Bob Barney on The Liberty Valence Factor Revisited (Transcript)

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Sometimes movies get it better than we can explain it. 

This is Bob Barney with the Plain Truth Today commentary. 

Once in a while on the Plain Truth Board, we republish a story I wrote many years ago, and it was called The Liberty Valance Factor.

Some people out there in this audience may have watched the movie, The man who shot Liberty Valance with the famous John Wayne starring as one of the characters, James Stewart, and Lee Marvin as the bad guy who was Liberty Valance. And the purpose of the article that I wrote about the Liberty Valance Factor is that it’s a story about a politician, a lawyer who moved west, a very honest and good, decent man, James Stewart, played the part of the lawyer, who stood up to the town thug and local gunslinger, Liberty Valance, and was challenged to a duel. Even though he didn’t know how to really shoot a gun and he was not good with a gun at all, he faced him down because of his bravery, obviously, as the movie tried to point out. The first scene that you see of the alleged shooting of Liberty Valance, you see Liberty Valance actually almost killing James Stewart and then James Stewart raises his pistol, shoots it, and you see Liberty Valance fall.

The story is about this little-known country lawyer who just moved out west from the east, who became famous for shooting Liberty Valance, and became the governor of the territory, and later the governor of the state. Then he was elected to the House of Representatives, and he was elected two times to the Senate, and he became an ambassador in some country in Europe and he came back and he ran for Senate again. In the story he is going to a funeral of somebody named Tom Donophin, who was played by John Wayne. And the newspaper people did not know that this very famous senator from Washington, D.C. was coming to the little town where he originally killed Liberty Valance. And they wanted to know why he was in town. And he said he wanted to be left alone. This is like 40 years after shooting Liberty Valance. And he said he came for a funeral.

And they said, well, whose funeral are you going to? And he says, Tom Donophin, who was played by John Wayne. Well, we never heard of Tom Donophin. Who was Tom Donophin? And Jimmy Stewart sat down and told the story about the man who shot Liberty Valance.It turned out when James Stewart was the lawyer, got into town, the other person in town who was equally as fast as Liberty Valance, and who Liberty Valance, played by Lee Marvin, was afraid of was John Wayne, was Tom Donophin. And his girlfriend ended up becoming Jimmy Stewart’s wife. And so it’s a very sad story of John Wayne is, unlike many of his characters, is the guy left behind by the girl who chose Jimmy Stewart over him. We think up until the end of the movie that James Stewart was the man who shot Liberty Valance. But it turns out when James Stewart finally bares his soul to the newspaper editor of the real story of the man who shot Liberty Valance, was that his wife, as still girlfriend of Tom Donophin, ran to the John Wayne character, Tom Donophin, and asked him to intervene and not let Jimmy Stewart get killed by Liberty Valance. Though you do not see it in the first scene, the second scene, when John Wayne is describing to Jimmy Stewart what happened that night, you’re seeing a different angle and you realize that John Wayne is in an alley with a rifle. And when Lee Marvin picks up the pistol to shoot Jimmy Stewart, Jimmy Stewart shoots, but his bullet is way off target and he would have been dead instantly and his career would have come to an end right then. The John Wayne character shoots Liberty Valance with his rifle and kills him instantly. He shoots him at the same time that Jimmy Stewart shot. The man who shot Liberty Valance, and there was a very famous rock and roll song about the movie called The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance, turned out really to be John Wayne and not Jimmy Stewart. 

Now, why am I talking about this today? Because it’s very important to the news and it’s why I wrote this article called The Liberty Valance Factor. Because oftentimes in the news, there are people that we do not who are very important, that they did something others got the credit for, especially when it comes to politicians. Many politicians love to steal other people’s work. Joe Biden’s not the only plagiarist in DC. And other people really carried the load and do not get the credit for it. That is the whole idea of the article that I wrote. 

I’ll give you a news story that I learned about a few years back that actually shocked me. It was a show, I believe, on the Smithsonian Channel. It may have been on the History Channel. And it was called The Man Who Saved the World. And it’s a person you never heard of, and I doubt you ever heard of this story. But you’re alive today, most likely because of this man.

It was during the Cuban Missile Crisis of 1963 when President Kennedy ordered a total blockade of Cuba, because Soviets had put missiles that could reach Washington DC in Cuba. Kennedy was drawing a line in the sand, and he was not going to allow Russia to do this. The Soviets had sent some submarines, and they were the old diesel electrics, which were very hard to find, to protect the convoys that were going to Cuba with the missiles.

When the American Navy fleet decided to enforce the blockade and stop the Soviet freighters from going into Cuba, and the Soviet commander of that submarine was ordered by Moscow to use his nuclear-tipped torpedoes and sink the entire United States fleet. Little known to even our side, the Soviet Union had armed these submarines, and I think there were three of them in all, with nuclear-tipped, or I should say nuclear weaponized torpedoes, meaning that the torpedoes did not have conventional bombs on them. They were equipped with atomic bombs on the end of the torpedoes. If he followed the orders of the Soviet Union High Command, he would have sunk the entire American Navy fleet with the torpedoes that he had on board, which would have been nuclear in power. They would have been atomic bombs, bigger than probably what landed on Nagasaki and Hiroshima, and would have sunk every aircraft carrier in that fleet, every destroyer, every supply ship, and there would have been tens of thousands of Americans instantly dead. World War III would have started, and that’s an important point.

If World War III started, we had enough missiles to reach Moscow and all of the Soviet cities to destroy them completely, and they had the same type of hydrogen bombs on their missiles that could come to America and destroy America completely. This is what we had, and it was very important to understand that this man, who represented a country, the Soviet Union at the time, which we consider the evilest empire since Adolf Hitler in the world, that this man absolutely disobeyed orders and refused to launch those missiles.

Now, you would think with all the things you hear about the old Soviet Union, this man would have been executed for disobeying that order.

He was not. 

He was actually stripped from his command, and he was ridiculed at home, and he went through years of being targeted by the Soviet Union officials, but he was not executed.

He was not even thrown out of the Navy.

He was not even thrown out of the submarine command. It shows you that what we thought about the Soviet Union and their hierarchy may be a little bit of propaganda, and it really wasn’t the case. But here you have a story, a factual story, of a man. I believe his name was Vasili Arkhipov. You can look it up. If you do a search, you will search the Russian sub-commander who saved the world, and you can actually find on YouTube the entire TV report that was on either the History Channel or Smithsonian Channel about this man who was ordered by the admiral on board his sub to launch the missiles. It took two people to know the codes to launch the missiles. His direct superior, who was in charge of the entire fleet, an admiral, ordered it to be done and put in his code.

This Soviet sub-commander refused to put in the code, and he prevented World War III.

And you’re probably alive today because of a man you do not even know existed, and this is what I call the liberty valence factor.

We’ll be right back in a minute.

Hi, Bob Barney for The Plain Truth today, brought to you by theplaintruth.com, the one place to go to every day to find out what’s happening and maybe what God has to think about it, because God is the real news behind the news. And so that’s what we try to show you here on The Plain Truth today, as well as theplaintruth.com. Go there every day. The broadcast, Monday through Friday is at 7 11 a.m., 7 11 p.m., and noontime. And Saturdays, the Sabbath day, we have a 7 11 Sabbath-type show every Saturday morning, and then 7 11 at night, we have an evening book, short story, or old-time radio broadcast, or even old-time TV show to entertain people on 7 11 p.m. on the Sabbath Saturday evenings. Sunday, we have just one show in the morning, 7 11 a.m., and it’s usually a political, economic-type show. That’s theplaintruth.com. Go there every day. We have a Message Board anybody can contribute content to. We have Your Health Today, which is a very important place to go to see what’s happening with health issues, food issues, the like, what God thinks you should be eating and what you should not be eating, as well as, like I said, the Message Board. That’s theplaintruth.com. Go there every day. Thank you.

The Liberty Valance Factor is a broadcast I did about a year and a half ago, and I’m updating it a little bit because there are people who you just do not understand who happen to be behind the news, that people that you think are doing things are not the really ones doing it, and there’s always that hidden person, just like the movie, which I explained in the first part of the broadcast, where you have a person who actually killed the Liberty Valance but never got the credit for it, and the person who got the credit for it became Senator and could be President of the United States, according to the movie. He never did it, and he thought he did at first, but he never did it, and that is the Liberty Valance Factor, and the greatest Liberty Valance Factor that has ever been is really what God is doing behind the scenes for you, your family, for this world, because this world is coming to an end. I don’t know when that’s going to be. I’m not predicting it’s a day after tomorrow, as some of these shysters do, trying to get your money, but there is going to come a second coming of Jesus Christ, and the age that we’re living in is coming to an end, and it’s about time that a lot of people realize there are things going on we don’t understand, but we have to have faith that God the Father and Jesus Christ knows what’s happening and will be there to help out when times get tough, because times are going to get tough, but what is the Liberty Valance, ultimate Liberty Valance person in your lifetime? It’s Jesus Christ, who came, the God of the Old Testament.

Most people do not even know, most Christians who go to church every Sunday, some maybe the Sabbath, but I doubt that, but most Christians that’s going to church on Sundays absolutely do not know the identity of Jesus Christ. Who did He claim He was, and that’s an important thing, because if you agree that Jesus Christ is your Savior, you think He’s a part of the Godhead, but you really don’t really understand because your churches don’t understand it, and it’s important, really, to know if this person, this God, as you think He is a God, and I believe the Bible makes that clear, but who was He? Who did He claim to be? And so many times people, when you mention about, did you know that Jesus was the God of the Old Testament?

People will look at you in such shock, they’ll say, what are you, are you imbibing in something that’s illegal? And people just have not been taught by their churches that the Lord of the Old Testament, the Lord who created Adam and Eve, who made the heavens and the earth, who said, let there be light, who talked to Moses face to face, Abraham’s best friend, was none other than the supernatural God being that became a human being, Jesus Christ, who died for our sins, was resurrected, the firstborn of the dead, Christ was the first born-again Christian, in a way, and is again back in heaven alive, waiting, preparing for another countdown to come back to this earth, this time as King of kings and Lord of lords. So many people do not even understand who exactly Jesus Christ claimed he was.

So when we think about people who have done things that we don’t really understand, we don’t even really understand the gospel, we don’t really understand the Bible, because most of us just do not read the Bible for ourselves. A lot of us go to churches on Sunday, they don’t know even about the Sabbath day, which they should know, but they don’t because their pastor is not going to teach them that, and especially if you’re in a Catholic church, you’re not going to be taught that. And so people are blissfully unaware of the true gospel of Jesus Christ, which ultimately is going to be the thing that saves their lives, and it’s about time we understood that.

Bringing this notion closer to home, I am sure that you know of people, and it may even be you, that have done things for other people and the other people just do not know it, and they do not want to glorify themselves or bring glory to themselves. Maybe they’re humbler than the average Joe out there, and so people have things done for them that they don’t even know who to thank, and like I said, that could be you, that could be your neighbor, it could be your father or mother or somebody that was close to you, but I think most of us are aware of the idea that there are people who mean a lot to our lives personally.

I’m not talking about now nationally, we were talking about national things, and then of course talking about Jesus Christ.

I’m talking about even in your own personal life, in your own family life, in your own work experience or whatever. You know of people, and like I said, it maybe you, but you know of people who absolutely never got credit for what they’ve done to help, and other people get their credit oftentimes. 

You see this especially if you work for big business.

If you work for a big corporation, you see there’s a lot of different people who are the leaders of a corporation, there’s different bosses. You know, there was always that joke one time, it wasn’t a joke, it was actually true, how there was like 38 vice presidents of General Motors, 36 of which didn’t know what to do because they went to work each day, they didn’t even have a job. They were the Peter Principle, they were promoted to the highest level of their incompetency, and then left alone until they retired, and so they had 38 vice presidents, and only two of them were actually working to be president. The other 36 were just biding time for retirement, and so when you work for a big company, oftentimes there is this person, and I’m sure if you’ve worked for a big company, you’re going to understand what I said. I know most of my career I haven’t worked for a big company, but I did work for several big time companies in my career, and what happens is there’s always one person, you know, you go to a, let’s say you’re working in a factory, and the factory is always making mistakes, and there’s always things going wrong, and there’s always idiots making stupid decisions, the employees mainly know this by the way, anybody who ever worked in a factory of any type, I don’t care if it’s food factory, paint factory, or making sneaker factory, that you always see there are many people who know what they’re doing, but the majority of the people are really just skipping along, trying to do the least possible, and that also happens with the bosses, the people in charge of the production of that factory, and often what happens is there are so many idiots managing a factory that it’s amazing that the company even can stay in business and produce anything, and when you boil it down, and most people I said will recall this in their own experience, when you boil it down, there’s always going to be that one person, maybe two, that really knows everything that they’re doing. They grew up from a teenager, they went to work at that factory, they’d done every job at that factory, they knew how to make everything from top to bottom without anything going wrong, and managing that factory was just like second nature to them.

They knew exactly what was going on, and what was the result?

They saved the factory from going bankrupt, from being mismanaged by all the morons who were bosses with them. There’s always that one person or that two people that keep everything moving strong, and you know that when they retire, like if something happens to the person, if they end up quitting the job and going somewhere else, or mainly when they retire, then after they retire, everyone realizes, how come we can’t produce what we used to produce? How come everything is down now? Why is this broke all the time? They start asking questions, and then they say, you know, George used to take care of this. Yeah, you’re right, you know, George used to take care of that too. Every time this broke down, he always seemed to know what was… and all of a sudden, the liberty valence factor is broadcast to everybody in the factory, then everybody sits there thinking when everything’s going wrong, you know, George did a lot more than we thought he did, and that is the plain truth of what happens in most big businesses today. 

Most big businesses today can’t compete on a worldwide basis. This is why everybody wants Donald Trump to pass these tariffs, which is the worst thing that could ever happen for any business, because all it does is give them protectionism. Instead of improving themselves, they actually degenerate even more so, because they got big government there protecting them with high taxes, and the real loser, tariffs or taxes by the way, the real loser in all this is the consumer who has to buy only inferior products because he can’t afford the good products because of the tariffs.

That’s what’s going on, and that’s actually what’s going today.

It’s about time, in my opinion, that when we read the news or listen to the newscast at night or any way we get our news on the internet or whatever, we have to realize to look beyond the story and look who the person is maybe that really is responsible in the good, usually, for what’s going on, and look through the people taking their credit. Politicians, for example, just love to take the credit when things go right, and they just love to find the blame when things go wrong. I think we live through that now, and I think you’re going to live through that with every politician that’s ever going to run for presidency and be president or any other position. That is human nature, is to always take credit when something goes well, and always find someone else to blame when everything goes wrong, and that’s politics in the 20th, 21st, 22nd, 23rd. That’s human nature.

Human nature, and this is something that we talked about in other broadcasts, human nature is something of we only basically, instinctively care only about ourselves. It’s greed and get.

Human nature, you look at a baby, when a baby, you put two babies together, I said this last week, I think it was, or a couple of weeks ago, you put two kids together, infants, and one has a toy, the other doesn’t, the other one will take the toy and whack it on the other one’s head and take it away from them, and they start crying, and that’s human nature, and God’s nature is giving, and that is not the nature of man. The nature of man is not to give. The nature of man, like any other animal on the face of this earth, and we are nothing but an animal according to your Bible, the nature of every animal is about what is best for themselves, but there comes in our lives the Spirit of God.

Sometimes we don’t even know it’s there and we don’t even know we’re Christians. In many cases, you see people who give their lives for others. Well, that’s a part of God’s nature that’s in them, and they’re unaware where they’re getting it from, and it’s always interesting when you see that kind of altruism from people, and they’re not always the people who are next to you in their church services or the ones that wear their Bible on their sleeves and not in practice.

But anyway, that is the show for today.

I do want to again go back to theplaintruth.com and the Plain Truth Today, as well as Your Health Today and the Message Board. I do really believe it’s the place to go to where you can find everything that’s going on today, and if there is God’s hand behind it, we try to explain that, and if there’s not, then it’s just news that you may enjoy. But I always say, and I said in the beginning of this show, it doesn’t do any good at all if people only can read yesterday’s news. It just doesn’t do you any good, or yesterday’s weather. Does it do you any good that a tornado took your house down yesterday when you didn’t have any foreknowledge of it? No. It would be really good to be able to pick up a newspaper or an internet program that tells you that 11:57 tomorrow, a tornado is going to take your house down, so make sure you get everything valuable out of it, including yourself.

Now, that’s the kind of news you need, and that’s the kind of news the Bible actually is giving you. It’s not giving you what is going to happen tomorrow at 1155, but it is telling you what’s going to happen in the future, in generic future, meaning in the macrocosm, not the microcosm.

It’s the whole scenario of the world, what’s going to happen to this world, how Christ is coming back to be King of kings and Lord of lords, and it’s going to happen.

And it’s important that we all realize, as just regular people out there trying to get along in our jobs and in our life, that there is another system of government coming, another way of life coming, and a better life for all coming.

Until the next show, this is Bob Barney for The Plain Truth Today.

I really do appreciate everyone who tunes in every day, and we seem to be growing again. We go through spurts, sometimes we go up, sometimes we have all kinds of hits on one particular week, doesn’t make sense to me why, and then the next week it’s back to very low numbers, and then sometimes, last week there were a lot of high numbers, no Google ads, nothing like that, and it was just very good numbers. We don’t know. But we give thanks to all who listen, and we give thanks to God, of course, for making this possible. You’re never asked for any money, you’re never asked to buy anything.

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I get a laugh out of all these so-called Christian-type sites that believe in God, and God’s in control of everything, and God’s in control of your life, but some God has seen fit to put that place in heads over heels in debt, and without your money, your particular money being sent to them, they’re going to be taken off the air, and it’s your fault when they can’t give God’s message anymore. Somehow, they have all this close relationship with God, but God can’t seem to slip them $20 somehow. Well, this program is free of charge.

It will always be free of charge, or it will not be on. I do not take ads. I am not bought or sold. I give you the opinion that I have that I believe is from the Bible and from within me, and I’m not for sale. Again, until tomorrow, Bob Barney saying thank you for listening.

God bless you. Bye-bye.