Seriously, I’m still trying to make sense of it all – that an anodyne and apparently harmlessly patriotic organization like the Oathkeepers can suddenly become the Awful Violent and Whiteness-Counterrevolutionary Group From Hell, at least in the eyes of the National Establishment Media and their minions in social media. In my Tea Party days, we met with a couple of members of the Oathkeeper leadership cadre; they were speakers at a couple of events, IIRC. A fair number of the local Tea Party organizers whom I worked with were retired military. And frankly, the Oathkeepers looked to be … well, just ordinary and earnest common or garden-variety patriots with a background in the military and law enforcement.
This is only to be expected in a town like San Antonio, familiarly known as the Mother In Law to the Air Force (as enlisted basic training is located there as are a number of specialty tech schools, officer training used to be, and flight training for various aircraft is still carried out). San Antonio is also the Home of Army Medicine, as training for Army medical personnel has been performed at Fort Sam and Brooke Army Medical – the end result being that one cannot heave a brick in any direction in San Antonio without hitting at least a dozen military retirees of every rank and service. The schtick of the Oathkeepers was basically – renewing the enlistment oath.
“I, __________, do solemnly swear (or affirm) that I will support and defend the Constitution of the United States against all enemies, foreign and domestic; that I will bear true faith and allegiance to the same; and that I will obey the orders of the President of the United States and the orders of the officers appointed over me, according to regulations and the Uniform Code of Military Justice. So help me God.”
It seems now that the words “support and defend the Constitution of the United States against all enemies, foreign and domestic” are those that give the heebie jeebies to the powers that be in the rickety and ramshackle structure that is the Biden Administration, and those sad and addled creatures who have the unenviable task of doing their media bidding. Kind of sad, really – as a sidebar to my main thesis, that the Mainstream Establishment Media is willingly, nay yet enthusiastically volunteering to do the same job that propagandists for Stalin’s Red Empire did at the threat of a sentence to the Gulag or to a shot in the back of the skull in the basement of a CHEKA HQ somewhere. But willing toadies to power are always a dime a dozen.
Seeing conservative activists being arrested for merely being in Washington on the day of the massive protest (commonly called a riot or insurrection by prog-leaning media and law enforcement) and held indefinitely without bail, while frequent-flyer Antifa/BLM rioters are on the catch-and-released-on-bail/charges dropped program, in spite of the year-long Antifa/BLM riots actually having done reckless damage to various cities. I presume that this difference is because the Antifa/BLM riots actually did substantial damage to ordinary flyover-country American property owners, whereas the Washington protest in January only scared the crap out of the Ruling Class.
Different strokes for different folks, according to the convenience of the Ruling class. Now there is a political measure afoot to pressure businesses into pledging loyalty to the regime by publicly affirming that the 2020 Election was completely fair and above-board. Or else. What is the eventual endgame in all of this? Pushing ordinary and patriotic citizens into a violent reaction, and thereby justifying further repression of non-prog thought? Discuss as you wish. I’ll get to the politization of the military in another post.
What is needed is someone–Trump, Thiel, I don’t care who–to be the right’s George Soros. Hire lawyers to fight for every one of these poor slobs, who are being treated horrifically. Jail for months, with no bail, their lives sure to be ruined, for what–taking a walk in the Capitol, for most of them. It’s outrageous. All while that BLM guy who was right there where Ashli Babbit was shot point blank walks free, and no word on who the other people who were right there are? You telling me the FBI can go through random facebook pages to hassle people who were in DC and did absolutely nothing wrong, but they can’t figure out who they were?
As for their endgame, it’s simple–now that They are back in charge completely, they are going to make sure that no one from outside the club is ever allowed any sort of chance to do what Trump did again. They messed up in 2016 through overconfidence, now they’re going to do whatever it takes to show through intimidation and force that no one better think about doing anything against them. Can anyone point to where a single GOPer has spoken out against the insane militarization of DC? I’m not aware of it, if so.
And if anyone does do anything stupid in response, then they’ll be more than happy use it for their own ends. January 6 was the Democrat’s perfect opportunity. They weren’t scared at all, because it was a huge nothingburger. They’re going to milk it for a generation, same as with Charlottesville and the “fine people” hoax.
It’s pretty clear, to me at least, that the January 6 thing was a setup. While the FBI and DOJ are searching for every Trump voter within 100 miles of the Capitol that day, They ignored a few things.
The FBI knew about the Muslim shooter in Colorado. Boulder is one of the farthest left cities in the world. Why was he able to buy a gun, not an AR 15, two days before he killed 10 people?
And another thing… He was a Trump hater.
Also, not one GOP Senator has said one word in support of these people being held without bail for misdemeanors.
Interesting choice of title, Sgt Mom. Same as Yang Jisheng chose for his recent book on the Chinese Cultural Revolution. Also interesting that there seem to be parallels between Beijing Biden*’s America and Mao’s China — such as people getting excommunicated for things they may have said many years earlier.
If we use the Chinese Cultural Revolution as a model of what to expect in this Woke New World, there will be violent clashes between Leftie groups fighting over who is the better Leftie while the nomenklatura maneuver behind the scenes. In the meantime, production will fall and people will go hungry. After about 10 years, the whole thing just burns out.
The difference between Mao’s China and the Senile Sniffer’s America is that we don’t have 10 years. The financial insanity of hollowing out the real economy while printing insane amounts of paper will catch up with us long before then.
So the bottom line is that we should sit back & smile. The Lefties have won, but they have won a Pyrrhic victory — one their hands will not be big enough to hold. If we are lucky, in 50 years time, the US will be in a position similar to where China is today.
}}} Different strokes for different folks, according to the convenience of the Ruling class. Now there is a political measure afoot to pressure businesses into pledging loyalty to the regime by publicly affirming that the 2020 Election was completely fair and above-board. Or else.
Zdrastvooetsya, Tovarisch!!
Comrade Biden gud!!
Nineteen Eighty-Four has become a classic literary example of political and dystopian fiction. It also popularised the term “Orwellian” as an adjective, with many terms used in the novel entering common usage, including “Big Brother”, “doublethink”, “Thought Police”, “thoughtcrime”, “Newspeak”, “memory hole”, “2 + 2 = 5”, “proles”, “Two Minutes Hate”, “telescreen”, and “Room 101”. Time included it on its 100 best English-language novels from 1923 to 2005.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nineteen_Eighty-Four
And Donald Trump is Emmanuel Goldstein. It’s happening.
I always thought (and I’m not sure it was wrong from your description) that the oath keepers were in the tradition of “muscular Christianity.”
I heard that some poll found the left fears “Trump voters”; 74 million who don’t believe as you do may be scary to them, but I suspect the average Trump voter has neither the muscle nor the armaments to really take the left down. Would that we had the spirit to cleanse elections and fight for our votes to count, which unfortunately, given the left’s actions is where we will need to muster some courage and justified anger. (And as always the strong government side is a magnet to businesses wanting some crony largesse – do we even call such monopolies capitalist?) Thanks for the Thiels of the world – and a few others.
Notice anything that seems a bit…unusual…here:
https://www.whitehouse.gov/administration/
I think Trump has lost enough capital that he will not fund to the extent of Soros, but he makes a great spokesperson. I’d sure like for him to front a new electronic media provider that owns all its own pieces. That would be a difference maker if scaled up quickly.
Death6
> I always thought (and I’m not sure it was wrong from your description) that the oath keepers were in the tradition of “muscular Christianity.”
i suspect that’s a confusion with the 1990’s PromiseKeepers. Wow. I just looked it up. It’s still active. Who knew?
they are going after likely nodes of resistance, like sgt kuehne, the left saw how paramilitaries and resistance, like in the escambray mountains in certain provinces of nicaragua arose, ex military, small businessmen, so they are preemptively acting against it
Dear Sgt. Mom,
Your question contains the answer.
The Endgame turns the World Upside Down.
Q
Interesting, Brian … probably setting the stage for Veep Throat to take center stage when they can absolutely, positively not hide the fact any longer that China Joe can barely tie his shoelaces of a morning.
No wonder they still have NG, barriers and concertina wire around the Capitol.
}}} I heard that some poll found the left fears “Trump voters”; 74 million who don’t believe as you do may be scary to them, but I suspect the average Trump voter has neither the muscle nor the armaments to really take the left down.
Individually, no. Collectively, yes. They so far lack the will. They are the proverbial frog in the pot of hot water at this point. When it boils over, though, they ARE armed, and this is not going to change.
BTW, some, if not most, of you know the term “Three Percenter”, aka “Threeper”.
It’s a reference to the (supposed fact, I have not verified) that only about 3 percent of the US population was at all active in the Revolutionary War. The rest of the population were mostly observers and non-belligerents.
It’s significant because 3% of 330 million is 9.9 million.
The adult population (which might matter less than you’d think — kids can very much be a part of a civil war) is about 255 million. 3% of THAT is 7.7 million.
This is FAR larger than any standing army on the face of the earth. China is only 2 million.
Even if you limit to the 74m people who voted for Trump (and more than likely a lot of fence-sitters might not side with the Left), you are still talking about 2.2 million people.
There are a number of interesting questions about what happens if the US Army is called to target civilians in an insurrection, and this, debatably, is part of what Obama’s purge of the military before he left office was about — getting rid of those who would not follow likely unConstitutional orders, those who would follow orders from the government against a people who were seriously on the warpath against their overreaching government.
The counter-side to that is, all those people they tossed out, would now be likely to come down on the side of open insurrection, providing the military leadership needed to really beat those they wound up against.
And that, Ginny, is why The Left is so terrified of The Right. They know their cadre would be nothing but a useless rabble in an actual fight. The right, on the other hand, could actually field a competent standing army from their ranks within a very short time.
They know their cadre would be nothing but a useless rabble in an actual fight. The right, on the other hand, could actually field a competent standing army from their ranks within a very short time.
In Schlicter’s novel, “Indian Country,” he makes the point that the left would use Antifa types as foot soldiers and they are enthusiastic looters and anarchists but the leadership would be weak.
“In Schlicter’s novel, “Indian Country,” he makes the point that the left would use Antifa types as foot soldiers and they are enthusiastic looters and anarchists but the leadership would be weak.”
That seems reasonable, but more than leadership, I’d also question their discipline, at least in a military sense. They are out for themselves as individuals. While I expect that there are a number of ex-military types among them, they will be ones who got pushed out for various psychological reasons. Political reasons, too, perhaps but I’d expect their personality types simply weren’t compatible with military discipline.
Anyway, the problem with Antifa as foot soldiers is that they aren’t soldiers, they’re looters. This means they’ll disappear back into the population when it becomes clear that they are up against a force that’s more numerous and better led.
Guerilla activity is about the best they can do, which will earn them a bullet in the head when caught.
}}} That seems reasonable, but more than leadership, I’d also question their discipline, at least in a military sense. They are out for themselves as individuals.
I Agree. More so, I think they are likely to scream and whine when they get hit or shot at. For the most part, they lack all semblance of duty, honor, cadre that can make a man willing to run into gunfire.
The endgame?
Lampposts for them.
Or camps for us.
One of the reasons why the Antifa folks make bail quickly is because there is an apparatus designed to do that. The Left has a quiet machine that provides bail and lawyers to these people. The lawyers are all of those ‘public interest’ types from the various ‘non-profit’ groups funded by 1630 and so on. It’s an interconnecting web designed to frustrate outside review. Of course, the machine is coupled to a group of ‘forgiving’ prosecutors and judges. But the machine makes sure that the Antifa thugs are out the next day, just in time to riot again.
That also gives the Left control — if someone in DC decides that the riots need to go quiet for a while, they simply tell the rioters that tonight there’s no bail money available, and the Antifa thugs and BLM thugs, etc., get the message.
Whereas, Oath-Keepers and others on the right have no bail machine, no organized system of lawyers, and certainly no sympathetic judges and prosecutors. That’s one reason why they sit in jail.
You guys are missing the point, re: antifa vs current vets. By a few years from now the military will be full of antifa types. The craziest, most drug-addled ones will wash out, but most of them will be ecstatic at the chance of being domestic ideological revolutionary guards. It’s their dream come true.
Anyway, the problem with Antifa as foot soldiers is that they aren’t soldiers, they’re looters. This means they’ll disappear back into the population when it becomes clear that they are up against a force that’s more numerous and better led.
In Schlicter’s novel they are pretty much looters and rioters with little discipline and killing them seems the solution. Don’t run out of ammunition. It’s an interesting premise and I have read his books. I hope it doesn’t come to that, of course.
By a few years from now the military will be full of antifa types. The craziest, most drug-addled ones will wash out, but most of them will be ecstatic at the chance of being domestic ideological revolutionary guards. It’s their dream come true.
This would require the destruction of the military culture, which seems to be a project now with these indoctrination classes. If they drive out the good NCOs and CPOs, they might just have anarchy.
“This would require the destruction of the military culture”
The fish rots from the head. The Pentagon is full of woke trash, since that’s what has been rewarded in recent times. It sounds like they are getting strong pushback from the regular troops on this indoctrination nonsense, but that just lets them ID who to purge, and how much work they have to do to get the “right sort” into the ranks.
but that just lets them ID who to purge, and how much work they have to do to get the “right sort” into the ranks.
That may well be a risk but I spent seven years interviewing and examining kids applying to enter the military. To get the Antifa types in, the waivers for behavioral issues would have to go way up. Certainly with time this could happen but it will be a while. First, we have to see what happens next year with the election. If the Democrats can steal the House and Senate seats, we are into civil war territory.
Remember that when WWII began, the officer corps was massively purged of timeservers. That was not just generals. The captain commanding the “Band of Brothers” lost his command because of incompetence. We have a peacetime military right now with REMFs being promoted like the new Biden Sec Def and Pelosi’s general.
They need to swap that out for the officers oath. There are no officers appointed over former and retired military members.
Mike K: “If the Democrats can steal the House and Senate seats, we are into civil war territory.”
If? If? We need to be honest with ourselves — Democrat insiders clearly stole the election of a President, with barely a whimper from the Republicrats, the judiciary, the States, and the media.
Of course the Democrats will take whatever House & Senate seats they want in the next “election” — with the cooperation of most of the Republican Party, the judiciary, the States, and the media. Why would we expect anything else?
The only good aspect of this situation is that reality will of course win in the end. Unfortunately, that reality will hurt.
I’m not that pessimistic about 2022. I may be wrong but it should be harder to steal 535 elections and the worst Democrat hellholes are already represented by idiots like Hank Johnson and Sheila Jackson Lee. The Senate is a problem as there are more GOP up for election than Ds.
If HR1 and the filibuster ploy are both done, then I am not so optimistic.
My kids and grandkids will have to deal with it, I’m 83.
The idea is simple. It is the ‘othering’ of patriotic Americans. They want us (the patriot crowd) to need to hide our beliefs much as communists in 1950s America did theirs. In doing so, they will extinguish conservatism as political force and rule this country without opposition.
Come on, people. Remember 2008. The Dems had 60 Senators, a huge House majority, and a popular president. Now they have 48 Senstors, a historically thin House majority, and a pathetic dementia patient as president who absolutely no one takes seriously. It’s embarrassing, but shouldn’t be as demoralizing.
Yes, the Dems stole the election. They told us they were gonna do it, then they did it. But not long ago they were stealing Florida, and elections there have been fixed enough to be legitimate. Other states can and should and I presume will do the same.
Yes, the GOPe is terrible. But we’re seeing even more of them retire, so the party will be more and more ours as we go forward. It’s time to recognize we need to treat government the way the Dems do–as a way to reward Our side and punish Theirs. Biden can openly say that he’s going to give money to non-white, non-male business, we need to just as brazenly reward small towns, red states, etc.
Make them cheat as brazenly as possible if they want to win.
Never deny the obvious truths that Biden didn’t win, the Deep State is real, and Epstein didn’t kill himself. We’re not as well off as we could have been, but as long as we don’t give up completely we’ll make it through, because nothing they want to do ever has or ever will actually worked.
Is HR1 constitutional? Do we have to wait for an election for someone to have standing to object to it? Sure Florida cleaned house but apparently even there it is a project requiring constant attention.
Our government is failing at its basic duty – to secure our rights. Certainly a number of the prosecutors don’t see prosecution as their duty. Domestically, our lives and property and security are hardly protected and wait till they start redistribution in earnest. Then there is our bulwark against enemies foreign: Swalwell on intel, the craven anti-American Kerry signing environmental treaties on our behalf. . . . At some point aren’t the (minority or majority – I suspect minority) that voted for Biden going to see that they were had.
IANAL, but it seems likely that the day after HR1 would pass it would be sued by 30 state AGs and blocked by some judge somewhere. The Dem goal is to keep hammering the message that America is irredeemably racist that their base of nonwhite activists and white liberals wants to hear.
Chernenko Joe is a perfect example of the power of the modern media, and the catastrophic position we’re in right now due to the leftist takeover. He’s always been a viciously partisan mediocrity, personally vile and brazenly corrupt, but a lot of people have this image of him as Gool Ol Joe from Scranton.
I am actually less pessimistic about the political situation that about the economic one. We have yet to have accountability for 2008 and it seems just more is being piled on the rotten base. The left has never governed successfully. China is doing pretty well because it is run by fascists and has an intelligent population that has been successful for a century when given the opportunity. The Chinese have been called “The Jews of the Orient” for 100 years and more. The CCP has made major errors, like the One Child Policy which might derail their economy, but the Chinese people have overcome worse. Russia is the classic example of what happens when the left rules. A more recent example is Chile which was saved by Pinochet and his decision to reform the economy using The Chicago Boys as designers.
Chile enjoyed 30 years of strong economy after Pinochet.
The Chilean economy has performed brilliantly over the past three decades, expanding an average of 5% per year. The sprawling upper-class suburbs of Santiago, with their shiny glass skyscrapers, million-dollar residential condominiums, luxury retail outlets, and countless fine-dining options rival those in any globalized cosmopolitan city.
The fruits of growth have trickled down, with the poverty rate falling from 40% in 1990 to under 10% today. Enrollment rates in institutions of higher education top those of most highly developed nations, and some health indicators surpass those of the United States. Life expectancy at birth has risen from 74 years in 1990 to 80 years today.
But memories fade.
Chilean politics has long been polarized between an extreme free-market right and left-leaning social democrats and socialists. Center-left governments have introduced a raft of social programs benefiting the middle classes and the poor, but the political right has maintained key elements of its “neo-liberal model” favoring the private provision of physical infrastructure and social services.
The right’s economic model was enshrined in the 1980 Pinochet-era constitution. Economic hegemony was attributed to the private sector, often subsidized by government financial transfers. The poor have remained dependent upon public schools and health clinics, of mixed quality at best, while the middle classes have to pay for privatized, higher-quality social services. Toll roads, even water resources, are licensed to private providers who charge premium rates.
The left always wants to “correct” those policies that involve private enterprise. This analysis is from Brookings, a left wing “think thank.”
If the Democrats really do take control, we will see an Allende and a Pinochet within a decade or less. It always ends that way.
We owe these people nothing but tar and feathers.
https://twitter.com/dlippman/status/1375430289313398788
President Biden is nominating Gayle Manchin, Sen. Joe Manchin’s wife, to be what it calls a “key member” of his administration.
Remember Chesterton:
“The men whom the people ought to choose to represent them are too busy to take the jobs. But the politician is waiting for it. He’s the pestilence of modern times.
What we should try to do is make politics as local as possible. Keep the politicians near enough to kick them.
The villagers who met under the village tree could also hang their politicians to the tree. It is terrible to contemplate how few politicians are hanged.”
Manchin’s daughter already runs the corporation that charges $600 for an epipen. They don’t need the money.
Venezuerica has a ruling class: leftoxenomorphs.
Venezuerica has nobility: leftoxenomorphs.
Venezuerica has feudal lords: leftoxenomorphs.
Venezuerica has a Brahmin caste: leftoxenomorphs.
Venezuerica has the equivalent of 480 BC Persian emperors: leftoxenomorphs.
Venezuericans are all equal but some are more equal than others: leftoxenomorphs.
Venezuerica has no official religion but one religion is official: leftoxenomorphism.
Venezuerica has a majority of sane people who hate leftoxenomorphism but still Venezuerica is leftoxenomorph.
Venezuerica suffers the natural end result of “one (entity-whatever), one vote” plus “the majority does whatever the fuck they want, no rules, no questions asked, zero risks, no matter what”
Venezuerica is not a Constitutional Republic. The late Constitutional Republic the United States of America (July 4th, 1776 – November 3rd, 2020) is dead and buried.
Venezuerica is leftoxenomorph, now.
What is a leftoxenomorph?
Any individual who is willing to abandon humanity to regress, deteriorate and degenerate into a sub-human ant-like thing of a rabid, fanatical, jihadist leftism and practices the religion of leftoxenomorphism.
What is leftoxenomorphism?
Leftoxenomorphism is a con or more precisely a collection of cons in the form of a religious dogma encompassing (but not exhausted at) the following concepts and incorporating the ideas and strategies and actions of the following characters and organizations: “believe all women” + “Build Back Better” types + “cancel culture” + “cashless society” peddlers + “Common Core” peddlers + “‘evidence’ is whatever we say it is because reasons” + “Great Reset” types + “islam is a religion of peace” types + “lived experiences” + “New World Order” types + “One World Government” types + “Open Society” types + “‘proof’ is whatever we say it is because reasons” + “‘science’ is whatever we say it is because reasons” + “women don’t lie” + “World Economic Forum” + Alfred Schmidt + all whites are racists + Antifa + Antonio Gramsci + Axel Honneth + Bertolt Brecht + BLM + brutalism + Carl Grünberg + climate change + Cloward-Piven Strategy + George Soros and his collaborators and enablers and protectors + collectivism + communism + critical-(whatever)-theory + cultural marxism + Edward R Murrow + Erich Fromm + Fabian Society + fascism + feminazism + Frances Fox Piven + Frankfurt School + Friedrich Engels + Friedrich Pollock + Georg Lukacs + gleichschaltung (the 1930s nazification process of “all the same by force”) + Antonio Gramsci + gynofascism + Herbert Marcuse + homonazism + Institute for Social Research + intersectionality (bullshitsectionality) + Jacques Derrida + Jean-François Lyotard + John Dewey, + Jürgen Habermas + Karl Marx + Leo Löwenthal + liberals (American slang, they are, of course the opposite of what the word literally refers to) + male toxicity + Martin Heidegger + Max Horkheimer + Michel Foucault + Milo F. McDonald + misandry + moral relativism + mRNA ‘vaccines’ peddlers (they are not vaccines but genetic engineering experimentation on a planetary scale) + multiculturalism + nazism + obamaphilia + Otto Kirchheimer + post-modernism + reparations + Richard Andrew Cloward + Saul Alinsky + Siegfried Kracauer + SJW NPC + social justice + socialists +subjectivism + the Cloward Piven strategy + the Fabian Society + The Long March Through The Institutions + the whole “democratic” party + Theodor W. Adorno + transnazism + Walter Benjamin + white supremacy + woke (wokeism, wokeraty) + zersetzung (the East german Stasi version of ‘cancel culture’ by ANY means necessary) + “social credit score” (a la chicomm) + progressivism + personal pronouns + teach boys not to rape + more than two genders + political correctness + The Weather Underground + Bill Ayers + Bernardine Dohrn + pedophilia normalization + Merriam-Webster Dictionary + the usurped government of Venezuerica.
Add to the above a rabid hatred of everything white, male, heterosexual, decent, normal, human, American and Western and the whims and the fee-feez and the boo-booz and the self-hatred and the inadequacies of its practitioners all of which mixes in a Macbeth witches cauldron and grows like a fungus on a fertile ground, changes all the time adapting to the weaknesses of their victims and grows more evil with every generation and allows us, normals, to paraphrase without a shadow of a doubt: something atrociously wicked this way comes: leftoxenomorphism.
How did this happen?
The rough, defiant, brave and brilliant men of 1775, the Founding Fathers, imagined and founded a Constitutional Republic that needed rough, defiant, brave and brilliant men as citizens.
So successful it was that in 245 years it brought so much safety and comfort that the Founding was forgotten and roughness turned to effeteness, defiance to submission, meekness and pusillanimousness, bravery to cowardice and brilliancy to inane apathy.
That’s how it happened.
Effeteness, meekness, pusillanimousness, cowardice and inane apathy are no match for an infestation of extremely dangerous and poisonous sub-human humanoid fire ant like parasites full of hate for anything human and decent and American and bent on changing the nature of humanity to enslave humans to be their serfs-ants in their ant-hill with a one-hive-mind.
That’s how it happened.
And now, with our backs against the last wall of the keep, we have to decide if we give in and die or become leftoxenomorph slaves or . . . we turn this around, massacre the leftoxenomorphs and re-found the Constitutional Republic.
Me thinks we can do it.
It would only take balls.
Wouldn’t want to rush you, I get how momentous the occasion is and what’s at stake, but . . . you know . . . time? . . . We don’t have all that much left . . .
Washington DID cross the Delaware . . . we gonna?