(Reprinted to Blog from email list of 9/3/05)

*** Bob’s Insider’s Message ***

Je Ne Se Quois

I probably didn’t spell it right, and I couldn’t care less.

I learned Spanish and German and other languages, but never French. They take their little language too seriously. Also, my Austrian wife wouldn’t let me use any French. She said she couldn’t stand hearing a MAN speak French.

Anyhow, Anyhow, Je ne se quois means nothing but, “I don’t know what.” If I say “you have a certain I don’t know what,” you would wait for me to figure out something to actually say. But if someone says, “You have a certain je ne se quois,” a Yuppie or an Intellectual will think you are Magnifique!

Magnifique is French for what the black guys call,”A Bad Dude.” If the subject is female, the black guys say something I can’t repeat here.

Je ne se quois drives ’em wild up in the circles where a Modern Artist can crack a toilet seat and sell it for a million dollars. But if they picture an ugly, swarthy Frenchman wearing lipstick and rouge saying je ne se quois with his lips stuck out so far they drip a bit, the intellectuals and yuppies pass out with pure admiration.

Most actual Americans — not Yuppies or “intellectuals” — never realize HOW American they are until they live in Europe for the first time. I was eighteen years old, not only living in Europe for the first time, but a teenager.

Nasty but true things about America really bothered me.

I was working for a businessman who, in addition to having a doctorate in engineering, regularly dictated letters in English, Italian, French, and, of course, German. When I wasn’t in a kiln shifting brick or traveling with him on business, I would be doing some German to English translation with him. He spoke excellent English, but it is always better to have a native speaker translate INTO his own language.

Once he asked me an innocent question that really embarrassed me. He showed me some pages from an American book where there was a lengthy quote in French. He asked, me, “Wouldn’t it have been better if he had written this whole section in French?”

Yes, it would have, but to explain this to him I had to reveal what morons New York writers are, and he thought New York was America.

The reason the writer didn’t write it in French was because he couldn’t write in French. Correct writing is MUCH harder than speaking. And if you use the wrong grammar, a Frenchman will have a stroke. All the other sophisticates will laugh at you.

Even if the writer COULD write in French, as William Buckley and all his sycophants keep reminding us that he can, the readers couldn’t read that much French.

So what the writer is doing is showing how sophisticated he is and letting the people who are “sophisticated” enough to decipher a little French know how sophisticated THEY are. This is a little hard for an eighteen-year-old to explain to a man to whom foreign languages are as much a tool of the trade as knowing the proper temperature at which clay should be dried before firing.

He was, of course, a little incredulous. He could not believe that grown men did this sort of thing.

He didn’t know the half of it.

I hope he never saw that cracked toilet seat.

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Auf wieder sehen, “Until we meet again.”

Bob

(Reprinted to Blog from email list of 8/27/05)

*** Bob’s Insider’s Message ***

Harry Truman had two enormous strokes of luck that gave him two terms in the White House.

The first was recited by William “Fishbait” Miller, who was the House Doorkeeper for some thirty years. Doorkeeper is a top staff position. Most of us old-timers remember Fishbait’s Big Moments. When the President would come to address the House or a joint session.

Miller would walk in with the mace in his hand and shout, “Mister Speaker, the President of the United States.”

Miller was a tiny man with a huge voice. He was called “Fishbait” because he was so small.

But Fishbait knew EVERYTHING about Capitol Hill.

The Doorkeeper is exactly like the butler in a wealthy home in the old days. He knows everything and keeps his mouth shut.

When Miller wrote his autobiography, called “Fishbait,” he didn’t reveal many secrets. But one he did talk about is a major event in history that nobody knows about.

Senator James Byrnes of South Carolina was appointed to the Supreme Court in 1941. In 1942 he gave up that lifetime appointment to become “Assistant to the President” for Roosevelt.

NOBODY gives up a seat on the United States Supreme Court for ANY other government job. But in his new job Byrnes was with Roosevelt all the time. He had obviously gotten a BIG promise from Roosevelt, and Byrnes was no fool.

It was obvious to everybody that Roosevelt was preparing Byrnes to be his successor. Byrnes would not have taken the job for any other reason.

Roosevelt was too sick to attend the Democratic nominating convention which nominated him for his fourth term in 1944. He was perfectly aware that he would not live out the term. FDR knew very well that when he named a vice presidential candidate he was naming the next president. So he told everybody who was going to the convention to tell the convention that his choice was, obviously, James F. Byrnes.

Byrnes was a segregationist and a Southern conservative. FDR’s wife Eleanor was fanatically anti-white. She went to the convention and announced that FDR’s choice was Harry Truman. “Fishbait” stated flatly what was obvious: Eleanor got Truman made vice president and therefore president.

Roosevelt, said “Fishbait,” had a fit. But there was nothing he could do about it once Truman was already announced as the nominee.

Contrary to all the crap you hear today, Truman was a VERY unpopular president. Thurmond broke with him to run as a Dixiecrat and far leftists, frankly and openly led by Communists, set up the Progressive Party to oppose him from the left. Everybody assumed in 1948 that Truman would lose.

Despite the rather stupid Stalinists who set up the Progressive Party, serious leftists realized that the election of Truman and a Democratic majority in both Houses was absolutely critical. Republicans were looking forward to exposing the heavy Communist influence in the New Deal and the World War II government.

There is no longer any doubt about this. When KGB files were opened after the fall of Communism in the USSR, everybody was absolutely astonished that even Senator McCarthy had underestimated how many Democrats, in the Administration and in Congress, were actually PAID agents of the Soviet Union.

If you read the editorials during the 1948 campaign, you will see that everybody assumed Truman was a goner. In 1946 Republicans had won a giant majority in both Houses of Congress for the first time since 1928.

By what others consider a trick of fate, Truman was reelected and both Houses of Congress went Democratic. We have all heard of the miracle of the 1948 election. We have all seen the picture of a smiling Harry Truman showing off the headline in a New York newspaper, “DEWEY WINS.”

Truman had the incredible luck of being picked by Eleanor Roosevelt, even though he was almost an unknown. In 1948 he had the luck to be the man whose election was absolutely critical to the left.

After World War II in the House, conservative Democrats like Byrnes and conservative Republicans worked so closely together on committees on subversion that you couldn’t tell which party they belonged to. During World War II they were silent because Russia was Our Beloved Ally.

If Byrnes had been elected the liberal Democrats would have been doomed. If the Republicans had won in 1948 America would have gone after Stalin the way they went after Hitler under Roosevelt.

Or it all could have been an accident.

You decide.

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Bob

(Reprinted to Blog from email list of 8/20/05)

*** Bob’s Insider’s Message ***

Alphabet Soup

I was a political appointee of the President, but before and after that I spent time in the regular career civil service.

So when I was appointed by Reagan to the Office of Personnel Management(OPM), another Big Presidential Appointee pulled out the organization chart and showed me how they had come in and reorganized OPM.

I have a reputation for laughing in all the wrong places, but in this case I managed to keep a perfectly straight face.

You see, every time a new administration comes in the professional civil service wants to keep them from rocking the boat. The standard way of keeping them occupied was something we called “playing alphabet soup.”

Every new cabinet secretary is going to Clean Up the Mess in Washington by making everything logical and orderly. So he takes the Office of Career Development (OCD) out of the Directorate of Training (DOT) and moves it to the Human Resources Development Unit (HRU).

Every administration appointee works on shuffling this alphabet soup around far into the night. By the time he has reorganized everything, the dangerous period when the new administration might actually do something has passed, and everybody is settled into Business As Usual (BAU).

It makes not the slightest difference who is in what letters of the organizational alphabet soup. The same high-level career people will be doing the same thing they have been doing for the past twenty years.

This is all well and good, except that people get hung up in trying to follow all the movements of the letters, and respectable conservatives debate the merits of this arrangement vs. that arrangement and argue with liberals over the most minute details of having this agency under that agency and so on, and forget the main point – that the same people are doing the same thing they have always done, and wrecking the country. This last detail seems to escape the notice of almost everyone who is allowed to appear in the media to tell us what is going on.

Getting caught up in following the shuffling is about as useful as playing the “shell game” with one of those con-men on a city bus. And a whole lot more disastrous for the country as a whole.

The reason we are expending the effort to bring you WOL, a radio program, and my book, is that someone needs to call attention to that forgotten detail, the one that everyone seems to have overlooked while following the shuffling.

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Bob

(Reprinted to Blog from email list of 8/13/05)

*** Bob’s Insider’s Message ***

The Emperor’s Clothing Store

Does anybody remember how that old story, The Emperor’s New Clothes ended?

A little boy said, “But he doesn’t have any clothes on.”

At that point, everybody was shamed. They had been told that if they did not see the New Clothes, it just showed they were not Worthy. When a little boy said what they could all see, they were shamed to realize they had been made fools of.

But the Professional Market Analysts and the Modern Artists are ALWAYS being exposed. As I keep pointing out on my radio show the Wall Street Journal regularly reports scientific studies that demonstrate that monkeys throwing darts do just as well as professional market analysts.

The Andy Warhol who cracks a commode and sells it for a million dollars is a fraud everybody knows about, but he is not the only person who gets the million. The Professional Art Critics and Art Professors live like kings, too.

And nobody notices.

Nothing professors require us to believe in ever works. But nobody minds. The next time they raise tuition everybody will complain, again, that tuition is being raised too much.

Our professor-priesthood, they say, is asking for too much more pay.

Nobody ever points out that there is no reason to pay them at all.

The end of “The Emperor’s New Clothes” ought to be different.

The kid said, “He doesn’t have any clothes on.”

“The people said, ‘We can all see that. When is the Emperor going to raise our taxes and order an even BETTER set of clothes that don’t exist?'”

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Bob