# 125
IN DEFENSE OF COMMON SENSE
By Hetty Gray
September 26, 2012
“Second Story Man”
When you hear this term, most of you think of a home burglary and access over a roof, but there is another, more ominous meaning currently.
Reminisce a bit and return to early 2009. We faced an economic mess with a new occupant at 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue. More and more people were losing their jobs and the answer we received? “Pour federal money” into the situation and it will improve.
The first story we got was wrong. The second story — as Paul Harvey would have put it, the rest of the story, although never properly acknowledged as truth — was that things became worse. The claims made are hollow. Drilling has been on private land, not federal land. Executive orders and regulations are the order of the day. It doesn’t work, folks. It is a pipe dream.
You cannot resolve debt by incurring more of it. It just doesn’t work, no matter how much someone pushes it as the proper thing to do. Jobs do not appear magically when federal dollars flow. Personally, I found the term used comical: “shovel ready”.
Consider the plethora of signs that attribute public projects to the Recovery Act. One might ask, “Just how much those signs cost?” The project is the goal, so why an expensive road sign? If the sign had said, “This sign cost hundreds of dollars to inform you that your federal government has no common sense at all when it comes to money!” It reminds me of an alleged philanthropist who insists on putting his or her name on anything donated. Identity is everything to those people, as it is to this administration.
Since brevity is the soul of wit, I give you a second, and most recent, instance and then you can mull over the information and come to your own conclusion.
The first story of September 11, 2012, is that the torture and murder of our Ambassador to Libya and three other brave Americans is chalked up to a very amateur video that originated, ostensibly, from California. Even after Secretary of State Clinton said that the attack was terrorism, Obama continued to cite an ongoing “investigation.” The video story was trumpeted by the administration until it could not ignore the facts. Oh, how inconvenient — facts. They are lethal to those with an agenda based on disinformation. The truth is that the consulate attack was premeditated and perpetrated by Islamic terrorists and planned to fall on the 11th anniversary of the 9/11 attacks. The President of Libya stated the facts while our president blamed a video and the supposed insult to Muslims.
It’s too bad that the Muslims don’t adopt that policy when it teaches its small children that Jews are pigs and deserved to be slaughtered. Their animosity toward Christians isn’t lost on me, either. Try building a church in the Middle East today and you will ignite a firestorm — and riots.
Well, I am tired of the “second story man.”
Give me someone who acts on principle and facts — not on feelings. I will never apologize for the fact that untold numbers of Americans have fought and died to give others the opportunity to live as free people. I will never question the Founding Fathers’ wisdom when they wrote the U.S. Constitution to protect us and bless us with a gem of a republic.
It’s time for us to take the high road. State the facts. If they hurt, so be it. Act on facts. Judge people by their actions. If you can’t trust your leaders to speak the truth, you can’t trust them at all. I don’t want to have to worry about the first story I hear. I don’t want that lingering dread that a second story looms — a story that cannot be ignored because it IS the truth.
A second story doesn’t deserve a second chance. Think about it.