FAST AND FURIOUS IS NOT A D.C. LAW FIRM

By Ann Coulter
http://www.anncoulter.com/
July 11, 2012

Most Americans don't care about whether Attorney General Eric Holder is hiding Fast and Furious documents because they don't understand the story.

Until someone can tell us otherwise, there is only one explanation for why President Obama's Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives gave thousands of guns to Mexican drug dealers: It put guns in their hands to strengthen liberals' argument for gun control.

Precisely because this is such a jaw-dropping accusation -- criminality at the highest level of government to score a political point -- Republicans refuse to make it.

But the problem with Republican rectitude in discussing this scandal is that as soon as they start talking about subpoenas and dates and documents, TV channels change across America. They're never going to get answers unless they first explain to the American people why it matters.

Liberals have been dying to reinstate the so-called "assault weapons" ban, but they haven't been able to for political reasons. (For more information on this, see the 1994 congressional elections.)

A typically idiotic Democratic scheme, the "assault weapons" ban prohibited the sale of semiautomatics that are operationally indistinguishable from deer rifles, but which looked scary to liberal women.

First, the Democrats tried lying about how American guns were being found in the hands of Mexican drug dealers -- while demanding a renewal of the assault weapons ban.

Obama had barely unpacked at the White House, when he and high-level administration officials and Senate Democrats -- Holder, Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, Sen. Dianne Feinstein, Sen. Chuck Schumer -- started railing about how our lax gun control laws were putting guns in the hands of Mexican drug cartels.

In 2010, even Mexico's President Felipe Calderon demanded that the U.S. reinstate the assault weapons ban -- on the grounds that Mexican drug violence was directly linked to the law's repeal.

The claim was preposterous for many reasons, including the fact that the type and quantity of armaments being used by Mexican drug cartels can be obtained only from places such as North Korea, China, Russia, Venezuela and Guatemala.

The notion that most guns used by Mexican drug gangs came from the U.S. was a lie -- exposed on about 1 million gun blogs and on Fox News.

So, then the Obama administration did exactly what Democrats had been falsely accusing American gun sellers of doing: They put American guns in the hands of Mexican drug cartels.

The only explanation for Fast and Furious is that it was a program to prop up a losing gun control argument. The Waco and Ruby Ridge raids were monstrous, but they at least made sense as simple screw-ups: (1) ATF's budget was about to be cut and it needed some showy raids; and (2) law enforcement officials detest private gun ownership on principle.

There is no conceivable law enforcement objective to giving Mexican drug dealers thousands of untrackable guns. It's not even fun for the agents, like an armed raid on a private home. If there's some other explanation, Holder isn't telling.

Republicans refuse to state this clearly because they can't prove it. Instead, they just keep chattering about the documents that haven't been turned over and subpoenas that haven't been answered.

Did Democrats wait for a smoking gun to accuse Karl Rove of treason for revealing Valerie Plame's identity as a CIA agent? It turned out Rove didn't reveal it, and it wouldn't have been a crime if he had.

Did they wait for proof to accuse Sen. John McCain of committing adultery? They had none, and yet that story ran on the front page of The New York Times.

Did they have any evidence before accusing the entire Republican House leadership of complicity in Mark Foley's creepy emails to young male interns? See if you can guess. Take all the time you need. Feel free to call one of your "lifelines" if necessary.

Liberals just make wild-eyed accusations and demand Republicans prove themselves innocent. (Say, whatever happened to Karl Rove's trial for treason for outing Valerie Plame? Can somebody call Lawrence O'Donnell and check on that?)

If conservatives were our only source of information about 9/11, no one would care about that, either. Somehow they'd make it about Osama bin Laden not answering a subpoena.

This isn't just another government program gone bad -- a $300 ashtray, stimulus money fraud, Solyndra or Van Jones.

It isn't just a story about some government official refusing to testify.

It isn't even a story about an American dying as a result of a government program, as outrageous as that is. Yes, Brian Terry died at the hands of a Mexican using a Holder-provided American gun. Pat Tillman died. Ron Brown died. People sometimes die as a result of government screw-ups. Fast and Furious is worse.

Innocent people dying was the objective of Fast and Furious, not collateral damage.

It would be as if the Bush administration had implemented a covert operation to dump a dangerous abortifacient in Planned Parenthood clinics, resulting in hundreds of women dying -- just to give pro-lifers an argument about how dangerous abortion clinics are.

That's what Fast and Furious is about.

COPYRIGHT 2012 ANN COULTER

What David Maraniss Left Out of 'The Story'

By Don Wilkie
http://www.americanthinker.com/
July 11, 2012

In his book, Barack Obama: The Story, David Maraniss is remarkably detailed about things that have nothing to do with The Story (Betty Davis' opinion of a film, how a letter was handled in Kenya, what President Johnson said to Bill Moyers) but is inexplicably incurious about many things that are very important to The Story.

Maraniss, in an interview on the June 18 Today Show, stated that Barack Obama's book, Dreams from My Father, was "literature," adding, "There's a big difference between memoir and biography." So big a difference that Ben Smith of Buzzfeed counted "38 instances in which the biographer [Maraniss] convincingly disputes significant elements of Obama's own story of his life and his family history."

Yet Maraniss continues to rely on Dreams for much of his narrative. A case in point is the story of how Obama Sr. (going forward, "Obama") and Ann Dunham met in a Russian class. Maraniss goes into elaborate detail as to why Obama would take a Russian class while ignoring the very real possibility that the whole story is hogwash.

Maraniss makes note of "Author Sally Jacobs" and "her vibrant study of Obama, The Other Barack." On page 112 of her book, there is a footnote: "Barack Obama's transcript from the University of Hawaii, Syracuse University, Frank C. Laubach Collection." These transcripts would show if Obama ever enrolled in a Russian class. However, the reading room supervisor of the Laubach Collection, Nicole Dittrich, has advised me that "Obama Sr.'s Hawaii transcript is currently missing from our collection." Maraniss makes no mention of the missing transcripts. He also makes no mention of Janny Scott's assertion in A Singular Woman that a friend "said he remembered Ann saying she had met Obama in the University Library." Maraniss does mention Obama's curriculum vitae that showed he spoke "Luo, Swahilli and English," but he explains away the omission of Russian by saying, "He had not followed through in Russian enough to become fluent."

Then there is the issue of whom Ann dated in high school. Maraniss quotes Ann's high school girlfriend, Susan Botkin Blake: "She dated a couple of guys from off the island. She looked beyond the white boys with crew cuts who were prevalent in our class." Maraniss comments, "It is typical that she [Ann] would look outside her set for romance." An interesting post on the "Classmates" website by Phillip Lipson and responded to by Ann's classmate Joelle Hannum gives credibility to Maraniss' contention. Lipson was "assisting David Maraniss Washington Post journalist who is writing a book on Barack Obama." Hannum, in responding to Lipson, wrote, "I can remember the rumors about her and another class-mate who were involved with and married African-American men." Did Ann date African-American men in high school? Maraniss shuts the door on that possibility, writing, "Dating someone of an even darker [than Italian] skin was implausible if not unthinkable." But why?

Maraniss, knowingly or not, opens up a mystery heretofore unexamined. Mentioning the birth notice that appeared in the Star-Bulletin, he states that it identified "Mr. and Mrs. Barack H. Obama" at a home address of "6085 Kalanianaole Highway." Maraniss adds, "But she and Obama and the infant never lived there." He goes on to say, "Only a few days after the boy was born, the father had to fill out immigration papers to extend his student visa. The residence he listed on those papers was 1704 Punahou Street, apartment 15."

Maraniss has this all wrong. The immigration papers listing the 1704 Punahou Street address were filled out on March 3, 1961, long before a child was born. The next time Obama listed his address on an immigration document was on August 31, 1961. The address given was 1482 Alencastre Street.
We don't know when Obama took up residence on Alencastre Street, but we do know from a memo, also written on August 31 by William Wood, that Ann and child were not living with him. The memo also confirmed Obama's residence on Alencastre. Maraniss interviewed Robert Ruenitz, an East-West Center student who visited Obama at his Alencastre address. "I could see no sign of other inhabitants, it was monastic at best," said Ruenitz. "A study table and a bed and a light." The mystery, then, is if Ann and child did not live with Obama, and they did not live with her parents, where did they live before moving to Seattle in late August 1961?

Maraniss writes, "Of all the chapters in the lives of these two human beings, the time they were together is historically the most important and personally the most obscure, a brief point of confluence with few witnesses or supporting documents." During this time, there are no pictures of Obama Sr. and Ann Dunham together. There is, however, a group picture showing a smiling Stanley Dunham, Ann's father, with his arm around his smiling son-in-law. An incurious Maraniss never mentions this picture even though he had the means to comprehend its meaning.

Students from the East-West Center, who were friends of Obama, some of whom Maraniss interviewed for his book, appear in the group photo as well, as in pictures from some of their many gatherings. Since we know that many of these students did not come to the East-West Center until September 1961, the group picture had to have been taken after Ann and child had left Obama for Seattle in late August 1961.

Maraniss gives two explanations for Ann's abrupt departure. The first: "She was married to a bigamist, and the probability is that around the time of Barry's birth the lie burdened the relationship so much that she had to flee from under its weight." The second: "There is one other possible provocation, an uglier one: spousal abuse." Neither explanation fits what we see in the picture -- namely, a smiling Obama with Ann's beaming father.

An inquiring Maraniss could have learned from the East-West students he interviewed what the relationship between Obama and Stan Dunham was like, where the picture was taken, who else was in the picture, who took the picture, and what was the occasion. Instead, he remains incurious.
There are other examples of Maraniss' willful lack of curiosity. For example, he accepts Susan Botkin Blake's dubious contention that Ann sent her letters about meeting and falling in love with Obama without producing the letters themselves. Just one page later, while talking about how Ann's and Obama's families reacted to their marriage, the ever-careful historian Maraniss wrote, "Either version is plausible, but questionable without evidence of the letters themselves." Why, then, no curiosity about Susan's supposed letters?

Maraniss goes into great detail explaining the II at the end of the baby's official name, Barack Hussein Obama II. He notes, "The father must have liked the ring of it," but he fails to mention that in Obama's immigration documents, he misidentifies his presumed child as "Barack Obama 2^nd" and gives his address as "c/o Univ of Hawaii." Obviously a very caring father!

Maraniss twice states that Obama's age was 26 in the early months of 1961. His birthday was June 18. This would have made him 27 on August 4,when the baby was born. Yet the official birth certificate lists Obama's age as 25. Maraniss gives no explanation for the discrepancy.

Maraniss told David Gregory on the Today Show, "I just wanted to get the story right." Though he must be credited with correcting 38 "elements of Obama's own story," it appears there is much more that a reporter who did not fear the truth could have fleshed out.

‘Adulteress’ Slaughtered in Afghanistan

By Robert Spencer
http://frontpagemag.com/
July 11, 2012

A video of a woman, Najiba, being shot dead in Afghanistan while a cheering crowd yells “Allahu akbar,” “Long live Islam,” and “Long live mujahideen” has provoked international outrage. Australia’s Foreign Affairs Minister, Bob Carr, called the shooting “a barbaric attack on a defenceless woman and another stark reminder of the brutalities that were regularly committed under Taliban rule, and of the task ahead of us in advancing the rights of Afghan women and girls.” British Foreign Secretary William Hague said: “Such deplorable actions underline the vital need for better protection of the rights of women and girls in Afghanistan.”

And so in the waning days of the West’s fruitless adventure in Afghanistan, at least two of our NATO allies have a new mission: protecting the rights of women and girls in Afghanistan. The video itself makes clear that this will be an uphill battle; and in any case the fate of Afghan women and girls was sealed, at least as far as getting any help from the West was concerned, when the Western powers oversaw the adoption of a Constitution in Afghanistan that enshrined Islamic law as the highest law of the land.

But many Muslim spokesmen have denied that the murder of Najiba had anything to do with Islam or Sharia in the first place. Many have decried the fact that Najiba was executed for adultery when there doesn’t seem to have been any evidence presented. Maulavi Sidiqullah Fedayee, an Afghan Islamic scholar, explains: “Islam has very clear rules. These clear rules of Islam cannot be changed. Those who implement Shari’a simply on the basis of accusations do not have an adequate understanding of the rules of Islam….In a case of adultery, there must be four witnesses, and these witnesses must testify that they actually saw the woman and a man together engaged in sexual intercourse.”

Fedayee is correct: absent a confession (which, for all anyone knows, may have been obtained in Najiba’s case), Islamic law requires four male Muslim witnesses who actually saw the act of adultery in order to establish it. This odd stipulation is based on Qur’an 24:4 and 24:13, which in turn are based, according to Islamic tradition, on a notorious incident in Muhammad’s life: his favorite wife, Aisha, was accused of adultery and thus had to be put to death, whereupon Muhammad received a revelation requiring four witnesses. Aisha’s accusers didn’t have them, and so she was exonerated.

Also, according to Islamic law Najiba should have been stoned to death, not shot, if she was indeed guilty of adultery. That law is not in the Qur’an, but in one hadith the caliph Umar, one of Muhammad’s closest companions, maintained that it originally was, and was still Islamic law:

‘Umar said, “I am afraid that after a long time has passed, people may say, “We do not find the Verses of the Rajam (stoning to death) in the Holy Book,” and consequently they may go astray by leaving an obligation that Allah has revealed. Lo! I confirm that the penalty of Rajam be inflicted on him who commits illegal sexual intercourse, if he is already married and the crime is proved by witnesses or pregnancy or confession.” Sufyan added, “I have memorized this narration in this way.” ‘Umar added, “Surely Allah’s Apostle carried out the penalty of Rajam, and so did we after him.” (Bukhari, vol. 8, bk. 82, no. 816)

And so Maulavi Sidiqullah Fedayee is correct: “Islam has very clear rules,” and by them one can evaluate whether or not Najiba was put to death justly from an Islamic standpoint. This belies the smooth deceptions that Islamic supremacists, faced with growing opposition to Sharia in the U.S., peddle about Islamic law. Reza Aslan, for example, has claimed: “There’s really no such thing as just Sharia, it’s not one monolithic Continuum – Sharia is understood in thousands of different ways over the 1,500 years in which multiple and competing schools of law have tried to construct some kind of civic penal and family law code that would abide by Islamic values and principles, it’s understood in many different ways.”

Yet neither Reza Aslan nor any other Muslim spokesman in the U.S. can point to any version of Sharia that does not mandate stoning for adultery, or polygamy, or female genital mutilation, or the devaluation of a woman’s testimony in court and inheritance rights, or any number of other provisions that ultimately make it impossible for the Western powers, despite the best intentions of Bob Carr and William Hague, to succeed in “advancing the rights of Afghan women and girls.”

Even if Najiba was the victim of an extrajudicial murder that violated the tenets of Islamic law, those tenets are oppressive enough for women as to ensure that the “rights of Afghan women and girls” will continue to be contravened in numerous ways, whether or not the Taliban returns to power – as long as Islam remains the dominant political and religious ideology of the land. Even if Najiba was killed unjustly in a manner that does not accord with Islamic law, other women are treated unjustly on a regular basis in Afghanistan in ways that accord perfectly with Islamic law: denied a just inheritance, treated as a commodity in a polygamous arrangement with a much older man, silenced in court, beaten (in accord with Qur’an 4:34), and more.

Everywhere that Sharia has ever been implemented, women have been oppressed, and always in the very same ways. For Carr and Hague, and other Western spokesmen who have deplored the murder of Najiba, to treat that murder as an isolated incident betrays an astonishing naivete, particularly from career diplomats who hold the post of Foreign Minister in their respective nations. They should both know that untold numbers of women suffer injustices up to and including the loss of life in Afghanistan on a daily basis; Najiba’s case is singular only in that it was filmed.

If Australia and Britain had Foreign Ministers worth their salt, they would be denouncing Sharia and calling for equal justice for women and non-Muslims in Muslim countries.

We could use a Secretary of State who would do that here, too. But the chances of getting one are about as good as those of Mitt Romney winning the Kentucky Derby.

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Calls to Destroy Egypt’s Great Pyramids Begin

By Raymond Ibrahim
http://frontpagemag.com/
July 11, 2012

According to several reports in the Arabic media, prominent Muslim clerics have begun to call for the demolition of Egypt’s Great Pyramids—or, in the words of Saudi Sheikh Ali bin Said al-Rabi‘i, those “symbols of paganism,” which Egypt’s Salafi party has long planned to cover with wax. Most recently, Bahrain’s “Sheikh of Sunni Sheikhs” and President of National Unity, Abd al-Latif al-Mahmoud, called on Egypt’s new president, Muhammad Morsi, to “destroy the Pyramids and accomplish what the Sahabi Amr bin al-As could not.”

This is a reference to the Muslim Prophet Muhammad’s companion, Amr bin al-As and his Arabian tribesmen, who invaded and conquered Egypt circa 641. Under al-As and subsequent Muslim rule, many Egyptian antiquities were destroyed as relics of infidelity. While most Western academics argue otherwise, according to early Muslim writers, the great Library of Alexandria itself—deemed a repository of pagan knowledge contradicting the Koran—was destroyed under bin al-As’s reign and in compliance with Caliph Omar’s command.

However, while book-burning was an easy activity in the 7^th century, destroying the mountain-like pyramids and their guardian Sphinx was not—even if Egypt’s Medieval Mamluk rulers “de-nosed” the latter during target practice (though popular legend still attributes it to a Westerner, Napoleon).
Now, however, as Bahrain’s “Sheikh of Sheikhs” observes, and thanks to modern technology, the pyramids can be destroyed. The only question left is whether the Muslim Brotherhood president of Egypt is “pious” enough—if he is willing to complete the Islamization process that started under the hands of Egypt’s first Islamic conqueror.

Nor is such a course of action implausible. History is laden with examples of Muslims destroying their own pre-Islamic heritage—starting with Islam’s prophet Muhammad himself, who destroyed Arabia’s Ka‘ba temple, transforming it into a mosque.

Asking “What is it about Islam that so often turns its adherents against their own patrimony?” Daniel Pipes provides several examples, from Medieval Muslims in India destroying their forefathers’ temples, to contemporary Muslims destroying their non-Islamic heritage in Egypt, Iraq, Israel, Malaysia, and Tunisia.

Currently, in what the International Criminal Court is describing as a possible “war crime,” Islamic fanatics are destroying the ancient heritage of the city of Timbuktu in Mali—all to Islam’s triumphant war cry, “Allahu Akbar!”

Much of this hate for their own pre-Islamic heritage is tied to the fact that, traditionally, Muslims do not identify with this or that nation, culture, heritage, or language, but only with the Islamic nation—the Umma.

Accordingly, while many Egyptians—Muslims and non-Muslims alike—see themselves as Egyptians, Islamists have no national identity, identifying only with Islam’s “culture,” based on the “sunna” of the prophet and Islam’s language, Arabic. This sentiment was clearly reflected when the former Leader of the Muslim Brotherhood, Muhammad Akef, declared “the hell with Egypt,” indicating that the interests of his country are secondary to Islam’s.

It is further telling that such calls are being made now—immediately after a Muslim Brotherhood member became Egypt’s president. In fact, the same reports discussing the call to demolish the last of the Seven Wonders of the Word, also note that Egyptian Salafis are calling on Morsi to banish all Shias and Baha’is from Egypt.

In other words, Morsi’s call to release the Blind Sheikh, a terrorist mastermind, may be the tip of the iceberg in coming audacity. From calls to legalize Islamic sex-slave marriage to calls to institute “morality police” to calls to destroy Egypt’s mountain-like monuments, under Muslim Brotherhood tutelage, the bottle has been uncorked, and the genie unleashed in Egypt.

Will all those international institutions, which make it a point to look the other way whenever human rights abuses are committed by Muslims, lest they appear “Islamophobic,” at least take note now that the Great Pyramids appear to be next on Islam’s hit list, or will the fact that Muslims are involved silence them once again—even as those most ancient symbols of human civilization are pummeled to the ground?

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Wimbledon 2012: Roger Federer appears to defy time itself with his amazing grace in victory over Andy Murray

It might have been a trick of the eye but in the Royal Box, it really seemed that the great Rod Laver was welling up with emotion. Perhaps the man so often considered the yardstick for greatness in tennis was reflecting quietly on how, actually, he might have just been watching a man who has usurped him as the finest exponent of the sport in history.

By Ian Chadband, Chief Sports Correspondent, at Wimbledon
The Telegraph
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/sport/
8 July 2012

Roger Federer of Switzerland holds the winner's trophy after winning his Gentlemen's Singles final match against Andy Murray of Great Britain on day thirteen of the Wimbledon Lawn Tennis Championships at the All England Lawn Tennis and Croquet Club on July 8, 2012 in London, England. (Julian Finney/Getty Images Europe)

 

The ‘Rockhampton Rocket’ never really goes in for comparing eras but he explained to me three years ago that he might make an exception in Federer’s case. “Let’s see what Roger Federer has gone on to compile by the time he retires. I have to believe it will be a lot more than 14 grand slams,” he shrugged.

He was not wrong. With this immaculate triumph, it is now 17 grand slams and the counting can start afresh. Laver was 31 when he played his last grand slam; Federer is coming up to his 31st birthday and, with this record-equalling seventh Wimbledon crown, has clambered back to No 1 in the world rankings again in an era when he could only have heard the constant refrain that the only way for him was down. Perhaps he has only just started again.

For, somehow, on this extraordinary afternoon when the Nureyev of the court reminded us that, in this era of the super athletes, of the Djokos and the Rafas and the Murrays, nothing is still as beguiling as an artistic genius painting perfect brushstrokes, the conversation had to rise above whether Federer was the best we had ever seen.

No, it now took in the idea, as one questioner put it to the crestfallen Andy Murray, that Federer might even belong alongside the likes of Muhammad Ali and Pele in the old argument about who is the greatest athlete of all-time in any sport. “He’s up there,” reckoned Murray, throwing in the name of Nadal too.

And why not? Watching Federer’s mastery was also to marvel just how amazing Rafael Nadal had to have been to beat him 6-2 in grand slam finals.

Yet while the Spaniard will occasionally surprisingly flounder, as he did to an unknown Czech, Lukas Rosol, in the second round, Federer just floats on timelessly and with consistent, beautiful excellence. Why, if he plays like this, couldn’t he have another lengthy spell as No1, putting Pete Sampras’s record of 286 weeks in the top spot - which Federer will equal this week - out of sight?

Everyone likes to joke on the tennis circuit about the Fed ego, about how he knows exactly, if ever so humbly, how great he is. Yet when asked if he felt he belonged in the pantheon alongside the Jordans and Alis, he genuinely tried to brush it aside.

He uses these other ‘greats’ as motivation. “Maybe Michael Jordan, Tiger Woods, Valentino Rossi, you name it. I’ve drawn a lot of inspiration from these great athletes in other sports. They inspire me to keep pushing further. You sometimes do need to see someone else do it for a long time to feel it is actually possible.”

Sometimes, though, what Federer is doing feels impossible. Now the second oldest world No 1 after Andre Agassi, he appears to be defying time itself with his amazing grace. Now the contented dad with his twin daughters cheering him from the players’ box, he says he is in a “much more stable part of his life”. Tennis is no longer everything; he just manages to make it look as if it is.

He laughed that he played the percentages these days, that he didn’t go for the outrageous shots so often. He could have fooled us. Remember that moment in the third set when, attempting to retrieve a thunderous cross-court forehand, he flicked an incredible, instinctive half-volley on the baseline straight past his dumbfounded opponent?

Or the preposterous moment he danced round to his left and dinked a forehand drop shot from the back court so it dived over the net at an angle which defied geometry? And what about those four or five sliced drop volleys, taken at full pelt but controlled so perfectly that they spun about 60 degrees on landing?

While Murray slid and tumbled and muttered, Federer waltzed on. When Murray began to doubt during the rain break, Federer vowed only to be more aggressive. No wonder Murray cried; faced with talent like this might break anybody’s heart.

But it is not just about the divine gift, that ability to play a variety of shots at a variety of speeds and over a variety of angles so that his opponent never knows what conundrum he is going to be bamboozled with next.

No, it is also about the self-belief, the absolute self-confidence in his own gift. Roger Federer remembered last year and the loss to Jo-Wilfreid Tsonga here from an impregnable position and the defeat to Novak Djokovic when match point up at Flushing Meadows. They hurt, he said, but those “tough moments” came within performances which still convinced him the grand slams would keep coming.

And in four Sundays’ time, who would back against achieving the one ambition he covets above all others now; that is, winning Olympic singles gold in another final here. “You know, I’m playing some of the best tennis of my life,” he said. And that is the best tennis of anyone’s life.

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Craig Johnson makes crime pay

His detective novels are set in the rugged west and go deep into the characters' psyches. He says he's just giving the readers what they want.

By Marc Weingarten
The Los Angeles Times
http://www.latimes.com
July 20, 2008

Craig Johnson comes as advertised. Standing outside the Autry National Center on a boiling summer afternoon, the Wyoming-based crime novelist is decked out in a long-sleeve shirt made of heavy cotton, scuffed brown boots and a 10-gallon hat that provides shade, but not nearly enough. Spotting his interlocutor, Johnson sticks out his hand and delivers a booming "How ya doin'?!" This is the same Marlboro Man who squints at readers from the window of a beat-up junker truck on the jackets of his four novels, which includes the recently released "Another Man's Moccasins."

If you didn't know that Johnson was a rising star in the crime novel genre, you might mistake the guileless rancher for a hayseed agog in the big city. That is, until he goes inside the museum and wanders around its latest exhibit on presidents and cowboys. Suddenly, Johnson is dropping little nuggets of historical information like a docent. Passing a photo of Bat Masterson, Johnson, 47, reels off the titles of some of the dime novels that the famed western crime-fighter wrote. He's got a few choice factoids on Lyndon B. Johnson and Calvin Coolidge as well.

In "Another Man's Moccasins," Johnson flashes back and forth between present-day Wyoming -- the setting for all four of his novels -- and LBJ-era Vietnam, where Johnson's protagonist, Sheriff Walt Longmire, once served as a Marine investigator during the war. As Longmire, the star of all four Johnson novels, searches for the killer of a Vietnamese girl who's found on the highway in tiny Absaroka County, his past creeps up on him, back to memories of drug runners and prostitutes among the mud and pestilence of Tan Son Nhut and Tet. As Longmire unravels the present-day murder mystery, Johnson uses his parallel stories to ponder racism, redemption and the gravitational pull of the past.

Like the greatest crime novelists, Johnson is a student of human nature. Walt Longmire is strong but fallible, a man whose devil-may-care stoicism masks a heightened sensitivity to the horrors he's witnessed. "Longmire has seen some bad stuff in his life," said Johnson. "I suppose there's a good deal of myself in Walt, but he's unhappier than I am. He certainly believes in the goodness of humankind even as he deals with his share of, for lack of a better word, evil."

Unlike traditional genre novelists who obsess mainly over every hairpin plot turn, Johnson's books are also preoccupied with the mystery of his characters' psyches. "Another Man's Moccasins" delves deeper into Longmire's dark past than any previous Johnson novel. It's a long and sometimes unpleasant plunge into his unsettled conscience. "The thing about crime fiction is that readers have the same expectations that readers of literary fiction might have," he said. "They want strong character development, a story arc that makes sense, social commentary. They also want the whodunit part, but everything else is just as important."

'A strong voice'

Although Johnson's previous books ("The Cold Dish," "Kindness Goes Unpunished" and "Death Without Company") have sold well, especially among crime fiction fans on the West Coast, his publisher, Viking Penguin, hopes "Another Man's Moccasins" will be a breakout novel that will vault Johnson into the kind of mainstream success enjoyed by Michael Connelly and Janet Evanovich. "There's a strong voice in Craig's writing, and that's what I always look for. He really understands character, and his books contain a lot of wit," said Kathryn Court, the president and publisher of Viking Penguin Books, who has edited all of Johnson's novels.

Those novels are grounded in the West. While walking through the Autry museum, he professes his affection for John Ford's films and tells a funny story about how Ford chose the Monument Valley region of Arizona as a film location (a small-time store owner with dollar signs in his eyes lured him there, apparently). Johnson views the West's lore as something to push against, as prime material to debunk in his books. "A vertical man in a horizontal landscape is a compelling image," he said. "But there are aspects of the West, such as our treatment of Native Americans, that cannot be ignored; at least, I can't ignore them."

The mores and rituals of Wyoming's local Crow and Cheyenne tribes play a prominent part in "Another Man's Moccasins." A prime suspect turns out to be a Crow Indian, and Longmire must rely on Henry Standing Bear, Walt Longmire's sharp-witted confidant and fellow Vietnam vet who appears in all the books, to navigate his way through the customs of the local tribes, particularly their complex caste systems and atavistic feuds. "I wanted to explore the notion of justice both on and off the Rez," said Johnson, who has befriended members of the Cheyenne tribe. "There's a lot of dramatic conflict in this region -- between opposing tribes, between tribes and the white population. It's a very multilayered region of the country."

Finding a new home

Like Longmire, Johnson resides in Wyoming, in a small town called Ucross in the northern part of the state. Johnson discovered it by accident. It seems he was delivering horses to a rancher some years ago, and the rancher hadn't shown up. "I spent 72 hours waiting for this guy," said Johnson. "I looked around and thought, 'This is a nice place. If I ever get the time, this might be where I wanna settle in.' "

It would be a decade or so before Johnson finally did make Wyoming his home. His life until that point had been like one of his novels -- full of interesting detours. He grew up in Cabell County, W.Va., the son of an engineer father and a schoolteacher mother. "They read voraciously," he said. "I loved books, but I also knew there was a lot I wasn't seeing just yet, and books could only take me so far."

Johnson mentions a few small-time scrapes with the law during his Angry Young Man period -- joy riding stolen cars, mostly. He had some notion that he wanted to write, but he had no idea how to go about doing it. Johnson studied playwriting at Temple University in Philadelphia and even got his doctorate degree there, but the thought of writing professionally seemed impractical. Then one afternoon "I was looking through the Village Voice and I came across a notice for the Civil Service Exam course," he said. "Well, I thought being a cop might be a good idea. So I went down there."
Officer Johnson worked in the 23rd district of Manhattan, living in a brownstone in Harlem. "That period had a formative effect on my ideas about society, the police and criminal behavior," he said. "I had spent a lot of my life dodging cops, and suddenly I was one! I began to have a lot more empathy for law enforcement."

Johnson was mentally stocking away stories and observations during his two years on the force, then suddenly decided it was time to move West and maybe write a book. He plunked his savings down on a large tract of land in Ucross and decided to build a ranch. Literally, with his own hands. Johnson laid 1,200 logs alone for the beams of his roof. It's been seven years, but he's getting there. "That's a young man's job," he said. "If I had built the bulk of it after the age of 40 it would have killed me!"

While building his ranch, Johnson befriended Larry Kirkpatrick, a sheriff in nearby Buffalo, Wyo., to pick his brain about local law enforcement. He got what he needed, then wrote two chapters and shoved them into his desk. It would be nine years before he pulled them out. "I was filling my gas tank one day and there was Larry," said Johnson. "He shook my hand and said, 'Aren't you the guy writing that murder mystery? If you don't mind me saying so, it's going kinda slow!' So I got back to work!"

He finished the rest of "The Cold Dish" in five months, then got lucky when Gail Hochman, a major literary agent who also represents Scott Turow and Julia Glass, loved the manuscript and sold it to Penguin as part of a multi-book deal. Now he's entertaining movie offers for "Another Man's Moccasins" and his earlier novels. But for Johnson, publication has been its own reward. "My dream was to be published by the same company that published Steinbeck's books," he said. "Just to see that orange spine running along the side of my novels. That was my idea of heaven."

The Republic of Baseball

A review of Joseph Bottum’s The Summer of 43

By Noah Glyn

http://www.nationalreview.com

July 9, 2012

R.A. Dickey #43 of the New York Mets pitches in the second inning against the Philadelphia Phillies at Citi Field on July 5, 2012 in the Flushing neighborhood of the Queens borough of New York City.

(Jim McIsaac/Getty Images North America)

In a beautiful article back in May, George Will described the 40th birthday of his son, who has Down syndrome: “This year Jon will spend his birthday where every year he spends 81 spring, summer and autumn days and evenings, at Nationals Park, in his seat behind the home team’s dugout. The Phillies will be in town, and Jon will be wishing them ruination, just another man, beer in hand, among equals in the republic of baseball.”

“The republic of baseball” is such an apt phrase, capturing the game’s character as a matter of players and fans living as individuals “among equals.”

In football, basketball, and hockey, individuals have less opportunity to integrate their personal aspirations with those of the team, the collective. In baseball, the contest between the two teams revolves around two men, pitcher and batter, facing off; only through preparation, ability, and luck will either one succeed in that moment. In football and hockey, the players wear helmets and pads that disguise their faces and identities; basketball stars are giants, chiseled to perfection to facilitate their sprinting up and down the court for 48 minutes a night. But baseball players, their guts hanging low and their faces exposed to the sun, wind, and rain, are athletes whom the average fan can both relate to and immediately recognize.

If there’s one pitch that epitomizes baseball’s republican spirit, it’s the knuckleball. It’s delivered with a unique throwing motion that causes the ball to jerk up and down and side to side without spinning. If used effectively, it can be devastating, nearly impossible for the catcher to catch and the batter to make contact with. Nor is it an easy pitch for the umpire to call a ball or a strike. No other sport has anything equivalent. Sure, basketball players have “street moves”: They might throw the ball off backboards or pass it between opponents’ legs. The knuckleball is of a different order. It represents the most sincere attempt by an athlete to assert his individuality.

In The Summer of 43: R. A. Dickey’s Knuckleball and the Redemption of America’s Game, Joseph Bottum, a contributing editor to The Weekly Standard and former editor of First Things, examines R. A. Dickey of the New York Mets, the most effective knuckleballer to emerge in Major League Baseball since Tim Wakefield debuted with the Pirates 20 years ago. The “43” in the book’s title refers to Dickey’s uniform number.

Published by Amazon in the Kindle Single line, a series of long essays or articles in e-book format, The Summer of 43 follows Bottum’s The Gospel According to Tim, a Kindle Single published earlier this year. There, he wroteabout Tim Tebow as a Christian mystic. Bottum is not one to simply analyze raw statistics. In The Summer of 43, he delves into baseball’s psyche, arguing that “R. A. Dickey’s revival of the knuckleball [is] an important story” because “it offers our answer to, our redemption from, the sin of steroids.” It’s also a “great story” because “it plays out one of the fundamental human narratives — the tale of a man who takes a chance and finds himself, finds his true gift, in this world that God has made.”

If you’re interested in learning more about baseball’s steroids era, the history and the dynamics of the knuckleball, and a brief overview of R. A. Dickey’s life, then you should read this essay. It’s enjoyable. In the end, though, Bottum misses the true significance of R. A. Dickey and his knuckleball.

Bottum considers and rejects recent attempts to situate baseball in political contexts. In The Daily Caller, for example, Mark Judge argued that Bryce Harper, the 19-year-old phenom of the Washington Nationals, is a conservative figure. And in National Affairs, Diana Schaub linked the decline of black participation in baseball to the growing number of black children born out of wedlock.

Bottum disagrees with such ideas. “Baseball is enjoyable only if we seek in it no middle ground. No politics or political theory. . . . Baseball doesn’t teach us about politics.”

I and many would be perfectly happy to permanently separate sports and politics; Keith Olbermann could then return to ESPN and no conservative would complain. But it’s quite a stretch to say that baseball has not informed our political discourse. “Whoever wants to know the heart and mind of America,” Jacques Barzun famously observed, “had better learn baseball.” Baseball has obviously influenced how we talk about politics. How often, for example, do we say that a politician has hit a “home run” when’s he made an especially effective point in a speech? And what about that aphorism, coined by football coach Barry Switzer and popularized by critics of George W. Bush and of his father, that some people are born on third base and think that means they hit a triple?”

But Bottum doesn’t rebut Judge and Schaub so much as he dismisses them. “There are no votes or campaigns in the middle of the seventh inning,” he writes.

Fair enough, but if you’re writing an essay that has the word “redemption” in the title, and if it’s about a born-again Christian pitcher whose meteoric rise you see as baseball’s answer to its past sins . . . well, it seems like baseball might be more than just a sport.

For baseball to move decisively beyond its past sin of steroids, it needs to embrace its republican past. “Baseball’s ubiquitous doping,” as Bottum phrases it, trampled on the premise that all athletes are given an equal chance to succeed. Steroids elevated certain players above others, rendering the juiced giants “more equal” than their peers.

And odious to fans. True, in 1998, Sammy Sosa and Mark McGwire captivated ballparks across America, but that was largely because they were in the process of breaking a record that had stood for 37 years. From 1998 to 2001, Sammy Sosa’s hit 66, 63, 50, and 64 home runs. That run was one of the great individual performances in sports history, but it generated less and less interest each year passed. Fans were downright hostile to Barry Bonds when he shattered McGwire’s three-year-old record. Their hatred of Bonds only increased as his dominance continued.

The new drug-testing procedures that crack down on the cheaters are working. Hitters are slimming down; pitchers are giving up fewer runs, and fans are paying in droves to see them play. In these respects, baseball in 2012 more closely resembles baseball in the late 1960s than it does baseball in 2005.

And players like R. A. Dickey are a big reason why. Both baseball and America have wonderful pasts that are worth preserving and emulating. Dickey reminds us that there was a time when public figures weren’t mocked for being publicly devout. He’s a throwback, a different kind of pitcher who plays a simpler sport for the right reasons.

Bottum is correct to celebrate Dickey’s accomplishments, and he’s right that “baseball needs Dickey’s kind of story.” But so does America.

— Noah Glyn is an editorial intern at National Review and a Philadelphia Phillies fan.

Today's Tune: AWOLNATION - Sail

Lights out for U.S.-style Big Government

No advanced society has ever attempted Big Government for a third of a billion people – because it cannot be done without creating a nation with the black-hole finances of Stockton, California, and the recent Black-Hole-of-Calcutta fetid, airless, sweatbox utility services of Rockville, Maryland.


By Mark Steyn
The Orange County Register
http://www.ocregister.com/
July 6, 2012

This weekend, I am thousands of miles from home in a remote and isolated part of the world with erratic communications and lack of basic services. No, not Washington, D.C. Things aren't that primitive, thank God. I'm in a rude Highland croft way up a far Scottish brae, enjoying the simple life by choice, rather than because the capital region of the global superpower is incapable of turning the lights back on within a week.

Which is by way of saying that news from the imperial metropolis has reached me in fits and starts. The other morning it was the intriguing tidbit that Chief Justice John Roberts had written both the majority opinion in the Obamacare decision and the dissent. He is literally his own worst enemy. He's apparently the Mike Myers of the Supreme Court, able to play both Austin Powers and Dr. Evil, although it has to be said that he seems rather more at home as the bumbling swinger. If I understand correctly, the Chief Justice wrote the dissent back when it was the 5-4 majority opinion, and then, after switching sides, wrote the new majority opinion, and the four guys left holding the old majority opinion decided to leave it as is, presumably as a way of not so subtly underlining their total contempt for their squishy Chief. Fascinating stuff, I'm sure. An enterprising legal scholar should pitch it to Paramount as a high school musical or a particularly dysfunctional reality show.

Meanwhile, back in the real world, East Coast municipalities were canceling Fourth of July celebrations because of lack of electricity. In a novel, this would be rather too obviously symbolic of the hyperpower at twilight, but truth is crasser than art. So we had the spectacle of Martin O'Malley, governor of Maryland, turning up on CBS' "Face The Nation" last Sunday as part of his not-so-subtle campaign for the 2016 Democratic presidential nomination. Across Montgomery County, his delirious constituents would have cheered, "President O'Malley? There's the answer to our nation's woes!" – except that their TVs weren't working, so they never saw him. Unless they jumped in their Chevy Volts and drove to ...oh, no, wait.

I live in the North Country, so in a light breeze our power goes out. As I tell bewildered foreign visitors, "Think of rural New Hampshire as Baghdad outside the Green Zone." But suburban Maryland is inside the Green Zone, and still the power goes out. America's dysfunctional utility companies have a zillion explanations for this, but years ago I rode through the outskirts of D.C. with a Dutch tourist who marveled at the men digging up the sidewalk in densely populated neighborhoods to bury the new cable-TV wires while the sagging electric lines overhead continued to string their way from pole to pole, dodging tree branches, across town. It's a very American sight: "Telegraph cables sing down the highway, and travel each bend in the road..." ("Moonlight In Vermont"). "I hear you singin' in the wire, I can hear you through the whine..." ("Wichita Lineman"). In the rural hinterlands, power lines are a sign of civilization. A stone's through from the imperial metropolis, they're an emblem of civilizational decay.

In recent years, speaking to audiences hither and yon, I'm wont to say something on the lines of "The lamps are going out on liberty all over the world." It's my update on a famous observation by Edward Grey, British Foreign Secretary, on the eve of the Great War. In August 1914, Sir Edward stood at his window in the summer dusk, and said, "The lamps are going out all over Europe." He was speaking metaphorically. After all, his remark was prompted by the sight of London's lamplighters going about their evening routine lighting the lamps in Whitehall. Metaphorically speaking, the lights of liberty were certainly dimmed by Roberts' hideously convoluted Supreme Court decision: I don't see why I should be fined $695 for declining to participate in an overpriced and dysfunctional "insurance" "market."

But that's a philosophical argument, and most folks just want to get on with their lives. And in that sense last week's power outages are more relevant to where the U.S. is headed than what passes for John Roberts' thinking in his Obamacare opinion. It was a reminder, as if you needed one, that in the American twilight the lights will be going out, literally. Last week, as the East Coast was fading to black, the West Coast was sinking deeper into the red: Stockton, California, became the largest U.S. city to date to file for bankruptcy. America is seizing up before our eyes, and the action necessary to reverse the sclerosis is stymied at every turn by rapacious unions, government micro-regulators, dependency-spreading social engineers and crony capitalists who know how to weave their way through the bureaucracy.

Insofar as it works at all, Big Government works best in small, highly developed, northern Continental nation states with a sufficiently homogeneous population to have sufficiently common interests. You can get by with it for a while in Mediterranean Europe, mainly because of a somewhat desultory attitude to the rule of law: in Italy and Greece, there are prohibitions against everything, but nobody obeys them and so, after a fashion, life goes on. Anglophone nations are generally disposed to abide by the law, and so, if there are a bazillion regulations, the average citizen will make a sincere effort to comply. But if you're, say, Australia and you're attempting to design a health care system for 20 million people across an entire continent, it's just about doable.

But no advanced society has ever attempted Big Government for a third of a billion people – for the simple reason that it cannot be done without creating a nation with the black-hole finances of Stockton, California, and the Black-Hole-of-Calcutta fetid, airless, sweatbox utility services of Rockville, Maryland. Thanks to Obamacare, in matters of health provision, whether you're in favor of socialized medicine or truly private health care, Swedes and Italians are now freer than Americans: They have a state system and a private system, and both are relatively simple. What's simple in micro-regulated America? In health care, we now have what's nominally a private system encrusted with so many statist barnacles that it no longer functions as either a private or state system. Thus, Obamacare embodies the strange no-man's-land of statism American-style: The U.S. is no longer a land of republican virtue and self-reliant citizens but it's not headed for the sunlit uplands of Scandinavia, either.

In their book "The Size Of Nations," Alberto Alesina and Enrico Spolaore argue that, if America were as centrally governed as France, it would have broken up long ago. But hey, that's no reason not to try it! In a land where everything else is supersized, why not government? Obituaries for the late Andy Griffith generally glossed over his career finale as a pitchman for Obamacare. But he was a canny choice to sell the unsellable, for is not "health" "care" "reform" the communitarian virtues of beloved small-town Mayberry writ large? The problem is, you can't write Mayberry large. And, if you attempt it, it leads not to Mayberry but to Stockton, California, and to a corrupt, dysfunctional swamp. A large Sweden is a contradiction in terms. It cannot be done, and the more determinedly you try to do it, the more you will preside over a ruined wasteland. The road to hell isn't paved at all, and the street lamps went out long ago.

©MARK STEYN

Remember Fast and Furious’s Mexican Victims

The “walked” guns draw blood south of the border.

By Deroy Murdock

http://www.nationalreview.com

July 6, 2012

Testimony has revealed that ATF weapons were also traced to the torture and killing of a prominent Mexican attorney, Mario Gonzalez Rodriguez, a sibling to a former attorney general in violence-plagued Chihuahua state.

The American people finally have heard of Brian Terry. He is the best-known victim of Fast and Furious, an Obama-administration conventional-weapons-proliferation program. Between November 2009 and January 2011, Team Obama arranged for licensed firearms dealers to sell guns to straw buyers, who transferred them to known violent criminals in Mexico. Two of these firearms, AK-47s, were found near Rio Rico, Ariz., where suspected smugglers fatally shot Terry, a 40-year-old former Marine, on December 15, 2010.

“I do not fear death,” Terry once wrote. “I do fear the loss of my honor, and would rather die fighting than have it said I was without courage.”

While Brian Terry is the most visible victim of this notorious policy, he is not its sole casualty.

On February 15, 2011, U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement agent Jaime Zapata, 32, was shot mortally in San Luis Potosi, Mexico. Members of Los Zetas drug gang also hit ICE Agent Victor Avila in that ambush, although not fatally. This assault involved a rifle purchased in Dallas in another Obama administration “gunwalking” escapade.

Largely overlooked is this plan’s calamitous impact on Mexico, its people, and U.S.-Mexican relations. Fast and Furious has spilled American blood. But south of the border, it has made blood gush like an oil strike.

“One of the things that’s so offensive about this case is that our federal government knowingly, willfully, purposefully gave the drug cartels nearly 2,000 weapons — mainly AK-47s — and allowed them to walk,” Representative Jason Chaffetz (R., Utah) told NBC News. These arms were supposed to lead federal agents in Phoenix to the Mexican thugs who acquired them. Instead, Fast and Furious guns melted into Mexico without a trace.

These weapons became invisible, but not silent.

Approximately 300 Mexicans have been killed or wounded by Fast and Furious guns, estimates former Mexican attorney general Victor Humberto Benítez Treviño. Now the chairman of the Mexican Chamber of Deputies’ Justice Committee, Benítez told the Los Angeles Times that Fast and Furious “was a bad business that got out of hand.”

Relevant details are scarce. However, at least one case generated enormous headlines in Mexico. Here is what happened, according to a July 26, 2011, joint report by House Government Reform Committee chairman Darrell Issa (R., Calif.) and Senate Judiciary Committee ranking Republican Charles Grassley of Iowa.

On October 21, 2010, Sinaloa drug cartel members kidnapped Mario Gonzalez Rodriguez, brother of Chihuahua State’s then–attorney general, Patricia Gonzalez Rodriguez. She believed his abduction was in retaliation for her prosecution of Sinaloa narco-traffickers. A video promptly emerged showing Mario in handcuffs, surrounded by five armed, masked captors. That November 5, his tortured body was discovered in a shallow grave. Mexican police soon nabbed his suspected kidnappers after a shootout. Serial numbers confirm that two of the 16 weapons seized from eight of these hoodlums were Fast and Furious guns. These also were tied to the kidnappings of two people.
Patricia Gonzalez Rodriguez said, “The basic ineptitude of these officials caused the death of my brother and surely thousands more victims.”

Fast and Furious guns have befouled at least 200 crime scenes. Among them:

Members of the La Familia drug gang fired at a Mexican Federal Police helicopter on May 24, 2011, wounding three officers and forcing it to make an emergency landing near Michoacán in western Mexico. Five days later, four more helicopters attacked La Familia. The gang returned fire, striking all four choppers and injuring another two government agents. The police prevailed, killing eleven cartel members and arresting 36 — including those suspected of targeting the first chopper and its passengers. Mexican authorities say La Familia possessed heavy-duty body armor and 70 rifles, including several Fast and Furious weapons.

Two weapons purchased by Fast and Furious targets were recovered in Sonora on July 1, 2010, and tied to a “Homicide/Willful Kill — Gun,” the U.S. Justice Department revealed last September 9.

Two Fast and Furious guns were linked to a February 2010 assassination conspiracy against Baja California’s then–police chief, Julian Leyzaola.

Four Fast and Furious guns were found on January 8, 2010, and connected to a “kidnap/ransom.”

Eleven Fast and Furious firearms were discovered in Atoyac de Álvarez after Mexican soldiers saved a kidnap victim on November 14, 2009.

As of December 2010, 241 Fast and Furious guns had been recovered in Mexico and 350 in America.
In one striking case, these weapons did not walk across the border; they ran. “Within a span of 24 hours,” Issa and Grassley learned, “a straw purchaser bought guns at a gun store in Arizona and facilitated their transport to Naco, Mexico with the intent of delivering the guns to the Sinaloa cartel.”
On November 20, 2009, 42 AK-47 assault rifles and a Beowulf .50-caliber rifle were recovered. In just one day, 20 of these guns traveled from Arizona to Sonora, Mexico.

The woman who transported these armaments told investigators that she planned to deliver them directly to the Sinaloa mob. Noting that this was the first Fast and Furious repossession, Issa and Grassley explained: “From the very first recovery of weapons, ATF officials knew that drug trafficking organizations (DTOs) were using these straw purchasers.”

Team Obama’s defenders correctly argue that Bush-administration investigators distributed some 450 guns in Mexico. But there are several key differences: Operation Wide Receiver caused no known deaths. Many of that program’s weapons (unlike most Fast and Furious guns) featured radio tracking devices. Also, Mexico’s government knew about and supported Wide Receiver.

In contrast, Issa and Grassley observed, “ATF and DOJ leadership kept their own personnel in Mexico and Mexican government officials totally in the dark about all aspects of Fast and Furious.”

Mexican attorney general Marisela Morales told the Los Angeles Times that she first learned about Fast and Furious via news accounts. “In no way would we have allowed it,” she said, “because it is an attack on the safety of Mexicans.” In June 2011, a U.S. official informed Morales that, eight months earlier, Mario Gonzalez Rodriguez’s murderers used Fast and Furious guns.

“Hijole!” Attorney General Morales replied. Roughly translated: “Damn!”

Consequently, another casualty here is America’s friendship with Mexico. Though not mortally wounded, this relationship is in serious condition.

“Fast and Furious has poisoned the well-spring of public opinion in Mexico as it relates to the cooperation and engagement with the United States,” Mexico’s envoy to America, Ambassador Arturo Sarukhan, told Washington, D.C.’s New Democrat Network on May 31. “The thinking that you can let guns walk across the border and maintain operational control of those weapons is really an outstanding lack of understanding of how these criminal organizations are operating on both sides of our common borders.”

This foreign-policy fiasco is the brainchild of an administration whose transparency was supposed to stun the world and whose sagacity promised to smooth international relations after the alleged small-mindedness of the G. W. Bush years.

Diplomatic headaches aside, the real victims of Fast and Furious are those whom this policy helped kill, and the Team Obama–supplied firearms that still haunt the horizon.

“This is the perfect storm of idiocy,” ATF’s Carlos Canino told Representative Issa’s investigators: “Unfortunately, there are hundreds of Brian Terrys probably in Mexico. . . . We [ATF] armed the [Sinaloa] cartel. It is disgusting.”

And, as Issa and Grassley concluded last July 22, 1,048 of those weapons “remain unaccounted for.” Unlike carrier pigeons, these Fast and Furious guns will not fly safely home. Instead, for years to come, they will keep drawing blood in Mexico — and points north.

— New York commentator Deroy Murdock is a Fox News contributor, a nationally syndicated columnist with the Scripps Howard News Service, and a media fellow with the Hoover Institution on War, Revolution, and Peace at Stanford University.

Small-town America and the modern world: Andy Griffith showed one to the other

By Ted Anthony
The Associated Press
The Province
http://www.theprovince.com/
July 4, 2012

Close your eyes and picture it: small-town America.

It has a little post office, of course. A general store, too, and a fishing hole. There's a barber who knows everyone — and knows about everyone. There's a friendly auto mechanic. The picture wouldn't be complete without several women who could be anyone's favourite older sister or aunt.

Kids scurry around at reasonable paces, making low-grade mischief while dirtying their short-sleeve plaid shirts or striped T-shirts. Quirky characters wander about in a landscape of picket fences and healthy storefronts. And the police officer in charge? He's tough but fair, community minded, the Solomon of his entire, geographically limited jurisdiction. He's Atticus Finch without any of the racial tension.

This is, today, the comforting script America often reaches for when it summons the vanished rural nation that so many say they long for. Not coincidentally, it is also the state of mind given to us by Andy Griffith and his long-running TV show.

More than anyone except perhaps Walt Disney, Griffith was the entertainment-world emblem of the 20th-century values Americans often like to say they prize most. He spread the notion, begun by no less a figure than Thomas Jefferson, that somehow the very best of us was contained in the rural life — in this case, the fictional tales of Mayberry that "The Andy Griffith Show" delivered for almost a decade.

"The show is kind of like a step back in time, especially for my generation," Molly Jones 24, of Raleigh, N.C., said after learning of Griffith's death Tuesday. "It's kind of like, 'Oh, this is how it used to be,' and 'Why isn't it this way still?' Things were so much simpler back then."

They certainly were in Mayberry, N.C. When Deputy Barney Fife wasn't arresting someone for jaywalking, little Opie was accidentally killing a bird with his slingshot and earnestly dealing with the moral fallout. Aunt Bee was usually either offering affection, feeling underappreciated or cooking ham. Goober and Gomer were causing disarray, and Floyd Lawson or Howard Sprague was dispensing quirky wisdom. (Come to think of it, that was true of everyone on the program.)

The reality of the age was somewhat different. Griffith's show, in a way, defied its times rather than captured them.

Though it felt like the 1950s in many ways, it was actually a product of the roller-coaster decade that followed. It debuted in 1960, four weeks before John F. Kennedy was elected, and ended its run on a spring evening in 1968 three nights before the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. was shot in Memphis. While the country was tearing itself apart, Mayberry quietly endured, a Dick-and-Jane primer for an America yanked in every direction — a vision, during the Cold War, of friendly, unintruded-upon isolationism.

At the centre of it all was Griffith himself, a product of Mount Airy, N.C., who began his career doing comedic interpretations of yokels years before he honed his persona into the Sheriff Andy Taylor combination of avuncular community figure, doting father and common-sense Southerner. Though Griffith would later say the sheriff was the better angel of his nature, the perception was otherwise. "Andy was Mayberry, and Mayberry was Andy," Don Knotts, who played Barney Fife, said in 1999.

Griffith was a far more complicated figure than he appeared. As Sheriff Taylor, he effectively acted as a cultural interpreter for a fast-urbanizing nation reared on, and comforted by, Norman Rockwell imagery. Griffith's take on a post-Eisenhower "Our Town" made him, to television, what Woody Guthrie had been to music two decades earlier — a popularizer who came from authentic country roots, polished it all up, then fed Americans back a more digestible version of rural culture. It was an approach that coincided with a musical folk revival in which rural songs were being popularized by mainstream musicians like never before.

During the run of "The Andy Griffith Show," more rural and rural-urban sitcoms had emerged — broader, city-mouse-country-mouse affairs such as "The Beverly Hillbillies," ''Petticoat Junction" and "Green Acres." The market for rural-themed comedy in America had grown so glutted by the dawn of the 1970s that there was actually a "rural purge" in which the networks scrapped most of their country comedies as irrelevant and out of sync with the more urgent times. The Griffith show's sequel, "Mayberry R.F.D.," was one victim, cancelled after three years.

Four decades later, the spirit of Mayberry lives on in the town that claims to be its muse. While it's widely believed that Griffith's childhood in Mount Airy inspired Mayberry, it's absolutely certain that Mayberry has inspired Mount Airy. Tourism has made the marketing of small-town flavour good business, and Griffith's hometown has taken the ball and run with it.

Everywhere you turn in the community, there is a Mayberry reference, explicit or otherwise. The names of businesses downtown — Mayberry Trading Post. Mayberry's Music Center. Mayberry Memories, Barney's Cafe — are testament to the exuberant opportunism Griffith made possible. An annual fall festival, Mayberry Days, draws tens of thousands of people to Mount Airy.

And at 129 North Main St., the owner of the six-decade-old City Barber Shop even added the word "Floyd's" at the front of its name two decades ago to evoke the TV show's Calvin Coolidge-loving tonsorial expert.

Melvin Miles, 69, of Mount Airy, has an idea why people are so attracted to this stuff. Miles works for Squad Car Tours, which owns five Ford Galaxys, replicas of the cars used on the show. He remembers a town where people gathered on porches and — lacking Facebook or 300 channels — just visited.

"The people long for the simple way of life," Miles says. "And that does not exist in too many areas anymore."

Mayberry today is shorthand for a shiny America that may or may not have existed at all, yet endures. Just whistle the theme from the show and Griffith's vision is summoned. Listen to politicians talking about traditional values, and Mayberry is there. Eat at a Cracker Barrel restaurant anywhere in the republic and walk through its "general store," replete with striped candy sticks, jars of apple butter and rocking chairs priced to move, and Andy Taylor is lurking. Try and watch the movie "Pleasantville" without thinking of Mayberry.

Like the folks in "Pleasantville," ''The Andy Griffith Show" eventually moved from black and white to colour. Its final episode in 1968 begins at Mayberry's bucolic railroad depot. But the arriving train brings a chaotic, voluble Italian family to town — or, if you're looking for symbolism, the larger world arrives. There is no going back.

Americans loved, and still love, the notion of the small town as a manageable, nonthreatening, friendly, finite community — an idea all but upended in the 21st century, where the truly isolated town is, for all practical purposes, no more. The black-and-white world that Andy Griffith shaped so masterfully is there for our perusal from a distance, but it is not coming back — either on television or anywhere else.

EDITOR'S NOTE — AP writers Martha Waggoner and Allen G. Breed contributed to this report. Ted Anthony, who writes about American culture for The Associated Press, can be followed at www.twitter.com/anthonyted .

Today's Laugh Track: SCTV Andy Griffith Merv Griffin spoof

Andy Griffith, A Champion of Bluegrass

By Randy Lewis
Los Angeles Times
http://www.latimes.com/entertainment/music/posts/
July 3, 2012

Andy Griffith’s background as a singer and guitarist were obvious during the long run of “The Andy Griffith Show,” in which he would periodically pull out a guitar to strum and sing a bit. He also welcomed the opportunity to incorporate other bona-fide musicians onto the set when producers invited the Dillards bluegrass group from the Ozark Mountains to portray a family band called the Darlings.

The Dillards -- fronted by brothers Douglas and Rodney Dillard -- had moved to Los Angeles from Missouri in the early '60s looking to broaden their audience. Rodney Dillard recently told The Times that they chose Los Angeles over Nashville because “we felt people were more open-minded, creative-wise. Nashville was formula cut-and-dried at the time.”

After signing with Elektra Records in 1962, they were hired to perform on “The Andy Griffith Show,” which was filmed in Hollywood.

“Andy Griffith became more than an icon,” Dillard said in a statement issued Tuesday. “He represented American family values and has given comfort and hope in these uncertain times. He gave The Dillards [The Darlings] an opportunity to be part of this. Andy was kind, generous and patient with an inexperienced group of pickers from the Ozark Mountains.”

Here’s a video of Griffith and actor Denver Pyle, who played the patriarch of the Darling clan, singing the gospel song “Leaning on the Everlasting Arms”:



“Because of 'The Andy Griffith Show' and the exposure that music brought, it gave an introduction to bluegrass to a lot of people who never, ever would have gotten to it," Rodney said. "They found others like Flatt & Scruggs and the Osborne Brothers, and found this whole world of the classic form of traditional music.”

Actress Maggie Peterson, who played Charlene Darling from 1963 to 1968, said in a statement issued Tuesday: “The Darling family was treated with such respect on the show. These could have been ridiculous characters without Andy’s respectful reaction to us. Everyone will truly miss him. Thank God we have those beautiful episodes to keep us company.”

Others guested on the show as well, including Roland and Clarence White as “The Country Boys,” with a performance of “Whoa Mule” for which Andy joined in when an Alan Lomax-like character showed up to record some backwoods music:

It was also Griffith’s persona as an unflappable source of common sense and gentle wisdom that prompted country singer Brad Paisley to seek him out when he made the music video for his 2008 single “Waitin’ on a Woman,” Griffith taking the role of Paisley’s mentor in the ways of male-female relationships. The song starts whimsically, examining a man’s frustration with his partner’s tardiness, then segues into a sweetly philosophical take on the subject.

Here’s the video for “Waitin’ on a Woman”:



“Few people in this world will ever have more influence on our lives than Andy Griffith,” Paisley said in a statement issued Tuesday. “An actor who never looked like he was acting, a moral compass who saved as many souls as most preachers, and an entertainer who put smiles on more faces than almost anyone; this was as successful a life as is pretty much possible. Andy Griffith made the world a better place, and I was so proud to call him a friend.”

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Andy Griffith: Iconic actor carried a musical spirit

Copyright © 2012, Los Angeles Times

 

 

North Carolina legend Andy Griffith dies at 86

By Dennis Rogers
The News & Observer
http://www.newsobserver.com/
July 4, 2012

Andy Griffith greets Wake County Sheriff Donnie Harrison after the unveiling of a statue of Griffith and Ron Howard as their characters, Andy and Opie Taylor, from Griffith's television show in Raleigh's Pullen Park. The statue, taken from the show's opening sequence, shows Andy and Opie walking to their fishing hole. (Scott Lewis - newsobserver.com)

Read more here: http://www.thestate.com/2012/07/03/2340745/andy-griffith-070312.html#storylink=cpy

Andy Griffith’s broad shoulders carried a heavy load for more than 50 years. In 1960, he created an iconic fictional character so noble that today, church groups still seek moral guidance in Sheriff Andy Taylor’s every televised word, deed and gesture.

And over the years, when Griffith insisted that Mayberry, the perfect little town he invented, was absolutely not based on his hometown of Mount Airy, N.C., fans nodded, winked, said “Sure, Andy, whatever you say,” and went right on believing what they wanted to believe.

What they wanted to believe was that around the next bend or over the next hill was a place like Mayberry and a man as fair, wise and decent as Sheriff Andy.
   
Griffith died Tuesday at 86 at his home on Roanoke Island. The Dare County sheriff said Griffith was laid to rest later Tuesday.

“Andy was a person of incredibly strong Christian faith and was prepared for the day he would be called home to his lord,” his wife, Cindi Griffith, said in a statement. “He is the love of my life, my constant companion, my partner, and my best friend. I cannot imagine life without Andy, but I take comfort and strength in God’s Grace and in the knowledge that Andy is at peace and with God.”
Bill Friday, former UNC system president and a longtime friend, said: “Andy Griffith was uniquely an American institution, all by himself. He made you and me want to be the very best we could be, and he never ceased in telling us really how fortunate we were as Americans.”

‘White trash’

There is no tougher role in show business than living up to the persona you created. Those who live in the public’s adoring and unrelenting gaze quickly learn they are expected to always be the character the public loves. Woe unto the one who deviates from that script. Andy Griffith found that lovable Andy Taylor was a tough act to follow.

Andrew (or Andy, as some of the reference sources insist) Samuel Griffith was born the son of a furniture factory worker, Carl Lee Griffith, and his wife, Geneva Nunn Griffith, on June 1, 1926, the same day as Marilyn Monroe. He grew up with other hardscrabble mill kids on the wrong side of the tracks at 711 Haymore St. in Mount Airy.

While he enjoyed the usual small-town summer delights of rock-kicking, cloud-counting and such, there were enough hard times and spirit-crushing prejudice in that blue-collar Surry County town that once he left, his return visits were few.

He once told show-business biographer Lee Pfeiffer, author of “The Official Andy Griffith Show Scrapbook,” “I cannot deny that the person I am was born and raised in Mount Airy, and I was influenced in many ways by that town. I will tell you that it was not all positive. I was actually called ‘white trash’ at one point. That was said by a young girl I was stuck on and she probably wasn’t thinking. And we did come from the wrong side of the tracks. But when she said ‘Get away from me, white trash,’ I did.

“I was only in the fourth grade, and that remark has stuck with me my entire life.”

Boost from a pastor

Not all of his Mount Airy memories were that painful. The Rev. Ed Mickey was pastor of the local Moravian church. One day the gawky kid with the heart-melting grin showed up wanting to learn to play a trombone he’d bought with $6 he had earned from a part-time job with the Depression-era National Youth Administration. Moravians were known for their brass bands. In two months, the youngster was good enough to play “Moonlight Sonata” in church.

Mickey, recognizing he had a talent on his hands, taught the boy to sing. Soon he was singing all over town, sometimes picking up $5 a show. Mickey went on to recommend him for a scholarship to UNC-Chapel Hill.

No one, at least to his face, would call Andy Griffith “white trash” again.

Griffith, like Thomas Wolfe and legions of other talented small-town kids from this state, invented himself at Carolina. He put aside intentions to become a Moravian minister like his mentor and changed his major to music. He was elected president of his fraternity and met Barbara Bray Edwards, from Troy.

They graduated and were married in 1949 and settled down as teachers in Goldsboro. The couple spent summers performing in “The Lost Colony” outdoor drama on Roanoke Island, in which Griffith was a popular Sir Walter Raleigh. He loved the island so much he bought land and would later build a 63-acre estate there.

Whether they needed the money or just needed to perform, the Griffiths created a musical act and traveled the area, playing any small-town civic club that would spring for dinner and a few bucks for gas money. As Andy later told the story, one night Barbara booked them to play a civic club where they had already performed. Problem was, they only had one routine.

“On the way over to the job, I made up a monologue about a country fellow’s first experience seeing a football game and not knowing what was going on,” Griffith said. “And it scored – heavy. So I kept doing it.”

Did he ever. What it was, was “What It Was, Was Football,” a now-classic comedy monologue that ranks with the nonsense of the Marx Brothers and the witty wordplay of Abbott and Costello’s “Who’s on First.” Orville Campbell, publisher of The Chapel Hill Weekly, heard Griffith do his hilarious cornpone routine and offered to have it recorded.

It was the break Griffith needed. He was ready to shake the sandy loam of Eastern North Carolina off his country brogans and head for the bright lights of New York City. Capitol Records bought out his contract with Campbell, and he and Barbara worked up new material for the nightclub circuit, including his follow-up record, a hillbilly retelling of “Romeo and Juliet.”

A taste of early Andy: “If you’ve got a boy that courts a gal you don’t like or the other way around, and if you don’t want the expense of a funeral on you, the best thing to do is let ’em have a cheap wedding.”

‘First TV job’

Then came the chance a new comic in town could only dream about: an offer to appear on “The Ed Sullivan Show.” For those born since the invention of Velcro, imagine the clout of Jay Leno, Conan O’Brien, Jon Stewart, Stephen Colbert and David Letterman all rolled into one. The Sullivan show was that important in its day. There was a lot riding on the country boy’s first shot on national television.

“It was the first TV job I ever had,” Griffith later told Pfeiffer. “When Ed Sullivan first heard of my record, he wanted to tie me up for 18 guest shots. William Morris (his agent) would only give him four. After my first appearance, he called and wanted out of the next three.

“I never got a single laugh. I just died that night. I absolutely died. I can still go in that theater now and get an upset stomach.”

The Sullivan show was not Griffith’s only disappointment. The hayseed act that wowed ’em back at the Rotary Clubs didn’t exactly catch fire in the nightclubs of New York, New Jersey and Long Island. The couple headed back home to regroup. That’s when Griffith saw a notice that “No Time for Sergeants,” a popular book by author Mac Hyman, was being turned into a television show for the United States Steel Hour. He just knew he was right for the part and headed back to Manhattan to try out.

“No Time for Sergeants,” starring Andy Griffith as the innocently goofy Will Stockdale, aired in March 1955. It was on Broadway by October of that year. It featured an unknown actor named Don Knotts as a character named Manual Dexterity.

The show ran on Broadway for 796 performances and earned Griffith a Tony nomination as Best Featured Actor. Most of the Broadway cast followed the show to Hollywood, where it was reborn as a movie in 1958.

It was not Griffith’s first movie role, however. In 1957, director Elia Kazan had tapped the unknown and unpolished Griffith to play a country singer and egomaniacal psychopath named Lonesome Rhodes in the gut-wrenching drama, “A Face in the Crowd.” It is the story of a wildly popular entertainer who becomes too big too fast and is corrupted beyond salvation. His fall from grace is even faster than his sudden rise from anonymity.

Griffith nailed it. He was dead-on brilliant. His demonic anger and barely controlled energy were difficult to watch, however, and the public stayed away in droves. Today, film buffs consider it a classic. But when it was released, only critics seemed to approve.

Nightclub comedian Danny Thomas had a popular television sitcom in the late 1950s. In 1959, he hit on an idea for an episode that seemed amusing: The fast-talking and often abrasive New York comic he portrayed would be driving his family through the rural South. They’d get pulled over in some hick town by a redneck cop. Hilarity, and a healthy dose of offensive regional stereotyping, would ensue.

“Name ain’t Clem. It’s Andy, Andy Taylor” were the first words spoken by the character who was on the verge of an eight-year reign in television’s Top Ten.

Griffith may have perfected the bumpkin bit, but when it came time to negotiate a contract for a spinoff series based on the country lawman he’d created, he and agent Richard O. Linke played big-city tough. They held out for a deal that gave a rookie series actor 50 percent of what became “The Andy Griffith Show.”

Good, popular, wholesome

Through 249 episodes, from the Oct. 3, 1960, black-and-white debut, when Aunt Bee replaced Rose as the family’s housekeeper, to the color finale on Sept. 22, 1968, when an Italian family moved to Mayberry to help town councilman Sam Jones work his farm, “The Andy Griffith Show” was about as good, popular and wholesome as television ever got.

The show ripened smoothly from its early days, when the ah-shucks, hee-haw Griffith tried too hard to be funny with his over-the-top Southern shtick. It was in the second year when he became the straight man and turned the day-to-day comedy labors over to his band of merry madcaps like rock-chunkin’ Ernest T. Bass, town drunk Otis Campbell, the weirdly Zen-like barber Floyd Lawson and sweet Aunt Bee.

Griffith was a stickler for authenticity. The North Carolina he created on the show would be the North Carolina he knew and the one he wanted the world to see. A typical Griffith decision: The occasional state highway patrolman who stopped by the Mayberry jail wore authentic North Carolina Highway Patrol insignia.

Oh, and there was a deputy named Barney. Don Knotts won the Emmy award as best supporting actor for five straight years for his hijinks. No one ever did that before.

But you already know all there is to know about North Carolina’s all-time most favorite show, don’t you? And if you don’t, it’s still on television every day, 52 years after its debut.

“The Andy Griffith Show” set a standard for excellence that would prove difficult for Griffith to equal. It was so popular – it was No. 1 the day it left the air – that anything that came after it had to be a disappointment. And so it was with Griffith’s career. It would be charitable to say the ’70s were not his favorite decade.

He tried with three series in the 1970s: “The Headmaster,” “The New Andy Griffith Show” and “Salvage One.” Each had its moments but no audience.

And then there were the awful made-for television movies with titles like “Winter Kill,” “Street Killing,” “Deadly Game” and the one that was so bad it is almost funny, “Pray for the Wildcats.” The former sheriff of Mayberry was now a motorcycle-riding psychopath in Baja, Calif.

In 1972, Andy Griffith and Barbara Edwards were divorced. He married Solica Cassuto in 1973 and divorced her 1981. In 1983, with his career going nowhere and his personal life in shambles, Griffith was stricken with Guillain-Barré syndrome, a neurological disorder.

The disease paralyzed him, and for a time it seemed he would never walk again. But the bad career choices, the failed marriages, the illness and even the drug-related death of his son Sam at age 36 would soon be put behind him.

In 1983 he married Cindi Knight. In 1984, he was given the role that would lead to his redemption.

Ben Matlock

Griffith was cast as federal prosecutor Victor Worheide in the made-for-television blockbuster, “Fatal Vision.” It was the story of the famous Jeffrey MacDonald/Green Beret murders at Fort Bragg, and those who knew the real-life principals knew how on-target Griffith’s meaty portrayal of Worheide was. It was the best straight acting he’d done since Lonesome Rhodes almost 30 years earlier.

That role led to his rebirth as a television icon, this time as a Southern lawyer in a rumpled seersucker suit named Ben Matlock. Off and on from 1986 to 1995, Griffith’s Matlock was wise, cranky, stubborn, funny and 100 percent Andy. Those who knew the actor said he was much closer to Matlock’s persona than he ever was to TV’s beloved sheriff.

It was also a favorite of fans of the old show who tuned in to catch the sly Mayberry-related asides Griffith would slip into the dialogue. Don Knotts was also a frequent guest, playing Matlock’s neighbor.

Griffith came home to North Carolina in the 1980s, at peace with his life and career. He moved “Matlock” production to Wilmington and still took a few outside acting jobs when they suited him.

He also became heavily involved in recording gospel music. He won a Grammy Award in 1997 for “I Love to Tell the Story: 25 Timeless Hymns.” Political observers even give him a share of the credit for the 2000 election of former Attorney General Mike Easley as governor. They say the commercials Griffith made for the low-profile Easley gave him the credibility needed to win. If Andy was for him, the thinking went, that was good enough for the rest of us.

Griffith mellowed in his later years. His reputation for a hot temper faded with his youth. He quietly and without fanfare seemed to forgive Mount Airy for its slights by showing up for the dedication of U.S. 52 as the Andy Griffith Parkway in 2002. It was the first time he had returned to his hometown in 45 years. He and Cindi even spent the night in his boyhood home.

During the dedication ceremony, Griffith, then 76, said, “I’m proud to be from the great state of North Carolina. I’m proud to be from Mount Airy. I think of you often, and I won’t be such a stranger from here on out.”

Then he said what the home folks had wanted to hear for a long time. “People started saying that Mayberry was based on Mount Airy,” he said with a smile. “It sure sounds like it, doesn’t it?”
Also in 2002, a statue of Sheriff Andy Taylor and son Opie was erected in Raleigh’s Pullen Park. The inscription is the perfect summation of the show they made famous and, in many ways, the role the public demanded Andy Griffith play for the rest of his life: “The Andy Griffith Show – A simpler time, a sweeter place, a lesson, a laugh, a father and a son.”

In 2005, President George W. Bush awarded Griffith the Presidential Medal of Freedom for, well, just being Andy.

That same year, Griffith was interviewed by Beverly Keel for the online magazine American Profile. In the interview, he talked about the difficulty of life in the shadow of Sheriff Andy Taylor:
“Don’t pay any attention to that, that is a persona,” he said. “I am not any favorite dad; I am not any kind of all-American person. I am just a 79-year-old person. I worship, and I am kind of private.
“I have many failings. My son died of an overdose when he was 36. I was not a good father to him. So I have failed in many ways. I am a man, like any other man.”

Andy Griffith never won an Oscar, an Emmy or a Tony for his acting. But then, around here we never thought of him as an actor. He was just our friend and neighbor, and we were so proud of him we couldn’t hardly stand it.

And if the rest of the world happened to tune in to his popular shows and just happened to assume folks in North Carolina were anywhere near as good-hearted as Andy Taylor, Ben Matlock or the good people of Mayberry, well, that was OK with us, too.

Brooke Cain of The News & Observer and Mark Washburn of The Charlotte Observer contributed to this report.