Crash Position

The pilot was locked out of the cockpit.

That phrase finally revealed the full horror of the crash of Germanwings flight 9525. Co-pilot Andreas Lubitz waited for the pilot to leave the cockpit, then locked the door to prevent his re-entry. After which Lubitz, for reasons unknown and perhaps unknowable, deliberately steered the jet into a harrowing 8 minute plunge ending in an explosive 434 mph impact with a rocky mountainside. 150 men, women and children met an immediate, unthinkably violent death.

Lubitz, in his single-minded madness, couldn't be stopped because anyone who could change the jet's disastrous course was locked out.

It's hard to imagine the growing feelings of fear and helplessness that the passengers felt as the unforgiving landscape rushed up to meet them. Hard - but not impossible.

Because America is in trouble. We feel the descent in the pits of our stomachs. We hear the shake and rattle of structures stressed beyond their limits. We don't know where we're going anymore, but do know it isn't good. And above all, we feel helpless because Barack Obama has locked us out.

He locked the American people out of his decision to seize the national healthcare system. Locked us out when we wanted to know why the IRS was attacking conservatives. He locked us out of having a say in his decision to tear up our immigration laws, and to give over a trillion dollars in benefits to those who broke those laws.

Obama locked out those who advised against premature troop withdrawals. Locked out the intelligence agencies who issued warnings about the growing threat of ISIS.  He locked out anyone who could have interfered with his release of five Taliban terror chiefs in return for one U.S. military deserter.

And of course, Barack Obama has now locked out Congress, the American people, and our allies as he strikes a secret deal with Iran to determine the timeline (not prevention) of their acquisition of nuclear weapons.

Was Andreas Lubitz depressed, insane, or abysmally evil when he decided to lock that cockpit door and listen to no voices other than those in his head? Did he somehow believe himself to be doing the right thing?

The voice recordings from the doomed aircraft reveal that as the jet began its rapid descent, the passengers were quiet. There was probably some nervous laughter, confusion, a bit of comforting chatter with seatmates, followed by a brief period in which anxiety had not yet metastasized into terror.

It was only near the end of the 8 minute plunge that everyone finally understood what was really happening. Only near the end when they began to scream.

Like those passengers, a growing number of Americans feel a helpless dread as they come  to the inescapable conclusion that our nation's decline is an act of choice rather than of chance. The choice of one man who is in full control of our 8 year plunge.

A man who has locked everyone out.

Cruz Control

Texas Senator and Conservative firebrand Ted Cruz threw his hat into the Presidential ring on Monday, immediately touching off arguments on the Left about whether his hat is made from beaver fur and has large, comical ear-flaps attached.

The reason Democrats are raising the question is that Cruz was born in Canada, the child of an American mother and Cuban father, and therefore - in their opinion - may be less of an American citizen than Barack Obama. A man who needed half a decade and a recent version of Photoshop to finally come up with a semi-plausible birth certificate.

Only kidding, of course! After the governor of Hawaii (a close friend of Obama) declared that the president's birth certificate would never be found, a low-level functionary magically did find and authenticate the birth certificate, copied it for the president, then locked the original away again without letting anyone else see it - shortly before she became the only fatality in a plane crash.

Life can be funny like that sometimes. And by "funny," we mean freaking suspicious.

But returning to Ted Cruz, his paperwork is all in order and his citizenship is beyond question. Which won't keep the Lefties from being appalled at his lack of racial purity, what with him being some sort of mutant, Conservative, high-IQ Hispano-Canuck.

We fully expect Hillary Clinton, who is widely believed to have popularized the rumors about Obama being a foreign-born muslim in 2008, to launch an ugly whispering campaign against Cruz, suggesting that he arrived in America one step ahead of the Royal Canadian Mounted Police (no easy thing in snowshoes) after being caught with a suspicious baggie of dried maple leaves.

Or maybe she'll say Cruz is actually the bastard grandson of Ricky Ricardo (Hope n' Change likes to include au courant celebrity references to keep our younger readers engaged).

In any event, it's too early in the election cycle for us to get very excited over any individual candidate, but we're glad that Cruz is injecting some Conservative ideas into the national dialogue. Not to mention making Democrats way more interested in the importance of actual, legal citizenship than they've been in years.

Trick or Treaty

There are only a few days left in the nuclear negotiations between Barack Hussein Obama and Iran, but Secretary of State and gangly professional shuttlecock John Kerry is hinting that an agreement is now within reach as the parties warm to each other.

For instance, as a show of good faith, the United States has already stopped pretending to be Israel's ally - and in return, Iran's supreme leader Ali Khamenei is calling for "Death to America"...but doing so with a new, pixyish twinkle in his eye.

Kerry believes that, as part of a comprehensive bargain, he can convince Khamenei to only call for America to have a wracking, bloody cough and painful hemorrhoids in the future.

Granted, to get a concession of that magnitude the U.S. has to give up some things. Like, oh, preventing Iran from developing nukes or keeping them from wiping Israel off the map. But as Kerry points out, "what's the big deal? A map is just a piece of paper!"

As will be doubly true of any agreement made with the murderous lunatics running Iran.

We didn't come up with this joke, but it was way too good not to share.