Independence Day

Happy Birthday, United States of America!  Of course, to some of us, this looks like a birthday party for a badly ill patient in the hospital, or perhaps a party for an unjustly imprisoned man.  We're glad he's still with us, but he's been a lot healthier.  We'd better pray for him harder than ever.


The vomitous Sundance Network has chosen the 4th of July to show the venomously anti-America  movie Born on the Fourth of July.  I assume that the Sundance Channel is a tumor grown from the Sundance Film festival, founded by commie-cuddler and Che Guevara idolater .Robert Redford.  I wouldn't be surprised if this channel shows the movie every 4th of July, and follows it up with some movies by Oliver Stone.  I never watch the Sundance Channel; I happened to see the listing while menu-surfing on Dish Network.

I will be observing my own Independence Day tradition.  I shall visit and tend the grave of Col. Patrick O'Rorke, Rochester, NY's Gettysburg hero.  Having graduated first in his West Point class in 1861, just after the "shooting war" had started at Fort Sumter.  While commanding the 140th NY Volunteers at Gettysburg, O'Rorke responded with perhaps Union-saving alacrity to Gen. Gouverneur K. Warren's desperate search for troop to hold the vital but undefended Little Round Top, the anchor of the Union position on the high ground on Cemetery Ridge.  Sadly, graduating first in your West Point class doesn't make you immune to bullets, and Col. O'Rorke was killed on Little Round Top, just south of Gettysburg, PA, on July 2nd, 1863.  One hundred fifty one years and two days ago.  He did not live to see the Union victory that he had done so much to save, or even his 27th birthday.  He never heard of the Union's great victory at Vicksburg, which made the defeat of the rebels inevitable.  (One of the reasons the Union's Army of the Potomac had such difficulty finding generals to match Lee and his subordinates was that so many of their most promising officers were killed as they were working their way up the ranks.  See Philip_Kearny, Isaac_Stevens, and Edward_E._Cross.)

Gettysburg is my favorite spot on earth, so I'd like to be honoring Col. O'Rorke on Little Round Top itself (there's a monument to the Colonel and his regiment there), but Holy_Sepulchre_Cemetery, where our hero is buried with his mother, his father, and Col. George Ryan, O'Rorke's successor as commander of the 140th, who was killed at Spottsylvania Court House in May 1864 will do nicely.

God bless our country, our soldiers of all branches of service, and everyone who made this country what it has been and still can be again, if we want it to be -- a government "... of the people, by the people, and for the people."