By DEXTER DUGGAN
He had suffered for more than seven years under brutal North Vietnamese Communist captors before he and nearly 600 other American POWs were released in early 1973, with the Communists triumphant in the Southeast Asia war that they and left-wing media fought against the U.S. government.
Air Force Capt. Edward Alan Brudno, captured in 1965, had been kept in solitary confinement for long periods and was deprived of news reports from the U.S. for years. A Marine pilot in an adjoining cell reportedly recalled Brudno as a tough little guy who wanted to be an astronaut, who hated the Communists, and “used guile and cunning to outwit the guards.”
After a few months back home in the familiar USA, the tenacious, resilient Brudno committed suicide just before his 33rd birthday in June 1973.
Untreated psychological wounds from overseas were advanced as one reason. Could another have been that the U.S. wasn’t so familiar anymore to Brudno after all?
Back when he had to leave his new bride for Southeast Asia, the American military was respected by his countrymen. In the culture, the family unit, even if imperfect, was pretty much the model. By the time he returned home, it was a shockingly different nation, devastated by an adversary media. This is what he suffered and sacrificed for?
Soldiers were spat on, and powerful media celebrated young pro-Communist U.S. rioters whose allegiance was to unlimited sex and drugs.
To Americans who’d continued living in the U.S., the changes were perhaps less shocking only because they occurred up close one day at a time, the classic situation of slowly increasing the water temperature on the frog in the pot.
Still, any adult in 1973 knew this wasn’t the nation of 1960, not merely because of time passing but of values, morals, and politicians assassinated.
And if the nation looked different back then, what of the result by 2017?
Many pro-lifers might argue that 1973 truly was a watershed, when the U.S. Supreme Court in January invented the previously unknown fundamental constitutional right to permissive abortion of innocents. There was no legal justification, but the same left-wing media that had cheered for Communist victory against Asian peasants and U.S. soldiers had new blood to spill.
It was a radical court decision that The New York Times and its pals quickly distorted and minimized, planning to protect it at home as they had stood up for Communist troops far away. Where Marxist dictators were remade as friendly reformers, defenders of babies and their moms were demonized as superstitious fanatics opposing a “moderate” update to the law.
Only few Americans would have approved of such a radical abortion decision then, so its media enablers revved up propaganda engines that have whirred for decades. Permissive abortion crept from being a simple matter of conscience in 1973 to something that Hillary Clinton and her extremists demanded taxpayer funding for throughout pregnancy, for any reason or none.
Leftist radicals in the Democrat Party within a few years undertook to begin purging the party of those who intended to disagree effectively. However, this didn’t help Democrats but Republicans, who welcomed new members. An early example would be “Reagan Democrats.” So Democrats increasingly looked to the fringe for members to replace those ousted or who had fled.
The characteristics of both parties changed.
Democrats, who had had a working-class party including practicing Catholics, became much more of an elitist party where Catholics were considered dangerous unless neutered. Republicans, who had been more of a Chamber of Commerce and business party, actually often tried to remain comfortably so, but restive grassroots members started demanding action against the immoralities that the Democrats not only surrendered to but promoted.
These grassroots Republicans could cite GOP superhero Abraham Lincoln, who memorably insisted that the 19th-century U.S. “cannot endure, permanently half slave and half free.” You can’t have a united nation where half of it thinks people can be enslaved on its own land like useful animals, and the other half rejects this resounding denial of human dignity.
So it is with permissive abortion. After decades of media propaganda, more people are for its wide sweep now than when the High Court imposed it overnight; but far more reject it who had little or no opinion about the issue when it was low-profile.
Any ordinary person today can see real-time scientific ultrasounds of unborn babies, and watch video revelations of abortionists selling baby body parts, that were beyond the ken even of a Supreme Court justice in 1973.
Aching consciences and moral discomfort probably fuel some of the anger and aggression on the political left currently, the precinct of, you know, “science” — where they refuse to look at scientific photos of preborn babies.
But various national Republican leaders still seem so uncomfortable with “emotion” that they do their best to quell it if it dare materializes — like the justified reaction against the attempted assassination of national GOP politicians playing early morning baseball in Arlington, Va., on June 14.
Out Of Hand
The Democrat gunman was a heavy consumer of left-wing social media who actually believed partisan lies such as that Republicans want tens of thousands of people to lose health coverage and die. (The babies who doubtlessly die every day at abortuaries don’t count, nor their mothers whose maiming and deaths are covered up.)
As repulsive as the attack was, it didn’t seem contrary to the wicked spirit of recent beatings and riots against Trump fans and conservatives. Before this got further out of hand, it should have been denounced in the strongest terms.
Donald Trump probably wouldn’t have been the best person to do that, because he already was identified by the media as a divisive spirit. The fact that his “unity” remarks won praise from the opposite side suggested they heaved a sigh of relief that they’d avoided his blame.
But House Speaker Paul Ryan (R., Wis.) quickly moved to fold Democrats into his embrace after the shooting, lest their frequent fury against Trump and the GOP cost them. Speaking before the assembled House on June 14, Ryan said its members are “all imperfect” but “are one family.”
On June 20 national radio talkmeister Rush Limbaugh noted that left-wing Sen. Bernie Sanders had just done a Facebook appearance urging his supporters to fight in “unprecedented ways” against Republicans — even though Arlington gunman James Hodgkinson, whom Sanders disavowed the day of the attack, was a fervent Sanders fan.
Limbaugh told his listeners that “I hate this one-way street stuff,” where Republicans always get the blame and Democrats skate. The talk host said he’d been cautioned not to resist in a way that is “just gonna continue the divide.”
However, Limbaugh said: “You know, us turning the other cheek here has been going for I don’t know how many years, and it isn’t solving anything, and it isn’t changing anything. In the meantime, our culture continues to be debased. Our politics, everything! These people are politicizing virtually everything now, debasing everything. It’s gotta stop, and helping stop it requires being honest about what’s happened.”
Tucker Carlson
Providing a revealing example of the GOP’s foes, hard-hitting Fox News host Tucker Carlson invited a New Jersey Democrat strategist on the air who had tweeted out a shocking message shortly after the Arlington attack.
James Devine tweeted: “We are in a war with selfish, foolish & narcissistic rich people. Why is it a shock when things turn violent?”
Devine immediately followed this with the hashtag for “Hunt Republican Congressmen.”
There could seem little doubt what hunting congressmen meant soon after they were fired on, leaving House GOP whip Steve Scalise nearly dead.
However, coolly looking into the camera, Devine denied he meant violence and saw his slant only as the response to Republican aggression against Democrats. “When you’re confronted with bullies, you have to stand up to them,” Devine told Carlson.
Later Devine added, “I’m saying that Democrats have to be more aggressive in the face of political issues, in the face of the opposition.” Sounding like a heavy consumer of left-wing media himself, Devine said there was GOP secret plotting to repeal health care “that’s keeping 50,000 Americans alive,” and to “erect barriers to the democratic process” that’s tyrannical.
Carlson replied, “It’s distressing that more Democrats haven’t disavowed you.”
In a June 20 email, Arizona conservative Republican activist Rob Haney told The Wanderer it’s the political left that occupies “the realm in which violent intolerance has flourished. Understandably, those on the political right find such behavior abhorrent because their roots are in the Judeo-Christian soil of tolerance, as opposed to the anti-religious, Marxist-socialist soil of intolerance.”
Haney, a retired chairman of the Maricopa County Republican Party, headquartered in Phoenix, added:
“I have found that many conservatives who should be natural allies of the political right have no stomach for ideological conflict. They will withdraw their support because they think politics should be a friendly and united social club. The left uses their knowledge of this Judeo-Christian weakness against the right when they so frequently call for bipartisan unity.
“Like Lucy pulling the football away from Charlie Brown, the milquetoast conservatives fall for it every time, and the political pendulum moves further to the left via another surrender,” Haney said.
“The Judeo-Christian right cannot believe that the left could be that diabolically evil. Ah, but they can and they are,” Haney said.
“We see examples of it every day in our courts, legislative bodies, and even in our churches. Until this reality is recognized and addressed, the battle to save our republic will be short-lived.”
Defending Ryan
However, conservative GOP political strategist Constantin Querard told The Wanderer in a June 19 email:
“Intolerance may have found a home on the left, but the rest of the country is not immune. We now watch media that reinforces our personal worldview, society continues to decay (which results in both poorer behavior and greater stress as the stakes appear higher), outside groups use ever-escalating rhetoric in an effort to motivate us to contribute or support the cause of the day, and the net effect of all of it is that a lot of people on all sides are losing their ability to debate or even speak with people of differing viewpoints. That’s intolerance and it is a growing problem.
“It would be wrong to blast Speaker Ryan to call for unity after the shootings, instead of insisting that Democrats bend the knee and beg for forgiveness. I think the fact that that is your personal instinct reflects the degree to which you and so many others are so braced for combat as a full-time stance, that it becomes possible to lose sight of what is moral, right, or even simply decent. I have to guard against it myself,” Querard said.
“Men are shot, one is possibly dying, so kneeling together to pray is the appropriate and right thing to do. Especially if you are a leader of the country, which the speaker of the House is,” he said.
“There are plenty of partisans who will start pointing fingers and assigning blame, so there is no need for Speaker Ryan to do so.
“Within an hour or two of the shooting, everyone knew that the shooter was a Bernie Sanders volunteer who participated in Occupy Wall Street protests, wrote angry letters to the editor, and was in every other way a seemingly average angry liberal activist. Sanders himself denounced him on the Senate floor. Ryan did the right thing,” Querard said.
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