Obey or die

This is the complete text of an article that was published today (January 26, 2015) in the Washington Examiner.  Both of the links that are in these paragraphs were in their article.  I made some comments about the statements in this article at the bottom of this page.

Joint Chiefs of Staff Chairman Gen. Martin Dempsey has established an essay competition to honor the late Saudi King Abdullah bin Abdulaziz, the Pentagon announced Monday.

The competition, to be hosted at the National Defense University over the next academic year, will focus on issues related to the Arab and Muslim worlds, according to the official DOD News.

"This is an important opportunity to honor the memory of the king, while also fostering scholarly research on the Arab-Muslim world, and I can think of no better home for such an initiative than NDU," Dempsey said in a statement.

Abdullah, 90, who ruled since 2005 and was the power behind the throne of his ailing predecessor, King Fahd bin Abdulaziz for a decade before that, died late Thursday and was succeeded by his brother and crown prince, Salman bin Abdulaziz.

Dempsey met the king in 2001, when he served as an adviser to the Saudi Arabian National Guard, which Abdullah commanded.

"In my job to train and advise his military forces, and in our relationship since, I found the king to be a man of remarkable character and courage," Dempsey said.

Though Abdullah was undeniably a key U.S. ally in the Middle East as head of his oil-rich kingdom, the official U.S. response to his death has also drawn criticism by dissidents in the Arab world and human rights groups.

President Obama is cutting short his visit to India to pay his respects to King Salman in Riyadh on Tuesday, and praise for Abdullah from U.S. officials has been effusive.

Saudi Arabia is an absolute monarchy where women are treated like children under the law, religions other than Islam are forbidden and beheadings for even relatively minor crimes are common.  As king, Abdullah pursued a reform program that was relatively liberal by Saudi standards, but glacially slow compared to expectations raised by the Arab Spring — or by international human rights standards.

"We have to question the integrity of those in the media and ruling classes who are now eulogizing King Abdullah as though he were worthy of admiration," the American Islamic Forum for Democracy said in a statement.

Following orders

Every uniformed U.S. soldier must obey the orders of his superior officers.  That includes officers, and it even includes the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff.

When any member of the U.S. military is given an order that he does not want to obey, he has six choices.

• He can ignore the reasons he doesn't like the order and then do whatever he's been ordered to do,
• He can make a formal claim that the order is illegal and that therefore, he has no legal obligation to obey it, 
• He can ask an officer whose rank is higher than the officer who gave him this distasteful order to give him a different order,
• He can disobey the order, which puts him at risk of becoming a defendant in a military court,
• He can take an unauthorized leave of absence from his assigned duty station, which also puts him at risk of becoming a defendant in a military court, or
• He can leave the military service.

General Martin Dempsey was given an order by his superior officer, the President of the United States.  He was told to have students at the National Defense University write essays that honored the recently-deceased Saudi king.

I doubt that General Dempsey, if given a choice, would have given this order to those students, but I have made the assumption that General Dempsey was ordered to do so, and if my assumption is correct, I have concluded that he chose to obey this order because five of the six alternatives were less pleasant to him, and the sixth alternative was unavailable because nobody in the military outranks the Commander-in-Chief.

Anyone who is a member of the U.S. military has an unusual relationship with his superior officers.  If any of them are serving in a combat situation, his superior officers can order him to take an action that risks his life.  There may even be a likelihood that he will be killed if he takes that action, but many of these soldiers, sailors, airmen, marines, and coast guardsmen voluntarily take those actions and assume these risks because those risky actions may very well save the lives of other men and women in their units.  Those risky actions may also advance the ultimate goal of protecting the safety and security of the people of the United States.

The men and women who risk their lives to protect our lives and the lives of our families are all doing what General Dempsey is doing here.  They are honoring us, even if their own lives end quickly, violently, and painfully.

We should accept the honor they are giving us, and we should honor them in return.

Refusing to follow orders

Most of the American people are not members of the United States military.  We have not taken an oath to obey the commands of superior officers because we don't have superior officers.  We are simply American citizens, free to live our lives, as long as we obey the laws of the United States and the laws of the state in which we live.

The actions of President Obama are the actions of a dictator, someone who doesn't value the best interests of the United States as much as he should.

In fact, I believe that President Obama places a higher value on his friendship with the late Saudi King than on his friendship with the leaders of America's traditional allies like Japan, Germany, the United Kingdom, and Israel.  If I am right about this, then his official actions should be questioned by the highest officials in our government, including the U.S. Congress and the U.S. Supreme Court, but there is more that we can do as American citizens.

The Declaration of Independence states that one of the grievances that caused the earliest Americans to revolt against an oppressive British King was his refusal to hear our petitions.  They had reasons to dislike the rules and regulations that he ordered us to follow, with enforcement by uniformed British soldiers, but the earliest Americans considered themselves, at least temporarily, to be British subjects, and they thought that when the British King read the written complaints that were sent to him from America, he would change his policies.  The earliest Americans were wrong, and so, they had to fight and win a violent revolution in order to save themselves from the king's oppression.

In the 21st century, Americans are also suffering under oppression, and we do have the right to petition the U.S. President to change his policies.  That is the action that is appropriate for this situation.  We can, and we should do what we can to punish this man's Commander-in-Chief for forcing this honorable man to make such a sacrifice.  The Saudi Arabian government, led by King Abdullah until his death, financed, organized, and provided manpower to many of the terrorist activities of Al-Queda, Hezbollah, and I.S.I.S.

These are the first two paragraphs of an article that was published September 14, 2014 by the Independent, which is published in the United Kingdom.

The rise of the Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant (Isis) has been aided by the continuing failure of the US Government to investigate the role of Saudi Arabia in the 9/11 attacks and its support of jihadi movements such as al-Qaeda in the years since, says former Senator Bob Graham, the co-chairman of the official inquiry into 9/11.

Senator Graham, who chaired the Senate Intelligence Committee, said that successive administrations in Washington had turned a blind eye to Saudi support for Sunni extremists.  He added: “I believe that the failure to shine a full light on Saudi actions and particularly its involvement in 9/11 has contributed to the Saudi ability to continue to engage in actions that are damaging to the US – and in particular their support for Isis.”

The late Saudi King is being honored by our President and to some extent, by every person who he can command, but I don't honor him, I won't write any essays that praise him, and I may even write an essay that criticizes him.  If that action is a violation of Saudi law, too bad.  I have no obligation to obey that law.

Does anyone think that the Saudi Royal Family cares about U.S. law when our own President doesn't care about U.S. law or the law-making process?

He thinks that he has the authority to make laws using his Executive Orders.

He doesn't.

He thinks that he has the authority to change existing laws by having his Executive Branch agencies rewrite the regulations.

He doesn't have that authority, either.  Every single one of his agencies must live within the limits of the laws that were passed by Congress and signed by the president, even if he wasn't the president who signed those laws.

History often repeats itself

Forty years ago last summer, the President of the United States faced formal accusations that he violated one or more laws of the United States.  Those accusations were written by a committee of the U.S. House of Representatives called the Judiciary Committee.  Each formal accusation was called an Article of Impeachment.  After three of those impeachment articles were approved by that committee, a vote was scheduled in the full House of Representatives.

Under the terms of the U.S. Constitution, if a majority of the members of the U.S. House of Representatives had voted in favor of any of these articles, then President Nixon would have been impeached.  Link to a page that explains this process.  President Nixon chose to resign his job instead of continuing the process of impeachment.  He took the same option that some military officers do when they are faced with a process that they do not like.

This process had already begun for two other previous presidents, Andrew Johnson (President Lincoln's Vice-President until the assassination) and John Tyler.  President Clinton, who gave false testimony to a federal grand jury, was impeached by the U.S. House of Representatives, using this same process, but the next step in the process, a vote by the U.S. Senate, did not convict him of the formal accusations that were made by the House.

There is plenty of precedent for making a formal accusation that an American President has disregarded his oath of office, turned his back on the American people, and even violated the laws of the United States.  Fortunately for the American people, we can demand that the House Judiciary Committee begin writing Articles of Impeachment.  This is a link to my own list of the accusations that are appropriate for this president.  This is a link to a summary of those impeachment articles.

If my list of impeachment articles looks like a long list, you should know that it doesn't include the impeachable actions that President Obama took (or failed to take when he had a duty to take them) with regard to the murders in Benghazi, Libya on September 11, 2012.  A former federal prosecutor has publicly stated that Obama's actions and inactions on that date are an impeachable offense.  Link to a story in The Blaze dated September 9, 2014.

There is a second method for forcing President Obama out of the White House.  This process became an amendment to the U.S. Constitution when President Franklin Roosevelt became the victim of polio in the 1940s, when we needed his help in fighting the second World War.  Many Americans, including members of both of our major political parties, considered him to be unable to perform the very demanding job of being the U.S. President.

This amendment stated that if a few, very-high-ranking members of Congress, with the approval of the Vice-President, decided that the President (this process applies to anyone who holds the office) is disabled, and if this group sent a letter to the President stating that he was disabled, then the Vice-President would immediately become the Acting President, with all of the power and authority of the Office of the President.  This constitutional amendment gives the President the right to appeal their decision, but this process also gives the U.S. Congress the last word on the subject.  If they vote to remove him, he is then permanently removed.

I wrote about this process, found in the 25th Amendment of the U.S. Constitution, in three published essays on a different blog.

• An inconvenient truth, published June 17, 2013
• Mister President, it is time to leave, published May 8, 2014
• A letter from a veteran to his Commander-in-Chief, published November 22, 2013

At this moment in time, I am so angry at the dictatorial behavior of the man in the White House, I don't have a strong preference for one removal method or the other, as long as this dictator is removed, and as quickly as possible.

Countries that are led by a dictator are always a danger to their own people.

Always.

My essay Why dictatorships are always bad, one of my most-well-read essays on any of my seven blogs, ever since I published it in July 2012, proves it.

Under President Obama, the United States is becoming a dictatorship.

We need to remove him and his evil policies before he can hurt us any more than he has already hurt us.

The longer you wait, the more he will hurt us.

He wants to hurt us, and until he's removed from the White House, he has the ability to hurt us.

Start either one of the two Constitutional (and therefore legal) removal processes.

Now.

A house divided against itself cannot stand

These words were spoken by United States President Abraham Lincoln, who had the most difficult duty that any president, of any country, can ever assume upon himself.  He accepted the duty of maintaining the unity of a country whose people were fighting each other with weapons.

Few men are capable of accomplishing this task, but he had God's help because he prayed to God frequently.  God listens to people who ask for help with love and humility in their hearts.

President Lincoln spoke these words at the beginning of America's Civil War, a war that would eventually take the lives of more people than any other war that we have ever fought.

Because he became president less than a century after this nation separated itself forcefully from Great Britain, he was acutely aware of the stress that any large-scale separation can have, but he was determined to continue the great principles that were the reason for our creation.

The first sentence in the above quote is in the Bible.  It comes from the 12th chapter of Matthew, verse 25.

Abraham Lincoln read the Bible because he loved God and wanted God's wisdom because he knew that his own wisdom was frequently inadequate for the solemn presidential duty that he had asked for and was now given to him by the votes of a majority of the American public.

He believed that no man was born into a better class of people than any other man.  This one principle contradicted many of the basic principles of other countries, some of which had great influence in the world.  India, a strong military power at the time, had a social system that placed people into four different categories.  The ancient empires of Egypt, Assyria, and Rome all included slavery as a basic part of their societies.  Great Britain, the home of a majority of America's ancestors at the time, itself believed (and still does) that some people are born into a class of people called "royalty".  They are blood descendants of kings and queens.  Some Britons believe that this makes them biologically different than the rest of England's population, who are called "commoners".  Britain's royalty are sometimes called "blue bloods", to distinguish them from the commoners, who (of course) have red blood.

France, Germany, Belgium, Portugal, the Netherlands, Sweden, and Spain have all had kings and queens during their history.  Some of these countries still do.  Some of the countries in the middle east, including Brunei, Jordan, and Saudi Arabia, still have royalty as an integral part of their societies.

President Lincoln had an opportunity to practice what he preached about the equality of every man, and he looked for an opportunity to speak out about it, possibly because the god he worshiped told him to do so.  Immediately after a Civil War battle in the state of Pennsylvania, the area was the new home to hundreds of dead bodies.  Both sides in this war had lost a large percentage of their soldiers, killed because of their hatred for each other.

President Lincoln, because of his love for God, hated the fact that some people were so angry at each other that they were willing to kill each other, thus violating one of the commandments that God had ordered all Christians to follow, but now people were dead, and he had a problem that he alone had to solve because he was the only United States President at that moment.

In the interest of maintaining the public health, Lincoln could not allow these dead bodies to become rotten meat, spreading diseases with the help of hungry wild animals, but because the Civil War was still being fought in nearby towns, he could not ask civilians to risk their own lives in order to transport these bodies to their hometowns for burial.  Another fact he had to accept was the fact that horses, who would have been used in the transportation of these bodies, were often malnourished because local farmers were being shot and killed by soldiers.  As I said, the Civil war was still being fought.

President Lincoln prayed to God for an answer to this very complex problem.  As a Christian, he loved all of God's children, and he didn't want any of them to have their bodies desecrated by being eaten by wild animals or left to rot on the spot where they had died.

Abraham Lincoln made a decision, and it turned out to be the right decision.  He decided to bury all of the bodies, from both of the warring armies, together in one new cemetery.

This was not an easy decision to make or to implement, partly because a large percentage of his own nation didn't even accept him as a legitimate president.  These were the people who were fighting (with every weapon they had) to create a separate country under a different president, but President Lincoln's words were spoken with Christian love, and some people on the other side of that war recognized the fact that he loved God and that it was really God's words that were being spoken through this good man.

Soldiers from both sides of America's Civil War stopped fighting sometimes, and sometimes, the only reason was to observe Christian holidays, but this time, Abraham Lincoln, as a Christian, asked both sides to stop fighting, at least in this one area, long enough to bury some dead bodies.  This request was granted by both sides.

The bodies were collected and brought to the place where they would be buried.  During the time that the land was being prepared, with trees cut down and graves dug, attempts were made to identify the men's names, so that their families would know that these men would not be a part of their families any more.  Time was running short, however, because many of the bodies were already decomposing.  These honorable soldiers didn't get buried until four months after they died.

Requests were sent out to some well-known public speakers who could be suitable and available to make a speech that would dedicate this cemetery.  One man, a well-known orator, accepted the invitation and began to write a typically long and inspiring speech.  Strictly as a courtesy, the people who were organizing the task of burying the bodies also sent an invitation to President Lincoln, but they didn't think that he would be able to take time out from all of his presidential duties, including the duty of being the Commander-in-Chief of a fighting force in the middle of a war, would be able to attend the small duty of being present at a cemetery dedication.

They were wrong.  President Lincoln did accept the invitation, and during the train ride from Washington, D.C. to Pennsylvania, he wrote some of his thoughts on the back of an envelope.

When it was time for the dedication ceremony to begin, the orator was introduced, and when he spoke, he delivered one of the best speeches that he had ever given.  Today, nobody knows what he said.

Abraham Lincoln got up to speak, and his speech, written on the back of an envelope on a train ride from Washington to Pennsylvania and delivered after a Civil War battle named, as usual, for the town in which it was fought, was true to the principle of equality that Abraham had learned as a boy and had striven to teach as an adult.

This is the text of that two-minute speech.

Four score and seven years ago, our fathers brought forth on this continent a new nation: conceived in liberty, and dedicated to the proposition that all men are created equal.

Now we are engaged in a great civil war. . .testing whether that nation, or any nation so conceived and so dedicated. . . can long endure. We are met on a great battlefield of that war.

We have come to dedicate a portion of that field as a final resting place for those who here gave their lives that that nation might live. It is altogether fitting and proper that we should do this.

But, in a larger sense, we cannot dedicate. . .we cannot consecrate. . . we cannot hallow this ground. The brave men, living and dead, who struggled here have consecrated it, far above our poor power to add or detract. The world will little note, nor long remember, what we say here, but it can never forget what they did here. It is for us the living, rather, to be dedicated here to the unfinished work which they who fought here have thus far so nobly advanced.

It is rather for us to be here dedicated to the great task remaining before us. . .that from these honored dead we take increased devotion to that cause for which they gave the last full measure of devotion. . . that we here highly resolve that these dead shall not have died in vain. . . that this nation, under God, shall have a new birth of freedom. . . and that government of the people. . .by the people. . .for the people. . . shall not perish from the earth.

"... a new nation: conceived in liberty, and dedicated to the proposition that all men are created equal."


Copied from a page on the website Abraham Lincoln Online:

Directly behind the Lincoln statue you can read the words of Royal Cortissoz carved into the wall:

"IN THIS TEMPLE AS IN THE HEARTS OF THE PEOPLE FOR WHOM HE SAVED THE UNION THE MEMORY OF ABRAHAM LINCOLN IS ENSHRINED FOREVER."

**********

As he requested, and because it is the right thing to do as a Christian, I dedicate myself to the proposition that all men are created equal.

It is wrong for any nation to put people into different classes.  Since President Lincoln died, many of the countries that were doing it are still doing it.

It is still wrong.

Japan has had emperors for centuries.  China has had emperors for thousands of years.

It is still wrong.

Since President Lincoln died, new philosophers have come and gone, preaching inequality as a means toward some other goal.  These men included Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels, who collaborated on a publication called the Communist Manifesto which puts people into two categories that they called the proletariat and the bourgeoisie.  They have both died, and the Soviet Union, created by passionate Communists after a people's revolt in Moscow (Karl Marx was in London at that moment), has disbanded, but their idea is still being taught by people who still believe in the goals that Marx and Engels believed in.

It is still wrong.

A few months ago, in this country, two men, at different times, were shot and killed by police officers.  Their families and friends thought that this was part of an organized war conducted by the police because of the way that these men looked.

The families and friends of Michael Brown tried to start a large-scale war on the basis of their passionate hatred for a large group of other people, which is exactly what happened during the U.S. Civil War.

It is still wrong.

A house divided against itself cannot stand.


I, David Cain, dedicate myself to the proposition that all men are created equal.

My June 2012 essay The End of Racism says that there are no separate races of people.  Anyone who disagrees with me is facing a contradiction.  The essay proves it, and because I have proved it, there is no need to discuss this matter any further.

I wasn't yet born when President Lincoln gave his speech at the dedication of a cemetery that helped to unify and thus heal a broken nation, but I am now resolving, because he asked me to do so,

"... that these dead shall not have died in vain. . . that this nation, under God, shall have a new birth of freedom. . . and that government of the people. . .by the people. . .for the people. . . shall not perish from the earth."

Amen, Abraham.  Amen.