Soap Box

I think we all learn pretty early in life that two and two does not always add up to four when you're referring to some people and especially some entities.

Take the global warming, oh pardon me, �climate change� crowd. No matter what the weather, drought, flood, freezing or melting, they can always find a way to fit a record snowfall or an extended hot spell into some scenario to argue their point and it's hard to lose when you're betting on all the horses.

They have vacillated between catastrophic global warming and a new ice age for the last century and with Al Gore's book, An Inconvenient Truth, the bible of the climate change bunch, a gaggle of grant seeking scientists, political activists and a media that loves nothing more than an international crisis, real or imagined, they play out their drama, warning us that if we don't change our ways the planet will become a wasteland, and of course it involves the United States, the least of offenders, financing the whole thing.

What it comes down to is, who can you trust anymore? These people have issued dire warnings for over one hundred years, an ice age that would engulf this country, kill off food supplies and end life as we know it, turned around and issued dire warnings that the earth's surface was warming which would kill food supplies and end life as we know it, then back to the ice age scenario.

As a songwriter and a sometimes author of fictitious stories I sometimes use what is referred to as "poetic license," which means I don't have to stick strictly to the truth, I can go off on a purely imagined tangent, erring in any direction, playing fast and loose with the facts.

For instance, I wrote a song several years ago called "The Legend of Wooley Swamp. There really is a Wooley Swamp in North Carolina, that part of the song is true, but everything else I added is not true. I invented characters, events and outcomes that were one hundred percent fictitious.

Hence, "poetic license," which works really well in telling an interesting story but should never be applied to politics or the information that is given to the public concerning vital, or non vital for that matter, issues.

People, we have a president who seems to think he has the right to invoke �poetic license� along with executive privilege.

He used it describing the cause of the Benghazi attack, he used it when he insisted that al-Qaeda was decimated because Bin Laden was dead, he uses it when he talks about job creation, the health of the economy, the "shovel ready" work projects of six years ago, about how ISIS would be destroyed by air strikes alone.

He has sent 3,000 American troops to Africa to fight the Ebola outbreak, but refuses to halt the airline flights into America from the affected nations while one Ebola carrier who comes in under the radar has the potential to infect thousands resulting in a pandemic that would spin this nation into a panic, halting commerce and decimating our spider web economy.

Obama seems to always show up at a gunfight brandishing a pocketknife and yelling, look at me, I'm taking the fight to the bad guys, he honestly seems to think that symbolism trumps substance, win the public relations battle and the election and worry about the ramifications later on.

We are being lead by a novice who has surrounded himself with other novices and there's probably not enough common sense in the whole bunch to pour water out of a boot.

He has a definite blind spot concerning anything to do with Islam and it seems his idea of fighting a war is, well I honestly don't understand what his idea of fighting a war is. I guess to look good doing it in the New York Times until after the mid-terms.

Meanwhile our one true ally, Israel, sits alone in the Middle East and wonders, along with the rest of us, what our president's next move will be and how it will effect them, biding their time until Iran perfects a nuclear bomb and holds the entire region hostage.

And I think America is putting too much stock in the 2014 congressional elections as there seems to be less and less difference in most of the Republican and Democratic parties.

It's going to take a lot more than one election to clean up the mess, It's going to take decades and honest, capable leadership who will tell the American people the unvarnished truth, and I'm not sure they're ready for that.

What do you think?

Pray for our troops and the peace of Jerusalem.

God Bless America

Charlie Daniels