Are the Good Times Really Over for Good? (Transcript)

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Are the good times really over for good?

Hi, this is Bob Barney with The Plain Truth today, and I want to ask the question that Merle Haggard had a song about some 40 years ago, right before Ronald Reagan was elected. The song was called, Are the good times really over for good? Merle lamented about how bad the country had become, how the money was no longer made out of silver, they were all turned to cheap metals, I wish a buck was still silver, he said, and I wish a joint was a bad place to be. 

It’s a very poignant song, but he had a special message in that song, and it ended with a message of hope.

At the end of this broadcast, I’m going to play that song. Many people may not be country fans but if you listen to the words of that song, I think you’ll understand where I’m coming from. Are the good times really over for good?

When Ronald Reagan was running for president, America was in bad shape. I don’t believe, by the way, it was in as bad of shape as it is right now. But it was in bad shape under Jimmy Carter. We were retreating around the world; we were the laughingstock of the world. We gave over the Panama Canal, which was the worst thing that we ever did after we spent years of our money and our lives, our blood, making the thing…we had a right to stay there. It was our territory, and it should have remained our territory, no matter what the people there thought. They used us to get their freedom from Colombia, and we had a right to stay there. But Jimmy Carter was retreating around the world, something that all Democrats seem to do since Jimmy Carter.

And unfortunately, the economy in the 1970s under Carter-nomics was almost as bad as Biden-nomics. And there was runaway inflation, there was stagflation in fact where people’s salaries did not go up, but their prices went up, and they couldn’t afford anything. And car loans hit 21, 23 percent. Can you imagine that? House loans hit 7, 10, 11, 13 percent, depending on your credit rating. People couldn’t buy cars, people couldn’t buy homes, everybody started renting. And the malaise of this country was awful.

Jimmy Carter actually put on a sweater and started giving fireside chats because he thought he was FDR. And he started blaming Americans for what was wrong with America, not himself. He wasn’t blaming their corrupt Congress, the corrupt Democratic Party. No, he was blaming the American people for not doing enough to turn themselves into a communist state that Jimmy Carter and all the Democrats wanted us to be, even then, a fascist-type communist state at that.

And that’s what was the beginning of an American future.

America had no future in 1979. I was alive back then. I first started believing what I believe today and studying the Bible and I started seeing things that scared the heck out of me. I understood that we were almost at the end of our rope and that America was going to be destroyed according to the Bible before the tribulation and before the end of the world. I was wondering how that was going to be in my lifetime. Could it be? I was worried. And so were people like Merle Haggard. The funny thing about Merle Haggard, just to let you know, the person that I was listening to in the 1970s, that for the first three or four years of listening to the man, I wanted to reject everything he said because I did not want to believe what he said. Unfortunately, I couldn’t disprove what he was saying. And I think if you’re honest with yourself, when you listen to my program right now and what I say…I think many people are not happy with what I’m saying. But I do believe if you try to prove me wrong you will not be able to. This man was Garner Ted Armstrong, I tried to prove wrong from 1974 all the way to 1978. I tried to just find every excuse in the world that he had to be wrong. Yet every time I looked up what he said to look up and I tried to disprove him, I could not. I told the story before how I came to believe what I believed in. I was an atheist. I believed in evolution.

I was a conservative. It shows you; you can be a wrong-headed conservative. I wasn’t a liberal, but I actually was doing the liberals bidding by not even realizing it because evolution is a joke. Evolution is not science. Evolution is a religion, just like the Green New Deal is a religion. And so, I was listening to Garner Ted, and I started realizing by the fall of 1978 that I couldn’t disprove what he had to say. And that this God that I was trying to deny was real. And it was the God of the Bible. I learned that you could understand God’s mind if you understood the Bible and you actually read it and didn’t listen to what people said was there, but you read for yourself what was really there, and you found out it wasn’t what you thought.

And so the ironic thing, this song that I’m talking about and making a show about, was written by a man named Merle Haggard who is actually one of, if not Garner Ted Armstrong’s best friend. They used to go hunting together and fishing together. They were buddies. As a matter of fact, when Garner Ted Armstrong died, I think it was 2003 or 2004 now Merle Haggard was quoted that he was one of the two most important influences in his life. The number one, he said, was Johnny Cash. And the number two influence in his life was Garner Ted Armstrong. A lot of people know Merle Haggard or they know of him, especially if you’re a country and Western fan…an old country and Western fan when it was truly country and Western music and not rap music disguised as country and Western music as it is today. But people that would be surprised who actually liked Merle Haggard, that he was a listener and a friend of Garner’s and believed he was a great teacher. And he learned more from Garner Ted Armstrong than any other person there was. And it’s important because Merle Haggard is known for one song. I mean, he had many hits, he had many big hits, but his breakout hit was a song called Okie from Muskogee. And if you’re a country and Western fan, you know the song, you know the song by heart.

It’s a very patriotic song. It was an anti-hippie song of the 1960s, making fun of the hippie movement that was creeping across college campuses. And he sang about true Americans, you know, that silent majority that Richard Nixon talked about who didn’t burn down campuses and did respect the college dean and who followed the laws and followed the rules. And they were the Okies from Muskogee, like he was. And where did he get that idea for that song? Well, he said so in the interview he gave after Garner Ted Armstrong died. He said they were going between cities, riding in a car; this was before they even had buses. They were all in the car, the whole band and him sitting in the back of a car and listening to Garner Ted Armstrong one night. You know, there was a time when all night long, no matter where you were in a nation, from dusk to dawn, you just had to go through the radio, and you would find Garner Ted Armstrong on one of thousands of radio stations playing all night long. He was the voice of the truckers. He was the voice of the night drivers. Everybody, I don’t know how many times in my life I would mention his name and people would know of Garner Ted and not even most of the listeners realized that he was an evangelist. Most of them thought he was a commentator. I did for a long time myself because he didn’t sound religious. He didn’t have churchianity in his delivery.

Merle had a very good voice, by the way. He didn’t have a southern twang like these evangelists have. Back to the band, they were listening to one of his broadcasts and Garner Ted was talking about how, you know, little town USA respects the college dean, and they don’t make a party out of living, they make a party out of love and they love and they woo and they follow old time practices and they’re American patriots and they love Americana. And that gave Merle Haggard the idea for that song. And many of the lines in that song were directly from the Garner Ted Armstrong show and he admitted it and it became his trademark song…probably still the biggest hit he ever had…over a million record sales even crossing over to the pop charts to the rock and roll charts of the day. It was a very popular song, and it was a protest song against protesters. Here are some of the facts in Merle’s song:

The 70s came along and the deep state got rid of Richard Nixon and America started to decline around the world.

And the Vietnam factor was part of it. And the other part of it, believe it or not, was the economy that just turned sour under partly under Richard Nixon because the war, the Vietnam War came to an end.

And believe it or not, wars do fuel the economy. Every Democrat likes to go to war…World War I, World War II, the Korean War, the Vietnam War were all started by Democrats to end a recession or a depression. Because wars do do that. They put people to work and they spend a lot of money in building arms and killing lives, unfortunately.

But by 1976, 1977, especially when Carter first became president, America was in deep doo-doo. We were going down the drain. We had no standing in the world. We had hostages taken. Some of the young people, if they’re listening to this, may not remember this as I don’t know if schools teach it. But in 1979, when Jimmy Carter was president, the Iranians actually allowed their students, they were really pawns of the government, allowed their students to attack our embassy in Tehran, take it over and carry and keep about 50 American hostages for over a year. The ABC show Nightline started every day counting down how many days the hostages had been captured. Day one, day 10. I remember hitting day 39, hitting day 69, hitting year one, day 365. And they were still held captive. And you know that only one thing freed those American hostages in our embassy…the day Ronald Reagan took office after he was elected in a landslide victory over Jimmy Carter! The Iranians decided that day to release them because they didn’t know what he would do to them. They were in fear of Ronald Reagan.

Now the news reports blamed that the Iranians did this only to embarrass Jimmy Carter. Well, that might have had a small part of it, but that’s what the liberal media wants you to think. Everything has to do with them and the Democrats. But the real plain truth of the matter was that they were in fear of what Ronald Reagan would do day one that he was president to get his hostages back. And do you know the person who ran for president in 1992, Ross Perot, a third-party candidate, he had members of his company held hostage at the same time in Iran? And did you know that he sent his own SEAL team to Iran and he rescued his hostages and got them out of the country and was not foiled? But Jimmy Carter, with the power of the United States military, tried a helicopter rescue attempt to the American embassy. The helicopters crashed into one another in the desert.

Many Americans died and we looked like a bunch of fools and inept wimps, a paper tiger. We were throughout the world. We couldn’t even rescue our own hostages, but Ross Perot could. Ross Perot could get his people out of Tehran, but we could not free our hostages from our embassy. That’s where we were in 1979. That’s where we were when the people went to the polls and overwhelmingly decided they were going to go with Ronald Reagan, the actor, the guy that the media tried to portray as the cowboy who was going to cause World War III. Instead, he prevented World War III, just like Donald Trump did. And so that is the scenario that Merle Haggard was writing this song, Are the Good Times Really Over for Good? When in the summer of 1979, his friend, yes, his friend, Ronald Reagan, and I’ll give you that scenario in a minute, he was trying to support to become president, even though Merle Haggard is a Democrat, I believe. Most musicians, most artists tend to be very liberal, and they tend to be Democrats for the most part.

I’m not sure of his position because he is a friend of Ted and Gardner Ted was as conservative as can be. Like me, he probably was right of Attila the Hun. But Merle Haggard, some of the things I’ve read about him, even a couple of the lines in the song, Are the Good Times Really Over for Good? shows a little bit of a liberal bent. But anyway, he was trying to make Ronald Reagan president and just knew that the good times were over for good if the American people were to go in a different direction and not stop what was happening to the country then. And we did so. We elected Ronald Reagan and Ronald Reagan did turn around the fate of the American government and the American nation.

In fact, I believe if God did not make Ronald Reagan president, America would have fallen back then. We would never have survived another four years of Jimmy Carter and another eight years of whoever followed him after that. It was that close. I also believe that the deep state and Satan the devil tried to kill Ronald Reagan. I believe that our own CIA was behind the assassination attempt of Ronald Reagan, who was shot by a son of a former employee of George Bush, who’s his father, John Hinckley’s father worked for George Bush. And the night before the assassination attempt, I believe it was Jeb Bush who had dinner with Hinckley’s father.

I that is the scenario where Merle Haggard wrote the song. So why was he a Ronald Reagan fan? In case you do not know the history of Merle Haggard, but Merle Haggard was from Oklahoma. Do you know the movie or the book, The Grapes of Wrath? Well, all these Oklahomans during the great dust bowl moved to California for a new future. And they had a hard life and they were called Okies, Oklahoma Okies. His family was a part of that movement, and their town was Muskogee.

So Merle, he was California born and raised yet the family had the roots out of the great depression and out of the great dust bowl coming from Oklahoma. He was proud to be that Okie from Muskogee as the song said. But now what a lot of people don’t know about Merle Haggard is that he was in prison in the 1960s. I believe he was in San Quentin or one of the major California prisons. Governor Ronald Reagan pardoned him and had him released from prison and helped Merle Haggard on his trip of stardom and of great success along with the help of Johnny Cash, another guy who understood the plight of the prisoners of America. He did concerts in San Quentin and wrote the Folsom Prison Blues as you may know. He was very much for the rehabilitation of prisoners to try to get them to change their ways and to find Jesus Christ. Johnny Cash was a great messenger for Jesus Christ. Merle Haggard knew Ronald Reagan was a good man as he had pardoned him. He wanted to meet him and he wanted to see if he could straighten out this country, he believed he could. 

Ronald Reagan did just that…he straightened out California. Ronald Reagan was a great governor of California. You won’t know that by reading Wikipedia or any bit of liberal history, which is always fractured history. You won’t know how good of a Governor Ronald Reagan really was. When he was the governor of California, California was the place to be. And the Neil Diamond song, you know, I Am I Said, you know, and he talks about California is nice, the rents are low. They’re not low anymore under the Democrat rule. But under Ronald Reagan, it was cheap to live in California. People left New York where they were born and raised, as Neil Diamond sings, and they moved to Southern California to the sun and the fun and the perfect weather and low rent and cheap living because Ronald Reagan brought prosperity to the state of California.

Unfortunately, the Democratic Party bought poverty and shantytowns and crime and corruption to California. So Merle Haggard wrote the song and he was trying to tell Americans to stop going downhill…to try and wake people up and to stop America from being like a snowball headed for hell. I’m going to play his song here in a minute and end the show with it. I’m wondering though, is America finally at its end with this Donald Trump sham kangaroo trial? We didn’t have that in the 1960s and 70s. We still had people who respected the rule of law in both parties. We do not have that right now.

Back to the question…Are the good times really over? I’m afraid they are. I hope I am wrong. Again, I hope I am so wrong that I can look back and be called a false prophet. I’m not a prophet by the way, I’m just a newsman. I’m not giving you prophecy. The Bible gives you all the prophecy we need to know. And the Bible tells you two things. One thing is America is going to be destroyed before the tribulation because we are Israel of the Bible and number two, we can put off the inevitable with fasting and prayer just as Nineveh did. When Jonah preached for them to repent, they did and God turned back from destroying the city. Please look up Jeremiah3227.com for the details on a day of prayer and fasting coming up on June 14th.

The Bible tells us two things…yes, doom and gloom is coming to this nation, but we can push off the inevitable as long as we stay a moral, good, and decent people. If America decides to go the way of liberalism, of communism, of fascism, of slavery, then the good times are really over for good. Remember, our forefathers said this government was a government that required a religious, moral people and actually a Christian religious moral people. Other nations of the world cannot have our form of government because they do not have the basis of law that the Christian Bible gives us…one that the Judeo-Christian work ethic gives us. Most nations of the world cannot be what we have become and what we are becoming, unfortunately.

There is not a Black-led nation in the world that has a democracy. There is not a Muslim-led nation in the world that has a democracy, not one. There are people of this world who cannot live in a democracy or a republic form of government. It is not in their makeup. It is not in their culture, and it is not in their history! It is however in the DNA of true Americans, and it can go away if we do not change direction really quick. I do hope that the beginning of the song that you’re about to hear in a minute, I am going to play it. The beginning of the song is doom and gloom, where my mind personally is at today.

I hope that God does bless us.

If God does not bless us though, you can be sure that we are going to go the way of other democracies and other forms of government before us. We’re going to go the way of Rome. I did a series on that fact, and we will replay it soon for you. It was called, Are we the modern Romans? What I meant by that is that we are not the Holy Roman Empire that’s going to be revived, but I questioned if our fate is the same as the ancient Romans. The ancient Romans had a republic form of democracy for over 400 years, longer than America has been here. They were a republic with a Senate. They didn’t have a House or a Congress, but they had a Senate. They did not have a dictator and they did not have a real Executive Branch. The Senate made all the rules and the people voted for their senators. And for 400 years, Rome was a democratic republic…then Caesar crossed the Rubicon River and became the first dictator of Rome. And are we crossing the Rubicon today with what happened Friday in the courts in New York? Have we just gone from a republic form of government that we so enjoyed to one that we abused and we took advantage of?

And are we now in the verge of becoming that totalitarian Caesar? Will we have a Caesar instead of a president real soon as happened to the Roman Republic? Because like Rome, we’re going to fail and we’re going to fall. And Rome fell for the same reasons we’re falling today.

They became immoral. They became overtaxed. They had mercenaries do their fighting for them. They became fat and lazy. They followed a terrible diet. They became Queers. They became homosexuals and they became deviant, decadent, and immoral. That’s what this country is doing. And so we’re following the way of Rome, but we can stop it because Rome didn’t believe in God, and we do. They didn’t have a Bible. When they fell, they really had the Christian church, but unfortunately, Roman emperors like Nero blamed the Christians for the problems with Rome instead of blaming the Romans themselves. But anyway, this is the song by Merle Haggard and see what it means when you listen to it and see if we are going to have the hopeful ending of this song.

Before the Beatles and yesterday. When a man could still work, still would. It’s the best of the free life behind us now. And are the good times really over with you? And are we rolling downhill like a snowball headed for hell? With no kind of chance for the flag or the liberty bell? I wish a Ford and a Chevy would still last 10 years like they should. It’s the best of the free life behind us now. And are the good times really over with you? I wish coke was still cola and a joint was a bad place to be. And if it’s back before Nixon, my news all on TV. Before microwave ovens, when a girl could still cook, still would. It’s the best of the free life behind us now. And are the good times really over with you? And are we rolling downhill like a snowball headed for hell? With no kind of chance for the flag or the liberty bell? I wish a Ford and a Chevy would still last 10 years like they should. It’s the best of the free life behind us now. And are the good times really over with you? Stop rolling downhill like a snowball headed for hell. Stand up for the flag and let’s all ring the liberty bell. Let’s make a Ford and a Chevy. It’ll still last 10 years like they should.

The best of the free life is still yet to come. The good times ain’t over for good. 

Well, let’s hope and pray that the good times really ain’t over for good.

This is Bob Barney. God bless America. Goodbye.