What happened to America?

Winston Churchill, Franklin Delano Roosevelt and Abraham Lincoln can only lead men past desperate crossroads, and in the right directions, if an informed and worthy electorate chooses a worthy man to lead.

No television, video games, pornography sites, Facebook or smart phone sexting messages existed 150 years ago. Everyone read books and newspapers by candlelight. Our national pastime was to be knowledgeable about great and small issues.

Democracy worked. Butchers, bakers and candlestick makers, were engaged in democracy. Now, we have reality TV, “Grand Theft Auto” and picture sharing of pet hamsters on Facebook. Kids don’t give a darn about which century or decade the Civil War or WWII occurred in.

The New York Times gave a platform to a fashionable “tart”, who ridiculed 400,000 American WWII dead. She said that knowing about WWII was “irrelevant to her life”. A Times “Styles” piece said “everyone wins” when privileged Hamptons wives have sexual trysts with plumbers and handymen, while their husbands toil on Wall Street. Mark Twain cancelled and replaced his Times subscription with the Wall Street Journal.

100 years ago, T.E. Lawrence, aka Lawrence of Arabia, said “The Arab will always be a little people, a petty people, bickering and fighting among themselves”. Today, they kill one another over Islamic interpretations of who best respects Mohammed and Allah.

Lawrence would say that Americans today, for whom history is a bore, are also a little people. Little people launch a ship of state that hits an iceberg and focuses only on LGBT, climate change and wealth redistribution agendas. Symptomatic is Caroline Kennedy, nearly appointed Senator to replace Hillary Clinton by New York Governor David Paterson, who replaced the whoremonger Elliot Spitzer. Mrs. Kennedy thought that gay marriage was America’s central issue.

Midget leaders have stranded us in a haunted land. In 1960, voters chose between centrist liberal Republicans and conservative Democrats. If your guy lost, Democrats and Republicans would be okay with the winner.

Now, we elect intellectually bankrupt extremists. Anti-capitalist senator Elizabeth Warren would print inflationary trillions to fund giveaways. The corrupt mediocrity of Charlie Rangel bribes Harlem voters with Thanksgiving frozen turkeys thrown from the back of a truck. Rangel finds Assad’s chemical genocide irrelevant to America.

Petty Tea Party Republicans replace an enlightened Eric Cantor with a wacko. The lunatic fringe applauds Rand Paul.

New Jersey’s Chris Christie, the best 2016 presidential choice pandering to 2016 primaries, caves in to extremists and line-item vetoes a Democratic bill banning clips that hold over ten rounds.

On July 4, 151 years ago, 210,000 of the blue and the gray roared near a little town in Pennsylvania.

He was born in Kentucky, raised in Indiana and he lived in Illinois. He was a quiet and a melancholy man. He never had a speech writer. On the back of an envelope on a train, he scratched out this speech. His face was a “ghastly color”. He was sad, mournful and haggard. A protracted illness and a mild case of smallpox would soon follow.

“It is an eternal struggle between two principles, right and wrong, throughout the world. It is the same principle that says you toil and work and earn bread, and I’ll eat it. No matter in what shape it comes, whether from the mouth of a king who seeks to bestride the people of his own nation and live by the fruit of their labor, or from one race of men as an apology for enslaving another race, it is the same, tyrannical principle.”

“The world will little note, nor long remember, those of us here today. But we of this congress and this administration will be remembered in spite of ourselves.”

“From these dead we take increased devotion, to that cause, for which they gave the last, full measure of devotion. We here highly resolve, that these dead shall not have died in vain, but this nation, under God, shall have a new burst of freedom, and that government of the people, by the people, and for the people, shall not perish from the earth.”

Words of timeless music, were followed by a bullet fired from two feet away. In a blink of an eye, he was gone.

Presently, an ideologue self-promoter masquerades as the leader of the free world.

Today, leadership can be found in a tomb inscribed “charity for all and malice towards none.”

Leadership can be found in the dust of an assassinated pathfinder.