The Importance of Standing Up

There were always a lot of stories floating around about my grandfather, my father's father — that he'd been rich once and lost it gambling; that he was a life-taker, a moonshiner, a cock-fighter, a hard man in a time of hard men. The one certainty was that his word was good to the ends of the earth. I can't even begin to sort out truth from fiction, and it truly doesn't matter anymore. I bring this up because my grandfather once chastised me harshly, and that verbal slap became one of the cornerstones of my life.

I was in high school or early college, my brain the consistancy of chicken noodle soup, and I was whining about how complicated the world was. Whine whine...it was all so complex...how does a thoughtful person like moi separate wrong from right...blah blah...

The old man stopped me dead...don't be an asshole, he said (although not so kindly), the world is actually very simple. There are people who stand up, and people who don't. That's all. Spend time with people who stand up; shun people who don't. Simple.

Yeah, I ignored him at the time...of course, he was right and I was an asshole.

Stand or not. Simple.

That's why I'm still supporting Fred Thompson. Of all the people who want to be President, only Fred had stood. read this piece from NRO, who have cast their lot with that miserable whore Mitt Romney:

Something has happened to Thompson in recent weeks. Yes, his schedule is still astonishingly light for a presidential candidate. And yes, he sometimes still underwhelms audiences. But in the last month or so Thompson has acted like a man who has been liberated from something. And that is what voters saw on stage Wednesday: a presidential candidate who has declared himself fully free of the stupid stuff one has to do to become president of the United States.