THE ROBERT W. WHITAKER ARCHIVE

SHEPARD SMITH IS A SOUTHERNER | 2005-04-15

Shepard Smith on Fox News is a Southerner, and he makes no bones about it. He just said, "We still have some Southern civility here." He refers to the South by its other name, God's Country. He speaks fondly of the University of Mississippi Rebels.

Smith has no Southern "accent." But on the air, Roger Mudd has no "accent" either. But in person, Mudd has a VERY Southern "accent."

I put "accent" in quotes because WE don't talk funny, THEY do. Right after Jimmy Carter won the election of 1976, Tennessee Ernie Ford said, "Finally we are going to have a president who doesn't have an accent."

Smith talks like a Southerner. He makes fast jokes and is entertaining. He makes you relax.

And I always suspect he knows a lot of things he's not allowed to say.

MAURICE BESSINGER DOESN'T TALK ABOUT COMBAT | 2002-02-02

I am bragging when I point out that I have known Maurice Bessinger for decades. We talked for many hours through the years. But I only heard him mention his Korean War experiences once.

He said he was walking guard duty in Korea with a Republic of Korea (ROK) soldier during the Korean War. The ROK soldier said for Maurice to stay on guard and he would go back and go to sleep.

A little later, an ROK officer showed up and asked Maurice where the ROK guard was. Maurice told him. The officer walked back to where the soldier was sleeping and a minute later Maurice heard the sharp crack of his pistol. He had shot the guard while he lay there asleep.

That was all Maurice ever said to me about Korea in all our many hours of conversation.

I came to find out later that Maurice Bessinger was in the most vicious part of the fighting in that awful war. But he simply never mentioned it.

I have known a lot of people who talk constantly about combat and others like Maurice who mention it barely or not at all. The ones who talk about it usually make you feel that they want you to feel responsible for it all. You owe them more money for it, and only they have any right to talk about war.

Then there are people like Maurice who don't claim some kind of special godhood from their time in combat. I was raised with the World War II generation, so I am very familiar with both types.

A very simple rule separates the braggarts and the real heroes like Maurice.

Maurice Bessinger did his fighting and then went back to being a citizen. He has had one hell of a life since then.

Another guy I know fought for five months in World War II, then he became an alcoholic and stayed in the service. Because he had won a Silver Star, they let him stay in, drunkenness and all.

This guy talks about nothing but World War II. He tells how he is the only person who should talk about war. He says we owe him.

The latter gentleman beats his chest so much I think he's broken some ribs.

The guy who talks about his college football days or his time in service all the time, hoping you will feel obligated and inferior, is almost invariably somebody who has not had a life since. I saw an outstanding example just a couple of years ago on the television program, "Cops."

The cops were called to a bar where an old guy kept pulling his pants down. When they arrived, he shouted that he had been at D-Day. I wonder how many times he has used that to stay out of jail.

Maurice Bessinger has shown physical courage in war, but he has also shown MORAL courage by taking the field in politics. It has cost him dearly. A major part of his life's work has been destroyed because he dared to speak out. Bessinger will never have to convince anyone worth talking to that he is a hero.

Please read November 20, 1999 - TYPES OF COURAGE.

BISHOP PIKE'S LEGACY | 2007-07-27

Back in the 60s Episcopal Bishop Pike was a hard-core leftist, even lefter than the Marxist consensus among bishops of established Protestant churches. But he got into trouble when he OPENLY said the Trinity and other doctrines were nonsense. He was there to preach Social Progress, not some Afterlife rot.

Now here is the problem. If the government does not sponsor porn like "Piss Christ," it is declared to be censorship. "Piss Moses" or "Piss Mohammed," of course, would be off limits.

Any artist has the right to produce anything he wishes, all we ask is that WE not pay for it or take responsibility for it. The same rule came up with Bishop Pike and the Episcopal Church. Any American has the right to any religious belief he wishes so long as it does not go against interracial dating and marriage, but he has no right to get PAID for doing it.

Bishop Pike denied the doctrine, but he still insisted on getting paid and wearing his Episcopal regalia and preaching Social Progress at his congregation's expense. So the Episcopal Church had its last heresy trial to determine whether someone who denounced the doctrines he was paid to preach could still get paid.

Needless to say, the media portrayed Bishop Pike as a hero of Free Speech, and the Episcopal Church backed down.

Now one black female bishop has declared that she is a Moslem. Another, I haven't seen her picture, had become a Buddhist.

Well, hell, unlike Pike, at least they're RELIGIOUS!

So the Anglican Communion is in a state of collapse. Whole dioceses are seceding. Notice that that is reported in the media, but very, very seldom. It is an example of the complete collapse of a fundamental historical institution by following the dictates of our KGB defector:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AaoX_SgNO70

The Anglican Church in Britain is negotiating to join with Rome again. I doubt that Rome, even today, will accept crap like that. That is why I got baptized by the Melkites, who are related to Rome, though the Pope's picture is not in their churches and they teach strict Orthodox except for the filioque. The Roman Church, for all its acceptance of fashionable crap, is still a CHURCH.

I am now a relapsed Catholic. But it beats the hell out of having any relationship whatsoever with mainline Protestants or Old Testament evangelicals. But the OT evangelicals are still, for now, a CHURCH.

A couple of years back, the Archbishop of Canterbury announced that, if you have trouble with this Resurrection stuff, he recommended you become a Jew. Everything is in the Old Testament anyway.

The old Calvinist Puritan Church at Plymouth is now Unitarian. Once you get fixated on the OT, this Jesus stuff goes.

But the Anglican Church bureaucracy, bishops, priests and all, is HUGE. They have to drop the faith, but they need their the checks. Rome would be a HARD row to hoe. The only problem is that there are no Unitarian bishops.

DECEMBER 8 | 2005-12-09

On December 7, 1941 Japan attacked Pearl Harbor.

On December 8, 1941 the United States Congress declared war on Japan. The one dissenting vote was, interstingly enough, the same woman who voted against declaring war in 1917. It was also interesting because in 1917 very few women had the vote, but she was in congress.

She was a consistent pacifist.

But something else happened in those twenty-four hours between December 7 and December 8. President Roosevelt was desperately trying to realize his dreamof getting the United States into the war against Germany. But, even at the height of war hysteria, he could not get the votes.

Remember, this was the pre-World War II generation, and they were not blindly obedient. So from December 7 to December 11 the United States was at war only with Japan. I say December 7 because the declaration said specifically that a state of war had existed from the moment the Japanese attacked.

That was a critical period. Newt Gingrich even wrote a novel that was based on the idea that Hitler never declared war on the United States, so the German Reich was still in existence in the 1990s.

On December 11, 1941, Hitler gave Roosevelt, Churchill and Stalin the greatest gift they had ever received. He did what Roosevelt had tried so hard to do on December 7. He declared war on the United States, a white country, "on the side of heroic Japan."

If Hitler had not given this gift to Roosevelt, the very victory he had fought for and lost, the United States' full militray effort would have been in Asia. Even after Hitler's declaration, newspapers complained about the effort the United States was putting in backing Britain's war in Europe and how we were ignoring the heroes the Japanese held as prisoners who survived the Bataan Death March.

If Hitler had not declared war, every ounce of effort Roosevelt put into Europe would have been subject to the complaint that it was not going into the war effort, the war against Japan.

It is impossible to explain why Hitler took Roosevelt's side this way and backed Roosevelt, but may have been the greatest strategic blunder in history.

Instead of a united Communist Empire, the world would have had a mutually hostile Germany and Russia.