S O U N D   O F F

October 29, 2008

Dear Mr. Charles Krauthammer,

Thank you for a commendable column, "For security, for McCain."
I will be on that ship with you. If we go down together I find comfort in knowing I went down in honorable company.
My first hand encounter with socialistic actions came in 1993, when the federal government promised fence and water development in exchange for my agreeing to take massive cuts in our number of cattle.
They never kept their promise. Instead, they took my assets and redistributed them to feral (wild) horse programs. To date, I've lost over $200,000 in income producing assets.
My second encounter with socialistic actions came 10 years ago (1998). The Islamic Jihad came onto my private property in Wyoming, and made over 350 cuts on my fences.
In our isolated country, the Islamic Jihad used a very sophisticated means of communications and lookouts, to drive along a stretch of over 80 miles, cutting fences.
You can well imagine the cost and months of time involved for ranchers and farmers to do repairs.
Yesterday in Colorado, they projected Obama had a two rally collective attendance of over 150,000.
Some young from Romania, Germany and the Netherlands, protested Obama. Why? They'd been subjected to socialism, knew it intimately, escaped it, and did not want it here in America.
American resource providers have been early recipients of socialistic actions I claim as: "People wanting things at others expense."
Dedicating near two years to educate people through our website www.GoodNeighborLaw.com, we've come to realize that because our urban friends have never had socialism steal their private holdings, they can not comprehend its wrath; therefore dismiss our warnings.
I'll never forget my wife Roni telling me about Ivan Lyman of Boulder, Utah. Standing hip high in boxes, the elderly man and his wife had been shoved off their land by Clinton's designation (Another act of socialism.) of the Grand Escalante National Staircase Monument. Within months after they moved, Ivan died. It's a given he died of a broken heart.
There are far too many tragic stories about resource providers and their battles with socialist programs, acts and policies designed specifically as means to take away their private property.
American people do not know what they're in for.
Thank you for being one alone, strong enough to try and warn.

Charles W. Sylvester, Jr.
4th Generation Colorado Farmer
Wyoming Rancher
Retired General Manager National Western Livestock Show and Rodeo/ Denver

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Monday, 27 October 2008
Charles Krauthammer: A vote for the stalwart
Daily Herald
Contrarian that I am, I'm voting for John McCain. I'm not talking about bucking the polls or the media consensus that it's over before it's over. I'm talking about bucking the rush of wet-fingered conservatives leaping to Barack Obama before they're left out in the cold without a single state dinner for the next four years.

I stand athwart the rush of conservative ship-jumpers of every stripe -- neo (Ken Adelman), moderate (Colin Powell), genetic/ironic (Christopher Buckley) and socialist/atheist (Christopher Hitchens) -- yelling "Stop!" I shall have no part of this motley crew. I will go down with the McCain ship. I'd rather lose an election than lose my bearings.
First, I'll have no truck with the phony case ginned up to rationalize voting for the most liberal and inexperienced presidential nominee in living memory. The "erratic" temperament issue, for example. As if McCain's risky and unsuccessful but in no way irrational attempt to tactically maneuver his way through the economic tsunami that came crashing down a month ago renders unfit for office a man who demonstrated the most admirable equanimity and courage in the face of unimaginable pressures as a prisoner of war, and who later steadily navigated innumerable challenges and setbacks, not the least of which was the collapse of his campaign just a year ago.

McCain the "erratic" is a cheap Obama talking point. The 40-year record testifies to McCain the stalwart.

Nor will I countenance the "dirty campaign" pretense. The double standard here is stunning. Obama ran a scurrilous Spanish-language ad falsely associating McCain with anti-Hispanic slurs. Another ad falsely claimed that McCain supports "cutting Social Security benefits in half." And for months Democrats insisted that McCain sought 100 years of war in Iraq.

McCain's critics are offended that he raised the issue of William Ayers. What's astonishing is that Obama was himself not offended by William Ayers.

Moreover, the most remarkable of all tactical choices of this election season is the attack that never was. Out of extreme (and unnecessary) conscientiousness, McCain refused to raise the legitimate issue of Obama's most egregious association -- with the race-baiting Rev. Jeremiah Wright. Dirty campaigning, indeed.

The case for McCain is straightforward. The financial crisis has made us forget, or just blindly deny, how dangerous the world out there is. We have a generations-long struggle with Islamic jihadism. An apocalyptic soon-to-be-nuclear Iran. A nuclear-armed Pakistan in danger of fragmentation. A rising Russia pushing the limits of revanchism. Plus the sure-to-come Falklands-like surprise popping out of nowhere.

Who do you want answering that phone at 3 a.m.? A man who's been cramming on these issues for the past year, who's never had to make an executive decision affecting so much as a city, let alone the world? A foreign policy novice instinctively inclined to the flabbiest, most vaporous multilateralism (e.g., the Berlin Wall came down because of "a world that stands as one"), and who refers to the most deliberate act of war since Pearl Harbor as "the tragedy of 9/11," a term more appropriate for a bus accident?

Or do you want a man who is the most prepared, most knowledgeable, most serious foreign policy thinker in the United States Senate? A man who not only has the best instincts but has the honor and the courage to, yes, put country first, as when he carried the lonely fight for the surge that turned Iraq from catastrophic defeat into achievable strategic victory? There's just no comparison. Obama's own running mate warned this week that Obama's youth and inexperience will invite a crisis -- indeed a crisis "generated" precisely to test him. Can you be serious about national security and vote on Nov. 4 to invite that test?

And how will he pass it? Well, how has he fared on the only two significant foreign policy tests he has faced since he's been in the Senate? The first was the surge. Obama failed spectacularly. He not only opposed it. He tried to denigrate it, stop it and, finally, deny its success.

The second test was Georgia, to which Obama responded instinctively with evenhanded moral equivalence, urging restraint on both sides. McCain did not have to consult his advisers to instantly identify the aggressor.

Today's economic crisis, like every other in our history, will in time pass. But the barbarians will still be at the gates. Whom do you want on the parapet? I'm for the guy who can tell the lion from the lamb.

. Charles Krauthammer is a columnist with the Washington Post Writers Group.