But, the more disturbing part of this line of thinking jumped out at me as I was reading some more in John Chodes excellent book Destroying The Republic: Jabez Curry and the Re-Education of the Old South. He has a good section on Ulysses S. Grant’s post-war mental transformation toward radical republicanism. And in it, he quotes Adam Badeau’s book Grant in Peace:

On the 18th of December, at the conclusion of his tour, Grant reported to the President that “the mass of thinking men of the South accepted the situation in good faith”; and while he recommended that a strong military force should still be retained in the Southern States, he declared his belief that “the citizens of that region are anxious to return to self-government within the Union as soon as possible.”

–Badeau, Grant in Peace

Do you think that the men and women of the South would be so quick to go along with the whims of a General if it was us that he was wanting to retain occupation over? I don’t think so. The South was occupied under military rule for years after the war ended. We were in the same position that Iraq and Afghanistan is now. We wanted the occupiers out of our land so we could get back to living our lives after they destroyed them. Let me re-phrase the above quote and see if it doesn’t make my point a bit clearer:

On the 18th of December, at the conclusion of his tour, Patreaus reported to President Bush that “the mass of thinking men of Afghanistan accepted the situation in good faith”; and while he recommended that a strong military force should still be retained in Iraq and Afghanistan, he declared his belief that “the citizens of that region are anxious to return to self-government as soon as possible.”

It’s always easy to find justification for military action after the fact. We can look back now and say that we “liberated” a million Iraqi’s from Saddam Hussein. Grant could also look back later after the war and say that he “liberated” a hundred thousand blacks from slavery. But, the fact remains that post-facto justifications don’t absolve from properly justifying our actions at the outset. Our military is there in Afghanistan now, doing what? Sitting around getting killed by random insurgency and destabilizing society by our very presence. And Iraq still has car bombs going off in Baghdad. Remember all the car bombs that struck Baghdad before we invaded? No, of course you don’t. Because that kind of street terrorism didn’t start until we got there.

If you are reading this and interpreting anything I said above as some kind of left-wing nutjob craziness then think again. I’m not anti-war. I’m anti-government. I’ll say it again: if we, as conservatives, don’t trust the government to do even the simplest of tasks then why would we trust them with guns and weapons of mass destruction? When wars need fighting then it’s every able-bodied man’s responsibility to grow a chest and go into battle. But, that’s a far cry from just placing unfettered loyalty in a government-run death machine that, evidently, nobody in the world can even come close to matching. I have many friends and family that are or used to be in the military. They have my love and respect. The government that puts them in harms way for stupid reasons does not.

It’s time for us as honest conservatives – and especially Southern conservatives – to re-learn the words of Thomas Jefferson:

“The Greeks and Romans had no standing armies, yet they defended themselves. The Greeks by their laws, and the Romans by the spirit of their people, took care to put into the hands of their rulers no such engine of oppression as a standing army. Their system was to make every man a soldier and oblige him to repair to the standard of his country whenever that was reared. This made them invincible; and the same remedy will make us so.”

–Thomas Jefferson to Thomas Cooper, 1814. ME 14:184

The last one is the most common reason that people give for not schooling at home. They list some personal reasons that they don’t feel they can. I’m not a homeschool Nazi. I think some of those reasons are actually legit. I’ve heard stories of people that just didn’t have enough personal initiative to pull it off and end up hurting their child’s education in the process. They get them home and then just fail to follow through on the actual teaching process. But I’ve also heard tons of stories of people who took the risk, not thinking they could do it, and turning out to be wonderful at it. Those people are usually the most vocal about anyone being able. The bottom line is: count the cost, but don’t be afraid to step out on faith. We do that with plenty of other big life decisions. Why not this?

Like I said, that freaks me out to no end, but it is also the sole reason this massive terrorist plot was thwarted and thousands of lives were saved on both sides of the pond. From the article:

Well, in this country that “covert” operation would have been outed by the New York Times and given the terrorists plenty of time to get away and change their plans so as not to be caught the next time around. Another quote:

That pretty much sums it up. In order to catch secret terrorists, carrying out secret plots using secret surveillance on us, we have to have secret programs, that carry out secret operations using secret surveillance of our own. It’s not rocket science unless you’re a liberal and then everything is rocket science.