Ever since the campaign started, he has been getting hammered by Obama’s No. 1 issue, the economy. And alas, for the sake of party unity, he has meekly accepted the role of Bush Junior. This has given the electorate the impression that their choice is between yet another free-spending Republican or a brave Democrat who will crack down on the moneyed interests in New York and their country club Republican friends in Washington – which is a masterpiece of semantic distortion.

What McCain must do immediately is to announce clearly, dramatically and repeatedly that he will be the fiscal opposite of President Bush, the anti-Bush. He must go way beyond pointing his finger at Obama and making vague assertions that he is a far-left liberal. (To which Obama could rightly reply, “Sticks and stones may break my bones. …”) Instead, he must get specific and pound away at the dollar costs of all the programs Obama has proposed or even spoken of favorably. He must memorize the main costs and be able to recite them rapid-fire, again and again. And then give totals.

You’ve heard it said that the national debt is almost $11 trillion now. But that’s another semantic masterpiece. It’s actually close to $112 trillion.

I had been screaming for several years – to anyone who would listen – that our total future obligations, which include Medicare and Social Security, were actually $65 trillion … about $20 trillion more than the combined value of all U.S. land, houses and corporations.

But that was before Medicare Part D. In a frenzy of compassion, congressional Democrats passed the law before anyone in Washington had read it or added up the cost. That’s anyone, including the Republican president who signed it.

Now it has been read. In 2007, the official government estimate of the future costs of Medicare and Social Security came in at $101.7 trillion. Problem: There is no governmental mattress with $101.7 trillion stuffed into it. Never was, never will be – unless somehow Santa Claus teams up with the Easter Bunny and the Tooth Fairy. Add in the interest-bearing part of the national debt, and you have over $111 trillion.

McCain must memorize these figures and put himself forth as a cost-cutter extraordinaire who won’t allow such deadly debts to pile up. In fact, during the first debate, he made a stumbling attempt to do just that. Did you hear him? “As president of the United States … I’ve got a pen [he took it out and held it up] … this one’s kind of old. … I’m gonna veto every single spending bill that comes across my desk.”

That’s a bold statement, but it was probably a spontaneous afterthought because I haven’t heard him repeat it. Yet it could have been the hallmark statement of the entire debate series. Instead, he looked ruefully at his own pen and offhandedly grumbled quietly, “This one’s kind of old.”

Friend, this is where you come in. Send John McCain a new pen! Send it now, so he can pull it out and show it dramatically in the next debate!

That will become his defining, iconic moment. And it will make it almost impossible for him to do what George Bush did, forgetting all his promises to hold down spending. President “Rubber-stamp” Bush vetoed zero bills in his first four years, and a paltry 12 bills so far in his second term.

In high contrast, President Roosevelt, a big-time spender and the father of the New Deal, still had the gumption to execute 635 vetoes in his three-plus terms. Truman had 250, Eisenhower had 181, and the champion bill-killer of all time, Grover Cleveland, had 170 in his first term plus 414 in his second, yet left office with broad and great respect.

Sadly, though, McCain’s staff told him last Sunday to drop the economy as his main issue. A major mistake. Rescue the man from his handlers! Hunt through your dustiest drawers and find the loudest, most unique pen you’ve got. (But keep it under ten inches or so, because the Commission on Presidential Debates would surely deem anything longer than that to be a prop, which isn’t allowed.) Send it to John McCain 2008, P.O. Box 16118, Arlington, VA 22215 – or 241 Russell Senate Office Building, Washington, DC 20510 (phone: 202/224-2235) for FedEx or UPS). Do it today!

You may even get to see history being made as Sen. McCain whips out your pen with a flourish, launches his new identity and destroys the Democrats’ No. 1 talking point.

My cup, dear friend, runneth over. The pile of papers on my desk was so deep this morning, I had to bring in a guy with a skip loader and a suicide squad of Islamists with C-4 explosives to unbury my keyboard.

Accordingly, I have requested an indefinite leave of absence from our guardians of the world’s cultural gates at WorldNetDaily.com. This will be my last column for a while. My date of return is uncertain, but I’m sure the world will scrape along without me somehow.

Meanwhile, you can keep track of my thoughts and adventures in either of two ways:

1. Check in at JimRutz.com and click on my blog site (or any of my sites) once in a while. My blog posts may be as erratic as Britney on a bad day, but drop by now and then, and eventually you’ll be duly rewarded.

2. Or let’s suppose you want to stay more current with me. But if I hit a busy spell and write no new website entries for a month, you don’t want to wear out your fingers, hunting through my sites for new stuff again and again. So here’s what you can do: Click on the “Notify Me” button installed on my landing page and blog site. That will bring you my RSS feed. (That stands for Really Simple Syndication.) An RSS feed is a great new timesaving mechanism. It will automatically send you an e-mail notice – usually a one-click link – every time I put something new onto one of the websites or my blog. The notice will be something like:

“Just found out the world will end tomorrow. Click HERE for details.”

“Also, check out my new, 300-page article on 14th Century French farming methods by clicking HERE.”

So, if you’re more turned on by eschatology than agriculture, you can click on that and skip the other. Like I said, RSS is a fast, painless way to get free updates. And if you ever decide you’re tired of my wheezings, you can always click on the Bail-Out Button.

Be forewarned: My website and blog site stuff will be more pointedly spiritual than my WND meanderings from politics to economics to the culture wars. My main participants will be card-carrying Christians. However, anybody can tune in. I echo the clever folks in Roswell, N.M., who now say on their entrance sign, “Welcome to Roswell … Wherever You’re From!”

It’s all God’s fault

The main reason for this sudden vanishing act is that the Lord has been putting more and more stuff on my plate – truly fantastic opportunities and challenges that are beyond what I ever dreamed of in my lifetime. As things grow, they could easily take up the rest of my life.

If you happen to be a citizen of Narnia, my word to you is, “Aslan is on the move!” Click on my link at the end of this column, and you’ll get a preview of what’s starting to explode in my life and around the world.

For one major example, I’m now part of a local team of fewer than 20 who reach out to anyone needing physical healing – or deliverance from spiritual oppressions of various sorts. Just since January, we’ve seen God heal several cancers, a couple of cases of osteonecrosis (severely disintegrating jawbones), plus other instances of healing totally incurable conditions like lupus, scleroderma, type-1 diabetes, post-polio syndrome and others I’ve forgotten.

We’re very ordinary folks – no professionals, no pastors, no shouting and no collections whatsoever. But we offer a quiet, open meeting about once a month in Colorado Springs, and if you or a friend needs help, please check out the time and place of the next meeting via either my landing site, or my blog site, then clicking on “Ministry Meetings.”

The true significance of what our little bunch is doing is this: We want to help you start a similar, miracle-producing team of ordinary people in your town. We want you to discover that fully dedicated, born-again Christians are empowered to do far, far more than what you’ve been told.

Lots of people who have read of the many miracles in my book “Megashift: Igniting Spiritual Power” have complained that most of those things are taking place overseas. Well, we’re starting to fix that. It looks like in a few years there will be thousands of small, home-based or office-based teams functioning as house churches (campus churches, etc.) all across North America. In agreement with top pollster George Barna, I’d say that by 2025, 65-70 percent of all U.S. Christians will be meeting in simple little fellowships: independent, interactive, non-hierarchical, empowering, life-changing and world-changing. The other 30-35 percent will still be in the pews, sitting and listening … and listening and listening.

Don’t get left behind

Well, this is it. It’s actually the end of my 100th column – perhaps a fitting point to take a break before I break into little pieces myself.

Visit my blog site. I can’t promise you a punctual column each week, but I can promise you excitement as it happens. History’s greatest adventures lie just ahead. Keep in touch. You ain’t seen nothin’ yet!

Get Rutz’s “Megashift”

So you want to retire on your stock market profits? OK, it can be done, but you’d better pick those stocks carefully. If you had relied on the rising tide of the Dow 30 Industrials to lift your boat for the past 97 years, you would have gained a pathetic 0.8 percent per year after deducting for inflation and capital gains taxes.

The main problem, see, is those darned dips. Like, if you’d owned an average portfolio of mutual funds in 1929, you’d have waited till 1953 to recoup your losses, even in nominal dollars. Today, buy-and-hold is for complete idiots. And I suspect it would work equally well for incomplete idiots.

Don’t listen to those exuberant shouts about the Dow (13,649 today) being at record highs. It’s not. If you’d bought 10 shares each of all the 30 industrials in 2001, you’d have lost over half your hard-earned money by now. Moral: Never invest in a statistical mirage. Remember, DJIA stands for “Doesn’t Jibe with Inflation-Adjusted.”

And a word about those 30 Dow biggies: They are selected on the basis of being truly representative of industrials. But if they falter over time, they are replaced by some stock that the marketmeisters consider more representative.

Yes, “more representative.” For extra credit, do your own translation. Keep reading this column, and you’ll eventually earn a doctorate in semantics. (You won’t get one, but you will have earned it.)

So now what?

Sorry if I’m eroding your faith in investing, but stock markets (and even bond markets) have more booby traps than the universe has black holes. Playing the markets is a horrible way to learn about investing. Don’t “play.” If you’re going into the markets, do it right. Get top advice (see below).

Also, heeding the pop recos of glossy newsstand magazines is a great way to ruin the rest of your life. Contrarian analysts have demonstrated, year after year, that the general recommendations of the glossies are reliable counter-indicators; that is, do the opposite of what they tell you, and you’ll usually come out ahead of the pack. For instance, when you see the ad-fat money mags filling the stands with covers screaming about the hottest bull market of our time, hit the silk. Run to the phone at Olympic speed and bail out of everything except your shorts. (That means, get out of everything but stocks you’ve sold short.)

Books on investing are no better than mags, and they bear the added disadvantage of going quietly out of date.

But before you start any investing at all, clean up your act. Get your ducks in a row. Consider the timeless advice of Sun-Sentinel columnist Humberto Cruz:

“Keep track of your income and expenses; live within your means and handle credit wisely; pay yourself first; build an emergency reserve and get adequate insurance; set specific financial goals, with a price tag and deadline for each; and build a diversified portfolio that’s suitable to your goals and risk tolerance. Invest for the long term; minimize your taxes, but focus not on lowering taxes per se, but on getting the most after-tax return or income. …”

Invest according to your DNA

There is no ideal investment for everyone.

• If you’re a sky-is-falling scaredy-cat, consider buying a duplex, moving in and renting out the other half, letting your tenant pay for the whole building.

• If you’re a savvy and patient homeboy who knows his turf, find a big plot of raw land lying squarely in the path of inevitable growth. Buy it and wait for developers to come banging on your door. (The broader advice in this vein is the mantra of Peter Lynch, former head of the $14 billion Magellan Fund: “Invest in what you know.” Think: Is there some business field that you already know inside out?)

• If your dream home is a fallout shelter, you may be happiest buying some form of gold. A good source: Swiss America, which advertises daily on these pages. I know them, and they’re good guys.

• If you’d like to roll up your sleeves and work full time in your own lucrative, Christian-oriented business, take a careful look at Dr. Gary North’s eye-opening presentation on day care.

• If you want to widen your scope to stocks, bonds and commodities, but you’re nervous about going it alone, pick one of the top gurus as rated by rating icon Mark Hulbert and follow his or her instructions faithfully. (Note: I don’t fancy your chances of great success if you just use an ordinary stockbroker.)

• If all that sounds too time-consuming, and you just want to get rich in the smallest possible number of minutes, the hottest adviser on Wall Street right now, to my knowledge, is No. 1-rated market timer Dr. Stephen Leeb. His Aggressive Trader Portfolio has been producing a 24.7 percent profit per average trade (average holding time: 28 days). Big Fat Warning: Steve is an old and valued friend, and I often do work for him. (I’ve ghostwritten for over a dozen of the top U.S. investment authorities, and he’s my favorite.)

But what if you just never seem to have any capital?

Stop whining, get a better job (even if you have to retrain), cut way back on expenses and start saving now.

If necessary, get tough with yourself. Stop eating out. Sell your big toys. Move to a poorer area where you may have to put up with peeling paint, crummy schools and a higher risk of petty crime. Whatever it takes.

I once visited a surgeon at her nice home in the hills above Whittier, Calif. I found she didn’t have rich parents to get her started. In fact, she was orphaned at six – with a 4-year-old brother to feed and care for. To stay alive, she gathered sticks and sold them as firewood in her native village in the Peruvian Andes. But if she was able to earn three centavos in a day, she and her brother would somehow get by on two … and save the third for her future education.

If she could make it, you can too.

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Today we delicately approach the profound sociological question, “Why do some people disagree so vehemently with Jim Rutz, who must certainly rank among the most likable public personae of our time?”

After two years of writing this peaceful pillar of prose and treading oh so lightly on the toes of carefully selected interest groups, I have arrived at some objectively derived, scientific conclusions.

My careful analysis of e-mails from readers coincides neatly with my lifetime study of media reports on the various screwloose factions treading the world stage. Briefly put, I have found that their deviations from the gold standard of sound judgment (me) derive not only from differences of opinion, but more deeply from their severely pathological profiles. In lesser words, they’re a bunch of jerks.

This disinterested conclusion is all the more valid because of my broad range of sampling. Over these past two irenic years, I have touched gently upon the little foibles of liberals, homosexuals, Muslims, radical feminists, Nazi retreads, atheists, FDA bureauquacks, lawyers, Marxists, AP reporters, FEMA officials, Democrats, New Agers, politically correct trendoids and most recently, Hindus.

I cannot claim my analysis has defined all these groups distinctly; the overlaps among them are simply too massive. In fact, their psychospiritual distinctives often get lost in the dark swirl of misanthropic bile, rather like the inky clouds squirting from a distressed octopus.

The ever-reliable Thomas Sowell, in his May 16 column, noted that “for many on the left, indignation is not a sometime thing. It is a way of life.

“How often have you seen conservatives or libertarians take to the streets, shouting angry slogans? How often have conservative students on campus shouted down a visiting speaker or rioted to prevent the visitor from speaking at all? …”

No, their problem is not so much a difference of opinion; it’s an absence of soundly ordered facts. And being chronically bereft of good arguments, they instinctively revert to the only arsenal they have left: vituperation and violence. What we have here is not a failure to communicate, but a severe shortage of anything worth saying at all. So lacking any big bombs of logic, they resort to splitting up society (rich vs. poor is one favorite) and pitting them against each other. Weapons of mass distraction!

Often these weapons are launched with a telltale barrage of noisy expletives. Case in point: On Dec. 12, 2006, I offered a few quiet observations on some likely chemical causes of homosexuality. Not the social or moral causes, mind you, just the physiological.

Well. The reaction of the Internet homosexual community was voluminous. A few of the e-mails I received were polite, but about 90 percent were energetically insulting and studiously filthy. There was an occasional bow toward evidence and logic, but mostly it was wall-to-wall invective, questioning my ancestry and my I.Q. – and suggesting that I go do some things that I frankly had never even considered physically possible. It brought to mind Huckleberry Finn’s observation on one character’s outburst of a stupendous string of profanities: “Somebody said it was as good as Sowbelly Hagan in his best days, but I reckon that were stretching it a bit.”

Lest you miss my point, I am saying that the interest groups I’ve mentioned above are composed mostly of people who are morally adrift – not mere victims of aberrant ideas, but devotedly evil in at least some respects. Their hate-riddled tirades and occasional vulgar or offensive tantrums are just the visible part of their ungodly edifice of twisted concepts and values.

After my last week’s column, which was down on Hinduism, I was surprised to find that I have a larger following in India than I thought. The range of expletives from my Hindu correspondents was only slightly less broad than that of my homosexual fans. And given the fact that English is a second language for most of them, they did a remarkable job of dredging up some impressively obscene tirades.

Make no mistake, a majority of the e-mails I get in response to my columns from homosexuals, Muslims, Hindus and some others are seething with hatred. And the odd part of that? They constantly accuse me of being hateful! The irony never strikes them.

Such folks reject not only conservative economics, libertarian politics and Christian philosophy, but our precious, underlying foundations of polite behavior and moral restraint. The issue isn’t just right vs. wrong, but good vs. bad. And that’s the problem behind the problem. (For further research, can anyone send me some good statistics on how many felons and drug addicts are Republicans?)

P.S. Did you ever notice that (apart from show biz types) beautiful women and good-looking guys are usually conservatives?

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A reliable March 25 report from the All-India Christian Council:

A Christian preacher is dragged by the police from a prayer function, bundled into their police vehicle, brutally attacked at the police station in full public view and remanded to police custody. When his followers object to the inhumane treatment, they are caned, leaving many badly injured. After four days of incarceration, he is let out on bail, driven across the border in the name of safety and thrown out like a disposable commodity. Looks like an episode taken out from a film script? No, this is what happened to Pastor Rajender Chauhan of Jaunpur in Uttar Pradesh!

Do read the rest of this one-page report.

The story has eerie overtones of an event from 2,000 years ago, doesn’t it? A humble preacher of good news draws crowds of thousands who come to hear him and be healed of their diseases. Then through trickery, he is captured by the authorities, who beat him mercilessly and put him in prison – all because of his good deeds and the great healing miracles, which they cannot match.

Hinduism has hit rock bottom

Being totally incapable of performing any healing miracles, much less the hundreds of thousands of miracles now being done in the name of Jesus Christ in India, Hindu leaders are now resorting to their ultimate line of defense: street violence and brutality. On a daily basis.

Oh, and when Christians offer them the Gospel, they love to bring legal charges: “paying people to convert” or “forcing people to convert”! These charges are insane, of course; no Indian evangelist would think of doing such a stupid, counterproductive thing. But because their own religion is so bankrupt and hollow, Hindus just cannot imagine anyone converting to a different religion for any other reason than bribery or force!

Hindus have no arguments that make much sense. Their 330 million gods (yes, that’s the accepted number) are totally imaginary. And none of them love the Indians!

That’s why probably over 2 million Indians became Christians in 2005 – and the numbers are growing so fast that they haven’t been able to count 2006. But as I said in “Megashift,” (page 15), as soon as word gets out that the brand new (since 1995) Indian house-church movement is a family-friendly, community-friendly, India-friendly network of friendships (not a Western institution), at least 70 million who now secretly admire Jesus in their hearts will become Christians overnight.

And that’s only the beginning. Longer term, India will be a Christian nation … and that will turn out to be a vast blessing to them – spiritually, culturally and economically.

In the meantime, we have lots of work to do. And you can help. Please send a brief, polite letter to the prime minister of India, asking him to repeal the anti-conversion laws in various Indian states. Below you’ll find my own letter for general background. But don’t just copy it; write your own! Dr. Singh can be contacted via his website.

The Honorable Dr. Manmohan Singh
Prime Minister of India
PMO, South Block
Central Secretariat, New Delhi, India

May 22, 2007

Dear Prime Minister Singh:

As a columnist for the world’s largest independent news website and an occasional tourist who has visited every corner of your great nation, I am distressed to read the rapidly multiplying reports of violence and rape against Christians in India. This is not the India I have respected and admired.

Surely you must realize that Indian Christians have never sponsored violence or struck back at those who strike them. These harmless people have built hospitals and colleges and orphanages for you. They have lived alongside you for two millennia and brought only good to the nation. That is why almost every enlightened country on the Earth (except a few backward Islamic regimes) has seen fit to allow them to remain as a loving, health-giving element of their population. Even atheistic China, with its tight restrictions on religion, has found that the over 100 million Christians there are model citizens who bring peace in the workplace, avoid drugs and other crimes, and never launch demonstrations against the government.

By any measure, India is one of the world’s truly outstanding democracies. It does not need a reputation as a bastion of hate for vicious, anti-Christian mobs. India still has a popular image among Americans as a land of peace and beauty. Please do your best to preserve that precious and delicate identity. By my estimate, it took Americans about 20 years to forget the damage done by your sudden takeover of Goa in 1961, when our newspapers ridiculed and laughed at the shattered image of a peaceful India. Unless you arouse yourself and your fellow leaders, the damage this time will be far worse and longer lasting.

During this exciting boom-time in your international service industries, the last thing you want to do is give Western corporations any reason to back off and look elsewhere for partners in commerce. I urge you in the strongest terms to take sensible steps to repeal or override the new anti-conversion laws in your various states and to encourage local police not to aid and abet the violent religious groups who are perverting the Hindu traditions which for centuries had set a high standard worldwide of peaceful coexistence.

Sincerely yours,

James H. Rutz
Columnist, WorldNetDaily
JRutzWND@jimrutz.com

P.S. to WND readers: For extra Brownie points (redeemable for a hearty slap on the back next time we meet), you may also write Mrs. Sonia Gandhi, president, Indian National Congress / chairperson, UPA; 10, Janpath, New Delhi, India. Contact Gandhi via her website.

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1. Why do Americans love to elect liars?

When President Nixon was being trashed for his lapses in forthrightness in 1974, young Bill Clinton was running for Congress. He staked out his moral high ground in a speech, saying, “If a president of the United States ever lied to the American people, he should resign.” Then in 1998, he firmly declared, “I did not have sexual relations with that woman.”

This class act was preceded in 1978 and 1979 by Clinton’s ingenious wife, who in 10 months turned $1,000 into almost $100,000 by studiously applying the cattle futures trading advice in the Wall Street Journal, she calmly explained.

Will somebody tell me what page of the Journal carries futures trading advice, especially for novices?

2. Where are all those missing links?

The liberal media keep reminding us that only hillbillies and mindless religious fanatics deny evolution. Of course, polls keep showing that at least two-thirds of us still suspect God had something to do with the process, so there must be a lot of us hillbillies out there.

Now, microevolution is easy to accept. Those little disease bugs keep outsmarting every vaccine we throw at them. Apparently they’ve all read their Nietzsche: “That which does not kill me makes me stronger.”

But macroevolution, where one species morphs into another, is harder to swallow. It relies heavily on the existence of missing links – not a rare specimen or two, but hundreds of thousands of them. The hillsides should be strewn with the remains of millions of transitional life forms. Alas, our stalwart Darwinists have come up short in that department. It takes a monumental leap of dopey faith to get from protozoa to fish to Jessica Alba. Last I checked, the missing link count was hovering around zero.

3. Where are the fatwas on Osama?

All those peace-loving Muslims we hear about must be hiding under rocks. Otherwise, they would have taken the proper steps to clean up their global image by issuing a death sentence for every terrorist on the planet. Hey, guys, I’m waiting.

4. Where are the showcase success stories for multiculturalism?

Now that the “Christian soldiers” in Northern Ireland are making nice, peace must have fallen upon the entire world, right? Brotherly love and cultural enrichment must be the new lifestyle of every nation that has a mix of disparate populations with varying cultures, right?

Well, maybe not. The exact reason any culture remains distinct over time is that it has been strong enough to resist assimilation or conquest by its neighbors. I’ve been to dozens of countries, and everywhere I go, I see attempts at mixing cultures producing conflict, not greater good will.

My conclusion: Multiculturalism is a code word for the hazy idea that American culture is responsible for most of the evil in the world and must be replaced by a relentless infusion of foreign values until it collapses. Apart from that, it’s an oxymoron.

5. Why hasn’t homosexuality been exposed for the horror it is?

If I were to invent a street drug that:

• Shortens the life of its average addict by 20 years

• Compels the typical addict to have sex with hundreds of total strangers (I’ve heard the number 550 – still checking it out)

• Spreads a horrible disease that kills 30 million people

… I would shoot past Osama bin Laden and go to the No. 1 spot on the list of World’s Worst Enemies.

6. Why don’t the media tell the truth about global warming?

Sure, the Earth is getting a bit warmer in recent years, but it’s a cyclical thing. Greenhouse gases, perhaps a main culprit behind all this, are not manmade. Depending on whether or not you include water vapor in the mix, manmade stuff comprises an insignificant 0.28 percent of all greenhouse gases. The Kyoto Protocol is nonsense.

7. Why won’t the media face abortion?

With all the juicy gore on TV, including hundreds of thousands of dramatic murders, why have they never shown even one abortion? And why have all those brilliant social analysts never made the obvious connection between the looming collapse of Social Security and the deaths of 45 million little would-be taxpayers during the 34 years since Roe vs. Wade?

8. Why aren’t resurrections from the dead noteworthy?

In “Megashift,” I’ve painstakingly documented cases of stone cold dead people coming back to life – through the name of Jesus Christ – in 52 countries in recent years. I even included names, phone numbers, e-mail addresses and a few photos. Hey guys, what more do you want?

9. Why haven’t academics discovered that the world is very rapidly becoming all-Christian?

Again in “Megashift,” I’ve done the math. Jesus is winning, Muhammad is losing (along with atheism, Buddhism and Hinduism). Although straight-line projections NEVER go in a straight line, the entire population of the world would be born-again Christians, under current trends, by 2032. Isn’t that worth a line in the newspapers somewhere?

And finally, the most vexing puzzle of all:

10. How come there’s never time to do it right, but there’s always time to do it over?

TO: Angela Merkel
Chancellor, Bundesrepublik Deutschland

FROM: James H. Rutz
Author, ?bermensch, crotchety columnist

Hi, I hear you’re locking up your best citizens again. Tsk. First, it was those pesky Jews, now it’s your top students. What next, Madam Chancellor? Armbands for Baptists? Public burnings of John Wayne videos? Auditions for the role of Lord Haw-Haw in the movie version of “Mein Kampf”? Where will it all end, Madam?

Those of us safely outside the concertina-wired borders of your fantasy Fatherland are fascinated to observe the delirious birth pangs of your new Germanic consciousness, the 3 1/2th Reich.

You could hardly have shot yourself in the foot more exquisitely than you did in your choice of the poster-child victim, Melissa Busekros, one of the most innocent, charming 15-year-old girls since Anne Frank. What loving American parent could look at a photo of her sweet face without wanting to reach out to adopt her, to protect her from the squad of jack-booted Thought Police that swarmed into her quiet home and took her away to your locked-down mental asylum for the grim crime of “schoolaphobia” … for the horrendous, twisted desire to be (gasp!) homeschooled?!

Madam Chancellor, you and your ingrown bureaucracy of edukrauts seem to have a little problem with the 21st century. The age of videotape and blogging is a hostile milieu for Nazi-style lies, like your infamous official declaration that Melissa was happier in your asylum and (later) her state-sponsored foster home than with her own family. That lie was delightfully blown sky-high when the scrappy little thing celebrated the night of her 16th birthday (a significant legal milestone in Germany) by going over the wall of her foster home and arriving unannounced on the doorstep of her delighted parents three hours after midnight.

Your clumsy style of lying calls to mind the wartime report of the U.S. Office of Strategic Services. Describing the Weltanschaung of your late predecessor, Mr. Hitler, it said:

“His primary rules were: Never allow the public to cool off; never admit a fault or wrong; never concede that there may be some good in your enemy; never leave room for alternatives; never accept blame; concentrate on one enemy at a time and blame him for everything that goes wrong; people will believe a big lie sooner than a little one; and if you repeat it frequently enough, people will sooner or later believe it.”

That clause about “never leave room for alternatives” rings a loud bell. One of your most inept officials commented on another family, after the Romeike children were forced into public school by police escort, by boldly stating, “The government is working to avoid future conflicts over homeschooling with one particular family by looking for possibilities to bring the religious convictions of the family into line with the unalterable school attendance requirement.”

Unalterable? Nein! You have a Bundestag in Berlin that sits and cranks out new laws by the carload, month after month. Of course you can alter the law. And in this particular case, you will eventually alter the law … because you’re on a collision course with 21st century enlightenment. The basic question is: “Who will win, the people of today’s Germany or Der F?hrer, ruling from the grave via his 1938 decree that took strict control over the education of all German children?”

Wolfgang Drautz, your consul general, has complained that your government “has a legitimate interest in countering the rise of parallel societies that are based on religion or motivated by different worldviews and in integrating minorities into the population as a whole.” [emphasis added]

Integrating minorities? Tell Herr Drautz he’s a classic luftmensch. You already have millions of unassimilated Turkish Muslims in Germany who have set up their own de facto legal districts in many cities, using Shariah law instead of German law. Why not go after them? Could it be that Christian homes are easier targets for cowards?

Parallel societies? Well, madam, let me tell you just a bit about them. You fear them so greatly that you are willing to trash your last 62 years of post-war image repairing, yet you’re missing the point that the homeschooling community is both parallel to and far superior to your own society, and they represent your best hope and best model for the future of Germany.

By and large, homeschooled kids don’t do drugs, don’t get in trouble with the law, don’t have psychological hangups or suicidal tendencies, don’t have sexual diseases or illegitimate babies, don’t waste their evenings watching junk TV and don’t drop out before graduation. All in all, they’re happy campers.

Instead, they learn to think for themselves, take on big challenges, look at life with eyes unclouded by government indoctrination programs, finish their homework hours before their public-school friends and most of all, they learn history, math, literature, science and the other basics far, far better than the inmates over at P.S. 138, who are bored out of the skulls by your dumbed-down, social-engineering curriculum.

After the third or fourth grade, they test one grade level higher than government-schooled students. And by the eighth grade, the average homeschooler tests at grade 12!

That’s why we have roughly 2 million homeschooled children in America, growing at a rate of 10-15 percent a year.

Madam Chancellor, wake up and smell the homegrown flowers. And please call off your storm troopers. They’re a disgrace to the great land that my ancestors called home.

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