In his youth, Chris Coons, the guy running for the Delaware Senate seat against the widely hated and mocked Christine O’Donnell once referred to himself as “a bearded Marxist.” He has since, for obvious reasons, tried to distance himself from that self-designation.

It’s understandable. Heck, even Karl Marx famously denied being a Marxist.

Today’s Marxists-at-heart usually do a pretty good job of disguising their true anti-Capitalist stripes. They build a nice veneer of words like “progressive” and “justice” and “working Americans” and “the working poor” and “corporate greed.”

But there is one piece of vocabulary, however, that gives them away every time. Anyone who in their college years has imbibed deeply of the typical university neo-Marxist, multi-culti, America-is-the-locus-of-all-evil claptrap can’t help using this word as a noun:

“Struggle.”

Marxist ideology is all about “struggle.” Not “battle.” Not “conflict.” Not “resistance.” Struggle.

Class struggle. Race struggle. Intestinal struggle. (Write or say the word a few times and it really starts looking and sounding weird, doesn’t it?)

Here are a couple of examples of this tell-tale word usage I came across just today.

I noticed an item over at the blog of Vox Day mentioning a horrifying untold story unfolding in the West Bank:

Two activists have exposed a disturbing phenomenon that they say is an open secret within the “peace camp”: female “peace” activists are routinely harassed and raped by the Arabs of Judea and Samaria with whom they have come to identify. They say the phenomenon has gotten worse lately and that many foreign women end up as wives of local Arabs against their will, but cannot escape their new homes….

Aloni-Sedovnik cites two specific cases which she has knowledge of – one is a case of rape and another is “severe sexual harassment.” The attackers in both cases, she stresses, were familiar with the victims and knew that they were “peace activists.” The rape occurred several months ago in the village of Umm Salmona, near Bethlehem. The victim, an American activist, wanted to press charges but leftist activists put pressure on her not to do so, so as not to damage the struggle against the ‘occupation.’

There is much I could say about this story, but for now just note the appearance of our special term in the last sentence of that excerpt. It is precisely the kind of language “peace activists” would use.

My radar is pretty finely attuned to the S-word coming from the mouths of liberal politicians, pundits and academics. For example, Nancy Pelosi uses it all the time.

There is a two-fer in a Q&A Speaker Pelosi did a couple of months ago with a journalism student at a Mills College. Mills is a womens’ college in California that, based upon a little time poking around in the online school newspaper, is fully marinated in the ridiculous, pretentious Women’s Studies, Postmodern, deconstructivist juices you would expect. Here the student asked Madam Speaker about the health care debate:

STUDENT: Could you speak more on why this particular struggle was so important to address at this time?

PELOSI: This particular struggle has been long overdue.

Ah, yes.

Well, I leave you with an excerpt from presidential candidate Barack Obama, speaking at a church in Atlanta on January 20, 2008:

Brothers and sisters, we cannot walk alone.
In the struggle for peace and justice, we cannot walk alone.
In the struggle for opportunity and equality, we cannot walk alone.
In the struggle to heal this nation and repair this world, we cannot walk alone.

Goodnight.

Well I spent the day yesterday yammering on Facebook and Twitter and other Intertubes about the Sarah Palin book. My apologies to everyone in my social network who grew weary of hearing about it. But it was a pretty cool day around here.

We’ve had a challenging and frequently disheartening year-and-a-half. It was great to have something to celebrate. In the spirit of celebration, Tracy brought home a couple of ribeyes and some fresh ears of corn to grill.

In our new place, the grill is actually up on a rooftop terrace, so I was up there doing my grillmaster thing when some dark, rain-filled clouds began to move in from the East. This happened just as the sun was getting ready to set in the west.

So guess what I saw from my rooftop vantage point? Yep.

Double Rainbow!

Now if the “double rainbow” meme doesn’t mean anything to you, it means you haven’t seen this video on YouTube which, as of this writing, has been viewed almost 16 million times.

Much of my caterwauling during the day had to do with letting folks know that my co-author and friend, Stephen Mansfield, would scheduled to be on Sean Hannity’s show last night.

If you were one of the ones who tuned last night, you know that it didn’t air.

That afternoon Stephen taped an interview with Sean on his set immediately after Delaware Senate candidate Christine O’Donnell taped hers. But apparently, when the editors started putting the show together, a decision was made to move the interview Stephen to another night this week. I’ll let you know when I hear which night.

In the meantime . . . DOUBLE RAINBOW!

It was a sign. A sign of good things to come. Indeed, those of us who take the Bible seriously know that it is precisely that. A covenant reminder. From a covenant-keeping God.

Today The Faith of Values of Sarah Palin officially launches. My co-author and friend, Stephen Mansfield, is in New York today doing some radio interviews and will be on Sean Hannity’s program tonight, as well as Fox & Friends tomorrow morning.

Of course, the readers of this blog who truly love me and care about my family have already ordered and received a copy of the book and will be writing a short but glowing endorsement over at the appropriate Amazon page any moment now. Others who are just merely fond of us will be doing so over the next few days. (I kid!)

Seriously though, I may be calling on a few friends in the coming weeks to volunteer a little help with some social media marketing I’m doing. Stand by for blegging. (That’s begging through a blog.)

In the meantime, here is the first of three videos Stephen and I did to help promote the book:

Friend and colleague Jon Simpson made these videos happen for me with the kind assistance of Michael Barton over at Barton Productions.

Awakened at 5:40 a.m. Wednesday by a phone call. My sister. A problem at Mom and Dad’s.

“I’m on my way.”

As I mentioned in the post below, Dad’s Alzheimer’s symptoms have gotten dramatically worse in the last month. I met Mom and my sister at a hospital in Henryetta, Oklahoma. He’ll spend a couple of weeks there. After that . . . well, we’re not sure. As a I said below, a season of hard decisions is upon us.

I took Mom home where she spent the first of what will almost certainly be many nights without her husband beside her.

The next day I drove her car into town to wash and service it. At the same do-it-yourself car wash I used back in high school 35 years ago, I dropped some quarters into the vacuum and went to work on the mats and carpet. While cleaning the passenger side floor, I noticed the ragged edge of a slip of paper sticking up from a crack between the carpet and the plastic door sill.

I gently teased it out of its hiding place and unfolded it. Here it is:

The camera phone picture quality is poor but the tattered card bears the words, “Army of the United States.” Puzzled by what I was holding, I looked more closely and saw my father’s name and a number typed in faded ink. The light came on for me when I saw these words at the top of the card:

Certificate of Service

This was Dad’s honorable discharge card. I flipped the card over and saw:

Period of Active Service

From: 29 Jan 51

To: 6 Jan 53

With the mystery of what I was holding solved, I turned to the bigger puzzle. What was a piece of paper issued to my father back in the Truman Administration doing wedged in the floorboard of a Buick my parents have only owned one year.

I showed it to Mom. She sighed and said it probably fell out of his wallet. But I can’t imagine that Dad has been carrying around his honorable discharge card for the last 57 years.

No, he put it in there recently. Of course he has been doing lots of unusual things recently. Over the course of the last year he has surrounded his favorite chair and his bedside with an astonishing assortment of family photos and memorabilia. He rummaged through the drawers of his old roll-top desk and retrieved long-buried photos and mementos, placing them around him

It is obvious what Dad has been doing. He has been fighting. Fighting to hold on to what he knows. Fighting to hold on to what he remembers. Fighting to preserve a sense of who he is. Or was.

At some point he came across that discharge card in a drawer and placed it in his wallet or pocket. And at some point, it fell out–which is an apt metaphor for what this hell-spawned disease has been doing to him for almost 10 years now.

Stuff he always carried around in his head or heart keeps falling out.

There has been another very telling aspect of this decline–one that has become more pronounced as the decline has accelerated.

On a daily basis Mom receives phone calls from concerned friends at church or from relatives. They are checking in on her and asking for a report on how Dad is doing. The problem is that, if she answers honestly, she must reveal some embarrassing things about Dad’s behavior or health problems, and when he hears her sharing this information, he gets very upset.

In recent weeks I learned to call when I knew Dad would be sleeping so Mom could speak freely about the struggles he’d been having. Otherwise, he would get very upset with her if she revealed anything about him.

There is a profound truth to be harvested in this field of blooming sadness.

All the marriage enrichment folks consistently claim that a man’s highest need–greater than even the core need for sexual fulfillment–is a hunger for honor . . . to be admired and respected by those he loves most.

I have always suspected this was correct, but now I am certain of it. Why?

Because as, piece by piece, most of what has made my father who he is has been stripped away–his gentleness, his calm, his good humor, his patience, his inclination to trust–one thing remains firmly intact. His need for honor.

Which brings us back to that faded, time-worn card, doesn’t it?

It is no accident that from among the hundreds of little cards and papers he could have selected,  he chose to carry one that said the following:

THIS IS TO CERTIFY THAT

JOHN F HOLLAND  US 54 007 570 Cpl

HONORABLY SERVED ON ACTIVE DUTY

Yes. Yes he did.

Period of active service: One lifetime.

I’m your host, Dave Sparseposter.

Here at Holland House, we’re adjusting to the rhythms and requirements of autumn with two fewer offspring in the mix. Now, with a senior back at Baylor and a Freshman freshly launched at the University of Oklahoma, we’re left with only one still at home on whom to focus all our parenting energies. You should probably pray for her.

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The official launch of the Sarah Palin book is still a week away but it’s been available online for a couple of weeks and it’s now showing up at bookstores. On the night of the launch, Sept. 21, my co-author, Stephen, will be on Sean Hannity’s show to talk about the book.

No, I wasn’t invited. That’s understandable and that’s okay. Stephen is a regular on Sean’s program and no one has heard of me. My hope is that I will be given some opportunities to do some media with this book and that I can translate those opportunities into a deal for my next book. Otherwise, I may need to find another line of work.

Here in the Dallas-Fort Worth area, the local Mardel’s store will be hosting a launch party for the book where I’ll be available to sign copies, answer questions, and just be generally charming and witty. It’s Saturday, October 2 at 1:00 p.m.. (details here) That happens to be the precise time of the kickoff of the OU-Texas game, so it will be embarrassing if my wife is the only one there. Super-embarrassing if she’s not there either.

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Things are not good with my folks. My father’s Alzheimer’s symptoms got dramatically worse after having an outpatient cancer procedure last month. He has really become more than my mother can handle as a care-giver. Some difficult decisions are upon us and I see no good options on the table–only bad ones and somewhat-less-bad.

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Speaking of hoping people will show up for something I’m doing . . . I will be teaching the “Prayer Tools” class at Gateway Church Sunday morning, October 3, at 9:00 a.m. in the big upstairs classroom. Come if you can. I’ll be signing copies of the Bible.

. . . was the fact that Pastor Flapdoodle in Florida got a knock on his door from the FBI right before he canceled his weenie roast.

I’m on record in the posts below of thinking the pastor is, to put it mildly, misguided. Though he may be on shaky biblical grounds, he was on rock solid terrain where is First Amendment rights were concerned.

Like me, the guys over at the Powerline blog are wondering what the heck the FBI is doing in this story:

This raises the suspicion that the FBI visit was an attempt to intimidate Rev. Jones. A vist for this purpose would be an entirely improper infringement on his (and by extension our) civil liberties.

That fact that the likes of President Obama, former President Bill Clinton, Gen. Petraeus, the FBI, the Pope, Oprah, the cast of Jersey Shore, and that guy from the Staples commercial who yell’s Wow! That’s a low price!” are all predicting new waves of jihadis and suicide bombers because some loon in Florida says he’s planning to burn some Korans, tells you pretty much everything you need to know about the moral equivalence of Islam and Christianity.

Andy McCarthy, the lead prosecutor on the 1993 WTC bombing case has it right when he says:

Terry Jones is a jackass. . . But that’s beside the point. Burning a book sacred to Muslims is a stupid, provocative thing to do. Yet, it is conscious avoidance — okay, willful blindness — to claim that Jones is causing the threat to our troops, in addition to the threat of other attacks and riots by Muslims (of the sort we’ve seen with the Danish cartoons, the false claims of Koran-flushing at Gitmo, the school teacher who named a teddy bear Mohammed, etc.).

Those are all pretexts. The cause is Islamist ideology, which is dehumanizing of non-Muslims (or, in the case of the Ahmadi, even of Muslims who reject core parts of Islamic doctrine). It is the ideology that puts the world’s Muslims on a hair trigger.

Christians are grieved and sometimes outraged when sacred symbols of the faith or even Christ himself is desecrated or defiled in art, film, theater or public protest. But such are commonplace in our culture and around the world precisely because those who do it know they have nothing to fear.

So some knot-head pastor in Florida with a congregation of 40 people announces an idiotic publicity stunt and it dominates the national headlines for a week and counting?

Really?

Sweet mother of cheese . . . the Pope felt obligated to weigh in on the matter today.

A commenter on some blog pointed out that on any given day, there are probably several dozen pastors of tiny churches doing something weird in this country.

Sadly, he’s probably correct. But it is also true that on any given day there are thousands of churches across this country doing wonderful things in their communities.  Sacrificial things. Redemptive things. Noble things.

And those acts will go unnoticed. Which is fine, because they are not done for show or for the praises of man.

So why is this nutburger with extra cheese the central topic of the national conversation day after day? Obviously, it is exacerbating a pre-existing condition. Namely, the debate over the proposed mosque near Ground Zero in Lower Manhattan.

Indeed there is a lovely symmetry with these two proposed actions. In both cases, the parties have a constitutional right to do what they are planning. In both cases, they should decline to exercise that right.

Yes, I know that Muslim activist groups in this country are constantly whining and bellyaching about sensitivity and deference to Islamic sensibilities which makes the mosque project gallingly hypocritical.

But then Muslims don’t have Jesus in the Koran establishing what we call the Golden Rule. Those who claim the Bible as their final authority and guide do have encouragement to “treat others as you want to be treated.”

In his heart of hearts, does Pastor Goofball want to see groups of skeptics, atheists, Muslims, or Wiccans holding Bible burnings? I doubt it. So the biblical course of action is clear. But I doubt that he’ll see it that way any more than that detestable Fred Phelps fellow and his creepy cult followers do.

And so the media circus continues, with a little Florida church serving as the clown car in the center ring.

This truth is becoming so obvious that even the Washington Post is acknowledging it:

“Small Businesses Feel Squeezed by Obama Policies”

Of course, this is WaPo we’re talking about so note the qualifier “feel.” The acknowledgement is not that small businesses are being squeezed by Obama policies–only that they feel they are.

Squeezed is actually the wrong word. Crushed, smothered, traumatized, shell-shocked, or “under siege”  . . . by Obama policies would be a better descriptor of what the business community is “feeling.”

(via Mediaite)
Posted without comment.

Okay. One comment.

Can you imagine any Katy Couric doing that?