We need a change in our politicians, and we have examples of what that change is (Transcript)

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A few months ago, I was on my Facebook page, and I don’t go to Facebook all that often, but I do sometimes like to keep up with the people I went to school with or worked with in the past that are part of my Facebook community. And I was talking to a woman who I went to school with. Her father owned a restaurant, dairy type restaurant in Connecticut where I was from, and I actually worked for her father because he was also a state senator in Connecticut.

And when I was going to school for politics, and after I graduated from the University of Connecticut in 1977, I worked for this person, his name was Walt Kahn, for about a year as his assistant and his aide in the Hartford Capitol. I learned a lot about politics, and I also learned a lot about politicians of the day, and they are not the politicians of today, and I’m going to get into that. Hi, this is Bob Barney for theplaintruthtoday.com, brought to you by theplaintruth.com, just so you know what you’re listening to and who you’re listening to.

But I’m talking about politicians in the 21st century versus the politicians that I actually worked for back in the 1970s. We always know that politics can be a dirty game, and there are a lot of corrupt individuals who’s always been in politics. You can go back to the 1920s Teapot Dome scandal. You can go back to the President Grant administration, probably one of the most corrupt administrations in the United States history. You can go back all the way to Thomas Jefferson and John Adams, and that era when people did all kinds of evil things against each other for political reasons, and even though they were friends, they became enemies. In the case of John Adams and Thomas Jefferson, they were enemies for like 30 years after they worked together on the Declaration of Independence.

They did die as friends again. They reunited and started writing to each other after like a 30-year feud went on where they wouldn’t even speak to each other. But that is the few things that most people do not understand when you study the history of politics in America. There has always been problems with politicians. There’s always been corrupt politicians. But for the most part, in my experience, even into the 1970s, the majority of politicians were actually trying to do good. Now, back then, even as there is today, the Democrats tended to be more liberal when it came to social issues, not necessarily when it came to defense or economy, by the way, but with social issues. And the Republicans tended to be more, how should I say, more right-leaning or more aggressively against certain social programs and issues because they had the policy belief that when you gave people handouts, you didn’t help them. You actually hurt their ability to make a living for themselves and you made them dependent on the state, turning them into welfare recipients who are always in debt to the government and always going to vote for the people that gave them their money so they have a better life or so they think they do.

And they never, ever have the chance to get ahead because of these programs. The two parties were always opposite when it came to social programs. But when you get, like, for example, the defense, you had people like Sam Nunn, who was more of a defense hawk than many Republicans, like a Rockefeller Republican, for example. Even when you get to the economy, under the Eisenhower, you had a 90 percent tax bracket for the richest people of America. They paid 90 percent of their earnings to income tax. And John Kennedy comes along, a Democrat, a liberal Democrat, but today he would be considered a very right-winged Republican, by the way, but a very liberal Democrat of his day, the first Catholic president, by the way, and that was a problem for him being a Catholic and getting elected as a president of the United States. But John Kennedy gave us the first Reagan-type tax cut, lowering the tax rate to, I believe, around 45 percent from 90 percent, and the economy boomed because of that. And so the very first Reagan tax cut did not come from a Republican. It actually came from a Democrat, John F. Kennedy..

A lot of people do not even know that. But when we get to the politicians of our day today, we see people on the right, people on the left, nobody in the middle anymore at all. Nobody’s sitting on the fence. You’re either radical left or radical right, basically concerned about your own re-election, your own self-interest, and your own pockets. That’s the only way you can explain the people like Nancy Pelosi and all these Democrats that got rich over the years, playing the stock market, doing better than any stockbroker could ever think about doing because they were controlling the companies whose stock they were either buying or selling through legislation. Totally corrupt, absolutely corrupt all of that. Republicans complained about Nancy Pelosi and that corruption for years. Yet when the Republicans win the House in 2024 and the Senate and also the presidency, all of a sudden you have the same Republicans who railed against Nancy Pelosi now saying, well, now it’s our turn to make the money. And you have somebody like Marjorie Taylor Greene, for example, making $180,000 in a few months on a stock market thing that she had inside information, which is legal for politicians to have inside information and still play in the stock market. It shouldn’t be, but it is. So I wanted to go back and give a little story of myself and how I got into politics. My father’s direct boss at the Nestle Company was a man named Buttsy O’Connor, and he was a very powerful Democrat in local politics.

And he had very long reaching arms to the Democrat Party, even in the national, the state level and the national level. He was a very, very influential man. He was a big boss at the Nestle Company as well. He was a very decent man. He was the next-door neighbor of the wife I’m married to for the 45 years. And she’ll tell you the same thing. He was a very cordial guy. He was very nice. He was very outgoing, and he would do anything for anybody to ask them a favor. Well, my brother, Vic, who is the oldest brother, I’m the youngest. He was the oldest brother. He was in the Air Force and he had a very serious accident in 1972, I believe it was, seven days before Christmas. This is when we followed Christmas at the time, by the way. And my parents had to fly down there at a moment’s notice. He was in a coma. He looked like he was going to die. The light pole from the car he was riding in, he was in the backseat, fell through the backseat window and hit his head and broke his neck. And luckily, I think God watching over him, maybe, this accident happened right in front of Broward General Medical Center.

And the doctor on call at the time was one of the greatest neurosurgeons of that area and was actually the neurosurgeon that was on the list for when Nixon was in South Florida. He would be the person that would work on President Nixon if he had a brain injury of any type. So this person saved my brother’s life. But my brother had a bad problem being in rehabilitation. It was going very slow and very hard. And the Air Force, he already went to Da Nang, Vietnam. He was in Korea. He was in two war zones. He did his job. He was shelled every night in Da Nang. We’ve seen videos he would send back. It was horrific times. He did his duty. He was now working at Homestead Air Force Base. He had about seven months to go, but they wanted him back. And my father was told by the Yale New Haven doctor that Vic was under care now when he had been on leave and going to an Army hospital in Massachusetts. But he was going to Yale New Haven for real care. That doctor said he cannot go back into the service in his conditions.

He could have an aneurysm and die immediately. You got to stop it. Well, my father tried to talk to the Air Force. They were not ready to listen. And they said they would come and arrest him for AWOL if he did not report at a certain date. My father went to Buttsy O’Connor, who, of course, was, like I said, he was a Democrat, a very powerful Democrat. And Ellen Grasso, and some people may know that name, she became governor of Connecticut. But she was a Democrat woman, house of representative for our town, or our whole county at the time. She was in the House. And I still remember to this day when she called my father and she said, you have a place to hide him. I cannot believe this, knowing what politicians are about. And she goes, and my father said, yes, I have a place we could put him. You hide him. You do not let the Air Force get him. You don’t know where he is. You get him out of your house. And within a week or two, I’m going to get back with you and we’re going to get him honorably discharged from the Air Force, I promise you. But do not have him in that house because I can’t stop what they’re going to try to do.

Well, they really didn’t try to do anything, by the way. I don’t remember any Air Force person coming to the House. But about a week later, she calls my father again and says, well, your son Victor is going to get a honorable discharge with all full benefits, military service, and the actions he was when he was in Vietnam and in Korea. And it will happen within a week or two. And it did. And the funny thing is, is we were Republicans and we did not ever vote for a Democrat. My father never did. My mother never did. I was voting age at the time. But when Ella Grasso was running for governor, even though I was at that time a registered Republican holding office in the town of New Milford, I voted for her out of obligation. And my brother Vic, who she saved his life, refused to vote for her. But that’s a side note. But this is the politicians of the day that I wanted to be a politician. And so Buttsy, when I graduated from college, University of Connecticut in 1977, said, well, you’re going to want to run for public office? And I said, yeah, I’d like to start doing something. And he said, well, I can get you in with.

And he started mentioning a Democrat name who was the person in New Milford. And I said, no, I’m a Republican. Well, this guy, who was my father’s boss and a friend of our family for many years. And even after he retired, my father took care of him, took care of his yard. And they were just great friends. He looked at me and he was so hurt. And he says, you’re a Republican. Yeah. Oh, I feel sorry for you, Bob.But my friend, Richard Gibhart, is the top Republican in town. And I’m going to tall him up and tell him that you want to run for office. And I ran for zoning commissioner. And that’s a different story. But it was very funny that these people could be friends with each other. And they could also be against each other over policy and policy alone. They were not bitter enemies. They were actually friends. And they could talk to one another, unlike what we see today. And so much more good things happened when that was the case. And I started seeing, this was the time Ronald Reagan was running against Gerald Ford for the nomination. And I was a Ronald Reagan supporter way back in 1976.

And so I started seeing a change of the Republican party even then, where they would not tolerate dissent. The Democrats tolerated dissent, but the Republicans would not at the time tolerate dissent. Today, both parties will not tolerate dissent. Do not be fooled. If you’re a registered Republican, I’m sorry, if you’re a Republican, hold an office, or a Democrat, hold an office, you better stick to the party line more now than ever with Donald Trump as president of the Republican side than ever. You better hold the party line or you will be in trouble. And you will be in trouble in more ways than you will ever figure out. And you will wish you were never born. And you will definitely wish you never became a politician. That is what we have today. Back in my day, we had people who stood up for decency and honesty. So I went to work for this man, Walter Kahn, the Republican. He was a state senator. And I wanted really to get up into national politics at the time. I really wanted to be a campaign manager and not even the politician per se, because even then, a lot of the politicians that were coming up were what we called empty suits.

They were pretty boys, but they had no brains. They always had this Karl Rove type behind them that was making all the decisions and knew what was going on. So I went to work for Walt Kahn, and I met a man, I basically knew his daughter because we were in the same grade. I knew her in the second grade all the way to high school. And her name was Sarah Kahn. And I remember a birthday party in the second grade for her birthday, and her father brought all of these treats for the kids. And he brought ice cream and everything else. And when it was my turn for my birthday, my father brought all this kind of stuff from Nestle’s and chocolates and stuff. And it was great memories.She’s still alive, and she’s well, you know, in good health and everything. And we keep in touch occasionally, not very often. But I told her, I don’t know, months back, I miss your father. I miss politicians like your father. Her father, Walt Kahn, was a man of absolute integrity and honesty and didn’t have a crooked bone in his body. And he did, for the town of Milford, things that would never get done today because of politics.

He could stand up to his own party, or he could stand up to the opposition, but he always stood on the side of what was right for the people he was representing. Now, he was a pretty well-to-do guy. He owned a dairy, restaurant-type dairy store. Think of an A&W or Dairy Queen. But it was his own. It was a local one. It was a very popular one. Everybody went there to get ice cream that I can remember in my age. And they had, also, you could get meals there. I guess it would be more like where we see a Friendly’s ice cream. But the one year that I worked for this man, I learned more about integrity and what a politician could be and should be than I could ever learn in any school. And I told her in a Facebook chat, where you can message each other, about, I miss her father’s way of doing politics. And I wish we had more Walt Kahns in Congress and in the presidency and in every form of government from state senator to governor to little old town mayor. But we don’t. For the most part today, we do not.

And it’s a very, very terrible shame. And we hope, and I hope, that America, that I know the future of America, I know who we are in the Bible, and I know what could be our future and will probably be our future. But I always say this, never forget this one thing about God. God gives prophecies in telling you what’s going to happen to your country in the future. If you listen to it and you know who the players are, you know who you are in biblical prophecy, you know what’s going to happen. But here’s the good news. And I want to say this all the time. The good news is people can stop it. When you go to the book of Jonah, who is a prophet of God, and God told him to go to the city of Nineveh, who are not Israelites, who are not God’s people, they were actually against God’s people, and told Jonah to go and to proclaim to the people of Jonah, because of their great sins, that city would be destroyed. And Jonah did not want to go. And you know the story, he ran away and he got swallowed by the big fish. And then he had ended up going back to Nineveh, gave them the message they were going to be destroyed by God for being such sinners.

And he sits out under a tree that God made for him, and he’s sitting in the shade of the sun, and he’s waiting for the city to blow up like Sodom and Gomorrah, and nothing happens. And he gets mad at God. And God said, why are you mad at me? He said, I knew this is why I didn’t even want to do this job, because I knew you’re a forgiving God, and you were going to forgive these people. And God said, they came to me in sackcloth and ashes, and they prayed for their forgiveness. And should I kill all these people that are turning to me for forgiveness? No, I’m not going to do that. And so what we learn here is that we have the ability, as late as this country, and as bad off as I believe this country is right now, we have the ability to change the destiny that God foretold us that we would have, because we are lost Israel. People don’t want to believe this, but we are lost Israel. You aren’t going to know what the future of us is. Go to the Old Testament, and prophecies considered Israel and Judah.

People don’t even understand this. There are two separate nations talked about after the Solomon reign under a united kingdom, when the house of Judah and the house of Israel were united as one nation. But after Solomon’s reign, Israel gets broken up into two separate nations. The northern ten tribes is called Israel, and the southern tribes, which is mainly the Jewish people of today, some Levites, and some of the tribe of Benjamin, was the tribe or the nation of Judah. And when you see prophecies in the Old Testament, you see Judah has a certain set of prophecies. You see Israel has other certain sets of prophecies. And you also see prophecies like in Ezekiel, where God says he’s going to take one stick, called Judah, and another stick called Israel. He’s going to weld them back together, and they’re going to be one United Kingdom again in the millennium. Not until, by the way. And so we know who we are. You can believe that or not, but we know who we are, and we know what’s going to happen. It’s clear in the Old Testament prophecies concerning Israel. But the news is, even at this late stage, we can delay it. We can prevent it. All we have to do is turn to God believe in what God says, obey God, which that’s against human nature, is to obey God.

We want to be like a three-year-old brat child when we’re 83 years old, because we want to be our own free moral agent. We don’t want some God telling us what to do. You know, I always laughed when Garner Ted Armstrong used to joke about, we don’t want some big hand coming out of heaven and pulling that cigarette out of your mouth saying, that’s not good for you, bub. No, we want to be a free moral agent till the day we die. And that is part of the human nature that is against God’s nature. And that is why we get all the trouble. We’re in all the trouble that we’re in. But if we, as a people, get together, show mercy, and not worry about politics, but we show mercy to one another, we show love to one another, we care about one another again, God will delay or even end the awful future we have coming. But if we continue finding fault with our opponents, putting them in jail, Donald Trump went through this with the Biden administration, there is no way, no how, anybody can say what was done to Donald Trump was right. As there is no way, no how, what Donald Trump’s trying to do in retribution is right. It’s just not right. Vengeance is mine, say the Lord.

Let God repay. If there is things going on, forgive and leave it up to God to decide what to do to correct things. If we as a people return to the principles of love thy neighbor as thyself and love the Lord thy God with all thy heart and all thy might, we would be a nation that would be blessed again. We would have all the money in the world. We would be lending to everyone. We wouldn’t be the world’s creditor. I’m sorry, debtor. We would be the world’s creditor as we were after World War II. We would have safe cities. We wouldn’t have murders in all these cities. We wouldn’t have crime and corruption. We wouldn’t have dirty politicians. All of this stuff could end if we would turn back to God. I can guarantee you that the moral politicians that I grew up with, the Buttsy O’Connor Democrat, the Walt Conn Republican, these people were godly people. They believed there was a divine influence over them. And if they did wrong, there was retribution. And if you don’t have that thought, if you think you can get away with stealing and robbing people and taking away people’s rights and throwing them in jail, if you think you can do that because there is no God to punish you for doing that, then you have the society we’re living in today. And this is a pretty sick society we’re living in today.

I hope that enough people, I know not very many people listen to this broadcast and it’s up to God if anybody is going to listen to it, but I just hope that people understand that we can stop the decline we’re in. And let me just finish this broadcast by this little statement about the decline we’re in. There is a reason why so many authors today compare us to the modern Romans. We have become fat, lazy, we’ve become self-centered, egotistical, and corrupt. That is what happened to ancient Rome and the slaves, you can in our day make that the foreign workers, the aliens amongst us, in Rome decided, why do we want to put up with these fat, ugly, lazy people? Well, kill them all and we’ll become the leaders of Rome and have all this wealth. And that was the Huns of the day. And Rome fell in the fifth century AD because of their total corrupt, fat lifestyle, all I can say. And that is where we’re going today in this country. And if you have any eyes that you can see anything around you, you know, I’m telling you the truth.

It’s about time that we start thinking not only that there is a God, but God has laws. The law of God was not abolished on Jesus on the cross. That is false Christianity. That is the lawlessness that prevails, not only in our churches by saying Christ did away with the law, which he did no such thing. Remember it is Jesus Christ is Lord of the Old Testament that wrote the 10 commandments with his very finger that no law has been abolished and no law has been abolished. And our court system has now followed our religious system by finding nobody guilty of anything, letting people out, no cash bail, letting murderers out in the street so they can kill over and over and over again. You know, there is no such thing as a prison in the Bible. I do not believe in prison. I believe in two principles of the Bible.

The one principle of an eye for an eye means that you really repay your sin. If you take someone’s life on purpose, your life has to be taken. That’s that simple. But at the same time, there’s also the practice of restitution. If you take somebody’s life by mistake, then for the rest of your life, you have to work a hard life and pay money to the family who you harmed. If you steal, you have to repay what you steal.There has to be in any society laws that make people do the right thing. And there has to be enough fear of the law that they know if they don’t do the right thing, they will be punished. Jail is not the punishment that God ever wanted.

When you send some young kid to jail for some pot violation or some little robbery that he did, even if it was a more aggressive robbery, when you send him to jail, you just sent him into a bunch of people going to teach him more stuff than he ever knew how to be a criminal. And when he comes out, he’s twice the son of hell that he ever was when he went in. But if you put that kid in, let’s say some kind of a work group that he had to repay, restitute under maybe a military type school, you know, military school type thing for bad students. In my day, by the way, that was Henry Abbott Tech and Danbury, where all the bad kids went to, but they turned them, most of those, you know, that graduated from Henry Abbott Tech became one person I know, a friend of my brother’s was one of the biggest shots in the FBI, New York Bureau, came out of Henry Abbott Tech. He was a troublemaker as a kid. There is a way to turn around bad behavior with good godly principles of discipline and restitution, not prison.

And again, this is the problem that our country is facing. We do not have politicians who care about the people that they are leading because they do not even like the people they are leading. They are just a means to an end for their own greedy corruption. And that’s the plain truth for today. This is Bob Barney for theplaintruth.com. Wishing everybody a very safe time, and I hope you listen to what I have to say, and I hope you take it to heart, and I do hope you start reading the Bible. Reading the Bible is not going to cause you any harm, but it could save your life, your eternal life. And until tomorrow, Bob Barney saying thank you for listening. Have a good day. Bye-bye.

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