It's time somebody put America in perspective for the snowflakes

I don’t know what you did on the recent Independence Day holiday (unless you had to work). I had all sorts of bold plans to do some bush hogging or clean up the garage. I sat down in front of the tube around nine in the morning and came across a History Channel miniseries that was released in 2010 called ‘America: The Story of Us.’ I actually had the whole series on DVD, but I had never gotten around to watching it. I was about a third of the way through the first episode when my wife joined me. Next thing I know it’s early evening and we’re finishing up episode eight.

After we finally decided to turn it off, I sat there reflecting on what I’d seen. We had been taken from the settlement at Jamestown through the Revolutionary War, the Industrial Revolution, the Civil War, Reconstruction, and the Gilded Age. We saw the good, the bad, and the ugly. We saw the slaughter of the Indians. We saw the enslavement of Africans. We saw the connection of east and west by the railroad, the invention of the lightbulb that lit the darkness, the discovery of how to make steel affordable thus ushering in the age of the skyscraper.

And we hadn’t even gotten to saving the world from Nazi domination or putting a man on the moon.

I reflected on our country as a whole. Not as a white man. Not from the perspective of an Indian or a black American or anybody else. Just from the perspective of an American. When you look back over our entire history it’s impossible to deny that we are the greatest country the world has ever known.

I was sharing my reflections with one of my sons, and he commented that any time the greatness of America is brought up in conversation his liberal friends say, “What about the Indians? What about slavery? What about the internment camps of World War II?” There’s no denying all of that is bad, but does the bad outweigh the good? It’s not even close.

I know this is a bold statement but here goes. No matter who you are—no matter what ethnic or racial or religious background—you are undoubtedly better off because of America. I was discussing this on my radio show and a guy called in and said, “Tell that to the Indians.” OK, I will. No matter the brutality that befell your people many years ago, you are better off today as an Indian living in America than you would be had the Europeans never dawned these shores. The alternative is living in a teepee somewhere in the middle of Kansas. If you’re black the alternative is living in a hut somewhere in Timbuktu. On the UN’s top 10 list of the poorest nations on Earth, all of them are in Africa.

Again, that’s not to excuse the slave trade or the Trail of Tears. We can’t change history. What we can do is appreciate our place in it. My genealogy tells me my ancestors came from England, Wales, and Ireland. Pretty cool places to live, but I’m certainly better off because my ancestors decided to move here.

Countries are like people. There’s no such thing as a perfect country. They all have their histories. They all have things they’re not too proud of. However, we judge countries in their totality, not by cherry-picking the negative things we want to highlight.

America ain’t perfect, but it’s a sight more perfect than 99 percent of the other places on Earth.

Phil Valentine is the host of the award-winning, nationally syndicated talk radio show, The Phil Valentine Show.

More doom and gloom from the Chicken Little crowd

It would be comical if it weren’t so serious. EPA administrator Gina McCarthy went on “The Daily Show” on Comedy Central to tell Jon Stewart’s viewers that global warming is the biggest public health and economic challenge we face. Forget that we haven’t warmed, globally, for at least 15 years, these folks find it necessary to ratchet up the hysteria. It’s akin to people who talk to foreigners who don’t speak English. They think if they just talk louder the person will understand them.

What’s so unfunny about McCarthy’s Comedy Central performance is we have scientists right now proposing that we spray sulphur and aluminum particles into the atmosphere to

block the sun. I am not kidding! Have these people lost their minds? Apparently, but these are the types of scientists who get funded not just by our government but by governments worldwide.

In fact, there’s strong evidence to suggest they have already been spraying these toxic chemicals into the atmosphere. All in the name of stopping some phantom theory of manmade global warming.

The other day the UN’s IPCC, the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, issued yet another dire prediction that we only had 15 years to do something about climate change or it would be too late. Don’t they know that we know they’ve been doing the same thing since 1982? 

Here’s a brief history of the hysteria from the website ClimateDepot.com.

The Executive Director of the UN Environment Program warned in 1982 the “world faces an ecological disaster as final as nuclear war within a couple of decades unless governments act now.” In 1989, the UN said we’d reach a tipping point in ten years. In fact, Al Gore said there would be no Arctic sea ice in the summer of 2013. The truth was, we had 50 percent more sea ice in the Arctic in the summer of 2013 than we did the year prior.

But, as this whole climate scam started to fall apart, they just upped the hysteria. In 2009, the UK’s Gordon Brown said we only had “50 days to save the world.” That same year, Prince Charles was a little more optimistic. He said we had 96 months. It was also in 2009 that Canadian Green Party looney Elizabeth May said “we have hours” to prevent climate disaster.

It seems 2009 was a big year for panic. The godfather of global warming, NASA’s James Hansen, said we just had Obama’s first term to save the planet. Then greenie James Lovelock slowed things down a bit in 2010. He said, “we may have 1,000 years to sort it out.”

The latest came from the UN on April 16, 2014. “The world now has a rough deadline for action on climate change,” the IPCC said. “Nations need to take aggressive action in the next 15 years to cut carbon emissions, in order to forestall the worst effects of global warming.”

Look folks, I was born at night but not last night. This is basic huckster behavior. You have to get that roof replaced and right now, before it all falls in on you! You have to replace that engine in your car because it’s just not safe to drive! And what’s always at the heart of these scams? That’s right, money. The UN wants producer nations like the United States to pay for our sin of “carbon pollution,” which is another way of saying, “pay for your sin of success.”

None of what Al Gore predicted in his movie came true, so now they’re doing a sequel. Maybe they should name it Gullible’s Travels.  

Phil Valentine is the host of the award-winning, nationally syndicated talk radio show, The Phil Valentine Show.