, Reinhard Heydrich, laid down the law to the Reich's leading actualizing luminaries, there was an earlier murder program called T-4.

National Socialism III - The Enabling Act

Shortly after the Nazi seizure of power on January 30, 1933, when things were still a bit dicey for the nascent Nazi hold on the German government, especially where Franz von Papen, a conservative, was nominated to exert some control over the boisterous Herr Adolf Hitler in the new cabinet after the aging Field Marshal Paul Von Hindenburg selected Adolf Hitler as German Chancellor, the Reichstag caught fire on February 27, 1933. This bit of high camp came just six days before the latest round of parliamentary elections were slated to take place, throwing the Nazi leadership into an uproar.

National Socialism II- Only the names have been changed

As President Obama routinely exceeds the US Constitution and carves a new country out of the wreckage he's already wrought, he's brought twenty or so new men and women into this heady mix. They have never been used before and their jobs exist way outside the three branches of government we learned in school - the legislative, executive, and judicial.

National socialism works pretty well for some

Forced national socialism worked pretty well for Hermann Goering, next in line to Adolf Hitler, during the life of the Third Reich. (Left: Shots of his palatial home - 'Carinhall' - in its heyday as Goering's retreat from his taxing duties in Berlin and abroad.) Interestingly, Amb. Jos. P. Kennedy and many in Chamberlain's cabinet felt they could do business with such a moderate Nazi as Goering, who both demonstrated and pursued such liberal tastes and mores as participating in the 1923 Munich putsch with Hitler, where he was severely wounded; serving as the Minister President of Prussia; directing the Prussian State Police; assisting in the formation of the Gestapo; aiding in the assembly of documents asserting the guilt of the SA and participating in gathering names for the hit lists for the Night of the Long Knives; ordering Himmler and Heydrich to undertake the Final Solution; picking up a considerable addiction for morphine and percodan due to the number of and the intensity of his duties; designing his own and wide array of uniforms, from pure white and sky blue, to deep blue, with the brilliant trappings and its many medals of his own construction, as head of the Luftwaffe; as an avid deer hunter; and dressing up as a Roman emperor in white and deep purple togas, sporting laurel wreaths, while wearing rouge and a strong cologne of his own mixture while entertaining visiting heads of state, ambassadors, and roving dignitaries while serving as host during many lavish parties at his home.

The view inside the snow globe

Folks across the USA are hearing a lot about New Hampshire lately as the grasping, wheedling, lying national politicians and their gas guzzling SUV’s carve swaths through the growing snow banks that cover the Granite State to such great depths and which seem to have come as early and as hip deep as the politicos this year.

Tears for the passage of time

Like many, I have been struck by the images contained in Ken Burns' The War. But I am most disturbed by the contrasts found in our pursuit of a multi-theatre war to victory then and the defeatism and rancor rampant in our current simpering left, as we try pursue a far less globally destructive but just as vitally important a conflict against a similarly determined fascist foe today. In early 1945, our troops began to liberate elements of the concentration camp system, horrible places like Dachau and Mauthausen, where unburied bodies numbered in the tens of thousands and the crematoria were still warm, and where we were met by its survivors, who put up posters welcoming our boys to those dreadful compounds.