By DEXTER DUGGAN
There’s no perfect time to live or perfect person to be, but pop singer Dionne Warwick’s lilting I Say a Little Prayer (for You), successfully released in 1967 for a general audience, evokes an everyday trust and spiritual awareness that seem harder to grasp today.
Whether she’s combing her hair, choosing her dress for the day, running for the bus, or taking a coffee break at work, the lyrics have the singer sparing a moment to say a prayer for her boyfriend. This wasn’t intended as an inspirational tune for a Christian audience but for the wider society and its mainstream line of thought.
Nor did the songwriters say that only an outstandingly religious person would be fit to perform it.
The Sixties weren’t simple times. To name a few: President John F. Kennedy was assassinated four years before this song’s release, Asia’s Vietnam War wasn’t an easy fight against Communist expansionism, and the vice president who succeeded Kennedy in the White House, Democrat Lyndon Johnson, was scandalously corrupt although not publicly known to be so at the time.
The very next year, civil rights crusader the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. was assassinated in Memphis, in April 1968. His death was announced the same evening by the late president’s brother, Democratic New York Sen. Robert F. Kennedy, to a black audience that briefly screamed in shock. Back in those days, people didn’t have cellphones to provide instant news.
A record of Kennedy’s remarks in Indianapolis at the traumatic time showed just the opposite of potential vengeance, retribution, and venom against conservative Republicans.
“For those of you who are black and are tempted to be filled with hatred and distrust at the injustice of such an act, against all white people, I can only say that I feel in my own heart the same kind of feeling,” Kennedy said.
“I had a member of my family killed, but he was killed by a white man. But we have to make an effort in the United States, we have to make an effort to understand, to go beyond these rather difficult times.
“My favorite poet was Aeschylus,” the senator continued. “He wrote: ‘In our sleep, pain which cannot forget falls drop by drop upon the heart until, in our own despair, against our will, comes wisdom through the awful grace of God’.”
Fifty-one years later, on August 7, conservative radio host Hugh Hewitt recalled Kennedy’s uplifting words in Indianapolis but said that’s not the language of the seething left today: “Bobby Kennedy’s spirit is not alive on the left.”
Only two months after King’s killing, Kennedy died in Los Angeles after being fatally shot upon winning the 1968 California Democratic presidential primary election. Shocks to the political system were to take their toll. Over following decades, the Democratic Party leadership was wrested away by anti-establishment radicals, with appalling results.
By the summer of 2019 various prominent Democrats and their friends warned that the party was in danger of losing the 2020 presidential election to incumbent Republican Donald Trump, despite enormous headwinds against him.
The Washington Examiner reported that on August 2, left-wing TV host Bill Maher warned viewers, “All the Democrats have to do to win is to come off less crazy than Trump — and, of course, they’re blowing it! Coming across as unserious people who are going to take away all your money so migrants from Honduras can go to college for free and get a major in ‘America sucks’.”
Yes, with his reference to tax-paid college for Central American border violators, Maher actually defied political correctness by going so far as to mock unhinged Democrat presidential hopefuls for pledging to shower even more U.S. benefits on illegal aliens.
Hardly had Maher spoken, though, than a deranged young gunman killed 22 people at a Walmart store in El Paso, a city, of course, on the international line with Mexico.
Never bashful about putting every crisis to raw political use, leftists quickly declared that people must never refer factually and truthfully to the massive invasion of the U.S. by unauthorized entrants as an “invasion” lest they stir racism and murder. Just fantasize that they’re only “tourists” or “dinner guests” or maybe “sightseers” and the problem will end!
No, not the never-confronted problem of corruption and socialism back in the homelands; just the problem of political embarrassment for Democratic manipulators caught with their hands stuffing the ballot box for the new arrivals.
Very early the next morning, August 4, a different young male killer far away in Dayton, Ohio, fatally shot nine people enjoying themselves in an entertainment area on the weekend.
Probably not remarkably at all, the self-blinded, Trump-hating dominant media quickly declared that the president was responsible for both slaughters. Not only did they lack proof of this accusation; the social-media evidence that the assailants provided showed the opposite.
Nevertheless, Trump-hating politicians declared that the awful president shouldn’t even visit the grieving cities to offer condolences or respect. Trump did visit on August 7, but imagine the assertions of callousness that would have been hurled his way if he had stayed away.
Just like after the synagogue murders in Pittsburgh last October. Trump’s foes raved that he must stay away from the city, but even the medical staff that had assisted at the tragedy obviously were pleased to meet him. Rabbi Jeffrey Myers said the president always was welcome to visit.
The Dayton shooter was a far-leftist yearning for socialism, a man whose political heroes would be found at the current Democratic presidential debates.
A manifesto attributed to the Texas gunman attacked unchecked immigration and also bemoaned the ills that leftists bewail — including environmental destruction, arrogant, unchecked corporations, automation destroying jobs, and the need for a reduced population, a historic goal of leftist-beloved organizations Negative Population Growth and Zero Population Growth.
“If we can get rid of enough people, then our way of life can become more sustainable,” his manifesto said.
He expressed admiration for The Lorax, an environmentalist tale by Dr. Seuss.
But if one was looking for astounding declarations, the anti-Trump legions couldn’t be beat, the guys who daily declare that Trump is another Adolf Hitler who just hasn’t been able to work his full will yet.
The conservative Washington Free Beacon was among sites drawing attention to left-wing MSNBC’s analyst Frank Figliuzzi finding scary significance in Trump ordering flags to be flown at half-mast for victims of the Texas and Ohio attacks.
The Free Beacon reported on August 7 that Figliuzzi, a former FBI assistant director for counterintelligence, said it was relevant that Trump’s order specified that the flags fly this way until August 8, or 8/8.
“The numbers 88 are very significant in neo-Nazi and white supremacy movement,” Figliuzzi said. “Why? Because the letter ‘H’ is the eighth letter of the alphabet, and to them the numbers 8-8 together stand for ‘Heil Hitler.’ So we’re going to be raising the flag back up at dusk on 8/8.”
Of course, for this kind of vast-conspiracy theorizing to have any meaning, unseen plotters would have had to ensure that at least one of the attacks occurred only a few days before August 8. If it had been, say, on October 20 or February 18, the 88 numerological significance would have been lost.
Apparently fearing how nonsensical their venom against Trump has become, now they drag out their Ouija boards, tarot cards, and magical crystals to prove what serious-minded social critics they are.
But who takes them seriously anyway? Every weekend liberal Democrat-run cities with strong gun-control laws suffer dozens of victims wounded and dead from shootings, but this isn’t played as national news.
Golly, whom would editors blame? Their hero from Chicago Barack Obama and his political allies? Dozens of deaths are an outrage only when it’s politically useful in their eyes, and their headlines.
As powerful as is the argument to keep guns out of the hands of criminals, that’s already illegal. And to strip legal weapons from law-abiding citizens only puts them more at the mercy of lawbreakers.
National conservative columnist Quin Hillyer told The Wanderer: “I’m not a gun aficionado, but the surest way to make me want and buy a gun is to tell me you’ll take away my right to have it. As a line of defense against all sorts of potential ills, guns are part and parcel of every person’s right to self-preservation.
“That’s why the right to bear arms is recognized in the Constitution — not as an offensive right, but a defensive one, to save my life and that of other innocents,” Hillyer said. “It is a stain on modern liberals that they want to extirpate this constitutional right while inventing a right to kill innocents in the womb via abortion. Their outlook is morally backward.”
Conservative Republican political consultant Constantin Querard told The Wanderer: “A split Supreme Court ruled in favor of an originalist approach to the Second Amendment several years ago in the DC v. Heller decision. But that 5-4 decision was in 2008 and today’s court is likely more solid (albeit still a 5-4 court) than that one was, so any changes in the law have to be able to satisfy the requirements of Heller.
“That means that the Second Amendment still means what it was originally supposed to mean — good news for law-abiding citizens,” Querard said. “Or I’ll put it in terms Democrats will understand — ‘If you like your gun, you can keep your gun!’
“It is a valid point to see how the left regularly attacks actual rights that are enumerated in the Constitution, like the First Amendment, the Second Amendment, the Tenth Amendment, and so on, while trying to push through a radical agenda in the name of ‘rights’ that don’t exist anywhere in our founding documents,” he said.
“They can do this because they often hold these documents in disdain and use them only as props in their process,” Querard added.
While the gun deaths of dozens or hundreds of people bring floods of crocodile tears in the swamp, what of tens of millions of deaths of innocent victims?
Any arrogant leftist who dares to lecture anyone else about gun violence likely is in screeching full support of torturing and tearing off the limbs, poisoning the hearts, and sucking out the brains of countless defenseless preborn babies.
Big Prayers Are Needed
The July/August issue of Amac Magazine, the periodical of the Association of Mature American Citizens, includes an article titled, “The Left’s Obsession with Infanticide.” It includes a full-page color photo of bad Catholic and House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D., Calif.) with members of the Democratic Women’s Caucus and the Pro-Choice Caucus on Capitol Hill.
The article marks the latest leap further into permissive abortion that now includes infanticide. Phony Catholic Pelosi is speaking into microphones at a lectern that is labeled, “Equal Access to Abortion, Everywhere.”
Yet Pelosi and her swampish minions dare to proclaim how magnificent are their morals, and how awful are Trump’s.
When Nancy and her Dems crawled onto the back of the abortion tiger, they may have thought it was a cute little cub they could manage, but they dare not get off now lest it decide to add them to its feasts of baby flesh.
It has been only 52 years since Americans sang along about saying a little prayer. Awful things have happened since, and many big prayers are needed. Every day and everywhere.
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