Stingray: January 2007 Archives

Try this Bizarro World scenario on for size. On January 3rd, four Tennessee National Guardsmen, troops that, per the Army Creed, “Stand ready to deploy, engage and destroy the enemies of the United States of America in close combat,” were manning an observation post on the Arizona-Mexico border. In as much as Arizona is one of the several states, this boundary is also the U.S.-Mexico border; the porousness of which these troops were there to address.

The Guardsmen were approached by 6-8 armed men, who appeared to be wearing protective body armor. The Guardsmen, in the finest tradition of the U.S. Army, radioed the Border Patrol, apprised them of the situation and then pulled back. Pull back being another word for retreat. These soldiers retreated fromt the border in the face of armed intruders. Subsequently, the Border Patrol was unable to locate said armed intruders. They are perhaps now employed in California, picking frozen oranges.

If the facts as they have been presented are accurate, it is enough to make you want to saw your own head off with a butter knife. This is so preposterous, it is difficult to formulate any commentary. These soldiers are not responsible for this ludicrous situation; as has been reported, they were merely following orders. Perhaps an addendum should be added to the Nuremburg principle; not only is a soldier obligated to disobey an illegal order, they are also obligated to disobey a ridiculous order.

The individual most culpable in this travesty is the president. Maybe someone should inform him that his Svengali, Vicente Fox, is no longer president of Mexico and that it is permissible to enforce United States territorial boundaries. It might also be mentioned to the president that there are reasons the Right has become lukewarm in its support of the Iraq war. One reason is that Americans tend to be less than sanguine about their soldiers serving as nothing more than target dummies for rag-tag Third World barbarians. They prefer to risk their troops and treasure in the process of destroying the enemy. Conservatives also observe the little charade being played out on the border. They conclude that, in the end, the president isn’t really serious about protecting America.

What other answer is there to explain the farce that we call border security?

Cross-posted at http://www.laconicblog.blogspot.com

Some of you may have noticed that this blog has changed over the past few months. Jon Pananas and Jack have joined me in regularly posting to Stingray in order to help me out. I encourage you to add both of their blogs to your blogroll as they always have a lot of good things to say.

“If you have a blog, then I want your readership to increase because of the cross-posting. If you don’t have a blog, I want to give you a voice.”

However, I need more bloggers and wanna-be bloggers to help me out. My job, especially, just does not allow me to blog any longer on a regular basis. However, my readers deserve more. My plan is to assemble a team of 18 or so bloggers who can post 2 to 3 times a week each. The qualifications are simple:

This blog is not about me. I have another writing project in progress that I hope will be successful and compensate me materially. This blog is about conservative news and commentary on faith and current events. When you write for this blog the post is yours. All I’m doing is merely providing a forum that, even through my hiatus still got 100-200 hits per day. A few months of writing and we should be back to 1,000 or so hits a day.
You must be at least a fairly good writer. Not necessarily a great writer, but one who hungers to write but might be too busy to have a blog of your own. If you have a blog of your own but want more readership, this is fine, too. See below for my comments on cross-posting.
Good research abilities are a must. The mainstream media fails to cite support for their positions; thus, their stories are basically opinions masquerading as news. If you write, say, that the rich pay more in taxes than they did under Clinton, then link to a citation or two supporting that assertion. We don’t want to be like the mainstream media, we want to be better.

“This blog is not about me. This blog is about conservative news and commentary on faith and current events.”

Humor is good, because even though I’m pretty good at humor writing, I never seem to write humorous blog posts. That needs to change.
You will get your own About page. Pictures and such are fine but no nekkid womenfolks. Keep the crudity and vulgarity to a minimum in your posts as well — this is a family site.
You do not have to be a Christian who worships like me or even a Christian at all to be a member of the team. Catholics, Jews, and even atheists are welcome. However, the main purpose of this blog is to spread Christianity and I won’t accept posts that are totally anti-Christian or that promote another faith. I do accepts posts that are critical of Christians in general because I have written such posts myself. Just take a look at how I criticize Southern Baptists here even though I’ve attended Southern Baptist churches most of my life and graduated from Baylor University, a Baptist school. Christians have mostly ignored Darfur and, in the past, have engaged in ugly things like racism. Talking about where Christians as a group fall short are welcome. However, there is absolutely no room here for Catholic/Protestant bashing or anything else of the sort. I am preaching here what C.S. Lewis called “mere Christianity.” There are lots of ways to truly worship God and I’m not egotistical enough to believe that if you don’t worship like me in every single way then you’re on your way to hell.
Posters should be conservative, as this is the second main goal of this blog. I don’t mind disagreement on issues here and there, but the angle of this blog is good old mainstream conservatism.
There are only two issues that are non-negotiable: pro-life and the War on Terror. If you don’t support them in general, then don’t write about them. That does not mean that you have to be 100% in agreement with me, just that anything you write must support those two issues in general if you write about them. Disagreements as to how to reach these goals are okay. For example, I am personally willing to accept incrementalism in the fight on abortion. I’m not an all-or-nothing person and I would be happy to support a law that, say, allowed abortions only in the first trimester. That would be a good start for me. You can write about the wisdom of banning abortions after 6 months as a starter and I’ll be fine. Likewise, if you have different ideas on fighting the war on terror, I’m amenable to those differences. I myself don’t like every aspect on how the war has been waged the past 5 years. However, you must support the War on Terror in general or agree not to write about it.
If you have your own blog, then cross-posting is welcomed. The goal is not to build my blog’s readership at the expenses of your blog’s readership, but rather to reach as wide an audience as possible. If you have a blog, then I want your readership to increase because of the cross-posting. If you don’t have a blog, I want to give you a voice. Just provide a link to your blog on my blog and a link to my blog on your blog. The mainstream media has an Associated Press and a Reuters to publish the same stories in different markets, so why shouldn’t we bloggers have the same?