The long European love affair with socialism is about over. In the immortal words of Margaret Thatcher, European governments have finally run out of other people’s money to bestow on the non working voters, and the non working voters are none too happy about it, so unhappy they riot in the streets, attack the Prince of Wales, burn cars, storm Parliament, urinate on the statue of Winston Churchill, all because the government raised university tuition. And that was just in England. Similar scenes for much the same reasons were seen all over Europe this summer as the governments tried to take back goodies they bestowed on the voters in the good times, good times they never thought would end. But end they did, though no one, as yet, believes it, demanding the party continue, demanding the band play on.

The party goers and well wishers

Deny the facts, deny the fissures

They dance atop the speeding floe

That hurtles to the falls below

We have our rights! they scream and shout

You cannot turn this floe about!

There are no falls around the bend

And if there are, it’s not the end

So we will dance and sing all night

And hope that all will turn out right

America will save us soon

Did not they put men on the moon?

Are not they friends who won’t forget?

Will they not come to pay our debt?

They’ve saved us from much worse before

They saved us twice from reckless war

They saved us from the Russian bear

Deny us now they would not dare

No we will dance, watch our debt climb

While fearful they won’t come this time

With pieces breaking off the floe

Here come the falls, the rocks below

Two thousand years, a goodly run

We’ve thrown away for decades fun

No babies born, but what the hell

I’m sure Islam will treat us well

The Federal Government has expanded to the point where it will soon capsize the country. Federal employee unions have grown massively in numbers and power in recent years, and are the principal reason the Democrats win any elections at all. And for that reason the Democrats must continue to feed the monster, even as it threatens to consume us all. Under the past two years of the Obama administration, the number of Federal employees increased by 137,000, at a time the private sector lost millions of jobs and the unemployment rate was approaching ten percent. President Obama recently ordered a two year pay freeze on government employees, a mostly symbolic act, for the freeze will realize 28 billion dollars in savings over the two years, or a six-tenths of one percent reduction in the projected national debt of 4.52 TRILLION over the same period. There is a freeze coming, and it will affect all of us, not just federal employees. And the big problem with freezes is that freezes turn the gentle snow into treacherous ice.

Dense packed snow will turn to ice

As quickly as you please

Long time no raise will not be nice

Because of two year freeze

But think about the upside now

Forget the lefty shouts

We’ve got to get rid of somehow

Those bureaucratic louts

Who sit all day and dream of ways

To make life worse for all

Now we can sit and count the days

Before the blessed fall

Of bloated government and yes

Of bloated unions too

The Tea Parties will clean the mess

And turn Reds white and blue

The world economy is in shambles, the euro is on the verge of collapse, the European Union is shaking in the wind, with countries that should never have been tied to the big boys tied to a monetary system that forces them into bankruptcy. I chanced upon my friend Montmorency, a homeless man, once a Wall Street Master of the Universe, and asked him what happened.

Well, he said, what no one thought

Was that the market could be brought

To such a state and in so short a time

In fact we thought ‘twould never end

That we could borrow, tax and spend

While making money risking not a dime

But suddenly it came undone

Just too much debt and when the One

Piled trillions more upon us that was it

And not just us but Europe too

The welfare state just grew and grew

We had a world of bubbles made of spit

And so that’s where we are today

Defaulted bonds and hell to pay

And riots in the streets with burning cars

The Chinese nervous as a cat

The Germans saying that is that

And all my money friends now drunk in bars

And then he cried and waved a hand

I saw he’d sold his wedding band

And noticed that his clothes were torn and soiled

I handed him ten bucks and said

This cannot last, it is not dead

The welfare state has left us soft and spoiled

The politics will find a way

To take us back to that fine day

When checks were given out to one and all

He cried and said he sure hoped so

And as I smiled and rose to go

He sobbed and said we sure did have a ball

Barack Obama is no longer the President of the United States. The other day he turned the job over to Bill Clinton, at a press conference called to explain the ins and outs of the compromise reached with the Republicans on the impending massive tax increases due on January 1, 2011, tax increases the Democrats dearly wish to inflict on anyone making a decent living. So now we have two former presidents, Clinton and Obama, but only one is and always has been a pretend president, and we all know who that is.

Oh yes, I’m the great pretender

Pretending that I’m doing well

My need is such

I pretend too much

I’m President, but no one can tell

Oh yes, I’m the great pretender

Adrift in a world of my own

I play the game

But to my great shame

I left you to stand there alone

Oh yes, I’m the great pretender

I fitted my head for a crown

Yes I seem to be

What I’m not you see

Yes I’m just another black clown

The reckoning is here for the European Union and the Euro. Too much socialism, too many people working lazy hours for exorbitant pay, too many vacation days, too much regulation, too few entrepreneurs, too many bureaucrats, too many lefty politicians promising the sun and moon, all hastening the coming of the asteroid that will one day hit and wipe out all lefty life.

Egads here comes the reckoning

The bony finger beckoning

And laughing what-the-heckoning

While driving a black hearse

The prospect far too sickening

The grinning clock is tickening

Resistance now is thickening

And things are getting worse

Economies are stuttering

The cringing public muttering

Politicos are puttering

And reach for Deutschland’s purse

And down will come the EU dream

Not with a sigh but with a scream

The shining light now but a gleam

Death socialism’s curse

Is the euro a dinosaur? Will the asteroid miss the Yucatan and hit Brussels? The Eurozone bids fair to be a thing of the past in twelve months or less, as German taxpayers grow very weary of bailing out a debt-ridden and profligate Europe that has always acted as if they could spend and borrow and grow their debt in any manner they pleased, secure in the knowledge that Germany and the United States, in the person of the International Monetary Fund, would come to the rescue and permit them to continue to live will beyond their means and at the expense of others who actually work. The Euro, as a common European currency, has been a dismal failure. The question is, what happens to the European Union, designed to protect Europe from Germany? That too has been a failure, for Germany has finally won the war, after all these years.

My heavens, goodness gracious

If it isn’t the Cretaceous

Large animals are roaming everywhere

They look like thunder lizards

Golden euros fill their gizzards

And they trample everyone without a care

But look now, see, they’re dying

And it’s not for lack of trying

To stay solvent and upright and in command

But their days they are now numbered

With their balance sheets encumbered

And soon from streams their fossils will be panned

But wither goes the EU

When the euro says I’ll see you

As it will when Germans rise and say no more

We’ll be back to nineteen thirty

And we’ll all get down and dirty

When the German army marches off to war

On his mostly unwatched and unwatchable MSNBC television show the other night, Keith Olbermann gave even more vent to his usual rage, this time not at Republicans and other traitors and pond scum, but against the Anointed One, President Barack Hussein Obama, describing Obama in terms he normally reserves for the likes of the detestable Sarah Palin. Didn’t see the show, of course, nobody did, but verse-afire has seen the transcript, and it was hilarious. Mr. Olbermann was, to put it mildly, unhappy with the president’s bowing to Republicans (apparently with Keith it’s alright for the president to bow to Saudi kings, but not Republicans) and not standing up for the principles for which such as Keith Olbermann elected him, that principle being to take the money that is rightfully the government’s from people who have earned it and give it to people who have not earned it. Not that it matters, really. No one pays much attention to Keith Olbermann or to MSNBC, but it probably went over well for the few who tune him in.     

More people read the bitter word

This Olbermann decree

On Belmont Club than they were heard

On MSNBC

The Left is angry, mad as hell

That money one has earned

Belongs to him, but do not tell

That to a Lefty spurned

The Left believes in fairy tales

That money grows on trees

That why you hear these sobbing wails

From MSNBCs

In Mexico, not so long ago, an elderly  farmer, Don Alejo Garza, was ordered off his farm by a drug gang. Garza refused, ordered his farmhands to leave, and stayed, armed and ready. When the drug gang came for him in the dead of night, in overwhelming numbers, Garza fought them, killing four and wounding two before he was killed. When the Mexican marines finally arrived they found Garza dead in the middle of a pile of dead gangsters. People sometimes ask why a man would rather die than give up his land, his home. To the people who fight back, the answer is simple. To submit is to give the decision of whether you will live or die to others. Men like Garza prefer to make that decision for themselves.

It matters not that you are strong

It matters not that I may live

For life is given for not long

And mine is mine alone to give

I will not grovel at your feet

I will not beg my life you spare

I live so long as my heartbeat

Proclaims I stand with my chest bare

And face you down as well I might

Not let you do as you may please

I may not see the dawn this night

But standing die, not on my knees

Guts and valor are words not usually associated with inanimate objects, but ships are not inanimate objects. Ships are live, living things. Ships, as well as men, can be tough and resilient. Such were the ships of Battleship Row.

0755 SUNDAY, 7 DECEMBER 1941

A quiet, peacetime Sunday morning. Seven battleships swung gently at their moorings; Maryland, Oklahoma, Tennessee, West Virginia, Arizona, Nevada and California. Pacific Fleet flagship Pennsylvania was in drydock. When the attack came, half their crews were ashore, and most of the officers. None had steam up, for it was Sunday, and all was at peace. Except Nevada. Nevada had steam. Nevada could move. At the height of the attack, with burning and exploding ships all around her, already severely hurt by a torpedo to her port side, Nevada, under Lt. Commander Francis J. Thomas, senior officer aboard, broke out her big battle ensign and stood down the channel, heading for the open sea. Sailors on the burning ships cheered and threw their caps in the air, but Nevada’s gallant sortie was short lived. Five Japanese dive bombers laid her low, beaching her.

The battleships were ultimately raised and rebuilt, those that were salvageable. They rejoined the fleet, but the war had passed them by. It was a carrier war now, and the World War 1 era battleships were too slow, could not keep up with the fast carriers. They were relegated to fire support, and accompanied the Marines in their march across the Pacific, bombarding the beaches, their 14 and 16 inch guns trained on palm trees instead of dreadnoughts, declared unfit to do the job for which they were built. Until Surigao.

SURIGAO STRAIT, 0351 TO 0409 hours, 25 OCTOBER 1944

Vice Admiral Nishimura, with a force of battleships, cruisers and destroyers, was heading for the Leyte beaches and the soft-skinned, vulnerable transports, still loaded with troops. Standing across his path was Admiral Oldendorf, and six old fire support battleships, all but Maryland and Mississippi on Battleship Row that Sunday morning in December. The other four were California, Tennessee, West Virginia and Pennsylvania. Oldendorf put his weary old battleships in line ahead, a Battle Line, as battleships had fought for four hundred years, and waited for Nishimura. At 0351 the big guns lit the sky. Oldendorf brought his big ships across the Japanese front, crossing the T, the dream of every admiral down the centuries, doing to the Japanese what Togo had done to the Russians at Tsushima nearly forty years earlier. The Japanese fought back, but when Nishimura turned away his battleships were gone, along with most of his heavy cruisers.

Surigao was the last battleship to battleship action of WWII, and very likely the last big gun surface action battleship fight the world is likely to see, and it was fought by ships that had been sunk at Pearl Harbor and returned to life. Ships, like men, can be judged by their deeds, and some, like the ships of Battleship Row, by their sheer stubbornness, their refusal easily to die. Ships, like men, are alive, and though it took the ships of Battleship Row almost three years, they gained their revenge in the only way they knew how, with their guns.

Torn by bombs, wracked by fire

They settled slowly to the harbor floor

Breathing their last, or so some thought

But not they

Rising, they joined their kind

Who scorned them now

As the young scorn the old

The slow

They did their job

Plodding the vastness of the central sea

Island to island

A supporting cast

Gaining no praise

No, that was for the young

The swift

The carriers

Until

Until

That blessed night

When called upon to be themselves

They were

Themselves and more

North Korea continues to rattle sabers and tin cups. Various estimates have it that the Norks have at least 6 to 8 nuclear weapons. If true, then the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty is dead, because the United States is not going to reopen the Korean war to remove those weapons, particularly since the NPT has been dead for some time. Just ask Pakistan, India, China and Iran, not to mention other nations with secret development plans and ambitions. What the death of the NPT means is that Japan and Australia, for starters, will go nuke, Japan within 6 weeks of making the decision, trusting no longer in the American umbrella. In the Middle East Saudi Arabia will nuke up, and Israel already is. In the meantime, United States foreign policy is in the hands of Hillary and Hussein, neither one of whom can or won’t do anything about the coming calamity. It is all a Kabuki dance with them, and one day the music will stop.

The Hermit Kingdom in the sun

Would be Japan if Japs had won

But Russkies came and sawed in half

Now North is poor while fatted calf

Now lives in South where people quake

For fear the northern half will take

All that they’ve worked for all these years

But Hildebeast has quelled those fears

A stiffly worded note from us

Has made the North back off and thus

Will peace reign once again on earth

And questions like will Jayson Werth

Return to Phils with handsome yield

If not then who will play right field

Will once again come to the fore

As B Hussein annuls all war

Burma Shave