People ask me what I think of Obama.

I reply, “He’s black.”

They then wait for more. I add nothing. You know me well enough to realize that I often consider the period the most important part of a sentence. I was asked what I think of Obama and that period indicates that the reply is complete.

The new administration began exactly the same way Clinton’s first term did. Clinton had Hillary set up a committee to reform health care. He tried to sell this reform and his popularity dropped from its honeymoon high. Obama started off the same way.

But when Clinton did things you knew it was CLINTON who did them. Clinton is a political genius. There are a thousand things you can say about Clinton, but his initiatives were HIS initiatives.

No one can point to one single thing that is Obama’s idea or Obama’s initiative. His election has put the old Ivy League liberal crowd back into control of the White House. You know, “the best and the brightest” who got us into Vietnam.

There is nothing Obama says or does that any particularly puppet-like Democratic president wouldn’t do. He says nothing that comes from HIM.

All this one can deduce from my answer.

IF you stop looking for some kind of respectable conservative respect, you see that the period is the most important part of the sentence.

Historical “fiction” is far more ACCURATE than regular history books. I have learned this through reading hundreds or thousands of both. Once again, as I keep repeating and I hope you HEAR, this goes back to the one question you must always ask yourself:

Why was this information PRODUCED?

History books are produced to satisfy academics and were trained by them. I read along and hit error after error routinely in regular history books. But I have long since stopped trying to correct them because they are not errors anyone reading these books CARES about.

For example, one book discussed Viking ships. It stated that, “surprisingly enough,” the only thing that could be “traced to the Middle East” was one type of sail used. The sail could not be “traced” at all. But the writer and his readers all took it for granted that if anything existed in the Middle East and in Northern Europe, it was invented in the Middle East.

Historical fiction writers have a hard life. Their books are not being read by those who look on the New York Times Best Seller and Sophistication List. They are being read by several hundred thousand history NUTS. If you think I’m just being funny, you miss my point, which is CRITICAL.

A writer of historical fiction who is sloppy pays for it, big time. He gets a thousand letter from PAYING CUSTOMERS a lot of other historical fiction writers would love to have asking “How do you TRACE a particular sail to the Middle East from the remains of a Viking ship?”

The very idea would fascinate his readers Can you REALLY trace a Viking ship to Middle Eastern design? HOW? And they would NOT react well to his admitting it was pure horseshit.

The question would never occur to a fashionable history reader. He assumes everything was invented in the Middle East. Mommy Professor told him so. That is why he says it is “surprising” that only this part of the ship was like Middle Eastern ones.

Hey, Bozo! Both the Viking ships and Middle Eastern ships had a BOTTOM, too! Did they built boats with no bottoms until the Christian missionaries got there?

This is part of the gigantic framework of assumptions every college graduate is trained in.

Seriously, to say that early Germanic people INVENTED things is what HITLER said. No one would put this in plain English outside this blog, but the fact is that the “sophisticated” history writer, subconsciously, sees something anti-Semitic in that assertion.

So only the writer of historical fiction will have to send out a thousand disclaimers of his Middle East nonsense no one would have questioned a Mommy Professor historian about.

Every successful historical fiction has lengthy disclaimers about what is and what isn’t true in his book. “History” books only cite the Mommy Professors they get the Truth from.

Before Vatican II many in the Catholic freely predicted that all Protestants were going to Hell. No one minded. But if they said JEWS were damned, all Hell, pardon the expression, would have busted loose. Even trying to convert Jews to Christianity is an act of PC anti-Semitism.

In William Shirer’s The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich he declared that nothing important was invented in the Third Reich because the Jews weren’t there. It sold millions of copies and was on the bookshelf out in sight in every Mommy Professor household.

Who but a Nazi would question this statement?

My family used to talk about how Hitler seemed to be talking on the radio twenty four hours a day. His voice had none of the identifiable scratch that records and wire recorders had, so the word was that he was being kept awake twenty-four hours a day with drugs.

That was how well known the German invention of the TAPE recorder was.

Both the Autobahn and the VW, for which Hitler himself gave the original bug design, were developed in Nazi Germany. Dr. Werner von Braun probably think his team invented some stuff, and when the V-1s first hit London, I doubt the Brits said, “Oh, God, it’s the same old thing again.”

The German jets and the first version of a Stealth bomber were a bit new in 1944. In fact, it was not until the 1980 election campaign that the public learned about the “first” Stealth bomber INVENTED, presumably, by Jewish-Americans.

The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich was required buying for any Mommy Professor product who wanted to be “with it.” Some of them probably READ a lot of it. But the line about no Nazi inventions is still there.

Who but a NAZI would correct it?

Well, as a matter of fact, if it had been historical fiction, several THOUSAND readers would have demanded to know where he GOT that crap.

By contrast you are not going to see many historical fiction books on people’s shelves that they have not READ. Only us historical fiction freaks HEAR of them, much less BUY them.

And we read each word. And we FASCINATED by history. A writer of historical fiction is performing in front of a TOUGH audience.

“Historians” write for manikins

The BNP just won a biggie in the last elections.

I would like to see bumper stickers saying, “Isn’t there room in the WHOLE WORLD for ONE British Culture?” This is the obvious answer to “multiculturalism,” at least obvious to ME.

Some 22% of Britons say they will “consider” voting BNP. When you realize that means “Nazi” in every publication they read, that is quite a large number.

Someone once asked me what I would advise some European party to do, since I am a recognized political expert. I replied, “I would advice that Party to let me live in that country for a few years.”

I haven’t been keeping up with British politics. I get a free National Review every two weeks, and they were terrified by the BNP’s breakthrough in this last election. Anything respectable conservatives hate deserves a second look. William Buckley was the only national commentator to endorse Europe’s prison-for Hate Laws.

But if I understand British politics somewhat, it is hard for an American to understand how MUCH government they have. So Griffin may talk about housing, which strikes us as a non-issue, but the British Government has responsibilities in housing which would astound an American.

I am always open to correction on this point.

Also, we underestimate the amount of control government has here because of federalism. Britain is centralized, which means that, in theory, every law is made in London. This is largely still true theoretically despite the Scottish Parliament and the European Parliament. I think that has had an affect on our psychology. Our governments tell us where we can live, what the interest rates will be, where our stores will be, and all that.

But it looks different to us when the head of government directly addresses housing, for example. The British are comfortable with “the government” handling all these things whereas we fool ourselves by saying that there is no THE government, but “t he country,” “the State,” the Federal Government” each having their own regulations. If one government was directly responsible for these things, as in Britain, we would feel over governed.

Actually there is an awfully lot of local government in Britain, which we inherited, so this centralization is more theoretical than we like to admit. As I say, they are theoretically centralized and we are theoretically federalized. But we have about as little contradiction of Washington here as they do in Britain.

The last thing I would recommend to someone running for President would be to talk all that much about housing regulations. But I have lived in Britain, which is the only reason I happen to know why Griffin has to.

I am acutely aware when I am an outsider. Not least because I am enough of an insider to know what an outsider can MISS.

But I think a bumper sticker saying “Is there not enough room in the WHOLE WORLD for ONE Danish Culture” would be excellent in that country. It would not interfere with anything they are doing, and bumper stickers are an American specialty.