A Gringo in Rural Mexico: Albatross, Straw Man, Red Herring

Friday 9 November 2012

Albatross, Straw Man, Red Herring

During the autopsy season following an election, there are the predictable people who come forth to say that the Republicans will cease to exist because they are an exclusive, discriminating group that prohibits the entry of people "who do not look like them". This although we have two Latin seated governors, and two South Asian seated governors, who in each case are divided equally between girls and boys.

Let us be perfectly frank about these things. It is the country-club, liberal Republican element that has always resisted the participation within the party...in any meaningful way...of the unwashed, the Mexicans, the Negroes, the working-class, the blue collar, the classical conservative thinkers....who in fact constitute most of the growth in the party that it has seen since 1976.

The Bushes, the RNC and almost the entire party leadership in almost all cases, speak in unintelligible, unintelligent, gibberish, conditionalising their positions, and never staking out hard ground, and hard positions because...quite frankly...they have no principles in terms of philosophy. Their position is almost always seems to be some variation of, "We can do what the Democrats do, just a little cheaper".

Tbe strange oddity is that the Country Club Republicans lose the elections and then blame the conservatives who had nothing to do with the loss.

Straightforward thinking...shooting down the demogoguery and cranking out the vote is how we can win. We can flood the polls again by going back to the future...to 1980 and 1984.

oooOOOooo

It is becoming clear that the reason Rasmussen and Gallup and even El Gringo Viejo were wrong about this entire election was because of the failure to admit to the invalidity of the original premise. We knew that there was significant weakness in the Republican turn-out looming. People, with my own disposition, have long since tired of being tolerated by the country club Republicans only for so long as we make phone calls and nail signs and lick envelopes and then vote for Bob Dole....because it was "his time". And we have tired of going back to our hovels while the "important professionals and experts" go back to their fancy saloons and talk over aged scotch about how "we almost made it this time". "If it just hadn't been for the ulta-radical conservatives scaring the black vote away...or the geezers...or the left handed lesbian lithuanian salmon fishing boat operators from southwestern East Virginia. We would have won this time. Too many conservatives...too many people who worry about debt and deficit...and guns....and dead babies that haven't even been born."

oooOOOooo

BUT~~~El Gringo Viejo did not think that the rightwing crazies like me would ever dream of saying ..... and then doing .... the often repeated and undone threat. We wanted Caine, we wanted some better than Santorum, we wanted something...but we knew that Romney would run a good race and lose. The Republican establishment talked itself into supporting Romney, because "he was the only one who could win", according to the country-clubbers.

Bit by bit he ran a good race...for a moderate...who did not want to truly inspire America, but did want to fix it so that it would be a place where the poor could have their flat screens and free cell phones with free time and their free food and their free homes and their free schooling, and their free whatever.

And we knew. Little things burned out the rightwing crazies. The worst one was probably the notion that we ....."needed to keep the good parts of the Obama Socialised Medicine Initiative." Other things came up....like saying "Oh yes! We agree that Mubarek needed to go, we congratulate Obama for getting rid of Mubarek".....and then the failure to call him the cowardly liar that he is....All of those things dug up the past about his pride in being able to bring socialised medicine to Massachussets and "work across the aisle" with the worst of the very, very worst leftist, labour union slime in the American political pantheon.

Boston, and the big dig. Kennedy's perpetural tunnel (ing) project. Originally budgetted for 2,000,000,000 dollars and two year's work, finally being almost finished after burning up over 30,000,000,000 dollars and 16 years. It had been perhaps the biggest, lardiest, most corrupt public construction project in the history of the Republic, and yet Romney was proud of working with them.

Romney could have blown Obama out of the water on the immigration issue simply by pointing out that his auntie and uncle had been living illegally in the United States on complete public assistance, at almost incredible expense to the taxpaying public, while "someone" arranged for extremely costly law firms to represent them in various courts for every issue ranging from immigration and deportation proceedings to welfare fraud to DWI in collision on multiple cases and counts,

But,Romney was not a fighter. He was brave enough to let sympathetic super-PAC people defame other Republicans in the primaries, while keeping his own hands ostensibly clean. It is still thought that his people collaborated with Gloria Alred to foist a set of baseless rumours onto the stage concerning Herman Caine. The rumours disappeared, but so did Herman Caine as a leader of the pack.
But, when dealing with an out and out lying, no holds barred marxist with the sake of the Republic in the balance, Romney could not override his better nature and become a fighter. And the rightwing crazies said, "To hell with it", and they did not vote....They saw Romney delivering the Republic to the ash heap one day later than Obama. They saw Romney, finally, as the guy who would say,"Well if we reduce the tax rate by 1.334 percent on people making 12,000 dollars every quarter, and gradually increase the rate on people making less than 64.22 times more than the median interceptor of the Gladian factor of the inverse quotient of 0.04% of the combined cost of living increases for the upper 39% of income earners.....blah........blah............blahblah."

Herman Caine's 9 - 9 - 9 proposal had to be ridiculed to Hell and beyond because it was the only thing that would really work. Caine's notion ...nay, theory...is correct. First tell the central government that this is what you are going to have..or less, and you will adjust your expenditures to that level. Southerner know that Caine would have used the ammunition necessary and would have rewritten the rules of any debates so as not to have a slob like the woman who corrected Romney by affirming that Obama's lie was actually the truth, (something she had to retract the next day...when of course it was too late). Mr. Caine, also, had the prescence of a man with black African ancestry who was a true product of the Amerian experience, while Obama had none.

oooOOOooo

NOW, CLOSING...The numbers are truly shocking. There were about 12,000,000 FEWER overall votes when comparing the 2008 presidential election with the 2o12 election. Obama did not come near increasing his gross vote or his percentage of the take. A last measure, it appears that he had something less than 9,500,000 fewer votes this time as opposed to his last run and 1.7% less percentage of the total.

Romney did a little better in very few places. He did better than McCain' s pitiable run in 2008 in Utah for instance, but in the final analysis he gained 1.7 million more votes and 2.8% more percentage than John McCain's hopelessly stupid, losing, pointless run. Which of course...that failure was blamed on Sarah Palin...who actually brought McCain into a significant lead before McCain's greater willingness to defend Obama than to defend Palin resulted in his fall into a dismal 2nd place against a person with no qualifications and no resume' and whose only claim to fame is that he hates America, white people, conservatives of any race or colour, and free enterprise.

Rightwing crazies did not vote in the numbers necessary to defeat the United Nations-type, marxist, narcissist. They saw Romney as just a weaker cup of tea, whose leaves are from the same bush.

WE THINK THAT THE NEXT ELECTION MAY WELL BE HAVE A CENTER RIGHT CANDIDATE BEING PROMULGATED BY A COMING TOGETHER OF THE CONSTITUTIONALISTS FROM VARIOUS POSITIONS ON THE RIGHT....INCLUDING ALL CONSERVATIVE REPUBLICANS. That amalgamation could defeat an emasculated Republican party of pinky libs and the truly "democratic socialist" party that the Democrat Party became some years back. What we have now only guarantees the ruin of the Republic.

El Gringo Viejo

(and yes, egv did vote, straight Republican. This was his 12th presidential...straight Republican. And in by-elections, straight Republican)

oooOOOooo

Comparative Totals and Percentages

2008

Barack Obama (Democrat) 69,498,516 (52.93%)
John McCain (Republican) 59,948,323 (45.65%) Total - 129, 446, 839

2012

Barack Obama 59, 946, 022 (51.2%)

Mitt Romney 57, 263, 941 (48.8%) Total - 117, 209, 963

Click to visit our little Adobe Hideaway…

This is our rustic, but very comfortable place, out in the rural area to the northwest of Ciudad Victoria, Tamaulipas…the State's Capital. From a bustling city of 400,000, we placed our domicile a bit more than 20 miles into the scenes of mountains, citrus groves, spring-fed creeks and rivers with crystal clear waters, and an abundance of bird species that make veteran birders shake their heads in wonder.

We are all but adjacent to the venerable Hacienda de Santa Engracia (about 500 yards away), which dates to the 1720s and has ancient structures still in use, very elegant, and mystical in many ways. It has operated as a guest hotel since the 1970s.

Our little place rests on three and a fraction acres, fronting on the Rio Corona, which is lined with over-1,000 year old cypress trees. The nearby Sierra del Cautivo…a major segment of the overall Sierra Madre Oriental that dominate most of eastern Mexico, lies to the west by about three miles. guards the many springs that maintain the almost perpetual flow from those heights (up to 12,000 fasl) while our place is situated right at 1,000 feet above sea level.

Give us a call, come by and visit…it is truly a different venture in the most positive sense. We can be reached by our email - privatouring@gmail.com - which is our preferred method of communicating.

______________

What is an OROG?

Once a person lands on our page, that individual becomes a member of the Order of Readers of the Old Gringo, (OROG). There are no dues or assessments to pay, no meetings, no requirements. We are not associated with the KKK, the WCTU, the French Masons, or the Global Warming Glacier

Protection Committee.

We do have a distant connection with the Knights of the Golden Circle and hold the maps to the internment sites of 34 tonnes of Confederate Gold, and 1,000 tonnes of Mexican Imperial Silver (bar and coinage) derived from the collapse of the Reign of Maximillian von Hapsburg, Emperor of Mexico (1863 - 1867). I think we can remember where we put it.

All kidding aside, we are acerbic, but we do not bite. We do believe in our antiquated philosophy, but we try to not impose our quirks and beliefs so far as to be disrespectful.

El Gringo Viejo

__________________________

Wise Words

Communism is a philosophy of failure, the creed of ignorance, and the gospel of envy. Its inherent virtue is the equal sharing of misery.

Winston Churchill

oooooooooo

Be sure you are right, then go ahead.

I bark at no man's bid. I will never come and go, fetch and carry, at the whistle of the Great Man in the White House, no matter who he is.

I told the people of my district that I would serve them as faithfully as I had done. But, if such was not to be, then you may all go to Hell, and I shall go to Texas!

David Crockett

oooooooooo

And on and on it goes. The more the Government gives away, the more it takes, and the less Americans do for themselves, until finally, like Europe, there is nobody left to do anything, and there is nobody left to pay for, the nothing that is not done.

And, yes, Virginia, there truly is a Santa Clause, and he and Mrs. Clause and their helpers care greatly for the good children of the Planet. So long as there is happiness, kindness, charity, generosity, and the Spirit of Fellowship, Santa Clause will be there, representing those noble things, and he will always move in a spiritual way so as to provoke humankind to goodness.

El Gringo Viejo

oooooooooo

“There is another class of coloured people who make a business of keeping the troubles, the wrongs, and the hardships of the Negro race before the public. Having learned that they are able to make a living out of their troubles, they have grown into the settled habit of advertising their wrongs — partly because they want sympathy and partly because it pays. Some of these people do not want the Negro to lose his grievances, because they do not want to lose their jobs.”

Booker Tallaferro Washington

oooooooooo

It is impossible to make a poor man rich by making a rich man poor.

Abraham Lincoln

oooooooooo

El Gringo Viejo: a fair description

Life for El Gringo Viejo began on the Texas-Mexico frontier, near McAllen, Texas literally on a real, live farm. The farmer, as one might imagine, was his father, who had moved with his parents from Gwinner, Sargent County, North Dakota in 1915 - 1916 period, down to the Lower Rio Grande Valley of Texas. (And yes, Virginia, that is the way Sargent County is spelled.)

His parents farmed in an area close to the new community named after its founder, called Ed Couch, in Hidalgo County of Texas. My grandfather is buried in the Weslaco Municipal Cemetery about 10 feet away from his friend, Ed Couch.

After studies, and a stint in the 1st Cavalry, 12th Regiment (mounted), Headquarters Squadron of the United States Army...riding warhorses back and forth along the Rio Grande from the late 1920s and early 1930s. He did not speak much about his service, but we determined that he apparently made rank of 1st Lieutenant.

El Gringo Viejo's Father established his farming and citrus grove-care operation just north of McAllen, Texas. Mother was a housewife and a professional woman....a learned, eloquent, well-read woman.

They were educated people, my father winding up as a Superintendent of a major school/facility of the Texas Department of Mental Health and Mental Retardation in Austin, Texas after a twenty year career in education at the secondary level. He had degrees in History, Psychology, and Education Administration.

El Gringo Viejo is the last of three children, all males. Number one was Milton Birchard, Jr. who was born in 1936 and died in a vehicular incident in 1988. He was narcoleptic. He held a doctorate in geography from Louisiana State University and was head of the Department there for a good while.

Number two is Norman Francis, who was born during the WWII situation in 1942 and became an important Republican political engineer and fundraiser. He served as Executive Director of the Republican Party of Texas during the late 1960s and early 1970s and as Senator John G. Tower's immediate Executive Assistant. The Senator is the Godfather of Norman's first son.

Norman died at age 77 in Austin, Texas and I was one of four eulogists who was chosen to speak at his en memoriam at the Austin Club in downtown most Austin…within sight of the State Capitol.

It was a personal duty and very rewarding

in every way.

My arrival was in 1947, and I was destined to confound my parents and all those around me. Educated entirely in public schools in McAllen, skipping the third grade, and stumbling out of my high school in the upper 90% of a class of 606. I

attended and graduated from Southwest Texas State University (now named Texas State University, unfortunately), being one of the few conservatives to graduate out of the School of Sociology, although my treatment at the hands of my tormentor-professors was not so unpleasant in those days. Emphasis of studies were social demography, and Latin American Affairs with a concentration on Mexico's history and current political evolution, with a minors in History, Geography, and Political Science.

El Gringo Viejo is one of the old, unreconstructed high-church Episcopalians. Politically, he is very fundamentally conservative. He prefers Baseball to football, and considers that baseball with a designated hitter for the pitcher should be called "poofy-ball". Favourite major league team of all times? The Brooklyn Dodgers of the 1950s. It will never be the same again.
El Gringo Viejo's father was born to a Hudson Valley-type girl and a man who had lost two older brothers who served in the Pennsylvania 96th Regiment of Volunteer Infantry during the War Between the States.

The surnamed line (Newton) originated from East Anglia, not far from a place called Washington in northeastern England. They came into Boston Harbour, Massachusetts in 1642 (the 1st voyage of the Mayflower had overbooked), and settled there and in Maine as well as spreading out to Vermont, New York, and Pennsylvania, over the generations for the first 220 years.
Another batch of folks, mainly Anglo, settled in the middle Hudson Valley. There was another group of Celto-Teutonics types from Saxony and Prussia, establishing and settling along the Hudson River from around what is Catskill County northward to Duchess and Rennselaer Counties around a place named Red Hook. The main group came in during the early 1650s.

My mother's people were another English line of long-term Southern and Tennessee people, from the Eastern part of that State, who originally came in during the 1660s through Virginia and North Carolina, and finally into Eastern Tennessee, settling in and around a county to be named Franklin, and helping to establish the city of Winchester. Almost all of these people originated from southwestern England, near the frontier with Wales.

Only recently did we verify that she had many people involved in the service of the Confederacy. One died in northern Mississippi, another Captain Asa Grant, 2nd Tennessee Volunteer Cavalry, was severely wounded and succumbed to his wounds finally in 1869, and another hung around in an Ohio POW camp (Camp Chase) for about 13 months, while three others were either wounded or died in action, including David Limbaugh, Lieutenant, 42 Tennessee Infantry. Another five made it through relatively unscathed.

Almost all were, oddly enough, related to the great-grand uncles and gggg-grandfathers down to gg-grandfathers of Rush Limbaugh. The gggg-grandfather came into the Colonies in the early 1740s from a Prussia and Saxony background, and served in both civilian and military capacities to the Continental government and Army. He was the XO of a Militia Battalion of 3,000 Pennsylvania effectives. They honed their military readiness under the supervision of Gen. von Steuben and someone named Washington at some place called Valley Forge, Pennsylvania.

A grandson of his, Isaac, settled in Tennessee after the War for Independence against King George III. So Rush and I share grandfathers, four generations deep on the American Continent.

It should be stated here that were I to be called to declare, my allegiance would still be with the Southern Cause, although I bear no rancor against those who feel the same about their instinct to maintain the Union. Oddly enough, both my mother (a Southerner) and my father (a true Yankee by blood) believed that we would have remained closer if we had separated, and each side gone the ways of their own yearning, but amicably.

The last of the English (El Gringo Viejo's) line came during the time between the Revolutionary War and the War of 1812. They left County Wicklow, where they had been involved, apparently, in that peculiar Anglo - Scots/Irish practice of making whiskey by the use of peat for fuel. They were also involved in the business of production and processing of various types of grains as well as the production of whiskey, gin, and beer. By their surnames one would know that, while coming out of Ireland, they were actually English, one with the surname of Christian and the wife, Webster. They had, in fact, married in Christ's Church Cathedral, Anglican, in downtown Dublin in 1796. They landed in New York, set up shop in the City among previously arrived relatives, and then in Albany. We have some record that this Christian who married the Webster had actually lived in the colonies, but travelled several times back and forth between the Spirits businesses in England and Ireland and the New World. They wound up as the generations progressed in and around Minneapolis (St. Anthony) & Saint Paul, Minnesota, and Racine, Wisconsin. My particular line went from New York to Alabama, then North Carolina, and then Wisconsin to join up with the rest of the extended family, finally in Minnesota, before the War Between the States.

The Time Line of entry of all lines of my children's blood ancestry on their mother's side in the New World begins in 1578, when Spaniards of mixed Hebraic and Iberian peoples, and others of ancestry from Portugal, Galicia, and southern Spain entered into what was to become Monclova and Saltillo, Coahuila. They are brought under the auspices of the Explorer, Conquistador, and Colonizer Jose Luis Carvajal y de la Cueva, with elements settling in Lampazos and Cerralvo (Nuevo Leon), in Palofox (Texas), and Revilla (Tamaulipas) on the Rio Bravo.
Also, the Count of the Sierra Gorda, Col. Jose de Escandon brought another group of mainly Spanish, Portuguese, and Azoreans in the early 175os, settling along the Rio Bravo (Grande), and then on the north (Texas) side, spreading up to what is now Yorktown, Texas (near and southeast of San Antonio de Bexar, more or less) before and during the Texas Republican period.

My children and theirs are qualified to join the Daughters of the American Revolution, the Sons of Liberty, The Sons of the Grand Army of the Union, The Sons of Confederate Veterans, and the Daughters of the Confederacy. By my side they are 16th generation English Colonial - American and 6th generation Texian. By my wife's side, my children are 23rd generation northernmost New Spain, Texian, and American. Isolating Texas alone, my grandchildren are 15th generation Texian.

LIKE?

Cats, and then dogs.

Fishing, even a bit of bird watching, now and then.

Really good music..antique, old, 1950s and early 1960s rock and roll, classical - Hayden, Mozart, Beethoven, both Strauses, and many others, African tribal sounds en chorus, Mexican bolero...mariachis when they play out-of-doors, some country and quite a bit of the old western (Sons of the Pioneers, the Texas Ploughboys, Marty Robbins "Gunfighter Ballads, for instance.), even some of my own piano works, bagpipes, Enya, marimba, Caribe.

The Gershwins' Porgy and Bess always seemed to me to have been, and remains, a true masterpiece of Americana.

Well maintained Firearms, smooth running small equipment, old autos that respond to repair and upkeep and keep going. Used to have BMWs and so forth, but being old helps tone things down a bit.

Antiques, and antiquities...Meso-American archeology...and religious history. Formal religious services among the Orthodox..as in Anglican, Roman, Orthodox and Conservative Jewish services and celebrations. Hard to find, now.

Overnight radio, rightwing talk radio until it becomes overly tedious and repetitive.

Weather and climate.

And strangely during the past few years,cooking. Not just barbequeing...but actually dishing up gourmet-type stuff...and gardening to a purpose.

We grow a lot of our own spices for our little bed and breakfast and we specialise in flowerng plants, bushes, and trees that attract bees and literally hundreds of species of common to extremely rare birds to our place.

Lifelong Republican, honourably discharged - United States Army (conscripted).

Now drifted into the position of favouring the amicable withdrawal of Texas from the American Union. My grandchildren are 15th generation Coahuila/Texas by my wife and 8th generation Texas by me and my will is to have them answer for the debt of Texas and not for the debts incurred by the National Socialists who have taken possession of the central government in Washington, D.C.

DISLIKES?
Any kind of socialism...bolshevik, national, marxist, social democratic, Trotskyite, progressive, ....and any kind of socialist.

The Ku Klux Klan and such types who figure that they have to hate somebody because of how he/she was born. They are just role players, resucitated by the Communist Party USA in the 1920s, whose members are fueled by a well deserved sense of inferiority.

And almost all social activism.

Almost all labour union officers and almost all labour unions. (There are some exceptions.)

Public assistance of any kind. All welfare and/or charity should and must be privately handled in order to avoid the trap wherein we have fallen, that being the multigenerational slide into the abyss of forlorn hopelessness that is government slavery and dependence. That slide is cheerfully supported by politicians who love to buy votes with other peoples' money.

Lotteries operated by governments.

Litter, filth, graffiti, gangs, and waiting in line for people using food stamps whil'st they argue with the cashier about how they "need" this or that to be covered...when they have three carts with 450 USD of snacks and things we cannot afford because we are in an 'upper income" category.

Church reformers who want to change my church instead of them going to another church and just leaving me alone.

Medications for boys who are over-active, and medications in general.

Lite beer, lite Coca Cola, fat-free, lo-cal, artificial sugars and sweeteners, anything marked "healthy" on food packages, sugar-free, margarine, and driving 23 miles to buy gasoline over there because it is 2 cents per gallon cheaper.

Any government programme designed to help anybody; 94% of the time the programme winds up morphing into some kind of monster. Then liberals and do-gooders will propose another programme, twice as costly, to cure the ills caused by the first cure-all.

Officiousness, and the term "non-profit", as if there is some kind of moral superiority in the failure to produce wealth.

Physical abuse of an animal, an extraterrestrial, a child, slave, woman, or anything like a tractor or power tool, firearm, sewing machine, or an auto, etc.
Loud and/or sharp noises, especially when such noises have no particular purpose.

Wasting anything, from paper towels to Clorox to cake and cookie batter...anything. And....waiting in a line.