The classic iconic image from Jack T Chick’s very first tract:

Well, good news for those of you who wish to “Witness” to a black audience. Jack T Chick is embarking on a process of Colorization: You know what is it, colorization? Well…

Christian workers have been telling us for some time that their work among blacks would be much more effective if they had Chick tracts where the characters in the story were black. Black people on the street are more receptive to black characters than Caucasian.

Beginning this month, we are rolling out a new tract series with the same story but with black characters. We have taken some of our most popular Chick tracts and redrawn them with black characters. To avoid confusion in ordering, we have renamed them. This Was Your Life has become It’s Your Life. Somebody Loves Me is called Hard Times.

I must say, the kid’s hair remains better groomed.

The Angels are changed as well.

Whether this means that there are two Heavens, one for Whites — the other for Blacks — Separate But Equal, as it were — I do not know.

In case you’re not privy to Jack T Chick, and have never picked one out from a public telephone where the Christian Fundamentalists of a certain stripe leave them: Yes, the premise of this tract is that you have an alcoholic dad beat his kid and throw him out into a rainstorm for not bringing home enough spare change from a day’s worth of begging, where-upon the kid dies on the street, his only solace being a piece of paper that informs him that “Somebody Loves You.” A good Christian woman comes by and tells him that that “Somebody” is Jesus. In the first printings of the tract, she leaves, saying nothing else. At some point, Chick realized this doesn’t come off well, so he added the line “I’ll get you some help!” Thank you, Chick, for making this morality tale newly accessible to a multiracial audience!

I’ll be be on the look-out for the new tract line in (our still segregated city) North Portland… The Christian Fundamentalists who do the Chick Tract thing will undoubtedly stuff these things in the phone-books next to (groan away) KFCs and Popeyes over there.

From Born Fighting: How the Scotts-Irish Did stuff and did some Other Stuff

As my grandmother, great-aunt, and aunt told it, my grandfather’s sin was to explain to the black folk of Kensett that they were being charged higher interest rates than whites at AP Mills’s store, thus keeping them in an even worse spiral of debt — and also to suggest to AP Mills that this was not a particularly Christian thing to do. By all accounts, my grandfather than told AP Mills to go to hell. And AP Mills, along with others who controlled the admittedly sparse purse strings of White County, showed my grandfather that there could be such a thing as hell on Earth.

The hard-luck story goes on. Unable to get any other job, he does some Hard Labor, wherein his bones give way, and he dies a horrible death.

When I became assistant secretary of defense in 1984, the deputy secretary of defense was a protege of Weinberger’s named William Howard Taft IV. Taft , who had graduated from Yale in 1966 and Harvard Law School in 1969, is the great-grandson of former President and Supreme Court Justice William Howard Taft, also of Yale, and the great-great-grandson of one of the founding members of Yale’s famous Secret Society, Skull and Bones. Will Taft and I may as well have grown up on different planets. He had gone to Andover, Yale, Harvard Law, heading to Nader’s Raiders after law school. I had attended seven different public schools in four different states between the sixth and twelfth grades alone as my father moved from one military base to another, then headed off to the Marine Corps and Vietnam after the Naval Academy. But I found Taft likable and proficient despite a certain patrican aloofness. And he did not know it, but he also inspired me.

Some people have their Skull and Bones. And some people keep their pride, then die of untreated broken bones.

Rip it; throw it on a brochure’ stamp a “Vote for James Webb — US Senate”; mail it to every Registered Voter in Virginia. There’s your campaign literature.

Speaking of Gore, one pattern that clearly emerges from this exercise is that Presidents who follow a successful two-termer of the same political party invariably flop. John Adams, John Quincy Adams, Van Buren, Andrew Johnson, Taft, Hoover, and Bush were all one-term flops, and Madison and Truman, although they won second terms, were less than distinguished. Would Nixon have done a one-term fadeout had he succeeded Ike after 1960? Will Gore do likewise if elected in 2000? History says yes, and one wonders why. Is this due to some cyclical swing in the mood of the electorate, or is it that popular Presidents are just hard acts to follow? Or do successful Presidents tend to mortgage the future to obtain short-term results (and win re-election), obliging their successors to inherit the wind? If so, then will Gore be stuck with the task of realizing the balanced budget by 2002 and facing the foreign crises that are bound to erupt with a hollowed-out, feminized military? He may well step into Bill Clinton’s shoes only to wish soon enough that he hadn’t. All the more reason for American voters to choose the Republican — any Republican — next time around. At least he (or she) will have a chance to be Great.
— McDougall, Walter A.
National Review 10-27-1997

Yes, the Supposed “feminized” “hollowed out” military of Bill Clinton. I mention this by way of a simple truth: had Gore gone on to be Bill Clinton’s successor as president, the Republicans would blame Clinton mercilessly for a 9/11 event (of whatever type) and would demand the impeachment of Al Gore because… Bill Clinton hollowed out and feminized the military.

As opposed to Bush II, who over-extends the military. But that may be part of the argument: it’s Clinton’s fault there aren’t enough people in the National Guard to fight in Iraq without being re-enlisted!

I was meaning to cut and paste an exchange I had online in the Summer of 2004, and make a point out of it, in celebration of the Third Anniversary of “Mission Accomplished”. But, the ezboard jumbled up the chronology, and thus… I cannot find it. So I’ll have to re-create it to a certain degree.

I had posted an article that pointed out that Republican Nominee of 1944 Thomas Dewey (who four years later would spend the summer planning his cabinet appointees and smiling happily at his huge leads in the polls, until Election Night returns came in at which point I think he probably just got himself plastered on vodka after banging his head against the wall several times) was attacking Roosevelt on the war front, article excerpts found here.

So a very hawkish — um — I’ll just say “Neo-Con” retorted with: So you’re going to vote for Dewey, then?

My response was: I still get goosebumps when I hear that speech Roosevelt made in 1943 proclaiming “Major Combat Operation are over. Mission Acoomplished!”

And the telling response: “Major Combat Operations In Africa are over. Mission Accomplished In Africa.

Which is clearly a sham, where the proper response was to laugh, with perhaps a whiff of a wince. Our celebrations of our Allied victory on the African front had to have been about as mooted as the Union celebrations of their victory on the Western Frontier Front (which was where the Union and the Confederacy sent their crazy generals out. Not that there is any correlation between the two wars on this particular score, as Eisenhower was moved on over to the real action.) As per Bush’s short-sighted photo-op: he never did employ it in a campaign commercial.

That line reverberates even today. Note Scott McClellan’s answer to the question of “Would President Bush use that today?” with a “Democrat efforts to contort what Bush said”, suggesting that Bush meant that mission of that particular crew was accomplished. Which is too bad Bush doesn’t do that celebratory fest with every returning unit… perhaps he could do that even for units coming home to base to take a break before going back to their missions in Iraq — “Mission Paused” could be the banner he stands before for those ones.

Why is everybody getting in a tizzy that Bush just named our course of military actions as per the present as “World War III”?

It’s doing former CIA Director James Woolsey one worst, Woolsey being the author of the “This is World War IV” commentary.

Myself, I have two minds on the subject: we are either still stuck in World War II — World War II never quite ended — the whole “The Nazis faded into the Intelligence Services of the US and the USSR, and took up residence there.”

OR… This is World War FIVE. I can’t quite decide where World War IV could be shoe-horned in, though. Maybe the Napoleonic Wars are tapped as World I, and we can defer to James Woolsey’s worldview from there. (Of course, perhaps his “World War III” isn’t quite over, either.)

Tin soldiers and Nixon coming,
We’re finally on our own.
This summer I hear the drumming,
Four dead in Ohio.

Tin soldiers and Nixon coming,
We’re finally on our own.
This summer I hear the drumming,
Four dead in Ohio.

Yesterday was the anniversary for the Kent State Incident. Which, since I personally have no connection to it and it’s simply a historical note to me, naurally makes me ponder the differences between his politically charged song of the time (with Crosby, Stills, and Nash) and what Neil Young thumped out with “Let’s Impeach the President”.:

The President Sucks
And He likes to Hunt Ducks
I say about this “Oh Shucks”
‘Cause We are all the Sitting Ducks.

Well, no, those are not the lyrics. These are the lyrics. It’s not a terribly good song. Sometime after “Ohio”‘s jab at Nixon, “Rocking In the Free World”‘s attack on Bush I, and “Southern Man” on the Civil Rights Movement — strong enough to warrant an attack from Lynrd Skynrd… he’s lost it. The song will soon be forgotten, and played nowhere.

I believe the problem is that the political song has lost its sociological import. Go back to “Ohio”, and the song is actually about these College Students’ “on their own”, when — “BANG!” — the “tin soldiers” kill some of their friends (or some of their generation) dead — and goddamned it, I need to get over there to Ohio for Solidarity — Nixon hatred is a backdrop.

Green Day’s “American Idiot” album ends up as something akin to — say, a suburban C-Student with vaguely “mall-punk” attributes going on to Community College and a bad minimum wage job, watching some of his friends enlist to join the Military with hopes that it will get them some way out of this burg (and besides, the military was quite aggressive in their recruitment jobs at the old high school, and the kids were largely directionness), and shipped off to Iraq, and thus… Bush II enters their world.

Neil Young’s new semi-hit gives us… Bumpkis.

Incidentally, Jon Bon Jovi has written a new country song, but as Tim Riley put it, it’s really written by Karl Rove.

05-01-2006, the “Most Ridiculous Item of the Day”…

O’REILLY: Time now for “The Most Ridiculous Item of the Day”. A few letters on the “60 Minutes” profile on Stephen Colbert came in overnight.

Bill Mattern, who lives in Pennsylvania, said, “Bill, Morley Safer made you appear as a guy who says ‘shut up’ and cuts people’s microphones off all the time. I wonder how far back he went to dig that stuff up?” And Randy Watts from Virginia wrote, “Safer slammed ‘The Factor’ as full of half-truths.” Well, that he did, Mr. Watts. I saw the piece and was amused by it.

Colbert’s lampooning of cable pundits is fine with me. He’s not malicious.

Safer simply doesn’t know what he’s talking about.

We have some of the best fact checkers in the business on this program, and when we make a mistake we correct it. You know, I do three hours of commentary every day. Sometimes you’re going to make mistakes.

And Morley has an open invitation to come in here and back up his statements about half truths. All right? I don’t expect to see Mr. Safer.

Some of the old guard bitterly resent the success of “The Factor” and the FOX News Channel, and that might be ridiculous.

Finally, tonight the mail. It was all over the place this weekend.

Rick Lindsay, Brentwood, Tennessee: “Bill, you and your liberal propaganda has […]

This is hilarious for any number of reasons. To be fair, I’m not altogether sure 60 Minutes should be profiling entertainers, as they do. I winced once when they did a profile of the Car Guys — Click and Clack. Or that 60-something year old sex kitten actress whose name escapes me, largely because I could care less.

Looking back in time for precedents, John Adams’s overreach was rebuked when he was voted out of office in favour of Thomas Jefferson. Franklin Roosevelt finally ended up with a Congress willing to put up some checks and balances after the 1938 midterm elections. (But there was some Machivellian trickery going on with his Court Packing Scheme.) And Nixon was impeached.

I may have Roosevelt figured a bit wrongly. Apparently his initial Social Security bill was quite a bit more conservative than he would have liked as he worked to appease the Southern Democratic delegation, and figuring correctly that he can build on it later. Majority Leader Lyndon Johnson, during his reign as Most Powerful Politician in America during the 1950s, would do a similar “slow” path with Civil Rights, and I’ll get to somebody’s comments on that in a later post. As it were, Roosevelt would find himself hemmed in from a supposed “left” by Huey Long and Father Coughlin and Townsend, and after a slight fall from grace in public esteem, come back strongly with new program material for the “New Deal” — in time for the 1936 re-election.

I’m rambling off topic. Arlen Specter. Arlen Specter just came out asking the question what the point of Congress is if the President just keeps giving these “signing statements” that chews away parts of legislation, and tells the public employess how to enact these laws by ignoring parts of the law that Bush Administration would prefer to ignore.

The chairman of the Senate Judiciary Committee, accusing the White House of a ”very blatant encroachment” on congressional authority, said yesterday he will hold an oversight hearing into President Bush’s assertion that he has the power to bypass more than 750 laws enacted over the past five years.

”There is some need for some oversight by Congress to assert its authority here,” Arlen Specter, Republican of Pennsylvania, said in an interview. ”What’s the point of having a statute if . . . the president can cherry-pick what he likes and what he doesn’t like?”

The first step to Dictatorship is to do away with Congress or to make it a meaningless institution… or is it to make the Courts do your bidding? At any rate, Specter is late in coming to this realization… better late than never. But then again, he does have a legacy to be concerned with.