It's Called "History." Learn Some of It.

One of my aviation buddies sent me this link, to a story about a speech by John McCain (R-Goon) in Wisconsin. In his speech, McCain drops this stunner of a line:

"The war in Iraq was part of the fight against Islamic extremism, the greatest evil, probably, that this nation has ever faced."

Oh. Really. Permit me, if I may, to introduce you to a few butchers whose toll of slaughter makes Osama bin Ladin look like a toddler in a day-care center.

One was an obscure veteran of the German Army in World War I. He rose to become the leader of that nation and started a war that resulted in the deaths of tens of millions of people. He industrialized the practice of mass murder. If you haven't guessed that I am referring to Adolph Hitler, go punch yourself in the face.

The second gent is a little more obscure. During the time that Hitler was the leader of Germany (and for some time before and after), he ruled the Russian Empire. He send tens of millions of people into a huge network of prisons where most died. He engineered a famine in the Ukraine in the 1930s that killed millions more. In World War 2, his uncaring about casualties resulted in his army suffering somewhere between 8 and 10 million KIAs. He drove his nation from being an economic backwater into becoming the second nuclear power and the first nation to have an operationally-capable fusion bomb. His name: Joseph Stalin.

Then there was the nation that carried out a successful military attack on a major U.S. naval base and actually occupied American territory: Imperial Japan.

I can go on and on. Osama bin Ladin sent 19 guys armed with boxcutters in 2001 and because of that, he poses a greater threat to the nation than that posed by the Confederacy, which invaded all the way into Pennsylvania. The British Army sacked and burned our capitol during the War of 1812.

If anything, the greater threat posed to this country comes from those who would destroy our freedoms and liberties and dismantle our constitutional system of checks and balances, all in the name of providing a glimmer of protection.

We were, at times, a great nation, too great to be stampeded into a mass of quivering jelly by a bunch of fear-mongers. We need to reclaim that greatness once again.