**How to Make a Happy Ending
**
We sat at a hi-top table for four at John D. McGurk’s Irish (duh) Pub in South St. Louis. Cold filled my being down to the soul. I’d been outside in the rain for the better part of two days. My favorite sport coat, soaked, lay in the back seat of my Jeep. My shirts clung to my shivering skin. My penny loafers made the sound of swishing mouth-rinse with every step. Nothing on this planet could have warmed me up, and a trip to the Sun might only take an edge off the chill. Still, I was willing to give alcohol a try.
“I feel like I’ve been raped,” John said. The former Missouri State Senator scanned his Palm Pre for news on the vote in the House. “I just have a such an awful feeling of impending doom. Like a nuclear weapon is on its way and there’s noting to do but drink and laugh.” The House was voting on socialized medicine.
The Senator and his wife, Dr. Gina, sat on my left. John Burns on my right. Opposite of me, the table lay open. The better to see the band, my dear. My back was to the bar and to the main entrance. Bad move, but what are you gonna do? Sitting with your back to the band is bad manners, and the bands at McGurk’s might just call you out.
St. Louis has its share of “Sunday night bars”–taverns that, for some reason, draw big crowds on the day before the next work week begins. McGurk’s isn’t one, meaning we had our choice of where to sit. When the food came, we moved.
Our second and final table was our old home, and our buddy, Ed, joined us there. Three months and three weeks earlier, this same group sat at this table with James O’Keefe, his fiancee, and his friend, Joe Basel. The O’Keefe clan was in town for our Christmas Tea Party. O’Keefe was the key note speaker.
On that night in November, I watched O’Keefe closely. I wanted to see if he knew just how big a deal he was. God, they’re going to love him, I thought of next day’s crowd as James told a tale of his unique form of Merry Pranking.
“At Rutgers, I went up to the cashier in the cafeteria with a box of Lucky Charms. I got a meeting with some diversity czar and told her, ‘As an Irish-American, I’m offended at the derogatory treatment of my people. This is stereotyping and belittling. I mean, we’re all of different heights. Not all Irish-Americans are short.'”
“The woman didn’t know what to do,” O’Keefe told us.
The fiancee’s eyes danced from him to his new admirers. As I tried to size up O’Keefe, she wanted to gauge our reaction to James. “So they ended up banning Lucky Charms from the campus.”
James O’Keefe, Ben Wetmore, Joe Basel, and John Burns went on to expose much more liberal idiocy after that. The coup-de-grace, the reason for O’Keefe’s appearance at a Tea Party, was his work with Hannah Giles in exposing ACORN (Association of Community Organizations for Reform Now).O’Keefe and Giles famously posed as pimp and prostitute at about a dozen ACORN offices from coast to coast. In nearly every office, the employees were eager to help James get government and bank money to open a brothel. The ACORN employees had no qualms with the news that James and Hannah would staff the brothel with thirteen-year-old sex slaves from El Salvador.
On the night that Obama and Pelosi conspired to rape the Constitution and to replace our democratic-republic with a despotic socialist system, ACORN lay on its deathbed. This morning, ACORN announced that it would close the last of his remaining state and field office by April 1. In the New York Times’ story on ACORN’s demise, written in a voice so heavy and sodden one can almost taste the author’s salty tears, we learn that O’Keefe was mightier than Barack Obama’s favorite community organizing group.
ACORN fell because James is focused on using video to expose government corruption and incompetence. He does not let side matters get in his way. He doesn’t confine his activities to the safe rule sets written my state socialists to keep conservatives and Republicans safely chained. Some say James is focused to a flaw, reckless, imprudent in his rush to tear down the walls–walls built high by a federation of academia, press, entertainment, big labor, and government. “I want to destroy them all,” he told our little band in November.
One wall is down, but a much larger wall went up. As if some evil demon had supported ACORN only until socialism became the law of the land. The fight goes on. Our tactics must intensify. We must disrupt the enemy’s ability to wage war. We must make them doubt everything.
I stopped talking and laughing long enough to look around the table at this abbreviated reunion. As John read the latest news on his Pre and Gina send text messages or emails from hers, I remembered the night in November ‘09. My mind jumped ahead to November ‘10. What chasm we have to cross before then.
Then I thought of Casablanca. German soldiers stand and sing Deutschland Uber Alles, or some damn thing. Victor Laszlo rushes to the house band and instructs the maestro to play La Marseilles. Laszlo sings alone, but then others join in. First the other Frenchmen. But soon, Czechs and Austrians and Americans and everyone who’s NOT a Nazi raises his voice in defiance. Overwhelmed, the Germans surrender. The Germans shut up as the band and Laszlo and the patrons sing on.
I wanted, at that moment, to stand, beer in hand, and sing:
Allons enfants de la Patrie, . . .
Alas, I know not a lick of French, and the first line of the lyric appears here only because of Wikipedia. Maybe The Star-spangled Banner would have been a better choice had I the courage to sing a capella at McGurk’s on a rainy Sunday in March. But I let the moment pass.
Out of my reverie, my friends were all laughing again. I missed the joke or the incident, but I couldn’t help but laugh with them. Despite our loss in the halls of Congress, we were happy. We are part of growing resistance movement. We are dedicated and tacitly sworn to fight and die for each other. We are a mini nation of Victor Laszlos who will stop at nothing to restore the dignity of the individual and the rule of law in the United States.
James O’Keefe showed us how to make happy endings. He talked about nothing but video, corruption, and relentless pursuit of the truth. Our enemies deny that truth exist, but James has pressed the Play button on his book of truth many times. We’ve seen the movie. The truth is out there–we just need the courage and the capital to seize it.
ACORN’s death was long overdue. Socialism’s is next. Whose side are you on?