Paineful Truth

Define: Principle: “A fundamental truth or proposition that serves as the foundation for a system of belief or behavior or for a chain of reasoning.” What are your principles? What is your fundamental compass of truth? What leads you and directs your actions? When presented with a hard choice or a difficult situation, what guides your decision? These are vitally important questions in America today. Every generation has a choice - what principles will guide us as a nation? However, often this choice is obscured through the distraction of individual personalities. A charismatic leader , a leader who talks a good game , a leader who promises everything , a leader who fails. Many people get caught up in personalities, while principles fall by the wayside. The failure of a leader often reflects badly on the principles of a cause. Disillusioned by the failure of a highly respected leader, followers may completely abandon things they claimed to believe in. After all, if the leader d...

The GOP race for the nomination is now a two man race, but with three contestants. Marco Rubio dropped out. John Kasich finally actually won something. Donald Trump has a clear lead. Ted Cruz holds on. But let’s talk about the general election, because no matter who wins the primary, the fight is not done. Defeating the harmful liberal policies of the Benghazi failure Hillary Clinton (or, Heaven forbid, the Soviet honeymooning Socialist Bernie Sanders ) is the ultimate goal. Which candidate is best suited to accomplish that goal? And which candidate has the worst possible chance? Polls also indicate that Trump would be mercilessly stomped in a general election versus either Clinton or Sanders. That’s fact , folks. Trump loves the polls and, according to him, the polls return that affection. But we see from the majority of polls that Trump loses the general to Clinton, and also loses to a self-avowed Socialist who honeymooned in the USSR. Ouch. So much for be...

Words have to mean something. In a culture where calling something “sick” or “wicked” can be a compliment, terms that used to be concrete in meaning can quickly become vague and ambiguous. This is a phenomenon we have seen in this hotly contested presidential race. The terms “ conservative ”, “ socialist ”, “ progressive ” and others have been bandied about and many have lost their real meaning. Two such terms are “politician” and “outsider”. When Donald Trump and Ben Carson were leading a lot of polls in the early days of the campaign, the news media was abuzz with talk of “the outsider insurgence”, etc. Carson and Trump were both seen as “normal, everyday” folks. In other words, they were not politicians. On the other hand, you had a slew of governors and congressmen that people saw as part of the problem. The establishment, the insiders, the evil politicians. Here again, we have a striking instance of the media creating a narrative that isn't grounded in t...