Mountain Views News          Saturday, July 3, 2010

14

Left Turn/Right Turn

 MountainViews-News Saturday, July 3, 2010


GREG Welborn

A Sobering 4th of July

HOWARD Hays 

As I See It

 
On the occasion of this Independence Day 
celebration, it seems wholly appropriate, 
perhaps even mandatory, to reflect on the 
state of our battle against tyranny and the 
oppression of the common by the elite. This is 
not to suggest in any reasonable way that our 
freedoms here in America are in jeopardy of 
disappearing. At the cost of our own blood 
and treasure, and by the divine providence 
which situated us on so perfect a piece of 
geography, we threw out the original British 
oppressors and have only had to revisit that 
issue once more in 1812. Thereafter, we 
mostly went about the business of perfecting 
our little noble experiment to the point 
where we are the envy of peoples everywhere 
and the last best hope for more of them than 
we can possibly identify.

 But because of our success and because 
of an innately noble characteristic in the 
American DNA, we haven’t been content 
to be an island of freedom and democracy. 
Starting with the first world war, we have 
felt an obligation to try to aid others in 
distant lands who also wanted to pursue the 
dream. We have fought on more battle fields 
in more foreign locations for the primary 
benefit of others than any other country in 
the history of the world. It largely remains 
the sole providence of the United States to 
make the world safe for democracy. It is an 
unending task. There will always be rogues 
and dictators with evil designs. Their success 
or failure depends on the will of the United 
States – on whether we have the collective 
will to use our military power to protect the 
freedom of others.

 Such is the situation in which we find 
ourselves in Afghanistan, a task and war 
made all the more important because of the 
commitment our enemy there has made 
to send terror to our shores and because 
of their potential to magnify that terror to 
unprecedented levels should they ever obtain 
nuclear capabilities. It is into this situation 
that our current president must throw 
himself wholeheartedly if he is ever to live up 
to the most basic of the promises he made at 
his inauguration: to defend the constitution 
and these United States against all enemies, 
foreign or domestic. With the sacking of 
General McChrystal and the appointment of 
General Petraeus as successor, we stand at a 
tipping point. 

 This war has now dragged on longer than 
the Vietnam war, and a democracy’s appetite 
for military campaigns is always limited. 
Unfortunately, we don’t have the option of 
just declaring victory and bringing the guys 
(and gals) home. We have to actually win. 
Unlike the Vietnamese, our enemies in the 
Middle East will follow us across the seas. 
Just because we say the war is over doesn’t 
mean they have to believe it or abide by it. 

 To be honest, I don’t know whether 
General McChrystal should have been fired 
or not. I do know that President Obama has 
the right to do it and the obligation to do it 
if he feels it necessary to the mission and his 
oath of office. That’s a call that history will 
have to judge. But what’s very clear is that he 
also has an obligation to replace McChrystal 
with a general who will press this war to a 
successful resolution.

 The worst thing that could happen would 
be for President Obama’s 
appointed generals (this is 
his second one… remember 
that he appointed 
McChrystal, too) to either lose this war or 
not win it before public opinion demands 
that the troops come home. Remember, if 
we leave, they will follow us, and we will fight 
them again under worse, and perhaps closer, 
conditions. When Obama ran for president, 
he rightly called Afghanistan the “good 
war.” Perhaps he only did it because it was 
a good sound bite, fit in with public opinion 
at the time, and allowed him, as a young 
Democratic progressive who hadn’t served in 
the military, to sound and look presidential, 
but it was still the truth. In 2009, as President, 
he ordered a full review of Afghanistan and 
received word from his top advisors that the 
prospect of losing Afghanistan might mean 
the loss of Pakistan, thus giving the Taliban 
access to Pakistan’s nuclear weapons. 
Notwithstanding the desires of his hard left 
base, President Obama realized correctly 
that withdrawal from Afghanistan wasn’t an 
option. And yet, he seems to struggle with 
that conclusion.

 President Obama’s West Point speech 
in December put on full display his deep 
ambivalence about the Afghan war. While 
granting his general most of the troops 
he requested, President Obama then 
undermined that general’s – and all future 
generals’ – mission by announcing that we 
would begin our withdrawal in July 2011. 
This is a strategic blunder of monumental 
proportions. It demoralized the troops 
while granting the enemy the first glimpse 
of success a la Vietnam fatigue syndrome. 
America, it would seem, can’t go the distance, 
just as Osama Bin Laden predicted so many 
years ago. Knowledge that America just 
might leave Afghans to the tender mercies 
of the Taliban at some future specific date 
certainly encourages them to think a second 
time before helping out the American effort. 

 So as General Petraeus is confirmed by the 
Senate and as we celebrate our independence 
from tyranny, let us hope that our president 
can draw the proper lessons from our nation’s 
history and position in the world and from the 
demands placed upon him by circumstances. 
First, President Obama must take charge of 
this war and own it. He can’t do that if he 
continues to insinuate that Bush caused the 
problem. Even if he did, it is Obama’s to lose 
or win, and the consequences one way or the 
other will be rendered unto all of us. Second, 
President Obama must speak publicly about 
Afghanistan in a serious manner which he 
hasn’t done since December of last year. 
Americans need to know from their leader 
what history and morality call us to do; they 
need to know how imperative success is in 
this endeavor; and they need to know what 
the results of failure will be. 

 About the author: Gregory J. Welborn is 
a freelance writer and has spoken to several 
civic and religious organizations on cultural 
and moral issues. He lives in the Los Angeles 
area with his wife and 3 children and is active 
in the community. He can be reached at 
gregwelborn@earthlink.net.

 Befitting Fourth-of-July, here 
are a couple questions on the 
U.S. Constitution:

1. What are the last four words of the 
President’s Oath of Office?

 If you thought “so help me God”, then you get 
a “wrong” buzzer.   The oath concludes with, “ . . 
. preserve, protect and defend the Constitution 
of the United States”.   Originally written as a 
statement (“I do solemnly swear. . .”), at first it 
was administered as a question  (“Do you, state 
your name,   solemnly swear . . .?”).   Chester A. 
Arthur in 1881 answered, “I do, so help me God”. 
  
The phrase stuck.

2. Could a teenage black girl vote in 
a Congressional election under the original 
Constitution?

 Nothing says she couldn’t.   One was qualified 
to vote if, under state law one was qualified to 
vote for the state legislature.   States back then 
pretty much limited voting to over-21 white male 
property owners, though.

 For those seeking the “original intent” of 
our Founding Fathers, there’s the fact that U.S. 
Senators were selected by state legislatures. 
  
There’s also this:   “Representatives and direct 
Taxes shall be apportioned . . . according to their 
respective Numbers, which shall be determined 
by adding to the whole Number of free Persons, 
including those bound to Service for a Term of 
Years, and excluding Indians not taxed, three 
fifths of all other Persons.”

 For that “three fifths” category, our Constitution 
adds:   “No Person held to Service or Labour in 
one State, under the Laws thereof, escaping into 
another, shall . . . be discharged from such Service 
or Labour, but shall be delivered up on Claim of 
the Party to whom such Service or Labour may be 
due.”   This is in the main body of the document; 
all that other stuff about freedom of speech, due 
process, right to bear arms, etc. was added later as 
an afterthought.

 There’s also the matter of precedent and 
“settled law”.   For this, our Supreme Court is the 
last word, and a look at past decisions can provide 
an illuminating perspective.   There’s Barron v. 
Baltimore (1833), where the Court decreed the 
Bill of Rights applied only to federal laws, with 
states free to trample those “rights” however they 
wished.   In Dred Scott v. Sandford (1857), slave 
Scott argued for his freedom on the grounds he’d 
been taken for extended periods to free states.   In 
writing for the majority declaring Scott had no 
standing, Chief Justice Roger Taney noted that 
blacks would never become U.S. citizens, as they 
are “beings of an inferior order”.

 Plessy v. Ferguson (1896) established that 
segregation was permissible as long as the 
facilities were “separate but equal”.     In the early 
twentieth century, the Court sought to protect 
what it called “liberty of contract” by striking 
down state and federal laws protecting workers 
through minimum wage and maximum working 
hours laws and guarantees of the right to join 
unions.   A few years later, the Court struck down 
programs in FDR’s New Deal.

 In Bush v. Gore (2000), the Court took it 
upon itself, rather than leaving it to the State 
of Florida, to decide a presidential election. 
  
Garcetti v. Ceballos (2005) permitted retaliation 
against government whistleblowers and limited 
free speech rights of public employees.   Gonzalez 
v. Carhart (2007) allowed Congress to ban an 
abortion procedure even when a doctor deems it 
necessary to protect the patient’s health.   Citizens 
United v. FEC (2010) granted “personhood” 
and free speech rights to corporations, allowing 
unlimited corporate donations to political 
campaigns.

 We can be grateful many of these decisions 
have been overturned, and others may be in the 
future.   I doubt it was the “original intent” of our 
Founding Fathers that the Supreme Court be 
allowed to select a president, or that a corporation 
be allowed to buy an election.   Sometimes the 
discussion gets bizarre.   Twenty years ago, at his 
confirmation hearing, would-be-justice Robert 
Bork questioned the constitutionality of paper 
money.   Last year on 60 MINUTES, Justice 
Antonin Scalia pointed out that torture is not 
necessarily “cruel and unusual punishment”, 
because if the purpose is to extract information, 
it’s not “punishment”.

 Then there’s the view of the late Justice Thurgood 
Marshall, who saw the Constitution as “a living 
document”, and said of the Founding Fathers, 
“the government they devised was defective 
from the start, requiring several amendments, 
a civil war, and major social transformations to 
attain the system of constitutional government 
and its respect for the freedoms and individual 
rights we hold as fundamental today.”   Marshall 
began his law practice taking on cases for the 
NAACP, breaking down the “settled law” of 
Plessy v. Ferguson and fighting discrimination in 
housing, voting rights and education (one of his 
first targets was the University of Maryland, to 
which he himself had been denied admittance). 
  
Arguing several cases before the Supreme Court, 
he’s best known today for his victory in Brown v. 
Board of Education (1954), which did away with 
the “separate but equal” doctrine in our public 
schools.

 “It’s a judicial philosophy that concerns me”, 
says Sen. John Cornyn (R-TX).   It “does not 
comport with the proper role of a judge” in the 
opinion of Sen. Charles Grassley (R-IA).   Sen. 
Jeff Sessions (R-AL) reveals that Justice Marshall 
was in fact “a well-known activist”.   Sen. Dick 
Durbin (D-Ill), has a different outlook:   “Some 
may dismiss Justice Marshall’s pioneering work 
on civil rights as an example of empathy, that 
somehow, as a black man who had been a victim 
of discrimination, his feelings became part of his 
passionate life’s work -- and I say, thank God”.

 Thurgood Marshall’s son was in the audience 
this past week during the confirmation hearing 
of his father’s former law clerk.   It’s not, as Chief 
Justice John Roberts put it, simply a matter of 
an “umpire calling balls and strikes”, but of the 
ongoing work “to form a more perfect Union, 
establish Justice . . .”   and building on the legacy 
of her mentor as Elena Kagan will hopefully do 
as Associate Justice of the U.S. Supreme Court.


SIERRA MADRE VOLUNTEER OPPORTUNITIES

The Sierra Madre City Council encourages citizen participation in its decision-making 
process through the use of citizen commissions. Currently, there are six citizen commissions 
established by the Council to advise and assist in dealing with specific problems (presently the 
Planning Commission has the responsibilities of the Cultural Heritage Commission). These 
advisory bodies are able to study a variety of issues and problems in detail. After gathering 
all pertinent information, hearing arguments, and weighing values, they recommend to the 
Council what they consider the best action to take. In certain situations, commissions are 
empowered to make specific decisions, subject to appeal to the Council. Public notice on all 
commissions are prepared in compliance of the Maddy Act.

Should you wish to apply to be a commissioner, applications may be obtained at City Hall or 
the City website at www.cityofsierramadre.com should you wish to apply. Applications will 
be accepted until all positions are filled; however the first review will take place July 6, 2010.

COMMUNITY ARTS COMMISSION

The mission of the Community Arts Commission is to promote the community’s interest in, 
awareness of, and appreciation for the arts; to provide support and encouragement to artists 
living in the community; and to increase the community’s participation in the arts. 

Meets the 2nd Wednesday at 6:30 pm, in the City Hall Council Chamber

COMMUNITY SERVICES COMMISSION 

The Community Services Commission is responsible for overseeing the City’s recreation 
and community services programs. The Commission oversees the use of park facilities and 
matters relating to the community’s recreational and service needs. 

Meets the 3rd Monday at 6:00 pm, in the City Hall Council Chamber

LIBRARY BOARD OF TRUSTEES

The responsibilities of the Library Board include the following: establishing Library policies 
and programs to ensure that quality programs are provided to the community, recommending 
an annual budget to the City Council for approval, and ensuring that efficient and effective 
services are provided at the Library.

Meets the 4th Wednesday at 7:00 pm, in the City Hall Conference Room

PLANNING COMMISSION 

The responsibilities of the Planning Commission fall into two broad categories: consideration 
of current land-use (i.e. applications for General Plan amendments, zone changes, specific 
plans, conditional use permits, tract maps, variances, and appeals of staff land-use decisions); 
and advising the City Council on City initiated amendments to the City’s General Plan.

Meets the 1st and 3rd Thursdays at 7:00 pm, in the City Hall Council Chamber 

 

SENIOR COMMUNITY COMMISSION 

The Senior Community Commission is responsible for defining the needs, locating and 
publicizing available resources, and coordinating and initiating services and opportunities 
for the senior population of Sierra Madre.

Meets the 1st Monday at 3:00 pm, in the City Hall Council Chamber 

TREE ADVISORY COMMISSION

The Tree Commission is an advisory body to the Director of Public Works, City Manager, 
Planning Commission, and City Council. The commission shall make recommendations to 
the Director of Public Works, City Manager, Planning Commission and the City Council 
as appropriate on matters involving care and maintenance of City-owned trees and trees on 
private undeveloped property.

Meets the 3rd Wednesday at 7:00 pm, in the City Hall Council Chamber