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John Longenecker Safer Streets Integrity, cont'd...
My series on integrity as patriotic continues.
I chose Brent Bozell's book review analysis and Michelle Malkin's piece this morning because they call attention to character and integrity.
These are distinguished from stubbornness. Anyone can be strong-willed and unyielding - stubborn - but this is not integrity. Anyone can change America, but this is not courage nor integrity. Courage became integrity in the War for Independence because of one distinction which keeps America today. Something was not destroyed, but built.
I have said that it doesn't take courage to change America, it takes courage to keep it. This is because, once America was formed, guts transformed into loyalty for what was built. It took guts to break from the Crown of England, but it takes integrity now to keep what we have. Ben Franklin knew this when he said that we have a Republic, if you can keep it. It will be for a loss of integrity if we should lose it.
Integrity is a combination of values and having the insight to see them as vital to the health of the nation along with the strength of character to adhere to them as best you can. You can't have integrity and be a Statist; that's no value. It does not build anything. Statism - any sort of statism - is no love of humanity, it is a contempt for humanity in assuming the State over humanity instead of preserving a state or condition of humanity. A State is not built, freedom builds a nation and government is an infrastructure which supports it, serves it. Statism is not within people, it is outside of people, and in a very true sense, needs people more the the people need the State.
There may be integrity in public service, but there is no integrity in Statism which, long ago abandoned the concept of serving anyone and lives to serve itself instead.
One of the best weapons against over-centralization which morphs into Statism is our integrity. This is reflected in love of due process, adherence to the law, involvement in changing the law if necessary, devotion to honor, safety of others, occasional sacrifice for others, and a host of other values which preserve freedom and our way of life.
It won't come with patriotism and love of America alone; it will require a love of country expressed in terms of personal - and professional - integrity. The sacrifices will come in the form of constant supervision of our servants, involvement in oversight of them, and strict adherence to our values of honesty.
Oh, and one more thing: even-handedness is not integrity, it is nonsense. In a nation of self-rule, there are no two sides to many, many issues. There is only our say-so. Government employees are not hired to quibble, nor are they hired for their ideas. They are hired for our ideas.
When they quarrel with our say-so, and ask for 'fairness', they challenge our very Sovereignty over them. That is not integrity, it is how we got into this mess to begin with.
See other articles at Patriot Post and elsewhere under search term Safer Streets 2011.
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[. . . ] And again, naturally, the editorial trots out the obligatory career-motivated police administrators to tell us why we ordinary folks being able to defend ourselves is a bad idea. Because apparently, all imaginable campus defense situations involve active mass shooters, and besides, the cops train themselves when encountering a firefight to make no distinction between aggressor and defender, but instead to just kill 'em all and let God sort 'em out. 
[ . . .] Curiously, one of Weiner's non-deleted tweets made reference to the Seattle time zone the same night the junk photo turned up. Weiner wrinkled his nose at a question on Wednesday about that inconvenient allusion, dismissing it as "pure, pure coincidence." He refused to explain why he gave Seattle of all places a Twitter shout-out. Weiner, if I may helpfully point out, represents New York's 9th District, not Washington State's.
[ . . .] Hollywood's made endless movies about cruel, life-destroying blacklisters of communist sympathizers, which is rich irony given their ongoing efforts to blacklist conservatives from their own industry. Shapiro calls this chapter "The Clique." 
