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UNITED STATES NAVY VETERANS ASSOCIATION
2008-2009 National Association Directors and Key Officers:
All United States Navy Veterans Association Directors and Officers
serve without compensation.
_________________________________
NATIONAL ASSOCIATION
EXECUTIVE COMMITTEE:
| Jack Nimitz |
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| National Chairman |
In his campaign statement for
election as National Director, Jack said he "... does not like to pull rank ...has a lack of admiration for those who do on
the officers' boards of other veterans' organizations, opposes an elitist approach to what is or what is not good for American
national security, welcomes all opinions, and seeks an Association with an expanding, and young, membership." Jack also suports
the REAL ID Act as providing a required, and additional, measure to American national security.
Jack is a lifelong resident of Texas.
Bob's
comments on public affairs, national security and veterans' issues, have been featured in the Tampa
Tribune, and on the PBS-TV Show (WEDU-TV Tampa) 'Tampa Bay Week' and on WTVT-TV (Fox-TV Tampa) and in the national media.
In his duties with the Association,
Bob works actively in both program services and in organizational development. He is one of the featured speakers on veterans
and their history in the Association's free National Speaking Program for schools and churches.In addition to being a member
of the United States Navy Veterans Association, he is also an honorary member of the Royal Naval Association as well
as a number of other British naval societies, honors he was awarded in part because of his substantial work for and
dedication to the cause of the Anglo-American naval services, their histories, traditions and the alliance of the two
nations those services represent. Bob is also a member of the American National Association of Railroad Passengers Advocates.
Bob opposes the REAL ID Act because it focuses unfairly on American citizens and those who are already
here in this country, as opposed to where he feels the real war should be brought, upon foreigners abroad who hate the United
States.
Bob is a lifelong resident of Tampa, Florida.
| Brian Reagan...General Secretary |
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| BReagan@NavyVets.org |
In his 2006 update to his campaign
statement for re-election as National Director,
Brian said: "Here's what's
wrong with self-proclaimed experts chosen by the media commenting on anything:
On May 18, 2006, BBC-TV had an "expert" on
air worldwide commenting on a major lawsuit relating to IPod. It turned out the guy had shown up that morning at the
station to apply for a low-level computer techie job.
While this is an extreme example, the
fact is major news media in the U.S. pick their favored 'non-expert' du jour to
comment on major issues every day:
In September, 2004 PBS-TV's Lehrer
Report featured a retired military officer currently working for a think tank, who said, as to the Missile Defense Iniative,
'So far, there is no actual proof the system can deflect an incoming missile.'! What kind of proof is he asking for? An actual
incoming IRBM from Kim Jong Il? The whole purpose of the system, an American 8th grader could tell this 'expert,' is to DETER
incoming missiles, and the success of the system is found in the hopeful fact there will never be actual proof.
[ America "proved" the accuracy
of the system, the Association wants to point out as an update to to Brian's statement when, in March, 2008, a US Navy
missile shot down with pinpoint accuracy, a disintegrating satellite about to hit the planet Earth.]
This clown's comments on BBC-TV
on IPod sounded no more smart than the comment of this so-called military expert on the Lehrer Report."
Brian also suports the REAL ID Act as providing a required, and additional, measure to American
national security.
Brian is a resident of San Diego, California.
______________________________
NATIONAL ASSOCIATION
KEY OFFICERS AND DIRECTORS:
"Hawaii, Hawaii, No Ka Oi!"
Sam is a lifelong resident of the great State of Hawaii.
Wiley Hance...National Vice-President, Education - Hance@NavyVets.org
| Linda West...Assistant General Secretary |
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| Assistant Director for Public Information - West@NavyVets.org |
Katherine Hughes...Assistant Director for Public Information
Hughes@NavyVets.org
| Karen Adair |
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| Assistant Director for Government Liaison...Adair@NavyVets.org |
| Brandi Darcy |
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| Assistant Director for Membership...Darcy@NavyVets.org |
| Patsy Mii |
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| Chairperson, Compliance Committee...Mii@NavyVets.org |
In her resume, Patsy says:
"I loved the Navy when I was in it. I love the Navy today. Diversity is important in America. It is one of the most important
aspects of our freedoms, that sets us apart from the countries our ancestors came from."
| Suzanne Chamberlain |
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| Director for Minority Affairs...Chamberlain@NavyVets.org |
In her resume, Suzanne says:
"I am an African-American. I believe that affirmative action is good for America and, having served in the Navy as an enlisted
woman, good for the Navy."
Suzanne is a lifelong resident of Chicago, Illinois.
| Melissa Anderson |
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| Chairperson, Navy Moms Committee,,,Melissa@NavyVets.org |
A list of recent NAVA and Association Presidents,
General and Assistant Secretaries, who, while in office, collectively serve as an advisory panel to the Executive Board, can
be found at the bottom of the Mission Statement Page.
Key Officers for the Association's Newstand organizations can
be found on the respective Newstand Pages.
General Counsel:
MacMurray, Petersen & Shuster LLP
6530 West Campus Oval
New Albany OH 43054
614-939-9955
Legislative and Public Policy Counsel:
LNE Group, LLC
216 Second St SE
Washington DC 20003
202-544-9000
1220 Huron Rd 2nd Floor
Cleveland OH 44115
216-781-9000
Legislative Associates, Inc
PO Box 2131
Stillwater MN 55082
651-439-7681
Special Counsel:
CAPT Samuel Wright, USNR (ret)
1201 South Court House Road
Arlington VA 22204
202-646-7767 (F)
RECENT PUBLIC RESOLUTIONS OF
THE NATIONAL EXECUTIVE BOARD OF THE
UNITED STATES NAVY VETERANS ASSOCIATION:
"Supporting the physical welfare and
protection of our Armed Forces in combat while simultaneously opposing the national security of the United States, is at best
an intellectually paradoxical position, a position straining hard to become an oxymoron.
Nevertheless, in this blessed land of
Liberty, we must, and do, support the right to speak of any American or any veterans' group which disagrees with that proposition.
But we also believe the average active
duty service member, the overwhelming majority of our troops in Iraq today, and the average veteran alike, not only agree
with that statement, but that they also put the national security of their country first, ahead of their own personal welfare.
That is what 'Duty, Honor, Country'
is all about.
And there is no higher calling than
theirs."
-United States Navy
Veterans Association
Executive Board
Public Resolution
8/31/ 2005
" Islamist fundamentalism is, fundamentally,
a lie. There is nothing fundamental about Islamism, the hijacking of a respected religion into a political creed which preaches
jihad, "holy war," by any means, against all men, women and children who are not Islamic.
Islamist fundamentalism is terror. It
is fascist terror incarnate. It threatens with immediate death every citizen of Western civilization. Its threat is real,
and it is imminent. That clear and present danger will not go away until the individuals who comprise the threat are destroyed,
every last one of them. Politicians who say otherwise are liars, and they compromise with the devil in so saying, or implying.
Islamist fundamentalism is today, in
the 21st Century, a greater threat than that faced by the U.S. in the last century by Nazi Germany, Imperial Japan or international
Communism. It is a greater threat than those because it is popular among masses of madmen who inhabit the third world and
whose leaders are capable of both developing and using any weapon modern technology permits them, in order to kill every
person they and their jihad hate.
Its that simple."
-United States Navy
Veterans Association
Executive Board
Public Resolution
10/9/2006
"Presidential decisiveness on issues
pertaining to the national security of the United States is a far, far better thing than a President who wrings his hands
endlessly, or submits each matter pertaining to our national sovereignty to some international body for their approval
by committee."
-United States Navy
Veterans Association
Executive Board
Public Resolution
8/1/2003
 "The Executive Board of the Association views
with disdain the decision of the U.S. Supreme Court, announced on Flag Day, 2004, no less, merely to deny jurisdiction in
a case brought by an American atheist to throw out the words 'under God' from our Pledge of Allegiance, on the technical grounds
the appellant did not have standing because he was not the legal custodian of the minor asked to recite the Pledge.
Only three justices wrote substantive opinions saying our Pledge was constitutional as constituted.
This Assocaition joins with those three. Here
is what we would have written:
'The founders clearly intended that the anti-establishment
clause in the Constitution promote an idea neither of an atheist America, nor even of a secular America, but, instead
of a non-sectarian official policy. Jefferson - our third president - wrote in his Notes on the State of Virginia, that
"God, who gave us life, gave us liberty. And can the liberties of a nation be thought secure when we have removed their only
firm basis, a conviction in the minds of the people that these liberties are a gift of God? That they are not to be
violated but with His wrath? Indeed, I tremble for my country when I reflect that God is just: that His justice cannot sleep
forever."
In Washington's First Inaugural Address in
1789, he told the nation, '"The propitious smiles of Heaven can never be expected on a nation that disregards the eternal
rules of order and right which Heaven itself has ordained."
And James Madison - one of the chief Framers
of the Constitution and our fourth President - wrote, "Before any man can be considered as a member of civil society,
he must be considered a subject of the Governor of the Universe. We have staked the future of all our political institutions
upon the capacity of each and all of us to govern ourselves, to sustain ourselves according to the Ten Commandments of God."
John Adams, second President and one of the
Framers, warned in 1798, "Our Constitution was made only for a moral and religious people. It is wholly inadequate for the
government of any other."
And Thomas Paine, Virginia legislator, born
in England, whose pamphlet Common Sense had such an effect on the American Revolution, wrote, "The cause of America is in
a great measure the cause of all mankind. Where, say some, is the King of America? I'll tell you, friend: He reigns above."
The Founding Fathers saw no reason , in or
outside the Constitution, why America could not officially be a non-sectarian, pluralistic nation, but one which, at the same
time, professed official respect for the Providence from which all our rights, the same rights which are at the
core of our government, flow.'
That's what we would have written."
United States Navy
Veterans Association
Executive Board
Public Resolution
6/14/2004
On March 28, 2006, Justice Stephen G. Breyer
of the United States Supreme Court cross-examined the attorney from the Office of the Solicitor General of the United
States on a case involving the right of the President of the United States to try foreign war criminals in tribunals other
than the civilian courts of the United States. In the course of that cross-examination, Justice Breyer said that the War on
Terror was not a real war at all, and that the President's requested powers of trial meant that any President of the United
States could walk into "Toledo, Ohio" tomorrow and set up tribunals to try Americans for any purpose whatsoever. The
oral response of the Solicitor General's office to Justice Breyer was, in our opinion, weak, and too meek. Here is how we
would have responded to Justice Breyer's interrogation:
"You do not intimidate us, Mr. Justice,
by your questions, or by the position you hold, regardless of whether we win or lose this case. Your statement that the
War on Terror is not a war, or not a war the moral equal of our Civil War, or World War II, is a false statement. And if that
is the starting point as to where we disagree, it is probably also the finishing point, and we are not going to call you names
accordingly as to that disagreement, since we are Americans, and we would hope you would afford us the same courtesy,
because that is a purely political disagreement between your side and our side. The War on Terror against Islamist
fundamentalist terrorists is every much a war threatening the United States and its social fabric as World War II ever was.
During World War II, by the precedent of this very court, the President of the United States, using executive national security
privileges which could, and should be, regulated by our American concepts of due process by our courts, had the right to try
foreigners who violently posed a threat to the United States in a judicial system separate from the formal judicial courts
of this nation.
The statement that, by so arguing, we
are saying that the President of the United States can walk into "Toledo, Ohio," or anywhere else for that matter and
start trying people for no reason at all, or any reason he sees fit, is preposterous on its face, and constitutes political
pandering, and no person, lawyer, or otherwise, who poses that sort of analogy from the bench, is fit to be a judge anywhere
in America, no less the Supreme Court of the United States."
- US Navy Veterans Association Executive
Board Public Resolution
3/28/2006
" 'U.N.izing' how the United States deals with
any foreign policy situation, where there is a direct security threat against the United States, inherently means some sublimation
of our national sovereignty. Protection of the national security of the United States lies, and should lie, in the final
analysis, with the American people, and their Government.
And our national sovereignty is inherently put
at risk when powerful foreign ideologues preach a 'Caliphate' world order designed to take over the United States and
destroy its way of life, as Al Quaida and their allies, which are to true Islam as the Ku Klux Klan was to true Christianity,
do.
When Khrushchev said to Nixon in the kitchen
debates, "We will bury you," he meant it. And the national security threat was real.
The threat from the new Klansmen of the jihad
is just as real. They are even more resolved than Khrushchev was, and they will not rest until we are buried, or they are."
-United States Navy
Veterans Association
Executive Board
Public Resolution
9/5/2003
We are resolved as follows in the total humility of our opinion,
and not in speaking as anything other than as common Americans who believe in Providence:
"Our strength as a Nation lies not in our military or naval might,
nor in our economic or financial prowess. It lies, primarily, and instead, in our moral values to know, as a people, right
from wrong, both domestically, and internationally.
God has neither foreordained America as the leader of the world; nor
has God foreordained the success of the United States and its cause. 'While God may not be on our side,' as Abraham Lincoln
once said,'we should all humbly pray that we are on His side.'
What Providence has done, we humbly believe, is to speak to the universal
freedoms of every man and woman born on the face of this earth, and to bless the United States with the only government document
of any state ever written, the Decaration of Independence ratified by our Continental Congress on July 4, 1776, in saying
so, that these rights come from Providence, not from government, that they are universal, for all men and women everywhere,
from the beginning of time to the end of time, and that man is the master of government, and that government is not the master
of man.
It is the manifest destiny of the United States to proclaim those truths,
that shining city, that light unto the world.
That is our destiny.
Not more. Not less."
-United States Navy Veterans Association Executive Board
Public Resolution
6/14/ 2004
'The only thing necessary for the triumph of evil is for good men to do nothing.'
- Edmund Burke
"There is a Non-Proliferation Treaty in the U.N. In simple English, states
which voluntarily have signed it which don't have nuclear weapons, pledge not to develop them.
In Simple English, some of those states have violated that Treaty.
What is more important is the spirit of the Treaty, and that spirit,
regardless whether a given country state is a signatory or not, is that if the world has a bunch of small states with half-crazed
governments turning out nuclear weapons, the world itself is in clear and present danger.
There are nine nations today with known nuclear weapons: North Korea,
China, the United States, Great Britain, Russia, France, India, Pakistan and Israel. Most of them understand nuclear deterrence
in a responsible sense, but that is saying nothing, for even one nuclear weapon, including dirty radioactive bombs, in the
hands of one irresponsible man or woman, is one nuclear weapon too many. Nevertheless in the 1960's there were predictions
that at this time at least 30 nations would have nuclear weapons. So nuclear proliferation is a containable problem, and international
cooperation on this issue should be requested.
But if requests for international cooperation are not successful, and
the national security of the United States is at stake, then we as a people should be resolved, despite the loss of lives,
to act in our own self defense without asking anybody's permission first, or listening to their Monday morning quarterbacking
after the fact.
The United States, as the world's only superpower, in the age of terror
in which we live, has a moral obligation to step in in such a case, as necessary, to see that the spirit of Non-Proliferation
which President Kennedy spoke so eloquently about at Georgetown University in 1963, is enforced."
-United States Navy
Veterans Association
Executive Board
Public Resolution
2/12/2004
"The globalization of nuclear weapons is everybody's problem"
- Mohammed al-Baradeh
Chairman, IEAA, United Nations
"We have some very simple military advice
as to the War on Terror abroad for future American presidents as to how to deal with the jihadists who strike at us first
('Square 0'):
1. Invade their countries with overwhelming
conventional forces and turn their deserts into glass. Overthrow their governments, but no protracted guerilla war like Iraq.
2. Withdraw and let them sort out their
own internal anti-American political mess.
3. Work diplomatically, non-militarily
and with covert action to hurt and destroy their new anti-American regime as much as possible, for as long as it takes.
No accomodation. No containment. Nothing less than destruction of their regime should be the goal.
4. If they go back to square 0, start
1, 2 and 3 all over again.
No overstretching our currently underfunded Armed Forces in fighting protracted
guerilla wars on the Asian land mass. A well-defined short-term mission with a publicly announced end game in advance. In
and out. Guarantees of long-term support for indigenous, truly popular pro-American forces capable of defending themselves
with minimal U.S. troops on the ground. No surrender to, or negotiation with, the Islamist enemy, ever. Announced, unswerving, strategic
goal of the unconditional destruction of every Islamist terrorist worlwide.
This model, we should point out, was
successfully used by the Administration of President George H. W. Bush, in the U.S. invasion of Panama in 1989, to overthrow
the government of General Manuel Noriega, who, like Saddam and others before him, claimed to be democratically elected. The
foreign policy concepts behind the Noriega invasion were scoffed at at the time by the Association's predecessor organization"
-United States Navy Veterans Association Executive Board
Public Resolution
6/15/ 2004
Kelly Craven passes on this email story from a U.S. Armed Forces
military father in April, 2006:
”One of my sons serves in the military. He is still stateside, here in
California.
He called me yesterday to let me know how warm and
welcoming people were to him, and his troops, everywhere he goes, telling
me how people shake their hands, and thank them for being willing to serve, and fight, for not only our own freedoms but so
that others may have them also.
But he also told me about an incident in the grocery store he
stopped
at yesterday, on his way home from the base. He said that ahead of several people in front of him stood a woman
dressed in a burkha. He said when she got to the cashier she loudly remarked about the
U.S. flag lapel pin the cashier wore on her smock. The cashier reached
up and
touched the pin, and said proudly,’ Yes, I always wear it and
probably always will.’
The woman in the
burkha then asked the cashier when she was going to
stop bombing her countrymen, explaining that she was Iraqi. A
gentleman
standing behind my son stepped forward, putting his arm around my son's shoulders, and nodding towards my son, said in a calm
and gentle voice to the Iraqi woman:
’Lady, hundreds of thousands of men and women like this young man
fought
and died so that YOU could stand here, in MY country and accuse
a check-out cashier of bombing YOUR countrymen. It is my
belief that had you been this outspoken in YOUR own country, we wouldn't need to be there today.
But, hey, if you have
now learned how to speak out so loudly and
clearly, I'll gladly buy you a ticket and pay your way back to Iraq so you can
straighten out the mess in YOUR country that you are obviously here in MY country to avoid.’
Everyone within hearing distance cheered!”
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On December 10, 1941, Adolf Hitler, when he declared war on the United
States, made a bet. He bet that German youth, racially pure in his view, and subscribing to the semi-mystical philosophy of
Nazism, would have no problem overwhelming an American youth based on a decadent, and racially mixed, democracy. It was the
same bet the Japanese militarists had made three days earlier, at Pearl Harbor.
Hitler and the Japanese were both mistaken.
The boys of democratic America stormed many beaches between that December
and 1945, in the Solomons, the Marshalls, New Guinea, on the shores of North Africa, Sicily, Normandy, Iwo Jima and Okinawa.
In March 1945, Carl Timmerman, a German-American, led his U.S. Army
infantry platoon, composed of Polish-Americans, Italian-Americans, German-Americans, Jewish-Americans and Native Americans,
over the bridge at Remagen, driving into murderous Nazi machine gun and mortar fire. His men fully expected that this, the
first bridge over the Rhine into Germany to be taken in World War II, would be blown to bits under them as they tried to cross.
When it was over, the American flag flew for the first time on the soil of Nazi Germany, and within two months, the war in
Europe was over, and the American mothers of those platoon members who lived, would welcome them home.
As with Remagen, in every battle, each and every time it was
the bravest sons of American democracy who prevailed over those who
proclaimed their racial superiority and their fanatic belief in the dictators who ruled them.
It was a lesson, and it is a lesson, we at the United States Navy
Veterans Association hope nobody ever forgets.
***************************************
Although the anti-American jackal Benito Mussolini
had
declared war on the United States, 20% of
all U.S. Armed Forces personnel who served in
World War II, we should point out, were Italian-Americans,
a percentage larger than any other ethnic group
other than African-Americans.
The first American patriot to be killed in battle during
the American Revolution, at the Boston Massacre of 1770, was Crispus Attucks, a runaway black slave.
During the Revolution, during World War II,
it was America first, for all of us.
Today, it still should be.
| The original Declaration of Independence |
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| Courtesy of the National Archives |
In June, 1776, a delegate to the revolutionary Continental
Congress in Philadelphia proposed a resolution which said "that these united Colonies have a right to be, and are, independent
of England." It passed and a committee was appointed to draft
a declaration of independence. At its head was John
Adams of Massachusetts and on it was a young Virginia House of Burgesses representative, Thomas Jefferson, known for his quiet
personality and, when he spoke, both his high pitched voice and his soaring rhetoric, and his writing.
Adams went to Jefferson and told him that Adams would
not draft the declaration. He told Jefferson he had three reasons: first, that he, Adams, was disliked in the Congress because
of his outspokeness; second, because it was better
that a Virginian from the middle colonies do the job; and third,
that Jefferson had the right rhetorical skills.
Jefferson accepted.
The American Declaration of Independence was passed
by
the Continental Congress on the early evening of
July 4, 1776, as the sun was going down on our beloved
Philadelphia, the first capital of these United States. Benjamin Franklin, a delegate from Pennsylvania, in asking his colleagues
to sign in defiance of the mightiest power in the world, England, at that time, said, "Gentlemen, we can either all
hang separately, or we can all hang together." Strong words then, strong words today. They all signed. Real Americans
would do the exact same thing today.
***************
"When the Declaration of Independence was first
read in public and the Liberty Bell was sounded in celebration, a witness said, 'It rang as if it meant something.' In our
time it means something still. America, in this young century, proclaims liberty throughout all the world, and to all the
inhabitants thereof. Renewed in our strength, tested but not weary, we are ready for the greatest achievements in the history
of freedom."
- President George W. Bush
Inaugural Address
January 20, 2005
*************************************
Let us say this about our brethren in
the Muslim fundamentalist world who hate America so much:
We respect their political contumacy
of what is right. Defiance is so very, very American.
... But we love our defiance of them more.
May God Bless the United States of America.
**************
| The U.S.S. Constitution, 1997 |
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| With the Navy's own Blue Angels |
 
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They say there is a place,
for everybody, in the world
which comforts and completes them....
And when they find it,
they yearn to learn
its stories, and its history....
That place is America,
and its story is Freedom.
A
On a quiet autumn afternoon in 1875, on a back street in a residential neighborhood in Paris
where nothing much ever happened, work began on a great statue. The work was paid for by over 100,000 ordinary Frenchmen,
was funded in part by a lottery, and was intended as, and became, a gift of the people of France
to the people of the United States. The
statue’s appointed sculptor, Frederic Bartholdi, did not even like Americans.
The statue’s huge
body, built of copper and bronze, was modeled on the shapes and curves of Bartholdi’s mistress, and she held in her
right hand a torch, and in her left, a tablet inscribed simply with the date: July 4, 1776.
On July 4, 1884, nine years
in the making, the statue was officially handed over to the American Ambassador to Paris.
The statue, dismantled,
was shipped in 1885 across the Atlantic to the United States,
on board a French sailing vessel. The ship, the Isere,
almost sank.
After much debate and controversy
during which France was vilified and American fundamentalist ministers
denounced the statue as “pagan”, Americans built a pedestal for the statue on Bedloe’s Island in the New York Harbor, which
had housed an abandoned fort, and, previously, had been a paupers’ graveyard.
The statue was dedicated
on October 28, 1886 by President Grover Cleveland. Only two women were invited to the ceremony.
A poem, written by the
great Jewish-American poetess, Emma Lazarus, herself an American immigrant, was inscribed inside the pedestal by the people
of the United States in 1903. It reads:
"Keep,
ancient lands, your storied pomp!" cries she with silent lips. “Give me your tired, your poor, your huddled masses yearning
to breathe free, the wretched refuse of your teeming shore. Send these, the homeless, tempest-tost to me, for I lift my lamp
beside the golden door!”
Bertholdi said he believed
she would stand for eternity.
She holds her lamp brightly
lit today, facing the Old World, and she is still the hope of a billion dreams of millions
of souls every day and night from every nation on this planet.
She is the Statue of Liberty.
Un après-midi tranquille d'automne en 1875, sur une rue arrière dans un voisinage résidentiel à Paris où rien beaucoup ne s'est jamais produit, le travail a commencé
sur une grande statue. Le travail était payé pour près plus de 100.000 Français ordinaires, a été placé en partie
par une loterie, et a été prévu comme, et est devenu, un cadeau du peuple de la France au peuple des Etats-Unis. La statue
désignée sculpteur, Frederic Bartholdi, n'a pas même aimé des Américains.
Le corps énorme de la statue, établi du cuivre et du bronze, a été modelé sur les formes et les courbes de la maîtresse de
Bartholdi, et elle a tenu dans sa main droite un incendier, et dans sa gauche, un comprimé inscrit simplement avec la date
: 4 juillet 1776.
Le 4 juillet 1884, neuf ans dans la fabrication, la statue
a été officiellement remise à l'ambassadeur américain vers Paris.
La statue, démantelée,
a été embarquée en 1885 à travers l'Océan atlantique aux Etats-Unis, sur le conseil un navire de navigation français. Le bateau,
Isere, est presque descendu.
Après que beaucoup de discussion et de polémique pendant lesquelles la France a été diffamée et les ministres fondamentalistes
américains aient dénoncé la statue en tant que « païen », les Américains ont construit un piédestal pour la statue
sur l'île de Bedloe dans le port de New York, qui avait logé un fort abandonné, et, précédemment, avaient été cimetière d'indigents'.
La statue a été consacrée le 28 octobre 1886 par le Président Grover Cleveland. Seulement deux femmes ont été invitées à la
cérémonie.
Une poésie, écrite par les grands poetess Juif-Américains, Emma Lazarre, elle-même un immigré américain, a été inscrite à
l'intérieur du piédestal par le peuple des Etats-Unis en 1903. Il lit :
« Gardez, les
terres antiques, vos storied la splendeur ! « pleure elle avec les lèvres silencieuses. « Donnez-moi votre fatigué,
vos pauvres, vos masses blotties aspirant à respirer librement, les ordures misérables de votre rivage de coulée. Envoyez
ces derniers, le sans-abri, tempête-tost à moi, pour moi soulèvent ma lampe près de la porte d'or ! »
Bertholdi a indiqué il a cru qu'elle représenterait l'éternité.
Elle tient sa lampe brillamment s'est allumée aujourd'hui, faisant face au vieux monde, et elle est toujours l'espoir d' milliard
de rêves des millions des âmes journalières et de la nuit de chaque nation sur cette planète.
Elle est la statue de la liberté.
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One young Cuban woman, so desperate for the freedom this Country offers, from the likes of Fidel Castro
and the tyranny Communism represents, shipped herself in a crate not much bigger than a small filing cabinet via DHL to
Miami, to get away from Cuba,
on August 25, 2004.
Maybe she could make speeches for us, better than we ever could, to the anti-American street murderers
employed by people like Muqtada Al Sadr and Usama bin Laden.
If you make it to U.S. soil as a Cuban refugee, under current rules, generally you get to stay.
As she stumbled out of the box at MIA, the young woman, clutching her only possessions left in
all the world, a cellphone and a water bottle, cried, and reportedly kissed the floor of the DHL warehouse
she was released in.
...The ground of freedom in the United States.
| Cuban refugees escaping from Castro |
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| launch their homemade raft from Cuba, 2006 |
No one has said this out loud en los Estados Unidos, but we will: those Cubanos who have loved,
and do love Cuba, have made an exodus to Miami y los Estados Unidos since 1961. An when this Communist thug Castro
and his ilk fall, those exiles, their children and grandchildren, will reclaim their country.
Cuba, again, will be free, and these people, who never gave up the faith, will be the cornerstone de la nueva
Cuba.
One can make all the arguments one wants about the necessity of realpolitik
in American foreign policy, parsing this and parsing that.
But, to quote with apologies from "West Wing" White House Press Secretary
C.J., on a show about North Korean nuclear blackmail of the United States:
"America was built on freedom. Every country in the world has less
freedom than we do. That's why they want to come here."
That's the REAL argument, folks, about our national security, and the
most important one.
Circular as it may seem, our freedom is based on our security, and our
security is based on our freedom.
There is no moral equivalence between the forces of freedom on the one hand, and the forces of
Islamic jihad and theocratic tyranny like those we are seeing operate in Afghanistan and Iraq, on the other, in the
world today. These two sets of forces are not moral equals..
The War on Terror is not a war on the process of guerilla warfare. It is an ideological, and substantive,
war on Islamic jihad and its politics of anti-Americanism.
One of these notions is based on the gift of true Providence; the other is based on true evil.
There are those Americans, men and women, who were never embarassed by patriotism, who, throughout
history, have fought that fight for freedom, and who have always had their opponents: Those who called them traitors, war
criminals, and people who used illegal means to achieve their ends.
President Eisenhower was once asked why the free world had to use underhanded tactics to fight Soviet
imperialism. He replied bluntly, "Because you have to fight fire with fire."
To those who call real American heroes names, whose vision for a little America is that she can act
on her own behalf only in concert with third worlders in the U.N., we say forthrightly, we know which side you are on.
Of the two sides, only one can prevail.
And the United States Navy Veterans Association believes it will be America's side.
"We do not live in Freedom," an American immigrant philosopher versed in music once
said, "Freedom lives in us."
This new website of the United States Navy Veterans Association was
dedicated on September 11, 2001, and everything you see hear, everything you hear here, everything you read here, was
re-formed as of that date. We Americans are constantly re-inventing ourselves as a people, and that is part of our wonder
for the rest of the world, and part of our glory. 9/11 made such a new American renaissance a necessity.
We will rebuild, we are told, on the site of the old World Trade Center,
a new Tower, One World Trade Center, 1776 feet tall, over one-third of a mile high, the tallest building in the world.
The United States needs its perpetual rebirth. It needs to move on to
new frontiers, but never to forget its past.
And to those who oppose us, we say, simply: "Bring Them On."
| New York City Mayor Rudy Giuliani after the attack |
|
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| on our World Trade Center, 9/11/2001, on site |
"In a sense, all wars are started by people who are consumed by both
paranoia and homicidal rage.
We hope and pray, and believe, that the American people have less
of those things in their hearts than other people.
But, if our enemies start a war with that motivation, we have a right
to finish it.
We are by nature a pacific people. And we believe, that in the eyes
of Providence, that holds us, as a Nation, in good stead."
- United States Navy Veterans Association
Executive Board Public Resolution
6/23/2004
"There is no difference between the Nazi threat during World War II, the threat
of Soviet imperialism, and the threat of Al Quaida today. None.
They were, and are, in the case of Al Quaida, threats posed by the
forces of world domination. They were, and are, in the case of Al Quaida, threats against the Freedom of Man. They
were, and are, in the case of Al Quaida, all threats against everything this Country stands for, including
its diversity.
In the case of the first two, they deserved to be driven off the face of the earth,
not because we wanted to, but because we had to. Likewise for the third.
We do not need the approval of others to defend ourselves against them, or to
fight them."
-United States Navy Veterans Association
Executive Board Public Resolution
July 13, 2004
"'Politics is an honorable profession',
as Robert F. Kennedy once said.
It is honorable because it is the profession which creates policymakers
who make policy
and pass legislation for our American democracy.
And it is that democracy and its workings which permit everyone
to speak.
In the final analysis, that is our cause,
the cause of America."
- United States Navy Veterans Association
Executive Board Public Resolution,
7/4/ 2004
"Six hundred years ago, the world's only superpower
was
Charles V's Spain. Man has been on this planet for
one million years, and, those who do not remember the past, we believe,
are condemned to relive it. Spain's empire is hardly
remembered today, other than by historians.
America does not, and should not, seek empire. We
should remember the simple past of our Republic, and seek
to keep alive and vibrant its values.
We should never challenge Nature
or Nature's God with our own arrogance.
With that wisdom, we hope and pray, God will bless
our endeavors."
- United States Navy Veterans Association
Executive Board Public Resolution
September 11, 2004
"Before destruction the heart of man is haughty,
and before honor is humility."
- Proverbs 18:12
Breaking News, September 25, 2006:
By Executive Board Resolution this date, the Association becomes
the first major American veterans' group to call for a boycott of the U.S. gasoline retailer CITGO because it is owned by the Government of Venezuela, run one-man-rule style by
the anti-American thug Hugo Chavez. For more detail on this story, and on Chavez, see the NSA Newstand's initial article "Sandstorm,"
which is updated periodically, appearing at the top of the initial edition of the
"Militarism can be defined as an ideology which says
all political problems in the world are susceptible to
a military solution.
If that is the definition, this Association does
not stand for miltarism.
But the definition we posed in the first paragraph
is a straw man. It is not a question for American
foreign policy, and never has been a question, as to whether every political issue in the world pertaining to U.S. national
security needed to be solved, exclusively, by either military or non-military means. Warfare is merely diplomacy by other
means, Clausewitz once said, and we agree.
The balance between military means
and diplomatic means, to achieve
the purposes of the United States
in the world is, just that,
a balancing question, not an either-or proposition.
Any politician, or John McLaughlin for that matter,
who disagrees can, first of all, and we invite all
those so inclined, to address the substance of this resolution."
- United States Navy Veterans Association
Executive Board Public Resolution
September 14, 2004
***************************************
"God created man so that one day all people would stand before
Him in judgment. It is not up to the United States to make that judgment. But it is the mission of our Armed Forces, for all
the enemies of the United States, to speed up that appointment date."
- GEN Norman Schwarzkopf,
USA (ret.)
****************************************
"We cannot plan future military campaigns in the
War on anti-American Terror as if they are parades down Pennsylvania Avenue. But plan these campaigns, and execute them, for
the forseeable future, we must.
We must be obdurate as well as straightforward with
the American people as to the sacrifice needed in these campaigns. We need to be as persistent and as patient as our enemies.
This was a problem in the past: That we were not. That is why we lost the only war we did.
And we cannot pretend that these enemies do not exist.
This War, like the Cold War, will not end until one
side or the other is, irrevocably, buried.
It should not be our side. It should be theirs. And
it should all end on a day and time of our choosing, not theirs."
- United States Navy
Veterans Association
Executive Board Public Resolution,
May 2, 2005
********************************************
"The history of America is now the central feature of the history of the world; for the world
has set its face hopefully toward our democracy; and, O my fellow citizens, each one of you carries
on your shoulders not only the burden of doing well for the
sake of your own country, but the burden of doing well and seeing that this nation does well for
the sake of mankind."
“It is not the critic who counts; not the man who points out how the strong man stumbles, or where the
doer of deeds could have done them better. The credit belongs to the man who is actually in the arena, whose face is marred
by dust and sweat and blood; who strives valiantly; who errs, who comes short again and again, because there is no effort
without error and shortcoming; but who does actually strive to do the deeds; who knows great enthusiasms, the great devotions;
who spends himself in a worthy cause; who at the best knows in the end the triumph of high achievement, and who at the worst,
if he fails, at least fails while daring greatly, so that his place shall never be with those cold and timid souls who neither
know victory nor defeat.”
-Theodore Roosevelt
Twenty-sixth President of the United States
Founder of the modern United States Navy
We're fighting for our Country in the Global War on Terror.
We're fighting for our freedoms, and the Freedom of Man, against enemies who despise
both those things.
That's why our loved ones are overseas.
We have to win.
We will win.
Not just for ourselves, but for all human kind.
"People who consider themselves, as is their right to consider
themselves, ethnic-Americans, regardless of what word they put before the hyphen, or who are immigrants, whether
legal or illegal, need to, as individuals, have personal humility in their hearts by reason of the fact
Providence has permitted them, in the time they have on this planet, to live in the greatest and freest country on earth,
and to believe they are Americans first, and that their children and descendants born here will be Americans first.
And they need to say both those things out loud, without prompting
by Senator Kennedy or anyone else, in whatever language they choose, to all their friends, their enemies, their acquaintances
and to the general world public, including the public in the countries they came from.
They do not need to believe substantively in anything in particular as
to what this country should stand for,
or whether this country shoud substantively stand for anything
at all.
Therein lies the truth and the greatness of America; therein
lies why we are different from all other countries, and why we are the best country on earth: Ours is a country built
exclusively on the proposition that any government's most fundamental duty is to protect the rights of its individual citizens,
and all persons, and the belief that those rights do not come from government itself.
Here are the exact words of Emma Lazarus, a Jewish-American who
grew up in New York City, written in 1883, as they appear on the pedestal of our Statue of Liberty, a gift to this country
from the people of France:
'...From her beacon-hand
Glows world-wide welcome; her mild
eyes command
The air-bridged harbor that twin cities frame,
'Keep, ancient lands, your storied pomp!' cries she
With
silent lips. "Give me your tired, your poor,
Your huddled masses yearning to breathe free,
The wretched refuse
of your teeming shore,
Send these, the homeless, tempest-tossed to me,
I lift my lamp beside the golden door!"'
Emma did not say "...[or] your huddling masses yearning to breathe
free." She said "...[and] your huddling masses yearning to breathe free."
Those two things we mentioned above should be the real
standards for current immigration. Not how many years you, legally or illegally, or your ancestors, have lived here. Not
anything to do with economics or whether somebody needs you to pick grapes or clean toilets. Nor what country you came from.
Those two qualifications, those two standards, alone. Demonstrated.
It's that simple. Or that complicated."
- United States Navy Veterans Association Executive
Board Public Resolution
4/10/2006
"No foreign person, government or entity should own any debt of the
Government of the United States unless, as part of the debt agreement, they sign a written statement that they will positively
support, in the sole opinion of the Executive Branch of the United States Government, the foreign policies, all of them, of
the United States currently, and into the term of the debt, or that the debt, principal and interest remaining, will be unilaterally
terminated by the Government of the United States, without notice or refund.
There is too much United States debt held by foreigners. Many of
them, including governments, are anti-American. These people hold us hostage. This is blackmail, and all blackmailers are
human scum. This whole thing needs to stop, and it needs to stop now. Loan us money, fine. Loan us money and not be our friend,
not fine. Be on our side or we do not need your money.
Period."
- United States Navy Veterans Association Executive
Board Public Resolution
11/24/2006
"Chairman of the Central Committee of the Communist Party of the Union of Soviet
Socialist Republics Nikita Khrushchev said to Western ambassadors at a reception at the Polish embassy in Moscow on November 18, 1956:
'My vas pokhoronim! ' 'We will bury you.'
We buried them, by outspending them on national defense and doing an end run around
their military economy when we knew they could not keep up with us, during the Reagan Administration.
We need to do the same thing with the Islamic jihadists, and the rogue nuclear
states which threaten us today, like North Korea and Iran.
We need to bury them. Nothing less."
- US Navy Veterans Association Executive Board Public
Resolution
5/26/ 2009
“This you knows. The years travel
fast.
And time after time
I’ve done the Tell.
But this ain’t one body’s Tell.
It’s the Tell of us all.
And you got to listen it and ‘member.
‘Cause what you hears today,
you got to tell the newborn tomorrow.
I’s looking behind us now,
into history back.
I sees those of us that got the luck
and started the haul for home.
It lead us here and we was heartful
‘cause we seen what there once was.
One look, and we knewed
we’d got it straight.
Those what had gone before had knowing
of things beyond our reckoning. . .
. . .even beyond our dreaming.
Time counts and keeps counting.
And we knows now. . .
. . .finding the trick of what’s
been and lost ain’t no easy ride.
But that’s our trek.
we got to travel it.
And there ain’t nobody knows
where it’s gonna lead.
Still and all, every night
we does the Tell. . .
. . .so that we ‘member who we was
and where we came from.
But most of all we ‘members
the man who finded us. . .
. . .him that came the salvage.
And we lights the city.
Not just for him. . .
. . .but for all of them
that are still out there.
‘Cause we knows
there’ll come a night. . .
. . . when they sees the distant light. . .
. . .and they’ll be coming home.”
--- With apologies to Savannah in Mad Max Beyond Thunderdome
Every reader over the age over the age of 12 in America
knows what we are talking here, and whom we are talking about.
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