All hail our commander-in-chief and his latest Mission Accomplished.

I didn’t think there was any way this president could disgrace our country even further on the world stage than he already had. I was wrong.

The Blitzkrieg is on. Maybe you’ve missed it with all the talk that the administration is at low ebb and taking mortal shots every day. Poppycock. Der kampf is right on schedule.

I know you’re busy, have personal travails of your own, have political and cultural issues you follow because they hit your hot buttons. And so you’re probably missing it. We are in the midst of an all-out assault on the America we grew up in, and the weapons we have available in our defense have about as much chance of succeeding against the enemy as the Polish horse cavalry had against German tanks in 1939.

We’re in the bowels of the second term. The time when boredom and lassitude and cowardice and personal distractions make it easy to overlook the systematic and deliberate scheme to destroy the United States of America once and for all.

In the last two weeks, there is no aspect of our values and beliefs that has not been subjected to continuous assault, either directly and provocatively or cynically and seditiously.

They’ve taken sports away from us. They’ve taken entertainment away from us. They’ve taken our universities away from us. They’re trying to take our moral and biological convictions about sexuality away from us. (Not to mention life.)

Yeah. Suck it, Sarah. You’re the joke here. Half conscious jester ordinaire.

They’re trying to take our freedom of expression and other constitutional liberties away from us. They’re taking our hopes for the future away from us. And they’re winning on every issue but guns.

It’s all more than I can summarize. Too many links, too much explanation to quote.

All I can do today is hyperlink the names of writers who are talking about the lightning attack in its various dimensions. Which should work out okay, because everybody’s really way too busy to feel the groaning of the ship as it sinks. Less angst that way, don’t you know?

James Pinkerton.

Jordan Schachtel and Raheem Kassan.

Laura Barron-Lopez, and er, Brian McNoldy. Also, Rowan Scarborough.

Jon Gabriel.

Fox News.

Joel Pollak.

Jazz Shaw.

Frank Bruni.

A.J. Delgado.

Kevin Williamson.

Heather MacDonald.

And just because I can’t quite bring myself to fly the white flag, here are two little essays designed to put some spine in your spine.

Left Offended.

And this one, which I’m actually minded to quote from, at length, because I’m feeling so pissed off.

The truth is that conservatism is an ideology that is in accord with natural law and basic human decency, while liberalism is merely the summit of a slippery slope leading down to the hellish depths of collectivist misery.

Liberals aren’t going to like to hear this manifest and demonstrable truth. So you’re going to get called “racist,” “sexist” and “homophobic,” even if you’re a conservative black lesbian.

What you are not going to get is an argument. An argument is a collected series of statements designed to establish a definite proposition. Arguments involve the presentation of facts and evidence from which one draws a conclusion. Implied within the concept of an argument is the potential that one might change his conclusion. But liberals start with the conclusion.

They don’t change their conclusions based on the facts and evidence; they change the facts and evidence based on the conclusion they want. This is why a 105 degree day is irrefutable proof of global warming, while a 60 degree day is irrefutable proof of global warming. As is a -20 degree day.

Liberals are only concerned with argument, or what superficially appears to be argument, as a rhetorical bludgeon designed to beat you into submission. They aren’t trying to change your mind. They don’t expect you to agree with them. They don’t even care whether or not you grow to love Big Brother.

They just want you to shut up and let them run rampant. If you understand that, you’ll be fine…

…This is why I prefer to counterattack. When you counterattack, you ignore the proposition offered by the liberal and refuse to respond on the liberal’s preferred terms. In fact, you don’t even need to address the same subject the liberal is talking about. Your goal is not to undercut the liberal’s assertion. You’re going to counterattack to undercut the liberal himself.

There are many good reasons to choose the approach of treating the liberal like he is a terrible person with terrible ideas who seeks to impose a quasi-fascist police state upon America, including the fact that it’s all true.

Let’s try a counterattack battle drill. Some doofus with a “Capitalism Is a Patriarchal, Cisnormative Hate Crime” t-shirt starts babbling about “privilege.” The undecideds start listening, their jaws drooping slightly. Some of the more conservative ones are silent, not wanting to be labeled racist by some geek whose grandfather came from Oslo. You need to act. So you causally inject the question, “Hey, why are you an eager and active member of a political party that made a KKK kleagle a beloved Senate Majority Leader?”

Then you mention that you’re a member of the party that fought slavery and didn’t turn hoses on civil rights marchers. Then you finish by announcing, “Well, I’m going to stand with Dr. King and judge people by the content of their character.” It’s optional whether you then get up, scream that the liberal should have issued you a trigger warning about his racism, and leave.

But be careful – the liberal may totally spit in the next latte he sells you.

Some people might question whether this kind of Alinsky-esque tactic means we are stooping to the liberals’ level. Except the liberals’ level is six feet underground, where the victims of collectivism lie buried. Anyone not willing to take the fight to them simply empowers their liberal fascist fantasies.

I’m pretty sure this has been a total waste of time. Where I am right now.

Sorry. Some things, as I’ve always known, are too big to see.

Left and liberal are no longer terms that have anything to do with one another. The left in this country is totalitarian. As the essay quoted above declares, they are terrible people. If you can’t see that and battle it tooth and claw, there is no hope for us whatsoever.

P.S. Okay. Since I know you’re too busy to read, I’ll give you a hint about what’s going on. The ObamaCare and VA screwups are not an accident any more than IRS targeting was. It’s about shearing off big chunks of inconvenient traditional populations. The scheme has always been about death panels for the inconvenient Americans. Old folks who once learned about the constitution get squeezed subtly out of life. Veterans who have a patriotic love of American exceptionalism need to be trimmed down in numbers. Middle class achievers need to be forced down, down, down into a simple fight for month to month survival until they too are government dependents.

Black people. The powers that be in the lefty world never regarded them as anything but chips on the table. Now they’re valuing Hispanics at 1.2 to 1 over blacks, not as people, mind, but simply a higher denomination of gullible losers. So far it looks like they’ve done their calculus right. Nothing sadder than Democrat politicians pushing for illegal alien amnesty when the first jobs lost will be those of their most loyal constituents.

And so it goes… until all that is left are the government schooled morons of all the motley sexes and races who know no history and have no allegiances except to the first person offering them a check for simply being there.

Congratulations, Brizoni. Your rational, godless universe is being born. The smart guys have made a shrewd deduction. Transfer America’s wealth to the rest of the world, pauperize the producers, and trust that there will still be enough money to fund a class of aristocratic American plutocrats who flit from Paris to Dubai to Monte Carlo while their kids learn tyranny at Harvard and Yale. (I first learned this from an MIT guy from a union family who exclaimed constantly about the Brits: “They’ve committed every economic mistake in the world and just LOOK at how much money there still is in the U.K.!” As if money were the point. Union values.) The best of all possible worlds? Sure. Absolutely. As long as our own kids can go to Sidwell Friends before they’re old enough for MIT.

Why am I so tired? Some few outlier intellectuals are acting and writing as if they discovered the phenomenon of lefty hatred of America. God bless their perspicacity, but I identified it 40 years ago. I specified its sources and how it would remake the world. Now, having been right so early, I’m not sure how to make it new again. But you’re all dying day by day from my failure to become more than a crackpot.

That’s what galls me. I thought you needed to know what was going on and how it happened. Never thought you needed to learn how to fight in the first place. My bad.

But I give up. YOU pick which one of me you want.

Well, I wanted “Fight” from Dirty Work (N/A on mobile devices??) Would have made the choice easier. So be it. You can’t always get you want.

But if you try sometime, you just might find, you get what you need. On your wife’s laptop. :).

Don’t be high fiving or fist bumping just yet. I know how to fight for civilization. Do you? Think before you answer. If you don’t know how to fight to the death like a cornered wolf, where you gonna run, where you gonna hide?

Look. It’s not easy to look.

So. Tonight CNN is revisiting sixties television when everything was tolerant, lovely, and great. The Smothers Brothers. Star Trek, meaning the first interracial kiss. The Twilight Zone, which was continuously worried about the varied ways humankind would destroy itself. And, of course, TV’s role in educating all of us that Bill Cosby and Robert Culp got along just fine, given that those of us who made ‘I Spy’ a hit were all terrible racists.

Guess the CNN show isn’t having the effect it should. It reminds me of PBS. Years old BBC series recycled late and sold on DVD during pledge drives for five times their value. Always the same shows: the blind tenor, the three now dead sighted tenors, the E-channel guy who sings in the Grand Canyon, well, you know the drill. The rest of the time, we’re expected to put up with idiotic political documentaries — oh yeah, starring fossils like Bill Moyers and Dick Cavett — hating the U.S and promoting Global Warming in fruity tones with that infuriating finality PBS has always had because the next show is going to feature Oxbridge pretenders who live in great estates that can’t possibly be as ugly as they obviously are. (One plaintive bleat from my younger self — watched Inspector Morse because I’m supposed to, and I can report that compared to Harvard, Oxford is Lena Dunham. The former is lovely and inspiring. The latter looks like a slattern and a pile of ugly g(r)ay fortresses designed to keep her out.)

We men shouldn’t be attracted to women. They’re too good for us. The gospel of the left.

Dreary, sorry, awful, ancient, and did I say awful. Oxford. Like America, Harvard is lovely.

Beyond Oxford.

‘Cause, you know, Harvard is lovely. Why John Harvard sits there in the spring. Nobody else can be so relaxed.

Oxford don’t got The Yard in springtime.

Sigh. PBS. Sigh. Which leads us to Great Performances.

Have you figured out that I’m pissed and tired and probably deader than PBS? All the public stations in our area keep rerunning the same shows. Everything the party of America’s progressive future does with its public broadcast dollars is a celebration of a very mundane, even antique, past. Barbara Streisand a decade or two ago. Communist Pete Seeger celebrating his ninetieth birthday and three quarters of a century of loving every enemy of America. Bob Dylan caterwauling on some stage somewhere sometime from a decade no one remembers. I could go on.

But I won’t. If I started, I would never stop. Anyone want to hear what I’d ask of all of you if life as we know it were on the line? No. Of course not. I’m the lance for a painful boil. That’s all. Life goes on. You live life. Life is for the living, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera.

You know. Same old male white privilege problem.

But sometimes the dying know something too.

Unfair, you Oxbridge types? The equalizer. Google. You tell me which is more beautiful. Oxford or Harvard.

P.S. Harvard. Rub my tummy. I’m the killer you’ll never know.

It’s gotten bad. (That’s his face…!)

Everything I wrote before about important posts and cover posts is just so much misdirection. I’m worried about the important stuff. Raebert is getting a haircut tomorrow. I have to deliver him between 7:30 and 9:00 to a ‘professional.’ Who’s a professional when it comes to deerhounds? No one I’ve ever met.

I wouldn’t do it. But he’s a mess. A complete and utter mess.

Seems like just a few weeks ago that I had it sort of under control. Brushings and like that. Then it all just went nuts.

Ever seen a coat like that? Thicker than all the thistles in Scotland.

Lying down, at a distance like that and stuff, he looks even worse.

What happened to my beamish boy? He’s becoming a sinister Harry Potter forest.

But I have faith. In him if nothing else.

Because I know who he is underneath the everything.

My Boy.

Before we knew him, he knew us. He was waiting for us. Don’t talk to us about scary.

Hmmm. Who?

Someone sent me the pic and the explanation:

While suturing a cut on the hand of a 75 year old rancher whose hand was caught in the squeeze gate while working cattle, the doctor struck up a conversation with the old man.

Eventually the topic got around to Obama and his role as our president.

The old rancher said, ‘Well, ya know, Obama is a ‘Post Turtle”.

Not being familiar with the term, the doctor asked him, what a ‘post turtle’ was.

The old rancher said, ‘When you’re driving down a country road and you come across a fence post with a turtle balanced on top, that’s a ‘post turtle’.

The old rancher saw the puzzled look on the doctor’s face so he continued to explain. “You know he didn’t get up there by himself, he doesn’t belong up there, he doesn’t know what to do while he’s up there, he’s elevated beyond his ability to function, and you just wonder what kind of dumb ass put him up there to begin with.”

See? What I usually do. An easy post sitting on top of a complex post. This is the one you feel comfortable responding to.

And the one I’m most likely to be hauled away for. What with being a post turtle myself in the age of new media.

Unless I’m really just a Yertle Turtle…

King of the Mud.

Tradeoffs. Comments, Ho! Because I’d really like to hear something from y’all.

Even the ones who stand so tall. Busy is the new virtue.

Sadly, it still leads inexorably to mud.

I used to have a vision of the pond myself. Now the pond is a dot in the landscape of my nightmares. Take my advice. Talk to the Yertle.

I haven’t been staying away because I was mad at you. I’ve been mad at everyone else, who offers so little reason to hope. Conservative icons are down in the dumps, simultaneously playing to their grim faced audiences and yet trying to play the Q-Rating media game. Charles Krauthammer blistered the Obama West Point address in the harshest possible terms, only — when pointedly asked for a letter grade — to give it a C-minus. For once he was embarrassed when Stephen Hayes of the Weekly Standard said, “What do you mean? It’s an F.” Driving the grade home by quoting Charles to himself. Meanwhile Kevin Williamson, luminary of National Review, finds it important to respond to a fancied feud between himself and Rush Limbaugh. Gaaah.

Others are taken in by the massive leftist diversion attempt to make everything about some historically unacceptable identity based inequality — from a new argument for African American reparations to a white male, gun-obsessed misogynist interpretation of the latest mass shooting (and stabbing and car crashing btw) to the idiotic new gambit against the Washington Redskins in which 50 Democratic senators participated, to frenzied and ludicrous new arguments by supposedly rational representatives of our government that we should be more concerned about global warming than we are by Islamic slaughters of Christians, honor killings of women, and the genital mutilation of pubescent girls.

Each of these has drawn some kind of answering essay, as if any of it were worthy of response. Nonsense is nonsense, and evil is evil. Tiffs are a waste of time. The volume of such responses is as huge as Kim Kardashian’s grossly implant-mutilated ass. Which National Review and other new media sites felt compelled to weigh in on, in light of the low ratings her latest wedding received on the internet.

If it occurs naturally, it’s a pathology called steatopygia. How did we get here?

So where do you go in search of hope? I can offer two interesting avenues today.

Everyone knows that video games are somehow complicit in school shootings. Everybody’s heard of Grand Theft Auto. But what if thug games aren’t the only choice video youngsters have? What if GTA is simply a natural selection for the constant population of the world’s thugs? What if the most successful games represent some kind of odd reaching out to a world in which virtue, duty, honor, bravery, and sacrifice are the ideals:

Halo 4: Forward Unto Dawn is a live-action film and miniseries set in the Halo universe. Although shot as a feature-length film, Forward Unto Dawn was originally released as a webseries consisting of five roughly 15-minute episodes, the first of which was released on October 5, 2012, with the last episode released on November 2, 2012. The series’ plot, occurring in the early days of the Human-Covenant War circa 2526, revolves around Thomas Lasky, a young cadet at Corbulo Academy of Military Science, and how John-117 inspired him to eventually become a leader. Lasky is also a prominent character in Halo 4 as a commander on the UNSC Infinity. The name of the series, aside from being a reference to the UNSC frigate Forward Unto Dawn, is given new significance in the series as part a running motif based around a poem. The series was known as Sleeper during pre-production.

Actually, I can show you the whole Halo 4 movie. It’s as far as you can get from Grand Theft Auto.

Don’t need to watch much here. Only enough to see the kid is not an incitement to California school shooters. The rest is at Netflix.

The protagonist is not a sociopathic killer. He’s a young man in doubt. His journey is from a sense of loss and ambivalence to the necessity of placing his unit’s lives above his own. How traditional can you get? There’s no sex, no nudity, no scriptwriter editorializing. One of the best pure futurist sci fi movies I’ve seen.

Thing is, the most impressive feature of Halo 4 is the music. Purists will deride it as derivative, but that’s too easy. It’s clearly rooted in Orff’s Carmina Burana, but it also does somehow convey a time beyond ours. Here’s the whole soundtrack. Call it Neo-Neo-Romanticism. Gregorian Chant and other liturgical forms seem to be hard-wired in us. There’s salacious and violent rap rebelliousness (mysteriously not here) and then there’s the need for transcendently deep, harmonic and rhythmically guilt-ridden meaning underneath our dreams and nightmares. The dark and the divine, intertwined. Why you can hear Rachmaninoff in the opening strains. Sweetened by electronic futurism that beats the human heart back to life. What it is to be human. That impossible long arc between our worst and our best. Why we all still need God, whether we know it or not.

Which is my introduction to the most interesting essay I’ve found in over a week, a philosophical formulation of precisely this kind of straddling. Which might be our last, best hope.

Post-Modern Conservative

To be postmodern and conservative is to deconstruct other uses of “postmodern” by beginning with the obvious. To be postmodern means to be about conserving what’s true and good about the modern world, as well sustaining or restoring what’s true and good about various premodern forms of thought and life. It is also, as Solzhenitsyn explained, about criticizing the modern world for its excessive materialism and its replacement of God and virtue with legalism, and the medieval world for its excessively single-minded focus on spiritual life or the soul at the expense of the body.

One of our conservative criticisms of purely modern thought is its prejudice in favor of endless innovation, which can be seen, for example, in its overly technological view of science. Maybe the purest sources of modern thought these days is the hyper-libertarianism of some economists and Silicon Valley technologists, which points in the direct of transhumanism. The false hope is that through techno-innovation we can become better or freer than human, a hope that depends on ungratefully misunderstanding how stuck and how blessed we are to be beings born to know, love, and die. That’s not to say that we believe, as do those existentialists, that death is the final word about who each of us is.

So to be postmodern and conservative is to take our stand somewhere between the traditionalists and the libertarians. The traditionalists focus is on who each of us is as a relational being with duties and loyalties to particular persons and places. The libertarians — or, to be more clear, the individualists — focus on who each of us is as an irreducibly free person with inalienable rights, a person who can’t be reduced to a part of some whole greater than himself or herself. A postmodern conservative is about showing how a free person with rights is also a relational person with duties. The truth is that each of us is a unique and irreplaceable free and relational person.

If you’re not suffering from ADD, you might be able to read and think about the whole thing.

She sailed far and wide in this dream boat.

The exact opposite of a 1960 Coupe de Ville.

Probably not a good thing to be married to a motorhead. Now she knows more. Frighteningly, she likes the Italians.

Yeah. She’s learned that before Ferrari there was Alfa.

And the French.

Life is not fair. The grandest car ever built is one Lady Laird would like to own. Bugatti Royale.

And, God bless us, the antediluvian Americans.

The most stylish monster equipped with headers before NASCAR was even a glimmer in some moonshiner’s eye.

And, shockingly, the aristocratic English, namely Jaguars.

Yeah, beauty interrupts life. Sorry.

We’re still working on the small English, which includes the car that if it actually worked would replace that Coupe de Ville in a second.

MY dream car. If it would only start. And not show instant electrical problems. Why I have an MR2 instead.

But it doesn’t, never did, work.

I could write 10,000 words about this movie. I could link dozens of recent Internet posts about the war on women, the new hyper-aggression of feminists, the snarky protests of disappointed metrosexual males, the inevitability of a woman president named Hillary because “it’s time.”

Maybe I will soon. But not today. I’m getting ready to visit the Devon horse show Saturday and a granddaughter’s wildly excessive Barbie birthday on Sunday.

So I’ll leave you with this Netflix available movie to watch on your own. It’s mostly for all you men who have young sons. I won’t even reference the philosophical implications of Plato’s cave, or the significance of one of my all time favorite poems, Kublai Khan by Samuel Taylor Coleridge. I, too, know the opening lines by heart and many more after that.

Make of it what you will.

Huge Hat Tip to Hotair. I can’t improve on the juxtaposition of an ancient multimillionaire parasite descendant of real producers condescending in the rawest bumper sticker terms to his political opposition — countered by a living human being who has actually felt the slings and arrows of life’s bare bodkin. Here:

Rockefeller should have felt shame. Did he? No. Progressives never feel shame. They’re all too damn stupid to comprehend simple logic, too infatuated with themselves to experience empathy, too lofty to see that virtue is not a function of their own godhood. They’re the quality. The rest of us are stinking, evil peasants.

Makes me nostalgic for Britain’s (when there still was a Britain, alas) sly understanding of what aristocrats were really good for.

I know. This happened more than a couple years ago, Dude.

But isn’t it interesting that the so-called party of the common man is now dominated by rich insiders who have no idea what kind of lives most common men lead between the incestuous power corridors of Washington and the gay bars of San Francisco?

I’m sure Hotair’s Allahpundit was most moved by Ron Johnson’s impassioned response to Rockefeller. I was most moved by Rockefeller’s subsequent response to Johnson. He’s not a sociopath. He’s a moral moron.

As all progressives in this nightmare era of American decline have become. Why I don’t keep up much with current events. When I don’t mention current affairs, it’s because they’re too ridiculously insane to be worthy of rational comment and too absurd to be possible of satire.

All I’d wish on Rockefeller is a good taxidermist. Except that I suspect he — and every other accomplice in this vandal regime — has already been stuffed with confetti made of shredded copies of the New York Times and posed in the museum of progressive paleontology like extinct creatures from an age no one should ever want back.

As I said. O in a nutshell. Emphasis on the ‘hell.’

How much sound and fury and high dudgeon has been expended on a mere name by those who profess to honor Native Americans?

You’ve heard tons of enlightened progressives wage a war against the Washington Redskins. Chances are, though, you’ve heard almost nothing about the war Washington, DC, is waging against the Native Americans they loudly claim to love. Here’s a brief intro.

Contrary to what you may have been led to believe, the United States has already tried its hand at a pseudo-single-payer system. The VA is one example. Another, albeit less highly publicized, is the Indian Health Service. (via WhiteCoat)

Based on an agreement in 1787, the government is responsible to provide free health care to Native Indians on reservations. And, as you can see from this scathing story from the Associated Press, that promise has not been kept.

The numbers don’t lie:

American Indians have an infant death rate that is 40 percent higher than the rate for whites. They are twice as likely to die from diabetes, 60 percent more likely to have a stroke, 30 percent more likely to have high blood pressure and 20 percent more likely to have heart disease.American Indians have disproportionately high death rates from unintentional injuries and suicide, and a high prevalence of risk factors for obesity, substance abuse, sudden infant death syndrome, teenage pregnancy, liver disease and hepatitis.

And, after Haiti, where in the Western hemisphere do men have the lowest life expectancy? It’s on Indian reservations in South Dakota.

I should tell you most of the (amazingly scant) reportage of the IHS crisis dates back to 2009, including this:

Recent accounts suggest the federal health service for American Indians on reservations is in crisis. Will President Obama’s stimulus plan and health care reform plans help?

A “Broken” Health Care System for Native Americans

On paper, the situation sounds good: Based on a 1787 agreement between tribes and the United States government, the U.S. has an obligation to provide American Indians with free health care on reservations.

But that’s not how it works, reports the Associated Press. Roughly one-third more is spent per capita on health care for felons in federal prison, according to 2005 data referenced by the AP. The system’s ineffectiveness has yielded a common refrain on reservations of “don’t get sick after June,” because that‘s when federal funds run out.

Does the age of the coverage mean that the beneficent Obama administration has solved the IHS problems it failed to solve in the VA? Uh, no. Typically, the O administration has made things worse.

Murkowski “Incredulous” at Indian Health Service’s Failure to Fully Fund Native Health Clinic Contracts

“I Feel Like I Am Fighting the Administration” to Abide by Supreme Court Ruling

WASHINGTON, DC — Senator Lisa Murkowski today had a candid exchange with the Director of the Indian Health Service over the Obama administration’s continuing refusal to fully fund the contract support costs for tribal health care providers nationwide, saying she is “incredulous that we are still living through this” fight. Contract support costs are the operational costs of tribes to manage tribal health programs –including personal management systems, liability insurance, and facility support costs. Last year, the Supreme Court ruled in the case Ramah vs Salazar that tribes should be fully compensated to for the operation of self-governance contracts in delivering the promises of the Federal trust responsibility.

Murkowski also rebuffed President Obama’s recent comments at the White House Tribal Nations Summit acknowledging his administration is shortchanging native tribes but seeking answers. “I went to the summit to focus on what the President would say about Contract Support Costs. The President said ‘I hear you loud and clear and we need to find answers,’” recalled Murkowski in her introduction. (clip below) “We don’t need to find answers; I think the Supreme Court laid it out very clearly – full reimbursement must be provided.” [Any of this sound familiar?]

The tribes had to go to the Great White Father to beg reimbursement for contracted IHS services.

Yet the current Wiki article on IHS seems, laughably, to blame the continuing fustercluck on, well, guess…

A 2010 report by Senate Committee on Indian Affairs Chairman Byron Dorgan, D-N.D., found that the Aberdeen Area of the Indian Health Service(IHS) is in a “chronic state of crisis.”[8] “Serious management problems and a lack of oversight of this region have adversely affected the access and quality of health care provided to Native Americans in the Aberdeen Area, which serves 18 tribes in the states of North Dakota, South Dakota, Nebraska and Iowa,” according to the report.

In 2013 the Indian Health Service was hit hard by sequestration funding cuts of $800 million, representing a substantial percentage of its budget.

News flash. The problems didn’t begin with the sequester. Again from 2009. They’re written in the history of another failed federal promise.

They’re written in the chronic under funding of IHS, and in its regulation heavy bureaucracy both of which give rise to the sobering fact that at 1,642 per 100,000 people, the death rate for Native Americans in South Dakota is the highest of any race or ethnic group in the U.S., according to 2007 Centers for Disease Control and Prevention numbers.

Here and across America, tribal people know they must be dying or about to lose a limb to get serious care. Otherwise, their stories are of rushed providers failing to test them for potentially fatal dis eases despite obvious symptoms, long waits in clinics without ever being seen, and credit ratings ruined when IHS makes referrals to specialists but then doesn’t pay for the care.

“To me,” said Tommy Thompson, emergency manager for the Crow Creek Sioux Tribe, “it seems like they’re hell bent to provide the cheapest possible health care at the expense of our people.”

Maybe one day the president will read about the real Native American crisis in the newspapers.

Or, maybe, passionate progressives can take care of everything by renaming the Indian Health Service? Aren’t words really the only things that matter?

P.S. Just found this. What I’d call perfect timing. 50 senators send letter to Roger Goodell asking Washington Redskins to change their name. Youse gots to have youse priorities. Does they’s care about them Injuns or what?