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Historical Information Captain Von Trapp

I imagine many of you have seen the movie The Sound of Music.  Well, at least people within 10 years of my age certainly have.  It was based on a true story of Georg von Trapp.  I was recently reading the book “Dead Wake” by Erik Larson about World War I and the sinking of the RMS Lusitania, a British oceanliner in 1915.  This event helped bring the USA into World War I.

I like history and in reading this book, I found it interesting to see a paragraph with a quote from Captain von Trapp.  As you recall from The Sound of Music, he was an Austrian Naval officer who the Nazis were demanding he join the German Navy.  Here’s the section which talks about Captain von Trapp:

Off the southeast tip of Italy a young Austrian U-boat commander named Georg von Trapp, later to gain eternal renown when played by Christopher Plummer in the film The Sound of Music, fired two torpedoes into a large French cruiser, the Leon Gambetta.  The ship sank in nine minutes, killing 684 sailors.  “So that’s what war looks like!” von Trapp wrote in a later memoir.  He told his chief officer, “We are like highway men, sneaking up on an unsuspecting ship in such a cowardly fashion.” Fighting in a trench or aboard a torpedo boat would have been better, he said.  “There you hear shooting, hear your comrades fall, you hear the wounded groaning-you become filled with rage and can shoot men in self-defense or fear; at an assault you can even yell! But we! Simply cold-blooded to drown a mass of men in an ambush!”

Newsweek on President Obama

Newsweek published an article on a look back at President Obama’s election and subsequent performance.  The typically liberal magazine publishws a startlingly objective piece, written by a conservative historian.

This week the Congressional democrats broke ranks to repudiate Obama’s Syrian refugee initiative and provided congress with a veto proof majority. Now it remains to be seen how many of the Democratic Senate will be brave enought to vote the same and face their voters.

An email is going around that Matt Patterson’s article, some of which is below was published in that issue of Newsweek.  However, according  to Truth or Fiction web site, Matt’s article was published in 2011 in American Thinker website.  It is an interesting perspective.

http://www.americanthinker.com/articles/2011/08/obama_the_affirmative_action_president.html

By Matt Patterson

Years from now, historians may regard the 2008 election of Barack Obama as an inscrutable phenomenon, the result of a baffling breed of mass hysteria akin perhaps to the witch craze of the Middle Ages. How, they will wonder, did a man so devoid of professional accomplishment beguile so many into thinking he could manage the world’s largest economy, direct the world’s most powerful military, execute the world’s most consequential job?  Imagine a future historian examining Obama’s pre-presidential life: ushered into and through the Ivy League, despite unremarkable grades and test scores along the way; a cushy non-job as a “community organizer;” a brief career as a state legislator devoid of legislative achievement (and in fact nearly devoid of his attention,less often did he vote “present”); and finally an unaccomplished single term in the United States Senate, the entirety of which was devoted to his presidential ambitions.

He left no academic legacy in academia, authored no signature legislation as a legislator. And then there is the matter of his troubling associations: the white-hating, America-loathing preacher who for decades served as Obama’s “spiritual mentor;” a real-life, actual terrorist who served as Obama’s colleague and political sponsor. It is easy to imagine a future historian looking at it all and asking: how on Earth was such a man elected president?

There is no evidence that he ever attended or worked for any university or that he ever sat for the Illinois bar.  We have no ocumentation for any of his claims. He may well be the greatest hoax in history.

Not content to wait for history, the incomparable Norman Podhoretz addressed the question recently in the Wall Street Journal: To be sure, no white candidate who had close associations with an outspoken hater of America like Jeremiah Wright and an unrepentant terrorist like Bill Ayers, would have lasted a single day. But because Mr. Obama was black, and therefore entitled in the eyes of liberalDom to have hung  out with protesters against various American injustices, even if they were ‘a bit’ extreme, he was given a pass. Let that sink in: Obama was given a pass – held to a lower standard because of the color of his skin.

Podhoretz continues: And in any case, what did such ancient history matter when he was also so articulate and elegant and (as he himself had said) “non-threatening,” all of which gave him a fighting chance to become the first black president and thereby to lay the curse of racism to rest? Podhoretz puts his finger, I think, on the animating pulse of the Obama phenomenon – affirmative action. Not in the legal sense, of course. But certainly in the motivating sentiment behind all affirmative action laws and regulations, which are designed primarily to make white people, and especially white liberals, feel good about themselves.

Unfortunately, minorities often suffer so that whites can pat themselves on the back. Liberals routinely admit minorities to schools for which they are not qualified, yet take no responsibility for the inevitable poor performance and high drop-out rates which follow. Liberals don’t care if these minority students fail; liberals aren’t around to witness the emotional devastation and deflated self-esteem resulting from the racist policy that is affirmative action. Yes, racist. Holding someone to a separate standard merely because of the color of his skin – that’s affirmative action in a nutshell, and if that isn’t racism, then nothing is.

And that is what America did to Obama. True, Obama himself was never troubled by his lack of achievements, but why would he be? As many have noted, Obama was told he was good enough for Columbia despite undistinguished grades at Occidental; he was told he was good enough for the US Senate despite a mediocre record in Illinois ; he was told he was good enough to be president despite no record at all in the Senate. All his life, every step of the way, Obama was told he was good enough for the next step, in spite of ample evidence to the contrary.

What could this breed if not the sort of empty narcissism on display every time Obama speaks? In 2008, many who agreed that he lacked executive qualifications nonetheless raved about Obama’s oratory skills, intellect, and cool character. Those people – conservatives included – ought now to be deeply embarrassed. The man thinks and speaks in the hoariest of clichés, and that’s when he has his teleprompters in front of him; when the prompter is absent he can barely think or speak at all. Not one original idea has ever issued from his mouth – it’s all warmed-over Marxism of the kind that has failed over and over again for 100 years. (An example is his 2012 campaign speeches which are almost word for word his 2008 speeches)?  And what about his character? Obama is constantly blaming anything and everything else for his troubles. Bush did it; it was bad luck; I inherited this mess. Remember, he wanted the job, campaigned for the task. It is embarrassing to see a president so willing to advertise his own powerless-ness, so comfortable with his own incompetence. (The other day he actually came out and said no one could have done anything to get our economy and country back on track). But really, what were we to expect? The man has never been responsible for anything, so how do we expect him to act responsibly?

 

Amanda Blackburn case

While watching a segment on the news about the tragic murder of Amanda Blackburn, they showed the blurry picture from a nearby residential security camera.  In it, the person is walking away and wearing a hoodie sweatshirt.  Then when they were showing pictures of Amanda and her husband Davey, I was rather startled to see that in the pictures they showed Davey was wearing a hoodie sweatshirt.

blackburn1 blackburn2 blackburn3

The hypocrisy of politicians

On the seemingly rare occasion that a liberal media person tries to exercise equal treatment of politicians, the liberal politician squirms under the treatment and lashes out!

Wasserman Schultz freaks out

On Friday, MSNBC host Andrea Mitchell actually fact-checked Hillary Clinton’s suspicious tale of trying to join the Marines in 1975: “Those comments are being mocked by Republicans today and they’re getting two Pinocchios from Washington Post fact-checker Glenn Kessler….Why on earth would she go to a Marine recruiter in 1975?…It doesn’t make sense.”

Her guest, Democratic National Committee chair Debbie Wasserman Schultz was so taken aback that the Florida congresswoman attacked Mitchell for asking questions: “With all due respect, Andrea, why on earth are we talking about this?” Mitchell hit back: “Because she brought it up in New Hampshire the other day. If she hadn’t brought it up, it would not be an issue in this campaign.”

Schultz argued: “Andrea, Andrea, what the story illustrated was that we have made a lot of progress in America. Secretary Clinton is absolutely right. I mean, back then, you did have a much tougher time for women to be able to make it successfully through the recruitment process and move up in the military and we’ve made tremendous progress since then.”

Mitchell replied:

I mean, with all due respect, I won’t defer to anyone in terms of people who have done stories over the decades about the challenges of women in the military….So I don’t think that’s the point. I think the point is just, did this happen? You have a presidential candidate, the frontrunner in the Democratic Party, saying something happened which is quite strikingly dissonant to people who knew her back then.

Schultz whined: “I just find it really unreasonable, Andrea….this is a personal story that Hillary Clinton has told, and it’s not the first time she told it. It didn’t come out of the blue.”

The head of the DNC talked herself into such a corner that she actually wound up defending Republican presidential candidate Ben Carson:

Do we need every single experience in a person’s life to be written in stone and blood and verifiable? There are things that happen to people all across America that can’t be verified. And I know your next question’s going to be about Ben Carson. And I think quite frankly, the same goes for stories about Ben Carson.

– See more at: http://www.newsbusters.org/blogs/nb/kyle-drennen/2015/11/13/dnc-chair-freaks-out-after-andrea-mitchell-actually-fact-checks#sthash.DDdrPONl.dpuf