By DAN BEGLEY
Twenty years ago I was standing in a "stone yard" on the edge of Lake Erie in Northeast Ohio, watching with interest as a big ship slowly powered its way to the dockside. The yard was next to a huge offloading dock which was used to accept Dolomite Limestone transported by 800 foot Great Lakes shipping freighters in the class of the Edmund Fitzgerald. I was about to experience a ten minute conversation with the 74 year old owner of the operation.just as soon as he climbed down off of the big front end loader he was vigorously operating. Jerome, "Ace", as he was nicknamed, was a multi-millionaire land developer that had started his whole organization with a pickup truck, trailer and backhoe. The stone operation supplied his concrete plants was only one of his businesses.
Over a 40-year period this humble man had created livelihoods for thousands of people, not just for those that worked for one of his companies, but for all of the affiliated construction workers and equipment operators that were employed to complete hundreds of building and development projects. The guy not only built roads, he built a town and an economy to go with it. Ace always wore his "uniform" which included khaki work pants, a white short sleeved shirt and a thin red nylon windbreaker. He was a simple guy, just a gray haired grandfather a little bent over from all of his years around heavy stuff. He'd bring his lunch to work in a wrinkled paper sack he would try to use for weeks. If you didn't know him and were to walk past him on the street you would probably mistake him for a talkative retiree and not the Titan he actually was. He looked "average".
When talking with Ace it was hard to keep up because he was always thinking of what he would do, or say next. I was there that day to thank him for including my products on a project that he was doing in the area. I had talked with Ace many times, but something he said during that conversation has remained with me. He wanted to know how my young children were doing and then asked me what I thought would be the most important thing I could ever do for them. Before I could respond he answered for me, saying "The best thing you can do for a child is to teach them to work". Typical Ace, simple, to the point, profound and very American. The man didn't think of himself as great, he was just doing what he thought he was supposed to do. He wanted people to have a job.
I was not the least bit surprised when I heard what Barack Obama said in his speech in Roanoke recently, and I immediately thought of Ace We will be given a story that Obama, worn out from a lifetime of campaigning, let his emotions get the best of him and didn't really mean what he said when he barked out his belief that no one is capable of building a business without government. The only thing he is tired of is hiding what he really is, a hater of the American work ethic. He is the anti-Ace, he would rather people not work, because that's what makes dependency grow and validates his policies. Obama's doctrine is designed to look like it's going to help his believers so he can keep them interested, when it will ultimately be their undoing. In the past three years the only thing he has proven is that his intention was to create and then agitate a mostly unemployed government entitled mob, not to lead a nation. He is a change agent, not a president
Almost a year ago I wrote that the Obama campaign would have to focus on creating more division to get re-elected because it was his only chance. He had already begun to pick future targets for his growing mob. He started with upper income individuals that "needed to pay their fair share". Then it was the ambiguous 1%, and the evil and profiteering corporations, along with the banks and Wall Street.and the list goes on. On July 13th he pulled out all the stops and attacked the very economic fabric of this nation. Obama has no interest in creating a single job and wants individual success to be viewed by his mob as immoral. The statements made in Roanoke were no accident; they were just his latest deployment of " incremental acclimation," a technique where he "floats" a radical idea to make it visible, and then never totally retracts it because he will circle back to it in the future.
It has always been very clear what Obama believes, he despises anything that even resembles capitalism. To him, a profitable private business represents the same thing a wooden stake does to a vampire. The speech was an alarming indication that Obama is confident he has the right size mob to support him and he is unafraid to say what he really means. There will be more degrading commentary directed at his targets, giving hope to his mob. The contrast between any great American like Ace and this donkey in the Oval Office has never been clearer than it is now. Ace never had a "vision" or an epiphany, he didn't even write one book about himself, let alone two. He didn't have to go back to his father's homeland as part of a self indulgent "life trek" to discover who he was. He didn't make shady deals. He just got up every day at 4 a.m. packed his sack lunch and went to the stone yard to teach somebody to work, hoping that the ethic would be passed along, and it was.thousands of times. I'm glad Ace got to do that Obama never will love his country by helping its people do for themselves.
Begley, of Loyalsock, works in Maryland, Washington D.C. and Northern Virginia with government contractors and is a longtime political observer.
