Lawton speaks from the grave

''There's a feeling loose in the land of utter frustration and anger, stronger than I've ever seen it.''

-Lawton Chiles; Former Governor of Florida

Let us alone will you

This was the first flag of the State of Florida. It sums up my feelings completely when it comes to new growth in this state. If you would like to come and visit we will give you the best time. We will treat you like family. Just don't stay here.

The still unanswered question of the WMD

I was scanning The Huffington Post and I noticed a very small headline that caught my eye. "Four years later, the search for WMD ends." But is it the rantings of an insane liberal to ask the question, why did they get off on this one. This may be the central reason that we are all barreling headlong into irrelevancy as a republic. The government of this nation told us that we needed to invade a sovereign nation because they had mountains, "tons and tons" of chemical and biological weapons that they were going to send halfway around the world in attack aircraft no more complicated than Cessnas to rain death and hellfire on us. We as a nation, with the exception of the Sunshine Empire editorial board, willingly trusted our leaders and committed ourselves to this endeavor, and lo and behold there were no weapons.

It was not so much that this happened, it was that our questions where met with, "fuck, our bad, but whatever WE WON!" Our reaction as a nation was to pay more attention to the winner of American Idol than we did why we caused such a fucking cluster fuck in the most dangerous part of the world. But most who blindly protect the President in this regard most often say that the whole world thought that he had weapons, and that is a bald faced lie. The Germans gave every bit of information stating that they really did not want to give any validity to what they had found. Their double agent, "curveball" has since said everything he told interrogators was a lie. Good that we committed the full force of the United States Armed forces on the word of a high strung ex patriot Arab. If William Jefferson Clinton had lead us into a war promising to find something and it never appeared he would be in a bunker fearing for his life right now. Yet nary a peep out of those same people. They are just being held down by the big bad liberal media. Liberal media just means anything that is not currently or will not probably be owned by Rupert Murdoch.

Many conservatives also state that the WMD where never the main reason for the invasion. The HELL they were not. Why would Condi Rice be talking about a mushroom cloud as proof? The media has basically said, "that's old news," and the Administration has said, "just move on." But why is it so out of line to still ask, did George W. Bush lie to the American public? And if lying to a grand jury about a blow job is impeachable, they why is lying about a war not? And if lying to a grand jury about a blow job was worth millions and a year and a half of investigation, then why is lying about a war not?

On having a plan

"Victorious warriors win first and then go to war, while defeated warriors go to war first and then seek to win."

-Sun-tzu, The Art of War

The War Of The Roses version 2.0

I miss that cliche that was "2.0". I was scanning through the front page of Media Matters today and read a headline from commentator Larry Sabato that said, "That every President from 1989 to 2017 may be a Bush or a Clinton is a national disgrace." I didn't read the article but I will say he is exactly right. Our forefathers fought a war against the British so that they would not be ruled by a hereditary monarch, and we have happily re-instituted it ourselves smiling and willing. George H.W. Bush was a dedicated public servant, and Bill Clinton brought untold prosperity to the United States. After this we re-elected Dubya because we thought Kerry was creepy, and he's such a bad President that we as a nation are looking seriously at electing a former First Lady. The Sunshine Empire editorial board is certainly not going to walk down the road of investing the competency needed to be the leader of the free world in a person based solely in a person's last name. I am sure Senator Clinton would make an able leader, and I would certainly vigorously support her if she faces Rudolph Guliani in a general election, but it is still sad that it has come to this. The framers wanted the job to attract those like George Washington and Thomas Jefferson, farmer politicians. People who felt the need to serve, then leave. Having a modern day War of the Roses across thirty years on the White House lawn is not what they intended.

On Law and Government

"Crime is contagious....if the government becomes a lawbreaker, it breeds contempt for the law."

-- Justice Louis Brandeis

Nixon vs. Bush, a fight to the finish

Theodore Roosevelt may have been this nation's finest President, but my favorite has to be Richard Nixon. Such a bizarre icon and towering flawed character. I feel the closest comparison to him of modern President's is the current one. Bush and Nixon are so much alike, but many I know don't seem to agree. They both craved utter secrecy and both took the law into their own hands. Both appealed widely, but ended up universally derided. Both could not have imagined what nightmares their second terms were to become after their triumphs for re-election. Nixon was found to be cold, heartless and out of touch. Bush has just been found to be incompetent. Both the men have legacies that many would have though Democratic accomplishments. Nixon created the Environmental Protection Agency, and Bush created the huge Medicare drug entitlement. Both men carried on unpopular wars long past the public appetite for them, and Dick Cheney and Spiro Agnew are both dicks as well. The difference is Nixon had experience in the Federal Government and was an adept diplomat. Things that I personally miss the President having. I think Bush might beat Nixon in a fight though, because he's all fit. A man of his skills and abilities and he's as healthy as an ox. Although I've never been an authority of the overall health of oxen.

Yeah, we're.... number...... 1?

"If you think the United States has stood still, who built the largest shopping center in the world?"

-Richard M. Nixon

When talk shows made sense

If daytime talk shows were still like this I would have it set for automatic record. Richard Bey now guest hosts a liberal political satellite radio show. Here he reveals his dislike of his competition. I miss this guy.

More from Sir Winston

"It has been said that democracy is the worst form of government except all the others that have been tried."

-Sir Winston Churchill

Sir Winston

"A joke is a very serious thing."

-Winston Churchill

Sic Semper Tyrannus

When you love to hate Clinton, but you're scraping off the W from your bumper

I found myself in a very interesting position today, reading Newsmax.com. This site is what Laura and Barney will be reading when every single American finally turns against the President. To say that it is right of center is to say that Strom Thurmond was old. As I read I was actually surprised to find some bit of reason among the right wing nut cake that fills the site. Yet it did strike me that everything bad that happens is always attributed to a Democratic administration, yet everything that has gone right in a Democratic administration was really only for the effort of the last Republican President. When you remind conservatives that it was a Democratic President that won World War II, they contend it was really a Republican general that did it. Clinton's economic boom is really the after effects of the Reagan years, but George W. Bush "inherited" the Clinton recession. So he essentially rode out Reagan's wave and then managed to set the beach house on fire in just one year. To most conservatives even today we are living with the insidious after-effects of the Clinton years, and the rest of America just only wishes that were possible.

Yet today, when even the blurplest of conservatives have trouble defending the President, I have the perfect marketing way out. Blame it on Clinton. I could see Mitch McConnel on the floor of the senate excoriating the Senator from New York for the odious scourge that her husband had brought. He had by the sheer force of his overwhelming popularity a full six years after he laid down the reigns of power, pushed down the President's approval rating. He did this because he hated America and wanted to aid a comfort the enemy, whoever that might be.

Yet as most conservatives begrudgingly admit that G-Dub is not quite Teddy Roosevelt, they arise in disgust when you discuss the 42nd President of the United States. William Jefferson Clinton inserted a cigar into the vagina of a consenting and of-age woman and then lied to a grand jury when asked about it in a trial that had nothing to do with said cigar. George Walker Bush violated a federal law that states any wiretapping of a call that occurs in the United States has to be cleared by a secret court that has approved almost every warrant application in it's history save for 6 that came from the Bush administration. They told no-one and they even went to a half comatose John Ashcroft in the hospital and forced him to approve the plan. Clinton received oral sex in a hideaway office to the side of the Oval Office in the West Wing of the White House. George W. Bush recreated the horrors of Vietnam in all new High Definition for the new millennium. The Federal budget was balanced under Bill Clinton. George W. Bush spends like a drunken French socialist. Bill Clinton is more of a Republican that George W. Bush ever will be. But they just enjoy hating him so much the just can't let go.

On The Risks Of Growing Up American

"In America any boy may become President and I suppose it's just one of the risks he takes."
Adlai Stevenson.

A Major War, settled on the playground

No matter what your feelings are on the matter of the War In Iraq, this evenings proceedings in Congress cannot leave one without the overwhelming feeling that they are all a bunch of schoolchildren. We live in one of the most advanced societies in the world. The country is the oldest of the modern democratic movement with a Constitution unchanged drastically in that time. But the pomp and circumstance that surrounded the passing of the Democrats' war spending supplemental with a withdrawal date they know will never be signed, and the President's tantrum amounting to "give me what I want or nothing else no matter the reality around me" just felt a bit ridiculous. It's like they all sit up there no matter the side and just fiddle away as Baghdad burns. I know the Democrats finally seem to have some balls when facing the President, but it still seems they keep them taped to the sides of their legs. Nothing on this issue will change until September, and by then we should either see Iraqi schoolchildren with chocolates and gumdrops, or even Barney and Laura will be arguing for reality.

Nuanced Differences

"A riot is a spontaneous outburst. A war is subject to advance planning."

-Richard M. Nixon

Washington On Government

"The unity of government which constitutes you one people is also now dear to you. It is justly so, for it is a main pillar in the edifice of your real independence, the support of your tranquillity at home, your peace abroad, of your safety, of your prosperity, of that very liberty which you so highly prize. But as it is easy to foresee that from different causes and from different quarters much pains will be taken, many artifices employed, to weaken in your minds the conviction of this truth, as this is the point in your political fortress against which the batteries of internal and external enemies will be most constantly and actively (though often covertly and insidiously) directed, it is of infinite moment, that you should properly estimate the immense value of your national union to your collective and individual happiness; that you should cherish a cordial, habitual, and immovable attachment to it; accustoming yourselves to think and speak of it as of the palladium of your political safety and prosperity; watching for its preservation with jealous anxiety; discountenancing whatever may suggest even a suspicion that it can in any event be abandoned, and indignantly frowning upon the first dawning of every attempt to alienate any portion of our country from the rest, or to enfeeble the sacred ties which now link together the various parts."

George Washington

More Wisdom from David

Our Boy Tom

“I cannot support a failed foreign policy. … President Clinton has never explained to the American people why he was involving the US military in a civil war in a sovereign nation, other than to say it is for humanitarian reasons, a new military-foreign policy precedent. Was it worth it to stay in Vietnam to save face? What good has been accomplished so far? Absolutely nothing.”

— Tom DeLay on the House floor in April 1999, when US troops were a month into their three-month mission in Kosovo

and today he calls Democrats treasonous.

Another great mind that will be missed

Please join all of us here at The Sunshine Empire in mourning the loss of David Halberstam. This accomplished reporter and historian covered such divergent topics such as the Vietnam War, 9/11, and Michael Jordan. He was, to steal a line from his most legendary work, on of our best and brightest. Although he had lived a full life having he taken in such a violent manner has shaken us all. Please keep his family in your prayers, and may we have more like him in the future.