Text from Jeb Bush's speech at Hillary's Award Ceremony

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Jeb Bush: Hillary and I agree on importance of civic engagement

• Alex Leary, Times Washington Bureau Chief

Monday, September 9, 2013 2:49pm

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Jeb Bush has taken heat from some on the right for agreeing to present an award tomorrow to Hillary Clinton for her work in public service. But he tells the Buzz that while he disagrees with Clinton "on many issues, we certainly agree on the importance of civic engagement."
     Bush, who is chairman of the National Constitutional Center, is presenting the award in Philadelphia.    "The National Constitution Center is recognizing Secretary Clinton with the 2013 Liberty Medal for her lifelong career in public service, especially her ongoing advocacy efforts on behalf of women and girls around the globe," he said in a statement. "While Secretary Clinton and I disagree on many issues, we certainly agree on the importance of civic engagement. The Board looks forward to the Center’s annual celebration of the vision of freedom, responsibility and equality embodied in the U.S. Constitution.”

 

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We were privileged to have been contacted by the Republican Institutional National Organisation (RINO) requesting that we assist in the composition of a short address for the famous conservative past governor of Florida, allowing us to amend his speech slightly before its presentation at (Sir Edmund) Hillary's award for "Public Service and Civic Engagement"  (?)   My inspired words came out something like what is found below.

 

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Image pertains to the Israel Museum

 



 

    While dreaming, a vision occurred to El Gringo Viejo, and as though from an angel from on high, the presence told me, "Go to Pharaoh and tell him....tell him to let My people go. Tell Pharaoh that it is My wish and command that he let the Texasites go!  Free them from their bondage."   So, in something of a trance, but pushed and pulled into my chair....at my typewriter....and compelled at times by my will and at times against my will, the words spilled forth as if dictated by Aaron in his better way of speaking.

 
 

It spilled forth thusly:

 

      Former Secretary Clinton has dedicated her life to serving and engaging people across the world in democracy,” Bush said in a statement. "The simple act of corkscrewing into the heavy enemy fire in the Balkans and shielding Sinbad and her own daughter from the withering sniper and mortar fire as they ran across the completely exposed tarmac, prove that this woman is truly a daughter of Jean d'Arc.

 

      We all remember when she suggested to Maggie Thompson and Bernie Nussbaum that it might be nice to "tidy-up" Vince Foster's office after poor Vince was found at Fort Marcy Park after having suffered a calamitous health issue, something like a work-place incident. (Sir Edmund) Hillary, always thinking of others, asked her staff to clean up the office so that Mrs. Foster would not have to be burdened.

 

     And we are moved to think how difficult it was for her to supervise the ghost writers of two different books...two! mind you....when she had so much on her plate, on behalf of women and children and minorities. It is very difficult to supervise two different books, when one realised that neither she nor anyone else ever read them. (Sir Edmund) Hillary emoted the new literary process, far ahead of its time by Cerebral Osmomosistic Diffusion, a process she invented and perfected, and will be awarded, later in the day, ten consecutive years of combined Nobel Prizes for Peace,Science, Literature, and Divinity. While some light a candle instead of cursing the darkness, (Sir Edmund) Hillary is more like a Times Square Solstice and Kwanza and LGBT Tree, lighting the way for what has been called the New Normalcy and Tolerance.

 

     The Wall Street Awards Group gave her, simultaneous to the Jeb Bush Award for being just like (Sir Edmund) Hillary, the coveted Bernie Madoff Award for devising new Techniques in Cattle Futures Trading. The Academy of Cattle Futures lovingly engraved her imitation silver and gold trophy with the message, "It really does take one to know one".
 

     And of course, sitting in the front row of the admiring and adoring audience was Mrs. Ron Brown, and the members of the White House Travel Agency staff who were given, let us say, a nice "early retirement" when (Sir Edmund) Hillary first entered the White House advised the FBI that they seemed to be tired and needed a rest. Always thinking of others.  She placed her cousins and some of their friends in charge of the White House Travel Office, and they served well enough until some were let go because of little discrepancies here and there.   Only two or three were ever convicted of anything, however.

 

    It was like when (Sir Edmund)Hillary and Janet Reno decided to have the FBI, the ATF, and Gen. Wesley Clark liberate those poor children from those crazy, religious gun-nuts outside of Waco, Texas. We are comforted in knowing that because of the heroic efforts of that team, led by (Sir Edmund)Hillary, those children are in a better place now.

 

   It doesn't really matter, whether we are talking about holding 1,300 FBI raw data files for two years or leaving a briefcase on Vince Foster's White House office desk, three days after the office had been visited, photographed, and dusted.   Either way, it really is phenomenal, folks, really, because Chuck Colson who worked for Nixon in the White House had one unopened raw data file, and he had to sit in the Big House for three years for that offence.  Imagine!  All of (Sir Edmund)Hillary's were opened and the papers returned in inaccurate manners.  We are talking about a really magical personality.

 

    Or, we can consider the phenomenal ability to have Web Hubbell serve two different long terms in the Big House so that (Sir Edmund) Hillary could keep her wide....uh...her wide.....uh...presence ensconced in the White House, or that she is the only person in this 5,000 seat auditorium at this time who can say with pride that he or she knows over 100 people who have met with violent and/or untimely deaths, sometimes unexplainable and sometimes ruled homicides and sometimes ruled suicides.....now, go ahead and say it...not many people can duplicate that record.

 

     This list can go on forever, shaking down political contributors who are trying to buy a Presidential Pardon...saying that her daughter was at the twin towers on the morning of 9 - 11 - 01, saying that she was named for Sir Edmund Hillary three years before he began his assault of Mount Everest, or telling a nice crowd of folks that she tried to volunteer for the United States Marines but was turned down because of her eyesight, we all just have to stand in awe of her.

  

     Who would have ever thought that we would have the opportunity to pay homage to a person who could actually be forever remembered for falling into her 1,000,000 dollar an hour airplane while drunk, and then avoiding a pernicious Congressional inquiry for three months, by faking first stomach flu and then faking a brain concussion and then faking a broken jaw.  What better way to work out of a really tough hangover?

 

     And she will forever be remembered for those inspirational and patriotic words, "What difference, at this point, can it possibly make?" We shall forever remember that defiant, scowling, witch-like face, skewed into a look of contempt for such common people to even think about calling her to account for herself and her stuperous inaction during the time Americans were being killed because she was too blotto and/or too uncaring and/or too self-involved to have considered addressing the need for beefing up security for a consular compound in some silly remote country full of funny looking dark people."

 

    Finally, I, Jeb Bush, demand that we have a moment of silence so as to consider deeply, everything....and I mean everything...that (Sir Edmund) Hillary has done for women.....and children......just think of everything she has done.....everything."

 

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  Thank you, Governor, for allowing me to advise and contribute to your attempt to speak reasonably about such an interesting personality.   I have been guided by my mother's admonition to only say the most favourable things one can about the living or the dead, and we believe that admonition has been served.   Suffice to say, I and all of mine will vigorously oppose any effort that you might make in terms of gaining any further elective office.  The notion that you can render homage to a certifiably psychotic narcissist who is dedicated to the destruction of this Republic and the establishment of a socialist replacement, while at the same time denigrating personalities like Ted Cruz, is disgusting. 

 

Sincerely,

 

 

El Gringo Viejo

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Continuation: Deception, Deceit, and Criminality in the White House II

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    Thomas Woodrow Wilson once said, almost in the following words,  that it is necessary to have the few who are able to go and graduate the University, while the many should be taught trades, so a to justify something of an existence and to be prepared to attend to those of the collegiate class.

 

     These are the believers in the "Four Freedoms".   When Norman Rockwell painted his "four freedoms" work, he probably did not think so much about what it meant.   The Four Freedoms notion is fundamental hard socialist.  It was the skeleton and nervous system of the CCCP Constitution that was chiselled up by the Bolsheviks.

     Franklin Delano Roosevelt placed the four freedoms as a goal in his in the first State of the Union speech to Congress after the catastrophe at Pearl Harbour.   In that speech of the 6th of January, 1942 FDR spake thusly:

 

      

In the future days, which we seek to make secure, we look forward to a world founded upon four essential human freedoms.

      The first is freedom of speech and expression—everywhere in the world.

     The second is freedom of every person to worship God in his own way—everywhere in the world.

    The third is freedom from want—which, translated into world terms, means economic understandings which will secure to every nation a healthy peacetime life for its inhabitants—everywhere in the world.

     

    The fourth is freedom from fear—which, translated into world terms, means a world-wide reduction of armaments to such a point and in such a thorough fashion that no nation will be in a position to commit an act of physical aggression against any neighbour—anywhere in the world.

      That is no vision of a distant millennium. It is a definite basis for a kind of world attainable in our own time and generation. That kind of world is the very antithesis of the so-called new order of tyranny which the dictators seek to create with the crash of a bomb.

 

Franklin D. Roosevelt

 

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     The first two "Four Freedoms are fluff, and highly subject to interpretation.  To a Bolshevik, he is fine with allowing someone the right to speak.   Whomsoever might wish should be allowed to speak to his heart's content.  Of course, the Central Commisariat reserves the legal and just right and prerogative to defend the public and even the speaker himself from dangerous speech, or speech that the Central Commisariat deems to be injurious to the greater good.   And, to be sure, while there is an absolute right to free speech, there is no known cosmic right of being heard.

 

     The third great freedom, the Freedom from Want, is pernicious and seductive.  If the government is allowed to determine what a citizen is allowed to want, to determine what his expectations should be, to determine exactly what a "Want" is, then there is no freedom.   The Castro Brothers Heaven on Earth programme solved the problem about freedom from want by giving the people their two pair of underwear every year, one cup of cooking oil every month per person, six hen eggs per month for each adult.....and when shortages inevitably occurred, the Castro Brothers simply amended the ration downward.

     And who really wants an apartment complex that wastes space by putting bathrooms into every apartment?  No one really minds twenty apartments using one bathroom.   Six or seven people standing in line for the toilet shows discipline of the proletariat!

     There is no reason why boys and girls can't shower out together.  Remember, we are giving you six hours of water every week, whether you need it or not.   We want you to have freedom from want.



	Freedom of Speech Freedom of Worship Freedom from Want Freedom from Fear

 

      And, of course, we have the Fourth Freedom, that being freedom from fear.  That will be accomplished by a world-wide reduction in armaments with such rigorous enforcement and authority that no nation could threaten its neighbour. Of course we could have Mugabe and the Ayatollahs in charge of the weights, measures, and standards of the disarmament of the world, just to make everything fair.   And, of course, a majority vote by the United Nations General Assembly would ensure fairness and goodness. 

 

     If Norman Rockwell had any second thoughts about any of the messages of any of his works, it is the sincere hope of El Gringo Viejo that it was the Four Panes depicting the Four Freedoms.   It might have looked better just with four panes with Larry, Curly, Moe, and Schemp -  "No job too big! No job too small!"

 

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    Now, back to Pancho Villa and Thomas Woodrow Wilson.

    We start a little too far down the road, with the rise of Margaret Sanger as the hood ornament of the "We Can Perfect Humanity and the World" gang.   But, we need to understand the perfect arrogance of the Progressive Movement, once again as the XIXth became the XXth.   The perfect solution to Slavery had proven to be a disaster.   Wages in the Northeastern factories plummeted with the floods of Irish and with the groups of Negroes coming up from the South.   Gompers and company moaned with the lament about how the Negro Slave had had better treatment from the Plantation system than the White factory worker received from the modern capitalists.

     Begging the question, of course, "Then why did all you damned Yankees come down to save us from ourselves and ruin the manumission system that worked to the good of Negro and White, and put in place emancipation, a system that could never have worked because it foisted the unprepared into an economic environment for which he was rarely perfectly prepared."

     But, while we were moaning and groaning about the empty boxcars going north, the Progressive movement did not really give a flip about what damage had been done to the America Negro by emancipation, because they had other damage to do that would be...appropriately...equal.   The biggest laboratory for the development of methods to destroy normalcy and impose the will of the elites was (1) the effete English upper class and (2) the hootsey-tootsey upper drawer Universities in Great Britain and the United States, especially the Ivy League.

     George Bernard Shaw typified the aloof arrogance and sense of self - justifying-self common to the Progressive movement's formative personalities.   He was very intelligent, completely functionally insane, uncontrolled by any notion that morality or ethics could or should apply to him, and he felt entitled to impose his will upon those poor fools known as "the masses".

     The OROG will appreciate the lunacy of a person who could be so inspired as to write in a letter,

      "I, as a Socialist, have had to preach, as much as anyone, the enormous power of the environment. We can change it; we must change it; there is absolutely no other sense in life than the task of changing it. What is the use of writing plays, what is the use of writing anything, if there is not a will which finally moulds chaos itself into a race of gods."

 

     These are the words to calm the heart and soul of AlGore.  We have to admire the affection many of these supposed bleeding heart people had for the lame, halt, retarded, coloured, Jew, the trees, and the animals.  Or not.
        To hear them first-hand, let us hear them first-hand.   (mandatory viewing for OROGs...You will be tested on this material at the end of the semester)

 

 

http://youtu.be/hQvsf2MUKRQ

 

 

    Still using George Bernard as an example, and certainly something much greater than the canary in the mine shaft, he was there as a charter member in the founding of the Devil's curses known as The Fabian Society and the fabled, though intellectually feeble, London School of Economics and Political Science.  This was the part of the building one sees when it under construction.   The Fabians were strike force committed to the notion that the exploited classes would be better off being paid to do nothing, if employed.  If not employed, they should be paid anyway.  They were dedicated to the notion that Dukes and Earls and country gentlemen needed to pay for the sloth of others.

   Margaret Sanger was also a contemporary of these flakes, along with various of her more intimate male friends.   They were fascinated with reproductive systems and how to destroy them or interrupt their function.  On the one hand they wept over the plight of Les Miserables and on the other hand they schemed to develop ways to destroy "unqualified life or life not worth living".

Edith Bolling Galt Wilson
assisting her husband in 1920
by steadying the paper while
Wilson signs.  By this point he
could barely talk or walk
without considerable
assistance

     Thomas Woodrow Wilson was one of those folks and he was one with those folks.   Ironically, he began to suffer something akin to mad cow disease after his return from the failed effort to establish the League of Nations.  He had been working towards an UberStaat that could control better the frailties of the overly sovereign provincial and selfish geographic districts that existed both before and after World War I.

    During the last three-fourths of his ill-deserved second term his health went into a steady decline, all associated with an obvious dementia.   His wife (a trophy wife who replaced a recently deceased first Mrs. Wilson in fairly short order) essentially became the first woman President of the United States.  She hovered over the failing, increasingly incommunicative President, frequently shooing people out of his presence.   She would appear from their private quarters and inform those interested that "The President has decided thusly on the matter of such and such.   He has told me that concerning the issue of the National Parks, follow the procedures that were included in the official memorandum of 12 March 1917.   Mr. Wilson wants the German Ambassador to be made comfortable but there will be no discussion concerning German reparation obligations until the matter of the League is settled."

    There was considerable speculation that Mrs. Edith was, for all practical purposes functioning as the President of the Republic.

 

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     El Gringo Viejo always recommends to the attention of friends and especially OROGs things that might be of interest.   The book, Emissaries to a Revolution,  Woodrow Wilson's Executive Agents in Mexico,  by Larry D. Hill, contains much material with which El Gringo Viejo agrees as solid general knowledge, some small errors, some overly willing tendency in some places to grant too much benefit of the doubt, and much detail...some of it miniscule and meticulous....well presented in a digestible, late night read for a week. Your humble Gringo has read it four times.
    Read words describing the past that is now revisiting us, written by Hill in the preface, "His use of excutive agents allows the president to conduct foreign relations without consulting the Senate in any way.  Their salaries and expenses are usually drawn from the president's secret contingent fund, for the expenditure of which he is not required to make an accounting."
   Add these observations, from the beginning of the first chapter, and it guarantees a jousting good read, "Mexico provided Woodrow Wilson with the first stern test of his skill as a diplomatist.   When he began his presidency he had no experience or training in the conduct of foreign relations.  During his notable academic career as a professor of political science and history and as president of Princeton University, Wilson devoted  himself mainly to the study of  domestic politics and legislative processes.  He scarcely mentioned foreign affairs in the presidential campaign of 1912, and his inaugural address dealt exclusively with domestic problems."  (sound familiar?)

 

    The other book might be a bit difficult to disinter from the Cosmos.   But, it is out there.  It is A Diplomat's Wife in Mexico , Letters from the American Embassy at Mexico City. covering the dramatic period between October 8th 1913 and the breaking off  of diplomatic relations on April 23rd, 1914, together with an account of the occupation of Vera Cruz, by Edith O'Shaughnessy, (Mrs. Nelson O'Shaughnessy).   Much of this book is written in real time in the form of letters mailed or cabled to her mother and other relatives.   In quicker time than Eric Holder can now "untangle" the tangled webs of his iniquity concerning Fast and Furious, this woman published a complicated, all but perfectly assembled and written opus in the middle of a complicated war and have it all in the hands of the public before Hillary could stumble and fall while doing something really complicated, like  boarding an airplane (a stomach virus we are told, caught while corkscrewing into Chappaqua).   We would also commend the quality of this book as being substantially more substantial than (Sir Edmund)Hillary's "It takes a Village, Idiot".

 

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There shall be a return to this topic to-morrow, when we shall tie together a loose end or two, and then delve into other pertinent affairs.   Thanks to  all for the following and perseverance with sentences that never seem to end.   Always draw a deep breath and pretend that you are speaking without a teleprompter.

 

El Gringo Viejo

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Deception, Deceit, and Criminality in the White House: 1912 - 1916

 

     This entry into the register of A Gringo in Rural Mexico is placed here at this time to remind the folks of one considerable and weighty fact.  Crosscurrents of interests and the acceptance of falsities as facts lead, frequently, to an incorrect understanding of history.   The true facts are often more interesting and romantic than the facts presented by the newspapers of the day and/or the official explanations.

 

     In 1916, for instance, there was a short, but drawn out, incident involving the Commander of the Covencionalista forces of the  Division del Norte, known in the vernacular as "Pancho Villa".  He had been confused by peculiar signals that were coming out of the Woodrow Wilson White House, as they pertained to various political alignments.   These alignments were in flux, and they dealt with relations between the United States and Mexico, the White House and Venustiano Carranza, Emiliano Zapata,  Francisco Villa, and between Germany, the United States, and Mexico.  Count the possibilities.
    Perhaps the word "incident" is too trivial for this affair because, in truth, it was quite complicated and runs very much to the contrary to the understanding of Americans who might even remotely familiar with the geo-political affairs during those times.

   Villa was a rough hewn man who had been a juvenile delinquent, found guilty of the attempted murder of the son of the owner of the hacienda where Villa's widowed mother lived.   Villa was moved to slay the spoiled son in order to avenge that person's attempt to rape Villa's sister.  This is stated as fact because there seems to be no countering explanation.   After Doroteo Arango went on the lam, he changed his public name to Francisco (Pancho) Villa, inspired by a bandit who had died some years before Doroteo's birth in 1875.   For a while he actually did dedicate himself to a bit of banditry, holding up wagon trains that took supplies into the Sierra Madre Occidental mountain ranges in Durango and Chihuahua States in Mexico's far northcentral regions.   The supplies were frequently intended  for large Haciendas and/or mines of gold, silver, lead, copper, and semi-precious stones.   Later, when with the arrival of Mennonites and Latter Day Saints convocations, and with increasingly scientific processes being employed in industry and agriculture, Villa turned to commerce.
     He established himself as a purveyor of fine beef.  Some say his beef was, at times, borrowed from the owners of huge haciendas, some of which were well in excess of 1,000,000 acres.  The Terraza family's interests, it was frequently joked, was described to a Gringo who once asked "Is your ranch in the State of Chihuahua?" , the response was "No, sen~or, the Estado de Chihuahua is in the Hacienda de los Terrazas."

Jose de la Cruz Porfirio Diaz Mori,
PRESIDENT OF MEXICO
1877 - 1911

    Pancho Villa was a profoundly charismatic person.  He was very gregarious, and he was idolised by the common people and even some intellectuals.   He was active in charitable works, and he had a lot of Gringo friends and business associates.  He hob-nobbed in El Paso, across the Rio Grande from Ciudad Juarez, and spoke a fair brand of English.  He neither smoked nor drank alcohol.  He was not a pretty picture...nothing handsome, or even terribly good looking, but it is said that no man could look into his jet black eyes for more than a couple of seconds, and that very few women could admit to not being moved by a profound attractiveness that emanated from the aura of his persona. He became peripherally involved in political matters in Chihuahua, and came the day, he found himself supporting Francisco I. Madero for President against the fossilised presence of Porfirio Diaz in the national elections of 1910.
    The incumbent beat Madero, although narrowly, in the electoral college (when Mexico still had such a thing).   Madero took particular offense to that outcome, feeling that it was statistically impossible that a person of Madero's stature, with the class, position, connections, and power of the Madero family could have lost when there had been so much anti-Diaz fervour.  But the Mexican Congress certified the count of the Electoral College and so stood the result.   So, the shrieky-voiced, smallish, intellectual F.I. Madero pronounced that he would fight for a free and fair election and called for a general uprising of the populace.
      Villa had been allowed to escape from prison in Mexico City after serving a few months essentially for being insulting to Porfirio Diaz's constabulary, the famous Rurales, and for various other charges, such as the borrowing of other people livestock.  The true reason for Villa's detention was that he had been keeping company with intellectuals who were known to favour a more liberal definition of democracy than did Don Porfirio Diaz.
    The generosity of the Diaz government did not buy a more amicable Pancho.  He went back to Chihuahua and, when Madero pronounced after the elections,  promptly organised a huge, volunteer, mostly light cavalry army with such rapidity that it stunned everyone, including one of his best Gringo friends, a brigadier named Blackjack John Pershing.
      Villa, another capable general of the common man  named Orozco, and Madero, who had been living in San Antonio and El Paso, Texas for the interim began a series of lightening fast strikes in various places along the Mexican side of the northern frontier.  Their supplies came from surreptitious private sources, primarily in Texas.  A major battle was brought upon Ciudad Juarez in March of 1911, involving about 3,400 revolucionarios under a tri-partite but unified command who would fight about 900 better trained and fortified troops in well-prepared defences, commanded by a competent brigadier named Navarro.   After three days of battle, with many dead and wounded, General Navarro finally was forced to yield his sword.


Sr. y Sra. Francisco Indalecio Madero
The gentleman pictured was Catholic
educated through primary but then
attended very fine schools in France,
England, and the United States. he
became a "Spiritualist" and turned
against Catholicism and Christianity
changing his middle name of Ignacio
back to his father's name, Indalecio. 

     Another victory by the Indian revolucionario Emiliano Zapata, in Cuautla, Morelia to the near-south of Mexico City convinced Porfirio Diaz that thirty-four years is long enough to be President of Mexico.  French diplomats arranged for his departure and exile and before Summer would arrive, Mexico would have Francisco Indalecio Madero as President (at least for a short while).

    We needn't delve into the Byzantine ins and outs of the Madero Presidency.  It was a dithering disaster;  short-lived and leaving much more ill than cured.

    But the first commander of the Division of the North, and now the Secretary of War and Navy, Gen. Victoriano Huerta accedes to the office of President in 1913 and promptly begins to try to  solidify his hold on Mexico.   In the meantime, Huerta marks Villa and Zapata as two forces...not just regular men...who must be eliminated from the geography of Mexico.   But here is where the interesting and confusing clash of personalities, philosophies, and political  persuasions go geometric.    Mix all of that with the international overtones and the situation in Europe, then it becomes even more dicey, dangerous, difficult, and diplomatically impossible.

     Suffice to say, all of the players before 1915 are gone at this point, save for General Alvaro Obregon, his boss the President of Mexico Venustiano Carranza,   Zapata, and Villa.   Carranza, like Madero, is a person of the north, and from the same State, Coahuila.   He will be the topic of other articles here in the future, as shall be the other personalities.   But Carranza, from Cuartro Cienigas (Four Swamps), is a dedicated Marxist.  He blends various influences into his notions about governance, but chief among them is the central government's ownership and /or control of labour and industry so that national objectives can be identified, achieved, and perfected.   If there were one or two personalities that one could use as similar to Carranza, immediately Fidel Castro Ruz and Hugo Chavez would have to come to mind.
    On the American side of this matter is the dull, stupid Progressive Elitist who despised Mexicans and Negroes as a chromosomal matter,  the estimable Professor Thomas Woodrow Wilson.  As issues swirled in Mexico, the American Press, by-in-large supported the interesting if prickly Pancho Villa on several levels.   Robin Hood, Democrat, Man of the People, Visionary, "growing in his humanism and maturing in his world view", etc.  He was the choice of many American informal agents, spies, and contributors  to the State Department, at that time headed by the doltish Secretary of State, William Jennings Bryan, one of America's greatest demagogues on behalf of the "common man".   Bryan also pretty much found Mexicans disgusting and slightly subhuman, no matter their social position, literacy, race, or anything in particular.   He, like Wilson, could not stomach the notion that a Roman Catholic Church could exist in a modern world.  Mix into this mess, the shadowy "Colonel" Edward House, the son of the Mayor of Houston, Texas at the outbreak of the War Between the States.   House was born three years before the outbreak of those hostilities, and used his family's connections to rise to prominence in Texas politics where, as the XIXth became the XXth  he became integral in the behind the scenes manoeuvres, such as selecting gubernatorial candidates and establishing legislative priorities for the candidates, once elected.   Once again, like Wilson and Bryan, House felt that all evil pretty much emanated from the Vatican.


      John Lind, a lesser player but Ambassador to Mexico for the United States when Madero and his Vice President were murdered while under arrest by the Secretary of War and Navy Huerta, managed to be linked to the machinations involved in what was obviously an assassination.   There were a lot of Lind's fingerprints on the matter, along with Colonel House and perhaps even Wilson himself.  Before all was over, and for a confusion of reasons, American Destroyers had blown down most of the interior one-half of Vera Cruz City and Harbour.  Naval officer cadets fought the destroyers with parade muskets and not too unremarkably, lost.   The destroyers were in harbour and firing very much at point blank range at anything left standing, finally within one mile of the port facility.   This was to prevent the off loading of Mauser rifles and ammunition, as well as numerous German machine guns and their belts.  These munitions were vital to the maintenance of Victoriano Huerta's armies in the field.  
 

1908 Maschinengewehr
German infantry piece, made to
be useable for defensive and
offensive deployment

Wilson was adamant that Victoriano Huerta had to go.  If one reads the incredible diary of Edith O'shaunnessy, the wife of the charge d' affaires who replaced Lind after the killings of Madero and Pino Suarez, then that person will be well instructed to the sights, sounds, dangers, and difficulties of anyone trying to keep any semblance of normalcy about the American Embassy in those times.
    Mrs. O'Shaunnessy was an open admirer of Huerta, hated Villa and Zapata whom she considered to be brigands and opportunists.   She lamented the passing of Madero and his Vice President.   But as one reads the book, without her saying anything directly about it....without anything more than being aware of what was going on in Washington D.C. and in the north of Mexico at the time, the conclusions must be drawn that Wilson and House and Lind, plus a cabal of intellectual leftists, one-worlders and the like had chosen sides in this Revolution.   Mrs. O'shaunnessy is a breathe of complicated fresh air, and her husband was a super-human in managing to put any kind of a happy face on the situation into which he was thrust by less competent superiors.

     It became apparent that sooner or later Huerta would wind up as a bartender at the Hotel Texas in downtown El Paso.   Wilson, Bryan, and House had determined that the American government was going to back Carranza as the winner of the Revolution.  After all he had written a constitution in Queretaro and had it ratified there, and he had Obregon's army and a substantial military force in every State of the Mexican union.
     And, to Wilson's and his peoples' pleasure the new Constitucion de 1917 essentially expropriated the Roman Catholic Church, and made it all but impossible for them to "export" money, operate schools, hospitals, or social services of any kind such as homes for elderly orphans who had outlived their families.   It also nationalised all subsurface resources in definitive terms and prohibited a wide range of prerogatives for private investors, domestic or foreign.  It would have done Obama proud.

A copy of a fairly common recruitment
poster of the period in Texas

     Various writings have covered the incident at Columbus, New Mexico down to every hot nail in the burning city that Villa ordered ransacked and destroyed.  Supposedly he was giving a deserved roughing up to the Gringos with whom he had had generally good to excellent relations.  He had been the darling of the newspapers and the fledgling Hollywood crowd.   But then, when Villa was trying to breathe new life into his resistance against a worse autocrat than Porfirio Diaz, the Big Gringos...the ones in Washington, D.C. and in the White House had decided to recognise the Carranza "Constitucionalista" government and to throw the "Convencionalistas" under the steam-powered locomotive.   This recognition and approval showed itself in spades when the U.S. Government permitted the Southern Pacific railway to transport several thousand Mexican Carranzista (now Federal) troops along with cavalry horses by the hundreds and tons of war materiel to a point near Agua Prieta, Sonora where they could enter Mexico again at Villa's rear and engage him by surprise.   Adding insult to insult, the United States Army  base, Fort Douglas deigned to turn on their very bright flood lights so as to shine on Villa's troops as the Federal troops attacked from out of the blackness.

     The attack on Columbus was for the purpose of extracting a pound of flesh.  Later analysis seems to indicate that the whole matter might have been what would pass for the "decree" in a divorce case.   One of the troubling forensic matters with the evidence left in the aftermath was the witnesses saying that the troops were all uniformed.   Most all of Villa's units wore large sombreros that showed rank and unit assignment, by division, regiment, battalion, and form of service.   But almost all soldiers below the rank of a very high Sergeant used the hat only as a uniform.  The rest of the uniform was essentially civilian, cowboy type clothes.   Most of the officers had a bit more formal attire, and usually a couple of business uniforms and perhaps something for formal presentation, such as a ball or a wedding, etc.  
    The next problem was that the firearms captured by the responding American cavalry units, the 13th Regiment, a Negro outfit who served well through the entire "Villa Pursuit" period, were Mausers, and the expended cartridges were Mauser.   Later it would be said that the Mauser had become ubiquitous on the Mexican battlefield, and all sides had numbers of them.
     The problem with that explanation was that it was simply not true.   Only the Federalists were completely equipped with German Mausers.  This and that Villista or Zapatista might have a Mauser as a trophy, but not an entire attack force of two companies of light cavalry....perhaps 500 men.   And further, the Mausers used by the Federal troops were really too long and cumbersome for cavalry application.  Villa's men preferred the Winchester lever action 30 - 30, or the Crag and Jorganson 30 - 40 carbine, and rarely used anything but.
      Couple this with the incessant shouting of "Viva Villa!" during the entire attack, in such a way that it gave some people the impression that the attacking force wanted to make sure that the people knew it was a Villa action.    This was thought strange by some observers as well because almost all the Mexican troops who were killed were very dark, like Indians from the south or Mestizos (people of mixed Indian and White ancestry).   Villa's troops were frequently referred to as "Los Dorados" or "The Golden Boys" because of the fact that his soldiers were derived almost entirely from the extreme north of Mexico and those people were much more likely to have either all white backgrounds or substantially white ethnic and racial composition.   Blonds and auburn and redheaded soldiers were nothing out of the norm, nor were the occurrence of green, blue, and/or grey eyes. The number one university that produced officers for Villa was Texas A and M, and about 3% of his volunteers were Texans and other forms of Americans.  

     Of all incidents of a cross-border nature during the years 1914 through 1918, the vast and overwhelming majority were conducted by either deserter/bandits or, more likely, Carranzista soldiers and operatives operating under orders from the "supreme commander" himself.   That was the conclusion of hearing that were held by the United States Congress that documented over 1,400 murders and killings of Americans in Mexico during the Revolution starting in 1910.   The Villista cohort of the combatant universe was involved in about 6 per cent of such events, while Carranzista personnel was involved in almost 65 per cent of the cases.
     Villa himself, after all the smoke had settled, declared that he admitted to both confessing to the attack and denying that he had anything to do with it just to be ornery.   But in the final recognition of the matter he declared that it was not him, and to the best of his knowledge it was none of his men.

    Villa also pointed out in his latter days, before Alvaro Obregon finally successfully had him assassinated in 1923, that he had worked with various of his friends to advise the Americans and the Texans especially of the intent of German agents to provoke an armed conflict pitting people of Mexican ancestry against the Gringos.   This was something that was promulgated by the German government and passed around to the very well-functioning German fifth column in Central Texas and throughout Mexico.   Part of the deal included in what is known as "The Zimmerman Note" was the German government's assurance that it would help restore the American Southwest to Mexican control in exchange for harassing the Americans or for declaring war on the Americans and the British.   It is known that Villa informed an American general at Fort Bliss, probably Blackjack John Pershing.   However, although Villa considered Pershing a friend and vica versa, he was closer to General Hugh Scott, who is quoted in the excerpt by a student of Villa's activities:



       Obregon was a self-made, highly skilled general who had studied trench warfare tactics used on the Western Front in France. With this expertise, he defeated Villa and drove him from central Mexico back to the northern sierra of Chihuahua. On October 19, 1914, the United States extended de facto recognition to Carranza. Villa felt this was a terrible betrayal. He'd always befriended the gringos and this was his bitter reward.

       Being a direct, simple man, he didn't understand, nor accept the politics mandating that you recognize whoever seems to effectively control the chaos of a nation. Villa was further angered on November 2, 1915, when carrancista troops were allowed to cross U.S. soil to attack him in the rear at Agua Prieta, across the border from Douglas, Arizona. To add insult to injury, U.S. searchlights were deliberately focused on the villistas to make them easier targets for their enemies.

       General Hugh L. Scott, who had many dealings with Villa, sympathized that "the recognition of Carranza had the effect of solidifying the power of the man who had rewarded us with kicks and making an outlaw of the man who helped us." Villa sent Scott a telegram saying that he was the one honest man north of the border.   (truth be known, Villa, during those days of resentment, sent about 20 such telegrams to various Gringos who had befriended the "Centaur of the North.")

 

 

     It must suffice to point out vigorously that Carranza was known to favour the alliance with Germany and that he played Wilson and Co. for the fools that they were.   Villa was pro-Gringo, and Carranza first and foremost was pro-Carranza, then anti-American to the hilt, and then pro-German in the affair of the trans-Atlantic War.   The White House tried to tie Villa and Zapata to the German side of the War, but nothing could have been further from the truth.

 

     With this submission, El Gringo Viejo has opened up a can of rattlesnakes that should serve as a fountain of interesting articles about the duplicitousness of one-worlders and leftist for a good long while.

El Gringo Viejo

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