I’ve been reading Gregg Jarrett’s book, The Trial of the Century, about the 1925 Scopes Monkey Trial.  Nearly 100 years ago, the State of Tennessee passed a law making it a crime for a teacher in a public school “to teach any theory that denies the Story of the Divine Creation of man as taught in the Bible, and to teach instead that man has descended from a lower order of animals,” in other words, the theory of evolution championed by Charles Darwin.  The trial was the subject of the movie, Inherit the Wind, with Spencer Tracy portraying John Scope’s attorney, Clarence Darrow.  Darrow was the most famous defense attorney in America in the 1920’s; a classical liberal, dedicated to the preservation of the freedoms guaranteed by the Constitution.  Reading the book, I was reminded of the words attributed to  Jean-Baptiste Alphonse Karr, “The more things change, the more they stay the same.”  A hundred years ago, government took up the cause of fundamentalist religious fanatics to suppress free thought and free expression.  Today, the government is in league with fundamentalist anti-religious fanatics to do precisely the same things.  And the issues faced by Clarence Darrow in his defense of John Scopes are no less pertinent today.  Here are some Darrow quotes from the trial transcript.  “Every bit of knowledge that the mind has must now be submitted to a religious test … If men are not tolerant, if men cannot respect each other’s opinions, if men cannot live and let live, then no man’s life is safe.”  “There is not a single line of any constitution that can withstand bigotry and ignorance when it seeks to destroy the right of the individual; and bigotry and ignorance are ever active.”  “They are after everybody that dares to think.” “The government is not equipped to tell its people what to believe and what not to believe.  Individuals have an indefeasible right to decide for themselves.”  As I said, the more things change, the more they stay the same.  100 years ago, as now, so-called Progressives were obsessed with controlling the education of children, in order to indoctrinate them with the notion that the government knows best what may be said and what may be thought, and to stifle any attempt at the free expression of ideas and opinions that conflict with Progressive orthodoxy.  Clarence Darrow was right in 1925.  The government is not equipped to tell its people what to believe and what not to believe.  Individuals do have an indefeasible right to decide for themselves.  The problem for the Left, however, is that individuals who make up their own minds, and who dare to challenge their Leftist masters, are a threat.  They threaten to expose the false premises and outright lies of the Progressive imbeciles, who can maintain control only by kindling the bigotry and ignorance upon which the Left relies.  100 years removed from 1925 Tennessee, the last thing the Left can permit is a populace, and therefore an electorate, which thinks for itself, and which is willing to consider that what it’s being told simply doesn’t make sense.  Clarence Darrow lived by the maxim that, “The beginning of wisdom is doubt.”  But the Left can’t maintain its control in the face of a wise populace.  The Left doesn’t want people who doubt the veracity of its pronouncements.  It’s wants only compliance.  The proof of this fact is palpable.  Control education, and you teach only that which supports your position.  Produce generations of students and graduates who, through no fault of their own, know nothing of history, are ignorant of the truth, and are ill equipped to discover when they’re being lied to.  To quote Darrow once more, “Ignorance and fanaticism is forever busy and needs feeding.  Always it is feeding and gloating for more.”  That neatly sums up today’s Left.  And 100 years after the Scopes trial, Progressives remain hard at work in their quest to spread ignorance and bigotry.  Think about it.  Today’s Democrats have denounced all Republicans as deplorable, irredeemable, extremist, insurrectionists, who are unworthy of holding any office.  Have you ever noticed that the election of any non-Leftist is denounced as illegitimate, while at the same time the Left condemns any conservative who suggests his election loss was unfair as an “election denier?”  And it’s not just a Republican vs. Democrat battle.  This week, the government got social media outlets to cancel the accounts of Democratic presidential candidate Robert F. Kennedy, Jr.  RFK dares think for himself.  Today’s Leftist quest to spread ignorance is done in the guise of a need to avoid “misinformation.”  That’s a neat term that means we should permit Leftist politicians to decide what’s true and what’s not true, and permit them to cancel, suppress, and remove all speech, opinions, or statements that they consider to be dangerous “to our democracy” by labeling it “misinformation.”  They did just that in 2020, having FBI agents warning social media outlets about postings (speech) which they claimed was untrue, and thus unworthy of being seen or heard.  That conduct has caused a number of State Attorneys General to sue the Biden Administration.  One pending lawsuit, in Louisiana, seeks a preliminary injunction to bar the government from “demanding, urging, encouraging, pressuring, deceiving, colluding, or otherwise inducing social media companies to censor disfavored speakers or opinions.”  A federal judge will soon rule on that suit.  Hopefully, the judge will look no further than the opening clause of the First Amendment to grant the requested relief.  “Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof; or abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press.” But the work of the Left continues.  Il Duce Barack Obama is pushing government censorship to stamp out “misinformation.”  He laments the fact that there’s too much access to differing points of view.  “You have the sheer proliferation of content, and the splintering of information and audiences … that’s made democracy more complicated.”  “Search and social media platforms are our primary source of news and information …  No one tells us that the window is blurred, subject to unseen distortions, and subtle manipulations.”  All this from the president who once said “it would be easier to be the leader of China, because no one’s scrutinizing his words.”  But as with most things Obama, this is pure bullshit.  Separating the truth from what is reported is not a new problem.  When Clarence Darrow was trying the Scopes case, newspapers were famous for simply making stories up.  Sadly, that practice still exists.  Obama and his henchmen aren’t worried about democracy.  They’re worried about their ability to continue to deceive the public.  Once upon a time Ronald Reagan said we should trust, but verify.  Recent actions by the Left constrain me to amend that proposition.  Don’t trust.  Doubt and verify.

Corrupt Demented Imbecile Joe Biden kicked off his 2024 reelection campaign last week.  He didn’t have a rally; he didn’t do a Townhall event, or make a major policy speech; but Biden set in motion his principal reelection strategy; he had his Justice Department indict Donald Trump.  The Biden reelection strategy is based entirely on running against a crippled Donald Trump, and the Democrats are doing everything in their power to destroy whatever chance Trump had to return to the presidency.  This strategy really is Biden’s only hope of reelection.  He certainly can’t run on his record, which has been a model of abject failure.  Joe Biden truly has bungled every thing he’s touched.  He knows he was elected only because he wasn’t Trump, but he, or the people really running the show, should have been smart enough to understand that simply reversing everything Trump had done was neither in their best interest nor that of the country.  Under Trump, America had lower taxes, higher wages, no inflation, energy independence, greatly improved trade agreements, a rejuvenated military, secure borders, world-wide peace, and well-funded NATO alliance.  Until China poisoned the world with its Wuhan virus, we had the lowest unemployment rate in 50 years.  Biden could have badmouthed Trump while continuing many of the Trump policies, and then taken the credit.  Instead, he mindlessly reversed all the Trump successes, and surprising no one, turned success into the failure that is the Biden Administration.  Joe Biden can’t point to even one thing that’s gotten better since he became president.  Even with a lapdog media that will repeat any lie he tells, Biden can’t run on any real or imagined accomplishment.  Hence, the Biden election strategy.  Run against a fatally weakened Trump.  The Democrats have been working on that strategy a long time.  Donald Trump may be an arrogant, narcissistic blowhard, whose inability to curb his big mouth makes him his own worst enemy, but when he says he’s the victim of a witch hunt, he’s not lying.  What the Democrats have done to Trump is a truly  monumental scandal, second only to the Biden Crime Family bribery scandal.  Trump’s only real crime was that he wasn’t part of the Washington Establishment.  He was an outsider, who wouldn’t play the D.C. money-wasting, pocket-lining, lying, thieving game.  He was like Rocky Balboa in the first movie, “He don’t know it’s a damn show, he thinks it’s a fight.”  As with most crooked political activities, the Trump witch hunt can be traced back to Hillary Clinton.  FBI whistleblowers have now confirmed what I said here six years ago.  Hillary used the fabricated Russian Collusion dossier to prompt the FBI, Justice, and the CIA to investigate Trump before and after his election.  The FBI treated the newly elected president as a criminal target from Day One.  I rarely give the Detestable Chuck Schumer credit for anything, but he did get one thing right.  Schumer warned Trump in 2017, “You take on the intelligence community, they have six ways from Sunday at getting back at you.”  The entirety of the Establishment has made getting back at Trump Job One.  They infiltrated the Trump campaign, tapped his phones, persecuted his aides, continually leaked classified information, and engineered two bogus impeachments.  Democrats may not know how to govern, they may be hypocritical lying bastards, and they may be downright nuts, but the one thing they do well is smear the opposition.  Perhaps the one thing that Democrats can credibly claim they’ve done successfully is that they have successfully managed to destroy Donald Trump’s ability to run for office.  And the irony is priceless.  They falsely smeared Trump as a Russian collaborator, while Hillary and Bill Clinton were taking Russian money, and we now know that the Ukrainian Burisma chief who paid millions in bribes to the Bidens is working for the Russian Foreign Intelligence Service (SVR).  It’s not fair.  The only true crimes involving Trump are the ones where he’s  the victim, but they’ve succeeded in destroying Trump’s ability to win, and now they just keep piling on, because they have to run against Trump to have a chance in 2024.  But the Democrats are walking a very hazardous tightrope.  Their challenge is to dirty Trump up as much as possible by repeatedly indicting him, while at the same time not burying Trump so deep that he decides he can’t run for election.  In truth they’re not taking much of a chance, because they’re counting on Trump’s unlimited supply of arrogance.  They know Trump will insist on running, and that his supporters will stay with him no matter how many times they indict him.  The problem is that, even without the indictments, more than half the electorate won’t vote for Trump no matter what he says or does.  But the Democrats want to make sure the election isn’t close, so they’re trying to keep Trump in different courts when he should be campaigning.  Their goal is to turn Trump into the latter day equivalent of Eugene Debs, a Socialist, who ran for president in 1920 from his prison cell, where he was serving a ten year sentence on an Espionage Act conviction.  Guess what?  Debs didn’t win, and neither will Trump, who will be running either as a convicted felon or as an indicted felon.  And even if all the crap gets dismissed, Democrats will say he’s a criminal, the media will support them, the real criminals of the crooked Establishment will be back in business, and the American people will be screwed again.  President Trump, for all your faults you deserved better.  What’s been done to you is a travesty, but the damage can’t be undone.  If you love America more than you love yourself, please step aside and let us have a candidate who has a chance of beating these bastards.

The longer Corrupt Demented Imbecile Joe Biden remains in office, the closer the parallels become between Sleepy Joe and our 29th president, Warren G. Harding.  The two were elected to office exactly 100 years apart.  Both W.G.H. and J.R.B. became president after a pandemic; Harding the Influenza pandemic, and Biden, the Wuhan Virus.  Likewise, both took a “hands off” view of the presidency, permitting others to make important decisions, but for different reasons.  Harding was a dark horse candidate, a Senator, who never really sought the presidency.  On election, Harding felt overwhelmed by the office, and left the running of the government to his “Ohio Gang,” a group of cronies whose corruption proved his undoing.  On Biden’s part, he was a Senator who long sought the office.  Biden leaves the day to day decisions of the presidency to others due to advanced senility that limits his workday to 10 am to 4 pm.  Biden therefore relies on his own cronies, “The Obama Gang.”  When Harding punched out for the day, he enjoyed dinners, parties, poker games, and a number of cocktails.  When Sleepy Joe punches out, they feed him his oatmeal and put him to bed.  Despite these differences, Harding and Biden share a number of scandals.  Harding’s Teapot Dome scandal involved the transfer of leases on oil set aside for use by the Navy.  Biden cancelled oil leases, and depleted our strategic petroleum reserve, selling oil to China that was set aside for our national defense.   Both Harding and Biden were plagued by stories of an illegitimate child; for Harding, the daughter of his mistress, Nan Britton, and for Biden, the illegitimate daughter of his son, who coincidentally is named Navy.  Harding and Biden both had corrupt Justice Departments.  The Harding DOJ had a corrupt, thieving Attorney General who sold justice to the highest bidders.  Biden has a corrupt Attorney General who has sold justice to promote the Left and persecute all opposition.  Of course, Joe Biden perfectly complements and is the chief beneficiary of his corrupt Justice Department, which unlawfully stamps out dissent, while at the same time shielding the Biden Crime Family from prosecution.  Warren G. Harding was elected in 1920 on the promise of “normalcy.”  Turbulent times preceded his election.  World War I and the Spanish Flu had roiled society and business.  Harding summarized his appeal to normalcy in a speech he gave in Boston in May 1920, “America’s present need is not heroics but healing, not nostrums, but normalcy.”  For Harding, normalcy meant less government regulation, more individual freedom, an expansion of business, a booming stock market, and the ascent of America on the world stage.  Ironically, Joe Biden also promised normalcy, following the twin turmoils of the Wuhan pandemic and the war against Donald Trump.  The difference has been that Biden’s normalcy means more government regulation, less personal freedom, higher taxes, recession, crippling debt, and an America in decline.  In a state of normalcy, laws are enforced, norms are acknowledged, standards are observed, and decorum is maintained.  Biden hasn’t given us that.  Instead of normalcy, Joe Biden has ushered in an era of abnormalcy.  Normalcy promotes order, while Biden abnormalcy promotes chaos, discontent, disrespect, and ruin.  The chief executive has a duty to enforce the laws.  The performance of this duty is hampered, of course, when the chief executive is himself a criminal, but Biden’s abnormalcy is beyond the pale.  Joe Biden is presiding over the complete reversal of all norms, standards, laws, and decorum.  And it’s not merely the acknowledgment or acceptance of what is abnormal, but the rejection of that which is normal, and the painting of the normal as racist, xenophobic, or whatever-phobic.  Abnormalcy turns everything upside down.  A normal nation has secure borders, and laws regarding immigration.  Biden has erased the borders and violated immigration laws.  Societies are formed and continue to exist only when there’s a consensus as to what’s right and what’s wrong.  Abnormalcy rejects that consensus.  In Biden-World, criminals are free to steal, maim, and kill, and the law exists only to punish those who refuse to surrender to the mob.  A world where a robber stabs a clerk and the clerk is arrested for protecting himself, and where a violent lunatic is free to prey on subway passengers, while the hero who acted in defense of others is charged with homicide.  We’ve gone beyond the absurd.  This week, two employees of a Georgia Lululemon store were fired for daring to tell a gang of thugs not to steal the merchandise.  In abnormal world, prosecutors overlook criminals who carry guns, while at the same time promoting the confiscation of guns from law-abiding citizens.  Biden decries gun violence, but he and his Party won’t speak out against teenage gangsters who use illegal guns.  The hypocrisy is pervasive.  This week, a meddlesome priest, Newark Archbishop Tobin, called upon his flock to forego their Second Amendment right to keep and bear arms to combat gun violence.  Apparently it hasn’t dawned on him that people who have gone to the trouble of legally obtaining a gun aren’t the problem.  Maybe His Eminence should get up off his cassock and start knocking on doors in Newark’s Central Ward, where illegal guns are being wielded by Bloods, Crips, and other criminals.  Then again, unless he’s gunning for martyrdom, that’s probably not a good idea, but such is the scope of abnormalcy.  Not convinced yet?  How about this one.  Not so long ago, drug addiction was widely considered an evil to be discouraged, but not anymore.  New York City has installed vending machines that dispense, free of charge, crack pipes, other drug paraphernalia, and Narcan, to revive those who overdose so they can keep using drugs.  It’s madness, but no madder than abnormalcy’s sacrifice of hard-won women’s rights to pander to transgender interlopers, no madder than a world where stores are forced to lock up the merchandise so the shoplifters can run free, and no madder than a world where we import millions of illegal aliens so that we can install them in luxury hotels at the expense of the overburdened and fast-vanishing American taxpayer.  100 years ago, Harding’s normalcy came to a bad end, and his scandals resulted in prosecutions and convictions.  Hopefully, Biden’s abnormalcy will fade away, sanity will return to our land, and the Biden Crime Family will finally be brought to justice.

In England, and early on in America, there were Debtor’s Prisons which incarcerated people who were unwilling, or unable, to repay their debts.  Unless you had friends with means to satisfy your debts, or friends in high places who could pull some strings, you could be locked up in The Clink (that’s where the term comes from, because the London Debtor’s Prison was called The Clink), in some cases for life.  The United States outlawed Debtor’s prisons in 1833.  We’re not allowed to lock up people simply because they lack the means to pay.  But what happens when the debtor isn’t the citizen but is the government itself?  We’ve almost always had a national debt.  Sovereign debt is not necessarily a bad thing, but it can become bad when it balloons out of control.  But how much debt is too much?  In 1929, just before the Stock Market Crash, our national debt was $17 billion.  Even with the New Deal social spending, by the start of World War II, the debt was $49 billion, and never was more than 50% of gross national product (GDP).  During World War II, the debt rose to $259 billion, and for the first time topped 100% of GDP.  There was good reason for this, as the War was a battle to decide if the world would be free or fascist.  The debt remained between $200 and $300 billion, and never more than 58% of GDP until the 1960’s and LBJ’s Great Society and Vietnam war spending double whammy.  The combination of war costs, the 1970’s stagflation and 11% unemployment increased the debt from $300 billion to $908 billion in 1980.  The debt hit $1 trillion for the first time in 1982.  It took 4 years for the debt to double to $2 trillion in 1986, and it doubled again to $4 trillion by 1992, but still was between 50 and 60% of GDP.  By 2005, the debt again doubled to $8 trillion, and doubled again to $16 trillion by 2012.  At this point, we were flirting with a debt at 100% of GDP.  In the 10 plus years since 2012, we again doubled the debt to nearly $32 trillion, and 125% of GDP.  Consider that.  The only other time in our history that our debt has exceeded 100% of GDP was World War II, when we were fighting for our very lives.  Now, we’re at 125% of GDP simply because we have lost the ability to stop ourselves from spending money we don’t have.  And we’re spending money, not to fight fascist enemies who threatened to take over the world, but to support illegal aliens, to subsidize electric cars that people don’t want and that our power grid can’t support, and for every whacky Leftist fever dream the Woke imbeciles can think of to expand entitlement spending to the point where they reach their goal, the collapse of the capitalist system, and the installation of their Socialist Workers’ Paradise, which worked great in the Soviet Union.  I didn’t make this up.  It’s the plan of sociologists Richard Cloward and Frances Piven, to fundamentally transform America.  Sound familiar?  The 8 step plan – Control healthcare and you control the people; Increase the debt to an unsustainable level; Use gun control to remove the people’s ability to defend themselves from the Government; Take control of every aspect of people’s lives, including food, housing, and income; Take control of what people read;  Take control of what children learn in school; Remove the belief in the God from the Government and schools; and Divide the people into the wealthy and the poor to create class warfare.  Democrats are pushing all of the above.  The objective is to collapse the system, create panic, and install a socialist tyranny to redistribute wealth until, as Venezuela found out, no wealth remains and we are fundamentally transformed into a Third World shithole.  It’s ironic.  In the 1940’s we went deep in debt to keep fascists from taking over.  Now, we’re deep in debt so that the Woke fascists can take over.  Ballooning the debt is just one part of the scheme, and it’s reaching a dangerous level.  The World Bank says that the tipping point between sustainable debt and collapse is 77% of GDP for a prolonged period.  As detailed above, we blew the doors off that level of debt some 11 years ago.  The battle over raising the debt ceiling now going on in the Congress has become an issue for two reasons.  First, we have a Republican majority in the House, which is insisting on some check, even if it’s just a slowing of new spending, and because Biden inflation has caused the interest rates to be raised so high that servicing the debt is costing us $640 billion this year and $739 billion next year, nearly as much as we spend on defense and Medicare.  Interest on the debt could be hidden before, with the Fed keeping interest rates near zero.  For instance, in 2018, debt service was $263 billion.  Now, it’s becoming the creature that ate the budget.  And in the face of this, Democrats just want to keep spending.  They were shocked, shocked that Speaker McCarthy insisted on spending caps in return for an increase of the debt ceiling.  How dare House Republicans “hold the government hostage” by doing something as controversial as demanding input into spending, which the Constitution says is their job?  Some may question whether the Democrats are really planning the collapse of the country, but ask yourselves what else could be driving them?  By admitting 7.5 million illegals, ignoring the concept of equal justice, encouraging predators to turn cities into Hellholes, refusing to enforce the law, purposely destroying our energy industries, and seeking to gain federal control of local zoning, they are carrying out the Cloward & Piven model to a tee.  Either their goal is a complete collapse, or else they are just too crazy or stupid to be left in charge.  And you and I know they’re not stupid.  Crazy and evil maybe, but never stupid.  If the Left succeeds, it will make no difference that Debtor’s Prison was abolished.  For hardworking taxpayers, the entire country will be our prison.  We’ll be prisoners of our debt just as though we were behind bars in The Clink.  All merit ignored.  All incentive killed.  All freedoms denied, and all hope fundamentally transformed into despair.  We’ll finally reach Equity, a state in which all are equally destitute, ignorant, and miserable.  But rest assured, as we all disappear beneath that massive tsunami of debt, our Woke masters will keep telling us how they preserved our democracy.

This coming Monday is Memorial Day.  Because our schools are producing generations of historical illiterates, as with most holidays, for most people Memorial Day is just an excuse for another long weekend.  However, there’s a lot more to it.  The first Memorial Day, then called Decoration Day, was held May 30, 1868, to commemorate the sacrifices made by veterans of the Civil War.  Traditionally on Memorial Day, either the President or Vice-President appears at Arlington National Cemetery and lays a wreath at the Tomb of the Unknown Soldier.  I doubt that Corrupt Demented Imbecile Joe Biden will leave his Delaware beach house for such an intrusion on his vacation time, so I guess Kamala, The Unqualified Vice-President, will visit the Unknown Soldier.  At the 1868 event, former Union General and then Congressman, James A. Garfield spoke at Arlington of those who had lost their lives in the Civil War.  Garfield went on to be elected President in 1880.  In July 1881, he was shot in the back by a deranged supporter who thought Garfield should have given him a diplomatic post.  I guess our politics have always been violent.  Garfield died two months later in Long Branch, New Jersey, a victim of both the gunman and poor medical care.  But I digress.  Part of what Garfield said at Arlington was, “For love of country they accepted death, and thus resolved all doubts and made immortal their patriotism and their virtue.” I have to wonder, if the Civil War veterans had known then what we know now, would they have been willing to make the sacrifice?  For love of country?  Which country?  The country created under the Constitution, which existed after the Civil War, and which inspired men to sacrifice their lives to defend freedom in the First and Second World Wars is hardly recognizable, and is teetering on the edge of extinction.  We must ask whether it really is a “country” anymore.  A “country” is a sovereign state which is independent of other nations, has a permanent population, and a defined territory, that is, borders.  Since the arrival of the Biden wrecking ball, we no longer have a defined territory with borders.  We have no borders, and our population isn’t what could be called “permanent,” because we have ceased to be aware of who or how many people make up our population.  It’s estimated that by the end of this year, Biden will have admitted some 7.5 million illegal aliens.  We don’t know who they are, we don’t know where they are, and we don’t know what they’re going to do.  We know only that they’re here, they’re never going home, and it’s the responsibility of American citizens, already $32 trillion in debt, to support these people with money, housing, education, and health care, no questions asked.  Sovereign nations may be destroyed by outside forces, through military force, but this isn’t that.  This is an inside job.  Would the honored dead have made the supreme sacrifice if they knew they were doing it for this country?  Our veterans fought for freedom; freedom for slaves, to preserve the Union, and for the personal freedoms that made America the Shining City on the Hill that drew millions of legal immigrants to her shores.  Yet today we have a political Party that’s sowing disunion and is bent on cancelling our freedoms in favor of a socialist dictatorship.  Was that worth dying for?  What have we become?  Remember the opening to the TV show The Adventures of Superman?  “Truth, justice and the American way.”  Today, truth is only an irrelevant talking point.  Justice, the certainty of consequences for bad acts, doesn’t exist for Leftist rioters, thieves and homicidal maniacs.  And the American Way is considered by the Left to be racist and xenophobic.  Who would willingly sacrifice his life for that?  America was once considered a Melting Pot, where a diverse group of immigrants from all over the world came to be assimilated, and recast as Americans.  Pride in their former heritage was expected, but in the end, they were Americans first and foremost.  Then we changed the calculus from Melting Pot to Salad Bowl.  Immigrants came to America and became Americans, but maintained their hyphenated identities.  No problem there, a bit more focus on our origins highlighted our diversity and added to our strength.  But now, America is neither a Melting Pot nor a Salad Bowl, it’s turning into a commode.  We are fast becoming the dumping ground for everyone and anyone all over the world who decides that being fed from the teat of Uncle Sucker is preferable to their current situation.  It’s a recipe for disaster.  Would our honored dead have given their lives for the prospect of an America which lacks a commitment to equal justice, depending on the political affiliation of the accused; for an America in which the chosen group is permitted to lie, cheat, and steal without consequence, while others are persecuted for the slightest real or imagined fault?  Would they have lain down their lives for an America in which the insane homeless are free to befoul the streets and terrorize innocent taxpayers, turning the Land of the Free into a real-life version of The Walking Dead?  The heroes who inspired Memorial Day were brought up in a world where they believed anyone could get ahead by obeying the rules, working hard, and persevering.  They died to give their descendants the right to that same opportunity.  I don’t think they died so that ignorant, spoiled Americans, and illegal aliens could just show up, do nothing, know nothing, and yell, “Where’s my check?”  I’m no Pollyanna.  I know America has never been perfect.  No nation has been.  But it’s head and shoulders above anyplace else on Earth.  The point is that, if we continue down the path we’re on, the concept of Memorial Day is just a cruel joke.  Unless our heroes fell to preserve the America they fought for, then they died in vain.  Let’s just consider it another meaningless day off for the ignorant, entitled, lazy rabble we’ve spawned.  Let the Unknown Soldiers rest in peace.  Associating them with this mess is an insult they don’t deserve.