Edward Cline's Blog, page 16
February 15, 2013
The Clueless Left and Islam
Daniel Greenfield penned a perceptive and welcome critique,
"What the Left
Does not Understand About Islam" (February 15th), of the
cluelessness of the Left vis-à-vis Islam. The Left, he writes, is naïve about its
rival ideology, and ideologically will always remain naïve. The Left, he
writes, has never been able to think outside of the cardboard box it has built
for itself.
The left has
never adapted to the transition from nationalistic wars to ideological wars. It
took the left a while to grasp that the Nazis were a fundamentally different
foe than [sic] the Kaiser and that
pretending that World War 2 was another war for the benefit of colonialists and
arms dealers was the behavior of deluded lunatics. And yet much of the left
insisted on approaching the war in just that fashion, and had Hitler not
attacked Stalin, it might have remained stuck there.
From my own observations, what the Left refused to
acknowledge was that it was Hitler's Nazi Germany, Imperial Japan, and Soviet
Russia that behaved like unrepentant imperialists and colonialists, invading
and conquering other nations for all the loot they could lay hands on. It was
the consistent kneejerk evasion of that fact which demoted the Left from a
noisy avante- garde to a commune of deluded lunatics. Greenfield goes on to remark:
The Cold War was
even worse. The left never came to terms with Communism. From the Moscow Trials
to the fall of the Berlin Wall, the moderate left slowly disavowed the USSR but
refused to see it as anything more than a clumsy dictatorship. The only way
that the left could reject the USSR was by overlooking its ideology and
treating it as another backward Russian tyranny being needlessly provoked and
pushed around by Western Europe and the United States.
The rise of Islam, however, presented the Left with
another conundrum it could not handle.
Communism was…a
red virus floating around the world, embedding its ideas into organizations and
using those organizations to take over nations.
Islam is even
more untethered than Communism, loosely originating from powerful oil nations,
but able to spring up anywhere in the world. Its proponents have even less use
for the nation state than the Communists. What they want is a Caliphate ruled
under Islamic law, a single unit of human organization extending across
nations, regions and eventually the world.
The Left, instead of confronting Islam as a rival
ideology, has preferred to stick with the devils it knows, imperialists and the
running dogs of capitalists. Greenfield notes:
The left is
incapable of engaging with Islamism as an ideology, instead it reduces the
conflict to a struggle between colonial and anti-colonial forces, showing once
again that the left’s worldview is usually at least fifty years out of date.
Fifty years out of date, or fourteen centuries?
Their response
to the Clash of Civilizations has been to include Islamists in the global
rainbow coalition of minorities, gays and gender theorists, indigent third
world farmers, transsexuals, artists and poets, sex workers and terrorists;
without considering what the Islamists were or how they would fit into this
charmed circle.
Here is another take on just how clueless the Left is about
its competitor for power.
Project a hypothetical triumph of Islam over the world, and
how its itinerant ally, the Left, would be treated. Not very well. Consider the Left's global rainbow
coalition of "minorities, gays and gender theorists, indigent third world
farmers, transsexuals, artists and poets, and sex workers." Islam,
committed to doctrinal purity and eager to cleanse the world in literal
conformance with that doctrine, would act to extinguish every member of that rainbow
coalition, including those not mentioned by Greenfield: feminists, gun-owners, free-speech advocates,
cartoonists who offend Islam, atheists, agnostics, apostates, followers of
other religions, libertarians, anti-government advocates, Constitutionalists,
First Amendment champions, and so on. Rightly or not, they'd all be lumped
together in Islam's holding pen until they can be prosecuted, tried and walked
to the chopping block or gallows. Leaving the Left what?
Nothing,
not a single victim of capitalism or colonialism. The Left will wonder what happened
to its dialectical materialism, or claim that these are not the progressive
forces it had predicted would pacify the world and leave it warless and in
peaceful harmony. They might complain, if they dared to, that a gatecrasher
hijacked their future. The more perceptive Leftists might then grasp just what Islam
meant when it claimed it was just a "religion of peace." They would understand
that it won't be a world in which they'd be expected to pray five times a day
to godless icons of Marx, Lenin, Engels, Mao, and Stalin, but instead to Allah and
Mohammad.
They
would understand that Islam isn't interested in peacefully coexisting with
other faiths and ideologies, "interfaith dialogue" to the contrary
notwithstanding. They would grasp that Islam is as totalitarian as anything conceived
by George Orwell and would play no favorites, not even with loyal Party
members.
All
they would see would be piles of victims of Islam, not of capitalism or of
colonialism. The Left acts now as the janissaries
of Islam, as ideologues and Sturmabteilung
of another totalitarian system, for the moment tolerated and drafted into Islam's
cause to swell the numbers of Islam's brigades and to handle the rough stuff in
protests and demonstrations and clashes with the targets of the day. And when Islam's
battles are won, the Left will act surprised when the executioners knock on their
door and escort its members to killing fields that resemble Pol Pot's and to camps
modeled on Auschwitz. They would be slaughtered by the bushel in the name of Allah,
because they worshipped false gods or no gods and proposed a godless global government.
The
humbler and more cowardly of them will submit to Islam. All others would be terminated.
Some of their women and pretty boys would
be whisked away to stock the numerous new harems that would be established, and
which would not be limited to the palaces of Saudi Arabia and Dubai and Qatar
and Cairo. They would pop up in New York City and Peoria and Buenos Aires and
London and Vienna and San Francisco. Name your city or town.
That
would be the character of the world under a global caliphate. The Left would
find itself in the inconvenient and embarrassing position of the garage
mechanic, George Wilson, in F. Scott Fitzgerald's The Great Gatsby. In it, Wilson is told that it was Jay Gatsby who
struck his wife in a hit-and-run outside his garage, not his airhead paramour,
Daisy Buchanan. So Gatsby catches the mechanic's bullets. Wilson then shoots
himself. Daisy gets off scot-free. While the literati may treat Daisy as a
useless "ornament" of capitalism, in fact, Daisy is Islam.
Gatsby
was F. Scott Fitzgerald's conception of unregulated capitalism, married somehow
to gangsters and crime, while Wilson's grungy garage was symbolic of the
underside of capitalism. Poor, exploited, put-upon George. But it was clueless
Daisy Buchanan who killed the woman. Leftist literati may understand Fitzgerald's
novel, but their ideological muchachos
do not.
Intellectually
honest Leftists will follow George Wilson's example. Less honest ones will
adapt.
Greenfield
concludes his masterly column thus:
The left dwells
in an intellectual bubble of its own making. It transforms that bubble into an
elaborate place, furnishing the space until it resembles a miniature world, but
a bubble is not a world, it can only ever be a bubble. Trapped inside the
bubble, the left cannot realize that the world is going backward, not forward,
that the 21st century is really the 7th century and that the future is the
past.
The Islamists
understand this quite well. The left cannot.
I think
Greenfield gives the Left too much credit for being clueless. I think his is a
misplaced generosity. I am convinced that the Left's ignorance of the true
nature of Islam is a front refined and tailored over recent decades, ever since
Islam and jihad began making
headlines, disguising something much more insidious. Down deep, in the remotest,
darkest corner of the soul of every Leftist, collectivist, statist, and
community organizer, is a seething glop of malice for freedom which he wishes
to exterminate, come what may, never mind how, and don’t ask him about it if
you don't want to see him froth at the mouth and threaten you with physical
violence. If the extermination is performed by Barack Obama, Hillary Clinton,
Valerie Jarrett, or Cass Sunstein, or any other exponent of totalitarianism, it
won’t matter to him, just as long as the murder is committed.
And
if it's performed by Islam, so be it. He will be content, even if it means he
will need to buy himself a prayer rug or pay jizya from his paltry income and show up at Islamic rallies as a
loyal infidel. All else – the protests, the books, the lectures, the posters –
is guff and practiced posturing to him. He works to create the image of a
champion of the underdogs, whoever and wherever they might be, when, in truth, he
would just rather shoot the mangy mutts.
And
what is the root of that seething glop of malice? An unquenchable, malevolent
envy of every individual who has ever achieved independence and happiness without
the Leftist's assistance or advice or guidance, an envy of the incalculable wealth
produced by what little capitalism has been permitted to exist in any given
nation's mixed economy or welfare state. This envy is coupled with an intimate
but repressed knowledge and certitude that the kind of ideal communist or
socialist state envisioned by him can produce nothing but poverty, misery, a
state of stagnation sustained by force and deception and lies, and the
suffocation of the able and the brightest.
Of
individuals better than he. All tyrants and would-be tyrants nurture an
inferiority complex. The only way they can compensate for it is the use of
force and as much power over people as they can muster.
Islam
would also produce that kind of existence, and the Left must know it, if only
secretly and not spoken about among themselves, and certainly not to the
gullible hoi polloi, in another kind
of "gentleman's agreement." The Left's ideology and Islam's ideology
are compatible in practice, differing only in details and object.
After
all, what should it matter to the Left to whose ideology the hoi polloi swear an extorted obsequious obedience?
Barack Obama's, or Mohammad Morsi's?
The
Leftist won't care which, just as long as they concede defeat and subservience to
the State or to the Caliphate.
"What the Left
Does not Understand About Islam" (February 15th), of the
cluelessness of the Left vis-à-vis Islam. The Left, he writes, is naïve about its
rival ideology, and ideologically will always remain naïve. The Left, he
writes, has never been able to think outside of the cardboard box it has built
for itself.
The left has
never adapted to the transition from nationalistic wars to ideological wars. It
took the left a while to grasp that the Nazis were a fundamentally different
foe than [sic] the Kaiser and that
pretending that World War 2 was another war for the benefit of colonialists and
arms dealers was the behavior of deluded lunatics. And yet much of the left
insisted on approaching the war in just that fashion, and had Hitler not
attacked Stalin, it might have remained stuck there.
From my own observations, what the Left refused to
acknowledge was that it was Hitler's Nazi Germany, Imperial Japan, and Soviet
Russia that behaved like unrepentant imperialists and colonialists, invading
and conquering other nations for all the loot they could lay hands on. It was
the consistent kneejerk evasion of that fact which demoted the Left from a
noisy avante- garde to a commune of deluded lunatics. Greenfield goes on to remark:
The Cold War was
even worse. The left never came to terms with Communism. From the Moscow Trials
to the fall of the Berlin Wall, the moderate left slowly disavowed the USSR but
refused to see it as anything more than a clumsy dictatorship. The only way
that the left could reject the USSR was by overlooking its ideology and
treating it as another backward Russian tyranny being needlessly provoked and
pushed around by Western Europe and the United States.
The rise of Islam, however, presented the Left with
another conundrum it could not handle.
Communism was…a
red virus floating around the world, embedding its ideas into organizations and
using those organizations to take over nations.
Islam is even
more untethered than Communism, loosely originating from powerful oil nations,
but able to spring up anywhere in the world. Its proponents have even less use
for the nation state than the Communists. What they want is a Caliphate ruled
under Islamic law, a single unit of human organization extending across
nations, regions and eventually the world.
The Left, instead of confronting Islam as a rival
ideology, has preferred to stick with the devils it knows, imperialists and the
running dogs of capitalists. Greenfield notes:
The left is
incapable of engaging with Islamism as an ideology, instead it reduces the
conflict to a struggle between colonial and anti-colonial forces, showing once
again that the left’s worldview is usually at least fifty years out of date.
Fifty years out of date, or fourteen centuries?
Their response
to the Clash of Civilizations has been to include Islamists in the global
rainbow coalition of minorities, gays and gender theorists, indigent third
world farmers, transsexuals, artists and poets, sex workers and terrorists;
without considering what the Islamists were or how they would fit into this
charmed circle.
Here is another take on just how clueless the Left is about
its competitor for power.
Project a hypothetical triumph of Islam over the world, and
how its itinerant ally, the Left, would be treated. Not very well. Consider the Left's global rainbow
coalition of "minorities, gays and gender theorists, indigent third world
farmers, transsexuals, artists and poets, and sex workers." Islam,
committed to doctrinal purity and eager to cleanse the world in literal
conformance with that doctrine, would act to extinguish every member of that rainbow
coalition, including those not mentioned by Greenfield: feminists, gun-owners, free-speech advocates,
cartoonists who offend Islam, atheists, agnostics, apostates, followers of
other religions, libertarians, anti-government advocates, Constitutionalists,
First Amendment champions, and so on. Rightly or not, they'd all be lumped
together in Islam's holding pen until they can be prosecuted, tried and walked
to the chopping block or gallows. Leaving the Left what?
Nothing,
not a single victim of capitalism or colonialism. The Left will wonder what happened
to its dialectical materialism, or claim that these are not the progressive
forces it had predicted would pacify the world and leave it warless and in
peaceful harmony. They might complain, if they dared to, that a gatecrasher
hijacked their future. The more perceptive Leftists might then grasp just what Islam
meant when it claimed it was just a "religion of peace." They would understand
that it won't be a world in which they'd be expected to pray five times a day
to godless icons of Marx, Lenin, Engels, Mao, and Stalin, but instead to Allah and
Mohammad.
They
would understand that Islam isn't interested in peacefully coexisting with
other faiths and ideologies, "interfaith dialogue" to the contrary
notwithstanding. They would grasp that Islam is as totalitarian as anything conceived
by George Orwell and would play no favorites, not even with loyal Party
members.
All
they would see would be piles of victims of Islam, not of capitalism or of
colonialism. The Left acts now as the janissaries
of Islam, as ideologues and Sturmabteilung
of another totalitarian system, for the moment tolerated and drafted into Islam's
cause to swell the numbers of Islam's brigades and to handle the rough stuff in
protests and demonstrations and clashes with the targets of the day. And when Islam's
battles are won, the Left will act surprised when the executioners knock on their
door and escort its members to killing fields that resemble Pol Pot's and to camps
modeled on Auschwitz. They would be slaughtered by the bushel in the name of Allah,
because they worshipped false gods or no gods and proposed a godless global government.
The
humbler and more cowardly of them will submit to Islam. All others would be terminated.
Some of their women and pretty boys would
be whisked away to stock the numerous new harems that would be established, and
which would not be limited to the palaces of Saudi Arabia and Dubai and Qatar
and Cairo. They would pop up in New York City and Peoria and Buenos Aires and
London and Vienna and San Francisco. Name your city or town.
That
would be the character of the world under a global caliphate. The Left would
find itself in the inconvenient and embarrassing position of the garage
mechanic, George Wilson, in F. Scott Fitzgerald's The Great Gatsby. In it, Wilson is told that it was Jay Gatsby who
struck his wife in a hit-and-run outside his garage, not his airhead paramour,
Daisy Buchanan. So Gatsby catches the mechanic's bullets. Wilson then shoots
himself. Daisy gets off scot-free. While the literati may treat Daisy as a
useless "ornament" of capitalism, in fact, Daisy is Islam.
Gatsby
was F. Scott Fitzgerald's conception of unregulated capitalism, married somehow
to gangsters and crime, while Wilson's grungy garage was symbolic of the
underside of capitalism. Poor, exploited, put-upon George. But it was clueless
Daisy Buchanan who killed the woman. Leftist literati may understand Fitzgerald's
novel, but their ideological muchachos
do not.
Intellectually
honest Leftists will follow George Wilson's example. Less honest ones will
adapt.
Greenfield
concludes his masterly column thus:
The left dwells
in an intellectual bubble of its own making. It transforms that bubble into an
elaborate place, furnishing the space until it resembles a miniature world, but
a bubble is not a world, it can only ever be a bubble. Trapped inside the
bubble, the left cannot realize that the world is going backward, not forward,
that the 21st century is really the 7th century and that the future is the
past.
The Islamists
understand this quite well. The left cannot.
I think
Greenfield gives the Left too much credit for being clueless. I think his is a
misplaced generosity. I am convinced that the Left's ignorance of the true
nature of Islam is a front refined and tailored over recent decades, ever since
Islam and jihad began making
headlines, disguising something much more insidious. Down deep, in the remotest,
darkest corner of the soul of every Leftist, collectivist, statist, and
community organizer, is a seething glop of malice for freedom which he wishes
to exterminate, come what may, never mind how, and don’t ask him about it if
you don't want to see him froth at the mouth and threaten you with physical
violence. If the extermination is performed by Barack Obama, Hillary Clinton,
Valerie Jarrett, or Cass Sunstein, or any other exponent of totalitarianism, it
won’t matter to him, just as long as the murder is committed.
And
if it's performed by Islam, so be it. He will be content, even if it means he
will need to buy himself a prayer rug or pay jizya from his paltry income and show up at Islamic rallies as a
loyal infidel. All else – the protests, the books, the lectures, the posters –
is guff and practiced posturing to him. He works to create the image of a
champion of the underdogs, whoever and wherever they might be, when, in truth, he
would just rather shoot the mangy mutts.
And
what is the root of that seething glop of malice? An unquenchable, malevolent
envy of every individual who has ever achieved independence and happiness without
the Leftist's assistance or advice or guidance, an envy of the incalculable wealth
produced by what little capitalism has been permitted to exist in any given
nation's mixed economy or welfare state. This envy is coupled with an intimate
but repressed knowledge and certitude that the kind of ideal communist or
socialist state envisioned by him can produce nothing but poverty, misery, a
state of stagnation sustained by force and deception and lies, and the
suffocation of the able and the brightest.
Of
individuals better than he. All tyrants and would-be tyrants nurture an
inferiority complex. The only way they can compensate for it is the use of
force and as much power over people as they can muster.
Islam
would also produce that kind of existence, and the Left must know it, if only
secretly and not spoken about among themselves, and certainly not to the
gullible hoi polloi, in another kind
of "gentleman's agreement." The Left's ideology and Islam's ideology
are compatible in practice, differing only in details and object.
After
all, what should it matter to the Left to whose ideology the hoi polloi swear an extorted obsequious obedience?
Barack Obama's, or Mohammad Morsi's?
The
Leftist won't care which, just as long as they concede defeat and subservience to
the State or to the Caliphate.
February 13, 2013
House of Cards: An American "Macbeth"
Power
tends to corrupt, and absolute power corrupts absolutely. Great men are almost
always bad men.
– Lord Acton
to Bishop Creighton, 1887
Francis
"Frank" Underwood is absolutely corrupted, and isn't a "great
man," except perhaps in the eyes of lesser
men, no less corrupted but out-maneuvered by Underwood in the
give-and-take-and-extortion business of Washington D.C. They pay him the
respect and deference he expects of them, because they lost to him in the
ruthless, cannibalistic pursuit of power that makes the slaughter of the French
knights at Agincourt look like a Kennedy clan game of touch football. That comparison
is of Kenneth Branagh's
1989 version of Henry V, not the
Olivier.
Who
is Frank (or Francis) Underwood? He is the leading protagonist of Netflix's
feature televised series, "House
of Cards," which debuted earlier this month. Frank Underwood is the
majority whip in the House of Representatives, shilling for handouts and
preferential treatment for his South Carolina district. A protagonist is a
leading character in a story who moves the story along by his actions. He could
be a hero or a villain. Underwood, played by Kevin Spacey, is a villain. Throughout
the series, he makes no apology for it. Quite the opposite. He boasts of it.
In
"House of Cards," there are no heroes. Only villains of various
shades of villainy, from gray to the blackest of blacks, fulfilling politically
correct requisites on diversity, covering all the affirmative action mandates
in gender, race, ethnic origin, and religion. "House of Cards" is an
equal opportunity employer in its portrayal of corruption. In that respect, the
series is very realistic, a reflection of "the way things are," in
the spirit of droll naturalism.
It
is even more cynical than the 1962 film version of
Allen Drury's Advise and Consent,
which portrays the sordid lengths to which politicians will go to defeat a
nominee for Secretary of State (played by Henry Fonda as Robert Leffingwell, a
left-winger proposing a treaty with the Soviets), in which the villains are
"right-wingers" who find dirt on a Senator whose confirmation vote is
critical.
"House
of Cards" is an American knock-off of a hit British
BBC trilogy that ran between 1990 and 1995. It is the title of the first of
that series, followed after critical acclaim and popular demand by "To
Play the King" and "The Final Cut." It follows the general plot line of the
British trilogy, adapted for American audiences and issues. Season One of
"House of Cards," in thirteen episodes, follows that plot line so
closely, even in numerous scenes, that it's as though Spacey, his co-producers,
writers, and directors laid a blank transparency over the trilogy and used a
Magic Marker to write in where things should be changed, tweaked, and wrinkled.
Plot
spoilers follow, so, legit cavete.
"House
of Cards" is one of the most educational TV series to come along in a long
time, posing as fiction, yet still instructive about how much of a giant whorehouse
Washington D.C. is, not only in its politics, but in journalism and personal
ethics. As knock-offs go, it's very well done, although Spacey frequently interrupts
scenes and conversations with Shakespearean "asides" to the viewers. Underwood is a perfect name of what you would find beneath rotted wood, maggots,
so I don't think the name is accidental. Likely, neither is the name of his
chief aide, Doug Stamper, played by Michael Kelly (the surname is a leftover
from the British series). Stamper puts out fires and crises with extortion and
blackmail by prospecting for and cultivating dirt on Underwood's enemies, with
a little bribery on the side.
In
the beginning of the series, Underwood plots to regain his nomination as
Secretary of State, after a newly elected president, a very hollow man, reneges
on his promise to nominate Underwood, and nominates someone else. Underwood
contrives to get the new nominee withdrawn and a Hillary Clinton clone substituted,
and then he's off and running to fresh new conspiracies.
Incredibly,
all the villains are Democrats. No Republican has put in an appearance yet,
although that might change in Season Two. Republicans are mentioned as the
opposition, although, to tell the truth, and to judge by the behavior and
record of the Republicans, the series could just as well be a portrayal of their political means and ends. Look how
they keep an arm's length from the Tea Party and seasoned politicians (e.g.,
Allen West) who hold Tea Party convictions. Not to mention their flip-flopping
on issues such as the budget, military spending, and immigration.
The
story is compelling because it realistically portrays the sprawling Washington whorehouse.
The most pathetic character is the vice
president, based vaguely on Vice President Joe Biden, whose biggest complaint
was that the president didn't give him one of the pens used to sign an
education bill, engineered by Spacey, souvenir pens given to Spacey and a
couple of kids in a scene reminiscent of Obama signing an executive order for
gun control or Obamacare.
Overall,
the sleaze dramatized in "House of Cards" is so well done you half expect
it to leave crud or mold on your screen.
The
British series debuted on the expiration of Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher's
tenure. It's claimed that it helped to secure John Major the election, because
"House of Cards" was broadcast days before an election. Based on the novel by Michael Dobbs, Major said of it
that it had done for his triumph "what Dracula did for baby-sitting."
The British series was meant to repudiate the Tories
and conservatism, because Francis Urqhart (played with bone-chilling
correctness by Ian Richardson), the protagonist and aside-maker of that series,
is a Tory Conservative more coldly ruthless and amoral than is Underwood in his
smug, cynical, and contemptuous rancidness.
But
one must wonder what else could be the intention of the American version but to
repudiate the Democrats.
The
difference here is that Underwood is a Democrat who is manipulating people and
things to expand or preserve government controls in education, development, the
environment, and so on, not because he sincerely believes in or values these
things, but because they're stepping stones to power. His wife, Claire, runs her
of charity, CWI, which caters to the poor in Africa and is always politicking
for donor support. Her campaign for money becomes enmeshed in Underwood's
schemes.
Actress Robin Wright, who plays Claire, remarked that the character is
"Lady Macbeth to
Underwood's Macbeth." As a couple who tolerate each other's infidelities,
and who regard their marriage as a kind of non-aggression pact and alliance in
pursuit of power, they reminded me most of Bill and Hillary Clinton. For all I
know, Frank and Claire Underwood were
modeled on the Clintons, another Macbethian couple. There's nothing in the
story that indicates otherwise. (Except that Robin Wright's Claire is a
knock-out and less of a windbag than is Hillary.)
It
even features a doppelganger of the British female journalist who's angling for
power and gets herself in cahoots with Underwood. Zoe Barnes is a pushy,
ambitious, obnoxious little vixen who also becomes Underwood's sharp-tongued
mistress. In the first of the British series, the journalist, Mattie, a
possible thorn in Urqhart's side, is murdered by him when he throws her off the
roof garden of Parliament, even though she professes her love for him and tries
to reassure him of her loyalty.
What
Season Two has in store for Zoe Barnes remains to be seen. Underwood has personally murdered a
conflicted Representative, Peter Russo of Pennsylvania, who was a loose cannon
in Spacey's plans. He murders him as coldly as he killed an injured dog in the
first episode, ostensively to put it out of its misery, but also because he seems
to enjoy killing as an expression of his power. As with a character from the
British series, Russo's drug and drinking problems become a threat to
Underwood. Season One's last episode has Zoe Barnes suddenly realizing that Spacey
and his Stamper fixer-aide might have been behind a lot of the nasty stuff.
At
this point, I think the American version of HOC will do to the Democrats what it's
alleged the British series did to the Tories. To date, all the protagonists in
it are progressive Democrats pushing welfare state, environmental, and fascist
economic programs (business/government development partnerships). And they're
all pragmatic, compromising, malleable villains, if not conspirators against
the president or other politicos.
This
is how American TV series and movies usually smear the Republicans or anyone
else who opposes the Democratic agenda or Progressivism. Since 9/11, Hollywood
has churned out over a dozen anti-American movies. Usually the uncaring, cruel,
and nasty villains are Republicans. So, if Season Two of the series continues
(it's "in development"), and remains an adumbrated replicant of the
British series, the Democrats will be painted in blacker terms than anyone
could ever have imagined. No "right-wing" weblog or newspaper or
magazine could do a more thorough job of it than has "House of
Cards."
And
unless the series departs from the British model, there is a question of how another
thirteen episodes of it can be stretched out to the climax. The British series
ends (in "The Final Cut") with a triumphant Urqhart riding to
Buckingham Palace as the new Prime Minister. He has forced the King to abdicate,
and has vanquished all his enemies, in the Party and out of it. And he doesn't
look in the least troubled by his crimes, which were committed wholesale.
So,
as a prediction, it's likely that Frank Underwood will manipulate his way the
White House at the end of the American version. He is a consummate manipulator
and string-puller. Please excuse the speculation. It can't be helped. Democrats
are like that. Look at President Barack Obama, and Bill Clinton. Their
political and personal careers could be dramatized just as well as Frank
Underwood's, with the focus on the darker chapters of their rise to power.
Which means everything about them.
The
only "anti-capitalist" elements in the American version are Claire
Underwood's foundation, "Clean Water Initiative (CWI), a billionaire who somehow
owns a lot of nuclear power plants, and some natural gas conglomerate, the
latter two entities intimately tied to the president and to the plot and the
competition for government favors. But I suppose that if you were going to
indict the Democrats, you would need a couple of "private" interests
lobbying for those favors (a la Orren Boyle's Associated Steel Company
in Atlas Shrugged). The Republicans
could also be indicted for the same practice. But in Spacey's "House of
Cards," all stops are pulled and the indictment is merciless.
However,
if the series does take a noticeable turn away from the British model,
it could only mean that the producers were lectured to or warned by the White
House and the DNC and other parties to "cool it," and find some other
villains to pick on.
I
have never liked Kevin Spacey as an actor. In his past hits, such as American Beauty (1999) and L.A. Confidential (1997), his cynical,
sneering mien was less developed but no less repellant than it is in
"House of Cards." It never goes away, just as the malevolent
masculinity of Robert Mitchum never left him even when he played good guys (and
he perfected that attribute as the menacing, nihilist villain Max Cady in Cape Fear, 1962). But, here is the
paradox: Spacey is a Hollywood liberal. He is a close friend of Bill Clinton,
once calling him "one of the shining lights of the political
process." He is friends with Hugo Chavez, the Marxist Venezuelan dictator.
According to Wikipedia, he has contributed over $42,000 to Democratic
candidates and committees.
So,
why has he produced a series that damns the Democrats, and, by implication, the
Progressive agenda to turn the U.S. into a welfare state and the government
into a "soft" fascist régime? If Netflix is right and the series
becomes a hit, the Democrats may become a permanent dart board for anyone who
doubts the propriety of the "democratic" (read "populist"
or "statist") process. In 2010, Spacey said that broadcasters should
carry "legitimate" political ads
for free during election periods. Who would decide which ads are
"legitimate" and which or not, he does not say. We already have a
Federal Election Committee that does that. Spacey was asked by Wolf Blitzer
about his predilection for political movies:
Emmy award-winning actor Kevin Spacey, star of the new film Casino Jack, says he blames television
networks “to some degree” for lobbyist influence on the political process. He
says television networks should run legitimate political ads "for
free" as a public service.
“Well, I think you have to separate the idea of that what lobbyists can do
is be an informational conduit for Congressman and Senators to understand
specific bills and specific issues in other countries but at the same time, I
think that there is no doubt that the amount of influence and power and money
dampens the political process. I think it discourages people from public
office,” he told CNSNews.com at the E Street Cinema before the Washington
screening of the film sponsored by the Creative Coalition.
In
a Hollywood Reporter interview, he said:
Spacey: "The
lobbying industry and what it has done in terms of Washington politics, and Casino Jack (and Recount about the Gore-Bush issue in the Florida vote count of
2000)…I'm very driven by the opportunity to examine current situations and
current things happening in the world…. I think these are very important
subjects for us to understand and see how we got where we are and if we can
make it better than it is…."
Interviewer: "And reality is almost as outrageous as
art, you can't even make this stuff up half the time."
Spacey: "You're right. I would go back to the
hotel in Baltimore where we were shooting the first season, and I'd watch the
news at night, this last election cycle… and I'd think, our story lines are not
that crazy."
Crazy
as a fox? Or just plain crazy? We won't know the answer to this paradox until
Season Two of "House of Cards" is aired (or live-streamed on
computers). After all, Spacey, Fincher and the scriptwriters could have easily
remained more faithful to the purpose of the British version, which was to
repudiate Thatcher and her policies, and instead targeted the Republicans for
political and dramatic excoriation. It wouldn't have taken much in the script
or in the characterizations.
If
Spacey is accusing the lobbying industry of being venal, conspiratorial, and
corrupting, he should know that it takes two to tango. If Congressmen and
Cabinet heads and bureaucrats weren't so venal, conspiratorial, and
corruptible, he would have no complaint.
He
could go back to the live stage and give Ian Richardson a run for his money in Macbeth or Richard the Third.
Otherwise,
go figure.
February 8, 2013
Al Gore, Al Jazeera, and the Gray Lady
The
New York Times isn't called The Gray Lady for nothing. It has entered its 162nd
year of publication. Despite its falling daily circulation that hovers
tenuously around one million, it is still regarded as the nation's "newspaper
of record." It boasts a monthly tally of thirty million
"visitors" to its online version. "Visitors," however, does
not necessarily translate into "readers." Once the most widely read
paper in the nation, today it follows USA Today and The Wall Street Journal in
circulation.
In
the 19th century, it was largely a Republican paper, until it turned
"independent."
The
Times' record of reporting "all the news that's fit to print" is not
immaculate. Its offences are legion. Too often it was charged with fitting the
news to conform to the paper's growing partiality for collectivist ideologies.
Today, it is more or less notorious for it. Its crimes of commission include
the Walter Duranty
series of articles
in 1931 that omitted mention of the Soviet government's engineered campaign of
starvation in the Ukraine, which claimed millions of lives, but for which
Duranty received a Pulitzer Prize. In 2001, it was revealed that before, during
and even after World War II, the paper "minimized" reports of the
Nazi genocide
of Jews by briefly mentioning the atrocities in stories buried deep inside its
pages.
There
were the Pentagon Papers in 1971, which revealed U.S. military strategy in
Vietnam, a war it opposed vociferously in tune with the anti-war and
anti-America mantra of the Left. There was Jayson Blair, a reporter who was
caught plagiarizing other newspapers and falsifying facts and whom the Times
had hired to prove its commitment to affirmative action. The paper reproduced
exclusively the prosecution's perspective in the Duke University/lacrosse rape
case.
Finally,
the paper has adopted an anti-Israel, pro-Palestinian policy that colors every
bit of its news reportage, and not just in its editorializing.
More
recently, it has become a kind of publicist for the anti-wealth and
anti-freedom complaints of the likes of Occupy Wall Street, running an article
that condemned the Constitution, whose writer, Georgetown University
constitutional law professor Louis Michael Seidman,
called the document "archaic" and "idiosyncratic" and said contained
"downright evil provisions." As though that weren't enough, it has
applauded the purchase of Al Gore's failed propaganda outlet, Current TV, by Al
Jazeera, the Muslim Brotherhood's
propaganda outlet.
The
Times acted as point-man in a libel case,
New York Times Co. vs. Sullivan, that
involved the number of times Martin Luther King, Jr. had been arrested in
Alabama by the state police as reported by the Times, and by implication, it
was charged with defaming the character of Montgomery police supervisor L.B.
Sullivan. The case went to the Supreme Court in 1964. Citing the First and
Fourteenth Amendments, the Court held that the Times could not be sued for
defamation of character because no malice was intended.
Factual error,
content defamatory of official reputation, or both, are insufficient to warrant
an award of damages for false statements unless "actual malice" --
knowledge that statements are false or in reckless disregard of the truth -- is
alleged and proved….
In
short, the Court, in overturning an Alabama Supreme Court finding, ruled that
malice could not be proven because no one can get inside a reporter's head to
prove that he had malicious intent.
The evidence was
constitutionally insufficient to support the judgment for respondent, since it
failed to support a finding that the statements were made with actual malice or
that they related to respondent.
Let's
try to get inside the Times' collective policy head and try to grasp why its
policymakers would, on one hand, condone a condemnation of the Constitution, and
on the other, applaud the establishment of an Islamist
propaganda medium in this country. Let us try to see what "malicious
intent" looks like.
In
the Constitution article, the Times implicitly and in agreement repudiates the
Supreme Court's Sullivan decision that the paper is protected by the First
Amendment, which its author disputes has anything to do with freedom of speech
and of the press. The Times ran the article without a proviso that it did not
necessarily agree with Seidman's statements.
In
his December 30th article, "Let's Give Up on the Constitution,"
Seidman provides us with a fantasy scenario linked to the "fiscal
cliff" gridlock in Congress and serves as the premise of his whole
article:
Imagine that after careful study a government official — say, the president
or one of the party leaders in Congress — reaches a considered judgment that a
particular course of action is best for the country. Suddenly, someone bursts
into the room with new information: a group of white propertied men who have
been dead for two centuries, knew nothing of our present situation, acted
illegally under existing law and thought it was fine to own slaves might have
disagreed with this course of action. Is it even remotely rational that the
official should change his or her mind because of this divination?
This
is hypothesizing one would find in supermarket tabloids. All it lacks are
Photoshopped pictures of the Founders hassling Obama in the Oval Office. It's
time travel without the CGI.
Concerned
that his fantasy might be taken out of context, Seidman attempts to provide a
context.
Constitutional disobedience may seem radical, but it is as old as the
Republic. In fact, the Constitution itself was born of constitutional
disobedience. When George Washington and the other framers went to Philadelphia
in 1787, they were instructed to suggest amendments to the Articles of
Confederation, which would have had to be ratified by the legislatures of all
13 states. Instead, in violation of their mandate, they abandoned the Articles,
wrote a new Constitution and provided that it would take effect after
ratification by only nine states, and by conventions in those states rather
than the state legislatures.
Seidman
provides other contextless examples, as well, citing John Adams supporting the
Alien and Sedition Acts, Jefferson's notion that every constitution should
expire after a single generation, his Louisiana Purchase, and other instances
of presidents exceeding their constitutional authority, in addition to some
Supreme Court decisions he alleges go contrary to the Constitution.
In the face of this long history of disobedience, it is hard to take
seriously the claim by the Constitution’s defenders that we would be reduced to
a Hobbesian state of nature if we asserted our freedom from this ancient text.
Our sometimes flagrant disregard of the Constitution has not produced chaos or
totalitarianism; on the contrary, it has helped us to grow and prosper.
So,
because the Constitution was ignored, contradicted, or usurped in the past, we
may as well scrap it and begin anew, fabricating a "compact" that
answers the needs of our modern times. His reference to Thomas Hobbes, author
of Leviathan ,
a 17th century political tract that sanctions strong or authoritarian
central governments, is evidence of Seidman's superficial grasp of our current
situation. The federal government is assuredly on the road to a totalitarianism
of the Fascist/Marxist kind, and at present the bewildering forest of laws,
regulations, prohibitions, mandates, and powers has produced a chaos not easily
mastered even by the most knowledgeable statist or informed politician.
Seidman
then expresses a concern that by discarding the document that has so far
haltingly guaranteed certain liberties, we shouldn't see the negation of those
liberties:
This is not to say that we should disobey all constitutional commands.
Freedom of speech and religion, equal protection of the laws and protections
against governmental deprivation of life, liberty or property are important,
whether or not they are in the Constitution. We should continue to follow those
requirements out of respect, not obligation.
You
must wonder what Seidman imagines would protect freedom of speech, life,
liberty, and property if there were no Constitutional restraints on what a
government may or may not do. What "respect" have a succession of
administrations and Congresses shown for them even with the Constitution? When has the New York Times ever shown
"respect" for them? What dictator or tyrant has shown
"respect" for them in the absence of such a Constitution? Without a
codified set of defined liberties and enumerated powers that a government may
not exceed, none of these liberties could be guaranteed or save from obviation.
Seidman
begins to let his cat out of the bag.
And as we see now, the failure of the Congress and the White House to agree
has already destabilized the country. Countries like Britain and New Zealand
have systems of parliamentary supremacy and no written constitution, but are
held together by longstanding traditions, accepted modes of procedure and
engaged citizens. We, too, could draw on these resources.
So,
we should model ourselves after countries that are full-fledged welfare states
with no governmental restraints on what they can do for the "general
welfare"?
Seidman
endorses the linguistic analysis, subjectivist notion that the words in the
Constitution (as well as in the Declaration of Independence) have no relevance
to today's collectivist spirit and yearnings, that they can be stretched or
"interpreted" to mean anything anyone wishes them to mean, and that obedience is the highest virtue a
citizen can aspire to. After referring to the Constitution as a "poetic
piece of parchment," and cautioning that "No one can predict in detail what our system of government would look like
if we freed ourselves from the shackles of constitutional obligation," he
writes:
If we acknowledged what should be obvious — that much constitutional
language is broad enough to encompass an almost infinitely wide range of
positions — we might have a very different attitude about the obligation to obey. It would become
apparent that people who disagree with us about the Constitution are not
violating a sacred text or our core commitments. Instead, we are all invoking a
common vocabulary to express aspirations that, at the broadest level, everyone
can embrace. [Italics mine]
Words
have no absolute meanings, but obedience
is an absolute obligation not to be questioned. And it can be predicted what
our system of government would look like sans
the shackles of constitutional obligation: authoritarian, and too likely,
totalitarian. No checks and balances, no referenda, no debates, no discussions,
no escape, mercy at the whim of a tyrant, and fiat law that would produce a
chaos which a régime would answer with more controls and exact more stringent
obedience on the part of the enslaved. The end result would be firing squads
and concentration camps and a lottery of death.
After
all, pleads Seidman:
If we are not to abandon constitutionalism entirely, then we might at least
understand it as a place for discussion, a demand that we make a good-faith
effort to understand the views of others, rather than as a tool to force others
to give up their moral and political judgments.
How
does adherence to the Constitution "force others to give up their moral
and political judgments"? It doesn't, or shouldn't, force liberals,
leftists, fascists, and Marxists to give up their political judgments. What it
does – or should do – is prevent them
from forcing their judgments on the rest of us. The federal government,
however, has forcing their judgments
on the rest of us for well over a century. Freedom from "constitutional
bondage," concludes Seidman, would allow us to "give real freedom a
chance."
Whose
freedom? That of the statists, collectivists, and others who would be free to
lock everyone into a single barracks for indentured servants? All 20th
century tyrants have imposed dictatorial régimes as a means of granting
themselves the freedom to act.
Hello,
Mr. Seidman? Anybody home? Are you asking for an American version of Hitler's Enabling
Act of 1933? His was passed by the Reichstag in an opera house. I think the
John F. Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts would also be a perfect venue to
vote ourselves into a dictatorship. Don’t you agree? The New York Times
certainly would.
Let
us now turn to the Times' newly discovered TV station, Al Jazeera, which also
broadcasts "all the news that fits." Fits what?
Lest
anyone think that Al Gore doesn’t believe in free enterprise, Bloomberg
News has a shock in store for you:
The deal
highlights Gore’s makeover from career politician to successful businessman.
His take from the Current TV sale is many times the maximum net worth of $1.7
million he reported while running for president in 1999. Besides investing in
startups, Gore is on the board of Apple Inc., an adviser to Google Inc.,
according to his website biography, and a partner at Kleiner Perkins Caufield
& Byers. Gore’s holdings also include investments in Amazon.com Inc.,
EBay Inc. and Procter & Gamble Co. through his Generation Investment
Management LLP.
Most of Gore’s
investments are made through Generation Investment Management, which he
co-founded with former Goldman Sachs Group Inc. executive David Blood. The most
recent regulatory filing lists about $3.6 billion under management in 29
publicly traded companies. In addition, Generation Investment Management also
has stakes in private ventures such as Nest Labs, a company formed by Apple
Inc. alumni to create a thermostat that adapts to user behavior and saves
money. The fund also backed Elon Musk’s SolarCity Corp.
(SCTY), a developer of rooftop solar power systems that went public last
month.
In April, Gore’s
fund was part of $110 million in venture capital invested in Harvest Power
Inc., a closely held company that produces renewable energy from waste such as
food scraps.
Gore
can only strut as a "successful businessman" if the government
subsidizes these companies, or passes legislation forcing everyone else to
patronize them. So rich a man as Gore, in these times, can only
"profit" if he's a member of what Ayn Rand called an
"aristocracy of pull."
Forbes
notes further that Gore is also tax-savvy.
Regardless of
whether one lauds or criticizes Mr. Gore’s actions in the sale to Al Jazeera,
he is likely to pay U.S. taxes influenced in part by the fiscal cliff deal.
Current TV has $41.4 million in debt and preferred holders with first dibs on
$99.5 million, according to a 2008 regulatory filing. Current TV appears to be
an LLC, and that will help Mr. Gore enormously.
How will Mr. Gore and his compatriots do? Initially named INdTV Holdings,
the Current TV LLC was founded in 2002 by Mr. Gore and businessman Joel Hyatt.
They appear to be shrewd investors. The LLC should facilitate a single tax on
the deal, not the two taxes common to more established businesses. LLCs are tax
reporting entities but the members pay tax on their share.
If Mr. Gore and other members sell their interests, their own tax basis in
their interests will count. But whether Al Jazeera is buying assets from
Current TV or membership interests from Mr. Gore and others, this should be a
nice single-tax payday. Not every business seller is so lucky.
But,
what about Al Jazeera?
Al
Jazeera is a Qatar-funded
"private" news organization that is acknowledged to be the propaganda
vehicle for the Muslim Brotherhood.
Having gained little or no traction in finding carriage or distribution
in the U.S., it finally found a willing partner in Al Gore's insipid
enterprise, Current TV. He has sold it to Al Jazeera for a reported $500
million, and will profit from the sale to the tune of $71 million. Al Jazeera's
connections with the Muslim Brotherhood and terrorism bother him not. WND
reported, on announcement of the sale:
Al Jazeera this
week announced a plan to establish a new U.S. cable news channel, tentatively
call Al Jazeera America, utilizing the purchase of Current TV. The
Qatar-financed network is hoping to retain and even increase Current TV’s
distribution rights in more than 40 million homes to broadcast its own new
network.
Qatar, Saudi Arabia, and the U.A.E. are also major funders of terrorism, and
also of programs now installed in American public schools to persuade students
of the "benign" nature of totalitarian Islam. Gore failed to
brainwash the world with his An
Inconvenient Truth, although he was awarded a Nobel Peace Prize for his
failure, just as President Barack Obama was. But he found another way to skin
the cat.
Yusuf al-Qaradawi,
one of the top leaders of the Muslim Brotherhood, rose to fame in the Arab
world after Al Jazeera gave him his a major platform. Many regard Qaradawi as
the de facto spiritual leader of Egypt’s Muslim Brotherhood. Qaradawi achieved
star status because of his regular sermons and interviews on Al Jazeera.
Gore must know this. But the truth is inconvenient or irrelevant and he'd
rather not think about it.
Al Jazeera was
founded with financing from the emir of Qatar, Sheik Hamad bin Khalifa Al
Thani, who previously served as the network’s chairman. The network is still
financed largely from Qatar, where its headquarters are located. The current
chairman of Al Jazeera is Sheik Hamad bin Thamer Al Thani, the Qatari emir’s
cousin.
Keeping it in the family seems to be a theme shared by Al Jazeera and Current
TV. About Current TV, Bloomberg News reported that:
The network's
investors included funds controlled by Los Angeles billionaire Ron Bruce
Burkett and San Francisco money manager Richard Blum, according to the 2008
filing, when the company unsuccessfully sought to sell stock to the public.
Blum is married to U.S. Senator Dianne
Feinstein, a Democrat from San Francisco.
But,
back to Qatar.
The Qatar
Foundation International, or QFI, a nonprofit group financed by the government
of Qatar, last year gave Harlem’s Hamilton Heights, a K-5 public school, a
$250,000 grant to support the Arabic program for three years….
In addition to
the Harlem school, WND found that QFI just awarded “Curriculum Grants” to seven
U.S. schools and language organizations to “develop comprehensive and
innovative curricula and teaching materials to be used in any Arabic language
classroom.” The
schools include Bell High School, a Los Angeles public school, and Safford K-8
in Arizona’s Tucson Unified School District.
And, here's that family connection again:
QFI, based in
Washington, D.C., is the U.S. branch of the Qatar Foundation, founded in 1995
by Qatari ruling emir Sheik Hamad bin Khalifa Al Thani, the Al Jazeera founder.
Thani is still the group’s vice-chairman, while his wife, Sheikha Moza bint
Nasser, chairs the organization’s board.
Why would Qatar be funding Arabic language programs in American schools? Why,
to better enable students to read the Koran
and its companion texts in the original tongue. It's fairly common knowledge
among "Islamophobes" and other critics of Islam that what Islamic
spokesmen say publically in English is quite the opposite of what they say in
Arabic. This practice is called taqiyya
or Islamic double-speak. If an Islamic
supremacist publically offers Israel or Obama or the West an olive branch, in
private, behind doors closed to the MSM, it says it is offering a slave collar
to infidels and a beheading sword to Jews.
WND
reports further:
In January 2012,
the foundation launched the Research Center for Islamic Legislation and Ethics
under the guidance of Tariq Ramadan, who serves as the center’s director. Ramadan
is the grandson of the notorious founder of the Muslim Brotherhood, Hassan al
Banna. Ramadan was banned from the U.S. until 2010 when the Obama
administration issued him a visa to give a lecture at a New York school.
It isn't just the Brotherhood that is offering us slave collars and beheading
swords. It is our own President. And, don't wonder where former Secretary of
State Hillary Clinton got her news about what was happening around the world
and a clue about how to formulate her own dismal and failed policies. The New
York Post had this interesting tidbit
about the popularity of Al Jazeera in the administration:
Secretary of State Hillary Clinton told a Senate Foreign Relations
Committee last March that viewership of Al-Jazeera is going up in the US
“because it’s real news.”
“You may not agree with it, but you feel like you’re getting real news
around the clock instead of a million commercials and, you know, arguments
between talking heads and the kind of stuff that we do on our news, which, you
know, is not particularly informative to us, let alone foreigners,” Clinton
said.
The
New York Times practically drools over the prospect of an Islamic propaganda
machine "competing" with the MSM, although the MSM hasn’t done too
badly acting as Obama's de facto
Ministry of Truth. Only, it isn't a Brotherhood-connected propaganda machine.
It's just another news outlet that will help bring "truth" to the
American viewing public. Qatar is mentioned in its report, "Al Jazeera
English Finds an Audience" (January 31st, 2011), but no mention
of that oil fiefdom's links to funding terrorism. Praising Al Jazeera during
the protests in 2011 against President Hosni Mubarak,
it noted:
Al Jazeera
English, however, is indisputably unique. In recent days, the channel, an
offshoot of the main Arabic-language Al Jazeera, has gained attention for its
up-close, around-the-clock coverage of the protests in Cairo, Alexandria, sues,
and other cities in Egypt.
Al
Jazeera is "unique," without a doubt. It is the Brotherhood's
propaganda outlet. The Times, guilty itself of recasting "facts" to
fit its political proclivities and ignoring genuine facts that don't fit, can
no longer distinguish between news and propaganda, thus explaining why it would
applaud the debut of Al Jazeera in the U.S.
Mr.
Gore demonstrated just how good a businessman he is. He sold his pitiful
investment to an Islamic propaganda machine for more money than it was worth,
because it had "journalistic muscle" and the money – read oil money –
to compete with American news channels. In its January 2nd article
on the pending sale, "Al
Jazeera Seeks a U.S. Voice Where
Gore Failed," the Times wrote:
Al Jazeera, the
pan-Arab news giant, has long tried to convince Americans that it is a legitimate
news organization, not a parrot of Middle Eastern propaganda or something more
sinister. It just bought itself 40 million more chances to make its case.
Al Jazeera on
Wednesday announced a deal
to take over Current TV, the low-rated cable channel that was founded by Al
Gore, a former vice president, and his business partners seven years ago. Al
Jazeera plans to shut Current and start an English-language channel, which will
be available in more than 40 million homes, with newscasts emanating from both
New York and Doha, Qatar….
A decade ago, Al
Jazeera’s flagship Arabic-language channel was reviled by American politicians
for showing videotapes from Al Qaeda members and sympathizers. Now the news
operation is buying an American channel, having convinced Mr. Gore and the
other owners of Current that it has the journalistic muscle and the money to
compete head-to-head with CNN and other news channels in the United States.
Well,
there will be no more vilification of Herr Goebbels' – excuse me, Mr. Gore's –
money moxie, nor of Al Jazeera, because it will have achieved
"respectability" as a legitimate news outlet in the U.S.
Going forward,
the challenge will be persuading Americans to watch — an extremely tough
proposition given the crowded television marketplace and the stereotypes about
the channel that persist to this day. “There are still people who will not
watch it, who will say that it’s a ‘terrorist network,’ ” said Philip Seib, the
author of The Al Jazeera Effect. Al Jazeera has to override that by providing
quality news.”
It
will be a challenge. Americans are already
saddled with the MSM, which many no longer trust for objective news reporting,
and sense are heavily biased and serve as the government's journalistic poodle
on one hand and a pit bull on the other. The MSM are considered by many to be
the collective mouthpiece of too many collectivist agendas that will affect
their lives, wealth, standard of living, and future. They'd rather get their
news from Internet weblogs and live-stream Internet channels. Still, oblivious
to the trends, the New York Times plods on.
Al Jazeera,
which has bureaus in New York, Washington, Los Angeles, Miami and Chicago,
intends to open several more in other American cities. “There’s a major hole
right now that Al Jazeera can fill. And that is providing an alternative
viewpoint to domestic news, which is very parochial,” said Cathy Rasenberger, a
cable consultant who has worked with Al Jazeera on distribution issues in the
past. However, she warned, “there is a limited amount of interest in
international news in the United States.”
Nowhere
in this article, either, is there mention of Al Jazeera's terrorist
connections, no hint of the propaganda character of its Islamic origins and purposes,
no suggestion that Al Gore, an anti-wealth ex-politician and the Chicken Little
of global warming, is going to make a questionable, hypocritical, and national
security-violating bundle from the deal. Not a word of any of that is remarked on by
the New York Times.
The
New York Times has grown as maliciously senile and useless as the radicals and left-wing
demonstrators from the 1960's and 1970's who chanted and shouted during the Occupy
Wall Street demonstrations to show their "solidarity" with the new
generation of fascists and Marxists. It abandoned honest, objective journalism
decades ago.
Perhaps
it's time for it to consider voluntary retirement. It is no longer fit to read.
New York Times isn't called The Gray Lady for nothing. It has entered its 162nd
year of publication. Despite its falling daily circulation that hovers
tenuously around one million, it is still regarded as the nation's "newspaper
of record." It boasts a monthly tally of thirty million
"visitors" to its online version. "Visitors," however, does
not necessarily translate into "readers." Once the most widely read
paper in the nation, today it follows USA Today and The Wall Street Journal in
circulation.
In
the 19th century, it was largely a Republican paper, until it turned
"independent."
The
Times' record of reporting "all the news that's fit to print" is not
immaculate. Its offences are legion. Too often it was charged with fitting the
news to conform to the paper's growing partiality for collectivist ideologies.
Today, it is more or less notorious for it. Its crimes of commission include
the Walter Duranty
series of articles
in 1931 that omitted mention of the Soviet government's engineered campaign of
starvation in the Ukraine, which claimed millions of lives, but for which
Duranty received a Pulitzer Prize. In 2001, it was revealed that before, during
and even after World War II, the paper "minimized" reports of the
Nazi genocide
of Jews by briefly mentioning the atrocities in stories buried deep inside its
pages.
There
were the Pentagon Papers in 1971, which revealed U.S. military strategy in
Vietnam, a war it opposed vociferously in tune with the anti-war and
anti-America mantra of the Left. There was Jayson Blair, a reporter who was
caught plagiarizing other newspapers and falsifying facts and whom the Times
had hired to prove its commitment to affirmative action. The paper reproduced
exclusively the prosecution's perspective in the Duke University/lacrosse rape
case.
Finally,
the paper has adopted an anti-Israel, pro-Palestinian policy that colors every
bit of its news reportage, and not just in its editorializing.
More
recently, it has become a kind of publicist for the anti-wealth and
anti-freedom complaints of the likes of Occupy Wall Street, running an article
that condemned the Constitution, whose writer, Georgetown University
constitutional law professor Louis Michael Seidman,
called the document "archaic" and "idiosyncratic" and said contained
"downright evil provisions." As though that weren't enough, it has
applauded the purchase of Al Gore's failed propaganda outlet, Current TV, by Al
Jazeera, the Muslim Brotherhood's
propaganda outlet.
The
Times acted as point-man in a libel case,
New York Times Co. vs. Sullivan, that
involved the number of times Martin Luther King, Jr. had been arrested in
Alabama by the state police as reported by the Times, and by implication, it
was charged with defaming the character of Montgomery police supervisor L.B.
Sullivan. The case went to the Supreme Court in 1964. Citing the First and
Fourteenth Amendments, the Court held that the Times could not be sued for
defamation of character because no malice was intended.
Factual error,
content defamatory of official reputation, or both, are insufficient to warrant
an award of damages for false statements unless "actual malice" --
knowledge that statements are false or in reckless disregard of the truth -- is
alleged and proved….
In
short, the Court, in overturning an Alabama Supreme Court finding, ruled that
malice could not be proven because no one can get inside a reporter's head to
prove that he had malicious intent.
The evidence was
constitutionally insufficient to support the judgment for respondent, since it
failed to support a finding that the statements were made with actual malice or
that they related to respondent.
Let's
try to get inside the Times' collective policy head and try to grasp why its
policymakers would, on one hand, condone a condemnation of the Constitution, and
on the other, applaud the establishment of an Islamist
propaganda medium in this country. Let us try to see what "malicious
intent" looks like.
In
the Constitution article, the Times implicitly and in agreement repudiates the
Supreme Court's Sullivan decision that the paper is protected by the First
Amendment, which its author disputes has anything to do with freedom of speech
and of the press. The Times ran the article without a proviso that it did not
necessarily agree with Seidman's statements.
In
his December 30th article, "Let's Give Up on the Constitution,"
Seidman provides us with a fantasy scenario linked to the "fiscal
cliff" gridlock in Congress and serves as the premise of his whole
article:
Imagine that after careful study a government official — say, the president
or one of the party leaders in Congress — reaches a considered judgment that a
particular course of action is best for the country. Suddenly, someone bursts
into the room with new information: a group of white propertied men who have
been dead for two centuries, knew nothing of our present situation, acted
illegally under existing law and thought it was fine to own slaves might have
disagreed with this course of action. Is it even remotely rational that the
official should change his or her mind because of this divination?
This
is hypothesizing one would find in supermarket tabloids. All it lacks are
Photoshopped pictures of the Founders hassling Obama in the Oval Office. It's
time travel without the CGI.
Concerned
that his fantasy might be taken out of context, Seidman attempts to provide a
context.
Constitutional disobedience may seem radical, but it is as old as the
Republic. In fact, the Constitution itself was born of constitutional
disobedience. When George Washington and the other framers went to Philadelphia
in 1787, they were instructed to suggest amendments to the Articles of
Confederation, which would have had to be ratified by the legislatures of all
13 states. Instead, in violation of their mandate, they abandoned the Articles,
wrote a new Constitution and provided that it would take effect after
ratification by only nine states, and by conventions in those states rather
than the state legislatures.
Seidman
provides other contextless examples, as well, citing John Adams supporting the
Alien and Sedition Acts, Jefferson's notion that every constitution should
expire after a single generation, his Louisiana Purchase, and other instances
of presidents exceeding their constitutional authority, in addition to some
Supreme Court decisions he alleges go contrary to the Constitution.
In the face of this long history of disobedience, it is hard to take
seriously the claim by the Constitution’s defenders that we would be reduced to
a Hobbesian state of nature if we asserted our freedom from this ancient text.
Our sometimes flagrant disregard of the Constitution has not produced chaos or
totalitarianism; on the contrary, it has helped us to grow and prosper.
So,
because the Constitution was ignored, contradicted, or usurped in the past, we
may as well scrap it and begin anew, fabricating a "compact" that
answers the needs of our modern times. His reference to Thomas Hobbes, author
of Leviathan ,
a 17th century political tract that sanctions strong or authoritarian
central governments, is evidence of Seidman's superficial grasp of our current
situation. The federal government is assuredly on the road to a totalitarianism
of the Fascist/Marxist kind, and at present the bewildering forest of laws,
regulations, prohibitions, mandates, and powers has produced a chaos not easily
mastered even by the most knowledgeable statist or informed politician.
Seidman
then expresses a concern that by discarding the document that has so far
haltingly guaranteed certain liberties, we shouldn't see the negation of those
liberties:
This is not to say that we should disobey all constitutional commands.
Freedom of speech and religion, equal protection of the laws and protections
against governmental deprivation of life, liberty or property are important,
whether or not they are in the Constitution. We should continue to follow those
requirements out of respect, not obligation.
You
must wonder what Seidman imagines would protect freedom of speech, life,
liberty, and property if there were no Constitutional restraints on what a
government may or may not do. What "respect" have a succession of
administrations and Congresses shown for them even with the Constitution? When has the New York Times ever shown
"respect" for them? What dictator or tyrant has shown
"respect" for them in the absence of such a Constitution? Without a
codified set of defined liberties and enumerated powers that a government may
not exceed, none of these liberties could be guaranteed or save from obviation.
Seidman
begins to let his cat out of the bag.
And as we see now, the failure of the Congress and the White House to agree
has already destabilized the country. Countries like Britain and New Zealand
have systems of parliamentary supremacy and no written constitution, but are
held together by longstanding traditions, accepted modes of procedure and
engaged citizens. We, too, could draw on these resources.
So,
we should model ourselves after countries that are full-fledged welfare states
with no governmental restraints on what they can do for the "general
welfare"?
Seidman
endorses the linguistic analysis, subjectivist notion that the words in the
Constitution (as well as in the Declaration of Independence) have no relevance
to today's collectivist spirit and yearnings, that they can be stretched or
"interpreted" to mean anything anyone wishes them to mean, and that obedience is the highest virtue a
citizen can aspire to. After referring to the Constitution as a "poetic
piece of parchment," and cautioning that "No one can predict in detail what our system of government would look like
if we freed ourselves from the shackles of constitutional obligation," he
writes:
If we acknowledged what should be obvious — that much constitutional
language is broad enough to encompass an almost infinitely wide range of
positions — we might have a very different attitude about the obligation to obey. It would become
apparent that people who disagree with us about the Constitution are not
violating a sacred text or our core commitments. Instead, we are all invoking a
common vocabulary to express aspirations that, at the broadest level, everyone
can embrace. [Italics mine]
Words
have no absolute meanings, but obedience
is an absolute obligation not to be questioned. And it can be predicted what
our system of government would look like sans
the shackles of constitutional obligation: authoritarian, and too likely,
totalitarian. No checks and balances, no referenda, no debates, no discussions,
no escape, mercy at the whim of a tyrant, and fiat law that would produce a
chaos which a régime would answer with more controls and exact more stringent
obedience on the part of the enslaved. The end result would be firing squads
and concentration camps and a lottery of death.
After
all, pleads Seidman:
If we are not to abandon constitutionalism entirely, then we might at least
understand it as a place for discussion, a demand that we make a good-faith
effort to understand the views of others, rather than as a tool to force others
to give up their moral and political judgments.
How
does adherence to the Constitution "force others to give up their moral
and political judgments"? It doesn't, or shouldn't, force liberals,
leftists, fascists, and Marxists to give up their political judgments. What it
does – or should do – is prevent them
from forcing their judgments on the rest of us. The federal government,
however, has forcing their judgments
on the rest of us for well over a century. Freedom from "constitutional
bondage," concludes Seidman, would allow us to "give real freedom a
chance."
Whose
freedom? That of the statists, collectivists, and others who would be free to
lock everyone into a single barracks for indentured servants? All 20th
century tyrants have imposed dictatorial régimes as a means of granting
themselves the freedom to act.
Hello,
Mr. Seidman? Anybody home? Are you asking for an American version of Hitler's Enabling
Act of 1933? His was passed by the Reichstag in an opera house. I think the
John F. Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts would also be a perfect venue to
vote ourselves into a dictatorship. Don’t you agree? The New York Times
certainly would.
Let
us now turn to the Times' newly discovered TV station, Al Jazeera, which also
broadcasts "all the news that fits." Fits what?
Lest
anyone think that Al Gore doesn’t believe in free enterprise, Bloomberg
News has a shock in store for you:
The deal
highlights Gore’s makeover from career politician to successful businessman.
His take from the Current TV sale is many times the maximum net worth of $1.7
million he reported while running for president in 1999. Besides investing in
startups, Gore is on the board of Apple Inc., an adviser to Google Inc.,
according to his website biography, and a partner at Kleiner Perkins Caufield
& Byers. Gore’s holdings also include investments in Amazon.com Inc.,
EBay Inc. and Procter & Gamble Co. through his Generation Investment
Management LLP.
Most of Gore’s
investments are made through Generation Investment Management, which he
co-founded with former Goldman Sachs Group Inc. executive David Blood. The most
recent regulatory filing lists about $3.6 billion under management in 29
publicly traded companies. In addition, Generation Investment Management also
has stakes in private ventures such as Nest Labs, a company formed by Apple
Inc. alumni to create a thermostat that adapts to user behavior and saves
money. The fund also backed Elon Musk’s SolarCity Corp.
(SCTY), a developer of rooftop solar power systems that went public last
month.
In April, Gore’s
fund was part of $110 million in venture capital invested in Harvest Power
Inc., a closely held company that produces renewable energy from waste such as
food scraps.
Gore
can only strut as a "successful businessman" if the government
subsidizes these companies, or passes legislation forcing everyone else to
patronize them. So rich a man as Gore, in these times, can only
"profit" if he's a member of what Ayn Rand called an
"aristocracy of pull."
Forbes
notes further that Gore is also tax-savvy.
Regardless of
whether one lauds or criticizes Mr. Gore’s actions in the sale to Al Jazeera,
he is likely to pay U.S. taxes influenced in part by the fiscal cliff deal.
Current TV has $41.4 million in debt and preferred holders with first dibs on
$99.5 million, according to a 2008 regulatory filing. Current TV appears to be
an LLC, and that will help Mr. Gore enormously.
How will Mr. Gore and his compatriots do? Initially named INdTV Holdings,
the Current TV LLC was founded in 2002 by Mr. Gore and businessman Joel Hyatt.
They appear to be shrewd investors. The LLC should facilitate a single tax on
the deal, not the two taxes common to more established businesses. LLCs are tax
reporting entities but the members pay tax on their share.
If Mr. Gore and other members sell their interests, their own tax basis in
their interests will count. But whether Al Jazeera is buying assets from
Current TV or membership interests from Mr. Gore and others, this should be a
nice single-tax payday. Not every business seller is so lucky.
But,
what about Al Jazeera?
Al
Jazeera is a Qatar-funded
"private" news organization that is acknowledged to be the propaganda
vehicle for the Muslim Brotherhood.
Having gained little or no traction in finding carriage or distribution
in the U.S., it finally found a willing partner in Al Gore's insipid
enterprise, Current TV. He has sold it to Al Jazeera for a reported $500
million, and will profit from the sale to the tune of $71 million. Al Jazeera's
connections with the Muslim Brotherhood and terrorism bother him not. WND
reported, on announcement of the sale:
Al Jazeera this
week announced a plan to establish a new U.S. cable news channel, tentatively
call Al Jazeera America, utilizing the purchase of Current TV. The
Qatar-financed network is hoping to retain and even increase Current TV’s
distribution rights in more than 40 million homes to broadcast its own new
network.
Qatar, Saudi Arabia, and the U.A.E. are also major funders of terrorism, and
also of programs now installed in American public schools to persuade students
of the "benign" nature of totalitarian Islam. Gore failed to
brainwash the world with his An
Inconvenient Truth, although he was awarded a Nobel Peace Prize for his
failure, just as President Barack Obama was. But he found another way to skin
the cat.
Yusuf al-Qaradawi,
one of the top leaders of the Muslim Brotherhood, rose to fame in the Arab
world after Al Jazeera gave him his a major platform. Many regard Qaradawi as
the de facto spiritual leader of Egypt’s Muslim Brotherhood. Qaradawi achieved
star status because of his regular sermons and interviews on Al Jazeera.
Gore must know this. But the truth is inconvenient or irrelevant and he'd
rather not think about it.
Al Jazeera was
founded with financing from the emir of Qatar, Sheik Hamad bin Khalifa Al
Thani, who previously served as the network’s chairman. The network is still
financed largely from Qatar, where its headquarters are located. The current
chairman of Al Jazeera is Sheik Hamad bin Thamer Al Thani, the Qatari emir’s
cousin.
Keeping it in the family seems to be a theme shared by Al Jazeera and Current
TV. About Current TV, Bloomberg News reported that:
The network's
investors included funds controlled by Los Angeles billionaire Ron Bruce
Burkett and San Francisco money manager Richard Blum, according to the 2008
filing, when the company unsuccessfully sought to sell stock to the public.
Blum is married to U.S. Senator Dianne
Feinstein, a Democrat from San Francisco.
But,
back to Qatar.
The Qatar
Foundation International, or QFI, a nonprofit group financed by the government
of Qatar, last year gave Harlem’s Hamilton Heights, a K-5 public school, a
$250,000 grant to support the Arabic program for three years….
In addition to
the Harlem school, WND found that QFI just awarded “Curriculum Grants” to seven
U.S. schools and language organizations to “develop comprehensive and
innovative curricula and teaching materials to be used in any Arabic language
classroom.” The
schools include Bell High School, a Los Angeles public school, and Safford K-8
in Arizona’s Tucson Unified School District.
And, here's that family connection again:
QFI, based in
Washington, D.C., is the U.S. branch of the Qatar Foundation, founded in 1995
by Qatari ruling emir Sheik Hamad bin Khalifa Al Thani, the Al Jazeera founder.
Thani is still the group’s vice-chairman, while his wife, Sheikha Moza bint
Nasser, chairs the organization’s board.
Why would Qatar be funding Arabic language programs in American schools? Why,
to better enable students to read the Koran
and its companion texts in the original tongue. It's fairly common knowledge
among "Islamophobes" and other critics of Islam that what Islamic
spokesmen say publically in English is quite the opposite of what they say in
Arabic. This practice is called taqiyya
or Islamic double-speak. If an Islamic
supremacist publically offers Israel or Obama or the West an olive branch, in
private, behind doors closed to the MSM, it says it is offering a slave collar
to infidels and a beheading sword to Jews.
WND
reports further:
In January 2012,
the foundation launched the Research Center for Islamic Legislation and Ethics
under the guidance of Tariq Ramadan, who serves as the center’s director. Ramadan
is the grandson of the notorious founder of the Muslim Brotherhood, Hassan al
Banna. Ramadan was banned from the U.S. until 2010 when the Obama
administration issued him a visa to give a lecture at a New York school.
It isn't just the Brotherhood that is offering us slave collars and beheading
swords. It is our own President. And, don't wonder where former Secretary of
State Hillary Clinton got her news about what was happening around the world
and a clue about how to formulate her own dismal and failed policies. The New
York Post had this interesting tidbit
about the popularity of Al Jazeera in the administration:
Secretary of State Hillary Clinton told a Senate Foreign Relations
Committee last March that viewership of Al-Jazeera is going up in the US
“because it’s real news.”
“You may not agree with it, but you feel like you’re getting real news
around the clock instead of a million commercials and, you know, arguments
between talking heads and the kind of stuff that we do on our news, which, you
know, is not particularly informative to us, let alone foreigners,” Clinton
said.
The
New York Times practically drools over the prospect of an Islamic propaganda
machine "competing" with the MSM, although the MSM hasn’t done too
badly acting as Obama's de facto
Ministry of Truth. Only, it isn't a Brotherhood-connected propaganda machine.
It's just another news outlet that will help bring "truth" to the
American viewing public. Qatar is mentioned in its report, "Al Jazeera
English Finds an Audience" (January 31st, 2011), but no mention
of that oil fiefdom's links to funding terrorism. Praising Al Jazeera during
the protests in 2011 against President Hosni Mubarak,
it noted:
Al Jazeera
English, however, is indisputably unique. In recent days, the channel, an
offshoot of the main Arabic-language Al Jazeera, has gained attention for its
up-close, around-the-clock coverage of the protests in Cairo, Alexandria, sues,
and other cities in Egypt.
Al
Jazeera is "unique," without a doubt. It is the Brotherhood's
propaganda outlet. The Times, guilty itself of recasting "facts" to
fit its political proclivities and ignoring genuine facts that don't fit, can
no longer distinguish between news and propaganda, thus explaining why it would
applaud the debut of Al Jazeera in the U.S.
Mr.
Gore demonstrated just how good a businessman he is. He sold his pitiful
investment to an Islamic propaganda machine for more money than it was worth,
because it had "journalistic muscle" and the money – read oil money –
to compete with American news channels. In its January 2nd article
on the pending sale, "Al
Jazeera Seeks a U.S. Voice Where
Gore Failed," the Times wrote:
Al Jazeera, the
pan-Arab news giant, has long tried to convince Americans that it is a legitimate
news organization, not a parrot of Middle Eastern propaganda or something more
sinister. It just bought itself 40 million more chances to make its case.
Al Jazeera on
Wednesday announced a deal
to take over Current TV, the low-rated cable channel that was founded by Al
Gore, a former vice president, and his business partners seven years ago. Al
Jazeera plans to shut Current and start an English-language channel, which will
be available in more than 40 million homes, with newscasts emanating from both
New York and Doha, Qatar….
A decade ago, Al
Jazeera’s flagship Arabic-language channel was reviled by American politicians
for showing videotapes from Al Qaeda members and sympathizers. Now the news
operation is buying an American channel, having convinced Mr. Gore and the
other owners of Current that it has the journalistic muscle and the money to
compete head-to-head with CNN and other news channels in the United States.
Well,
there will be no more vilification of Herr Goebbels' – excuse me, Mr. Gore's –
money moxie, nor of Al Jazeera, because it will have achieved
"respectability" as a legitimate news outlet in the U.S.
Going forward,
the challenge will be persuading Americans to watch — an extremely tough
proposition given the crowded television marketplace and the stereotypes about
the channel that persist to this day. “There are still people who will not
watch it, who will say that it’s a ‘terrorist network,’ ” said Philip Seib, the
author of The Al Jazeera Effect. Al Jazeera has to override that by providing
quality news.”
It
will be a challenge. Americans are already
saddled with the MSM, which many no longer trust for objective news reporting,
and sense are heavily biased and serve as the government's journalistic poodle
on one hand and a pit bull on the other. The MSM are considered by many to be
the collective mouthpiece of too many collectivist agendas that will affect
their lives, wealth, standard of living, and future. They'd rather get their
news from Internet weblogs and live-stream Internet channels. Still, oblivious
to the trends, the New York Times plods on.
Al Jazeera,
which has bureaus in New York, Washington, Los Angeles, Miami and Chicago,
intends to open several more in other American cities. “There’s a major hole
right now that Al Jazeera can fill. And that is providing an alternative
viewpoint to domestic news, which is very parochial,” said Cathy Rasenberger, a
cable consultant who has worked with Al Jazeera on distribution issues in the
past. However, she warned, “there is a limited amount of interest in
international news in the United States.”
Nowhere
in this article, either, is there mention of Al Jazeera's terrorist
connections, no hint of the propaganda character of its Islamic origins and purposes,
no suggestion that Al Gore, an anti-wealth ex-politician and the Chicken Little
of global warming, is going to make a questionable, hypocritical, and national
security-violating bundle from the deal. Not a word of any of that is remarked on by
the New York Times.
The
New York Times has grown as maliciously senile and useless as the radicals and left-wing
demonstrators from the 1960's and 1970's who chanted and shouted during the Occupy
Wall Street demonstrations to show their "solidarity" with the new
generation of fascists and Marxists. It abandoned honest, objective journalism
decades ago.
Perhaps
it's time for it to consider voluntary retirement. It is no longer fit to read.
February 7, 2013
To Think or Not to Think: A Muslim's "Outrageous Fortune"
In
his penetrating essay on the futility of Islam's efforts to "reform"
itself through revolution, "régime change," or purification, "Springtime
for Islam" (February 5th), Daniel Greenfield noted:
There is a
peculiar tragedy to a religion which cannot escape its own destructive nature,
each time it reaches for some form of redemption, its hands come up dripping
with blood and it all ends in more bodies and petty tyrannies.
"Reform,"
of course, means to change oneself or some institution for the better, from bad
and corrupt to good and pure, or at least to the unobtrusive benign. But, as
Greenfield points out and stresses, the Arab Spring is in reality a
continuation of an ongoing "Arab Winter." The "Arab Spring"
was fueled by Islam, and Islam is, by its foundational nature, destructive and
self-destructive.
Islam's only
redemption is in establishing a theocracy. Its commitment to power and the
indulgence of the earthly and heavenly paradise of loot, slaves and violence,
led to its own degeneration over and over again. Having no other spiritual form
than the exercise of power, it has corrupted itself each time, and then
attempted to exorcise the corruption through more of the same.
Any
theocracy must be totalitarian. It
can become totalitarian by default or happenstance or by negligence, or it can
become totalitarian according to an instruction manual written by clerics and intellectuals
friendly to what they know in their minds are dystopias for the masses and
paradises for the rulers. Islam has its instruction manuals.
Islam
governs an individual's life from his sandals to his beard, from his diet to
the number of times a day he must demonstrate fealty to his icons, to how he
may lawfully (per Sharia law) treat his wives and children. It governs his social
relationships with his friends and enemies, and his enemies are everyone who is not Muslim.
The Koran ,
the Hadith ,
and the Reliance of the Traveler
all command it. They are how-to manuals written
chiefly in Arabic and translated into a dozen languages.
A Muslim
accepts this state of submission – whether or not he's read all the manuals
from beginning to end – for a variety of reasons, none of them complimentary
and too often those reasons become a Molotov cocktail blend waiting to explode:
a repressed, unacknowledged fear of the mortal consequences of not conforming; mental inertia,
encouraged by an unquestioning faith in non-evidentiary assertions; a
delusional sense of superiority (qua
Muslim, and qua Muslim male); a sense
of predestination; an attitude of privilege and expectation of deference; and a
borrowed sense of omniscience.
After
all, the propaganda goes, Islam will conquer men, neighborhoods, cities,
nations, and the globe. It is written. Fealty to Islam gives a rank-and-file
Muslim the comforting confidence that he's on the winning side. Why bother to
think about it? Islam is like an advancing glacier, and he is but a lump of ice
on it. He doesn’t mind. He knows that he's just dross, a grain of ballast that helps
to keep the Islamic corsair upright and afloat and its sails taut in the wind.
Islam
cannot be "reformed" unless its caretakers repudiate its instruction
manuals. But their repudiation would necessarily entail the repudiation of
Islam. When the manuals go up in flames, so will Islam.
Writing
about the turmoil in the Middle East over the past two years, Greenfield bursts
the balloon, which has mesmerized Western leaders and the Mainstream Media, that
the turmoil represents a kind of weird "jihad" among Muslims to find
"democracy" and stability and a just society.
Apologists for
Islamism like to portray those groups as liberation movements, but there is
nothing liberating about terrorist groups run by millionaires and billionaires,
doctors and other degree holders, and funded by the ruling clans of Kuwait, the
UAE and Saudi Arabia. These ruling families have the most to lose from
modernization, and though they build skyscrapers in their cities, they also
helped orchestrate the Arab Spring to topple more modern governments and
replace them with parties affiliated with the Muslim Brotherhood.
Turkey,
which seemed to be sliding towards Westernization, has succumbed to the
intrinsic malaise that Islam inculcates in any culture, and has rejected the
West. It now has a leader, Recep Tayyip Erdoğan, who announced his Islamic
fealty long ago:
In a public gathering in 1998, Recep Tayyip Erdoğan, leader of the ruling Islamist party and current
Prime Minister of Turkey, recited:
"The mosques are our barracks, the domes our helmets, the minarets our
bayonets and the faithful our soldiers..." These words earned him a
conviction and minor jail-term for inciting religious hatred.
He
has made good on his poetry,
and has accelerated Turkey's collapse into an Islamic polity.
After
an interminable wait to be admitted into the European Union (a rather dubious
benefit, given the shaky economic and political condition of the EU), Erdoğan
has now spurned the chance and wishes to join a cabal of authoritarian
governments dominated by China and Vladimir Putin's Russia, the Shanghai
Cooperation Organization.
Totalitarian
or authoritarian states will not automatically move in the direction of
"democracy" or Western values unless they renounce their obsession
with power. The Mideast, however, is now a battleground for power between
Islamic factions. The "Arab Spring," as Greenfield portrays it, was
simply a rerun of past Mideast "rebellions" and
"revolutions" and upheavals, only with different faces, mobs, slogans
and weapons.
Islam
in any country where it has reigned for decades will not let that country go. Like
a tapeworm, it gnaws away at men's minds and the culture until the men and the
culture submit and accept Islam as a parasite by right.
Let
us imagine that a work-a-day, average, devout Muslim permits himself a secret,
muffled chuckle about his conundrum and how deep a hole he has dug himself into
by just "going with the Islamic flow," and is content with being a grain
of ballast in the Islamic ship-of-state. He might laugh at himself, but what is
it that he would really be laughing about when he's brought to the brink of
doubt or bothers to entertain speculation, especially about Islam? The
ludicrousness of his beliefs, of his unquestioned assumptions, and the ubiquitous
banality of the evil they foster, when they are brought into the unforgiving
sunlight of reason and rationality.
A Muslim who still retains a shred of repressed rationality would think in a
surreptitious manner it would be hard for any normal person to imagine: What?
Why do I suspect in the darkest corner of my heart that Allah is really a
psychopathic, whim-worshipping deity whom I would not want for a parent?
What?
Was Mohammed, our faceless poster boy of virtue and goodness, really a brigand
who founded a religion to justify his sociopathic habits, such as murder,
pedophilia, rape, betrayal, dishonesty, and plunder? What? If Islam is so
benevolent and peace-loving and magnanimous, why does it promise eternal hell
and the most agonizing torments of apostates
and non-believers?
What?
That man over there has his own deity, and I have mine, yet I am expected to
slit his throat for not believing in mine, while he would never think to slit
mine for not believing in his? What? What have these children done that they
deserve to have guns put to their heads and murdered? What? Why are young girls
tortured by clitirectomies?
What?
What possesses parents when they conspire to murder their own daughters? Where
is the "honor" in killing them because they wished to escape the
suffocating ethos and burqas? What? How is beating one's wife for simple
infractions or for disobedience an act of justice? How heinous a crime is it
for a wife to glance at another man, and is it more heinous to murder her for
it?
What?
If infidel women who do not cover up are filthy whores, would it not make sense
to not rape them, and not risk contracting their filth? What?
If alcohol is evil, why does it make so many people happy? Is happiness evil? What?
Why do I deny myself everything that seems to allow infidels and even Jews to
enjoy living?
What?
Can Allah be so pleased with having created so many unhappy, envious, and
hateful beings – as we are?
Envy
in a Muslim may not necessarily lead to crime. He would need to hide it from
his fellows. Jealousy, another powerful emotion, however, can lead to hate and
trigger the crimes and irrationality a Muslim may harbor doubts about. It's up
to him which way he goes.
The Muslim who asks himself those questions, becomes an apostate. But there
aren't very many of them running around, are there? That is because Islam is a nihilistic,
totalitarian ideology, perfect for anyone who refuses to think. Those who
choose to think are marked for a fatwa and termination. They know it. That
takes courage and honesty, and a commitment to reality, actions possible only
to an individual who chooses to think.
They,
better than anyone else, more than any non-Muslim scholar who questions the
morality and feasibility of Islam, know that Islam cannot be "reformed,"
not in its doctrines, not through revolution or régime change or rioting in
Tahir Square or fighting each other in Syria.
his penetrating essay on the futility of Islam's efforts to "reform"
itself through revolution, "régime change," or purification, "Springtime
for Islam" (February 5th), Daniel Greenfield noted:
There is a
peculiar tragedy to a religion which cannot escape its own destructive nature,
each time it reaches for some form of redemption, its hands come up dripping
with blood and it all ends in more bodies and petty tyrannies.
"Reform,"
of course, means to change oneself or some institution for the better, from bad
and corrupt to good and pure, or at least to the unobtrusive benign. But, as
Greenfield points out and stresses, the Arab Spring is in reality a
continuation of an ongoing "Arab Winter." The "Arab Spring"
was fueled by Islam, and Islam is, by its foundational nature, destructive and
self-destructive.
Islam's only
redemption is in establishing a theocracy. Its commitment to power and the
indulgence of the earthly and heavenly paradise of loot, slaves and violence,
led to its own degeneration over and over again. Having no other spiritual form
than the exercise of power, it has corrupted itself each time, and then
attempted to exorcise the corruption through more of the same.
Any
theocracy must be totalitarian. It
can become totalitarian by default or happenstance or by negligence, or it can
become totalitarian according to an instruction manual written by clerics and intellectuals
friendly to what they know in their minds are dystopias for the masses and
paradises for the rulers. Islam has its instruction manuals.
Islam
governs an individual's life from his sandals to his beard, from his diet to
the number of times a day he must demonstrate fealty to his icons, to how he
may lawfully (per Sharia law) treat his wives and children. It governs his social
relationships with his friends and enemies, and his enemies are everyone who is not Muslim.
The Koran ,
the Hadith ,
and the Reliance of the Traveler
all command it. They are how-to manuals written
chiefly in Arabic and translated into a dozen languages.
A Muslim
accepts this state of submission – whether or not he's read all the manuals
from beginning to end – for a variety of reasons, none of them complimentary
and too often those reasons become a Molotov cocktail blend waiting to explode:
a repressed, unacknowledged fear of the mortal consequences of not conforming; mental inertia,
encouraged by an unquestioning faith in non-evidentiary assertions; a
delusional sense of superiority (qua
Muslim, and qua Muslim male); a sense
of predestination; an attitude of privilege and expectation of deference; and a
borrowed sense of omniscience.
After
all, the propaganda goes, Islam will conquer men, neighborhoods, cities,
nations, and the globe. It is written. Fealty to Islam gives a rank-and-file
Muslim the comforting confidence that he's on the winning side. Why bother to
think about it? Islam is like an advancing glacier, and he is but a lump of ice
on it. He doesn’t mind. He knows that he's just dross, a grain of ballast that helps
to keep the Islamic corsair upright and afloat and its sails taut in the wind.
Islam
cannot be "reformed" unless its caretakers repudiate its instruction
manuals. But their repudiation would necessarily entail the repudiation of
Islam. When the manuals go up in flames, so will Islam.
Writing
about the turmoil in the Middle East over the past two years, Greenfield bursts
the balloon, which has mesmerized Western leaders and the Mainstream Media, that
the turmoil represents a kind of weird "jihad" among Muslims to find
"democracy" and stability and a just society.
Apologists for
Islamism like to portray those groups as liberation movements, but there is
nothing liberating about terrorist groups run by millionaires and billionaires,
doctors and other degree holders, and funded by the ruling clans of Kuwait, the
UAE and Saudi Arabia. These ruling families have the most to lose from
modernization, and though they build skyscrapers in their cities, they also
helped orchestrate the Arab Spring to topple more modern governments and
replace them with parties affiliated with the Muslim Brotherhood.
Turkey,
which seemed to be sliding towards Westernization, has succumbed to the
intrinsic malaise that Islam inculcates in any culture, and has rejected the
West. It now has a leader, Recep Tayyip Erdoğan, who announced his Islamic
fealty long ago:
In a public gathering in 1998, Recep Tayyip Erdoğan, leader of the ruling Islamist party and current
Prime Minister of Turkey, recited:
"The mosques are our barracks, the domes our helmets, the minarets our
bayonets and the faithful our soldiers..." These words earned him a
conviction and minor jail-term for inciting religious hatred.
He
has made good on his poetry,
and has accelerated Turkey's collapse into an Islamic polity.
After
an interminable wait to be admitted into the European Union (a rather dubious
benefit, given the shaky economic and political condition of the EU), Erdoğan
has now spurned the chance and wishes to join a cabal of authoritarian
governments dominated by China and Vladimir Putin's Russia, the Shanghai
Cooperation Organization.
Totalitarian
or authoritarian states will not automatically move in the direction of
"democracy" or Western values unless they renounce their obsession
with power. The Mideast, however, is now a battleground for power between
Islamic factions. The "Arab Spring," as Greenfield portrays it, was
simply a rerun of past Mideast "rebellions" and
"revolutions" and upheavals, only with different faces, mobs, slogans
and weapons.
Islam
in any country where it has reigned for decades will not let that country go. Like
a tapeworm, it gnaws away at men's minds and the culture until the men and the
culture submit and accept Islam as a parasite by right.
Let
us imagine that a work-a-day, average, devout Muslim permits himself a secret,
muffled chuckle about his conundrum and how deep a hole he has dug himself into
by just "going with the Islamic flow," and is content with being a grain
of ballast in the Islamic ship-of-state. He might laugh at himself, but what is
it that he would really be laughing about when he's brought to the brink of
doubt or bothers to entertain speculation, especially about Islam? The
ludicrousness of his beliefs, of his unquestioned assumptions, and the ubiquitous
banality of the evil they foster, when they are brought into the unforgiving
sunlight of reason and rationality.
A Muslim who still retains a shred of repressed rationality would think in a
surreptitious manner it would be hard for any normal person to imagine: What?
Why do I suspect in the darkest corner of my heart that Allah is really a
psychopathic, whim-worshipping deity whom I would not want for a parent?
What?
Was Mohammed, our faceless poster boy of virtue and goodness, really a brigand
who founded a religion to justify his sociopathic habits, such as murder,
pedophilia, rape, betrayal, dishonesty, and plunder? What? If Islam is so
benevolent and peace-loving and magnanimous, why does it promise eternal hell
and the most agonizing torments of apostates
and non-believers?
What?
That man over there has his own deity, and I have mine, yet I am expected to
slit his throat for not believing in mine, while he would never think to slit
mine for not believing in his? What? What have these children done that they
deserve to have guns put to their heads and murdered? What? Why are young girls
tortured by clitirectomies?
What?
What possesses parents when they conspire to murder their own daughters? Where
is the "honor" in killing them because they wished to escape the
suffocating ethos and burqas? What? How is beating one's wife for simple
infractions or for disobedience an act of justice? How heinous a crime is it
for a wife to glance at another man, and is it more heinous to murder her for
it?
What?
If infidel women who do not cover up are filthy whores, would it not make sense
to not rape them, and not risk contracting their filth? What?
If alcohol is evil, why does it make so many people happy? Is happiness evil? What?
Why do I deny myself everything that seems to allow infidels and even Jews to
enjoy living?
What?
Can Allah be so pleased with having created so many unhappy, envious, and
hateful beings – as we are?
Envy
in a Muslim may not necessarily lead to crime. He would need to hide it from
his fellows. Jealousy, another powerful emotion, however, can lead to hate and
trigger the crimes and irrationality a Muslim may harbor doubts about. It's up
to him which way he goes.
The Muslim who asks himself those questions, becomes an apostate. But there
aren't very many of them running around, are there? That is because Islam is a nihilistic,
totalitarian ideology, perfect for anyone who refuses to think. Those who
choose to think are marked for a fatwa and termination. They know it. That
takes courage and honesty, and a commitment to reality, actions possible only
to an individual who chooses to think.
They,
better than anyone else, more than any non-Muslim scholar who questions the
morality and feasibility of Islam, know that Islam cannot be "reformed,"
not in its doctrines, not through revolution or régime change or rioting in
Tahir Square or fighting each other in Syria.
February 5, 2013
The Twenty-Eighth Amendment
The
rectangle of light in the acres of a farm was the window of the library of
Judge Narragansett. He sat at a table, and the light of his lamp fell on the
copy of an ancient document. He had marked and crossed out the contradictions
in its statements that had once been the cause of its destruction. He was now
adding a new clause to its pages: "Congress shall make no law abridging
the freedom of production and trade…."*
Who
is Judge Narragansett? What "ancient document" is he editing? And where
is he doing it?
Anyone
who has read Ayn Rand's novel Atlas
Shrugged will recognize the
scene, which occurs near the end of the novel, when all the key strikers are secretly
gathered in Galt's Gulch to await the collapse of the world they escaped. But I
think too little attention has been paid to that short but key scene. When one
boils down the active plot of the novel, one will see that all the conflicts
and subplots are generated by the government having the power to abridge the
freedom of production and trade. In short, to regulate and ultimately abolish
the role of man's mind in existence. Dagny Taggart, the railroad
"tycoon," is stymied by government rules and regulations of her
freedom to act. So is Hank Rearden, who is blackmailed into giving the government
the right to dispose of his new metal process and forced to "compete"
with incompetents.
So
are all the novel's other producers and traders who vanish to leave the country
and the world to try to flourish without them. This includes doctors, who
refuse to work as indentured servants, and writers, and artists, and
industrialists, and "common" men who did not wish to remain held down
by the wishes of other men….and judges, who refuse to sanction injustice.
That
was Judge Narragansett.**
Think
for a moment of what his emendation of the Constitution implies and means. Of all
the actions men might take to reclaim and preserve their freedom, that one
correction is perhaps the most critical if a government is to be (re)formed
that would break the bonds, chains, and fetters with and of the old. The Declaration
of Independence reads:
That to secure
these rights, Governments are instituted among Men, deriving their just powers
from the consent of the governed, --That whenever any Form of Government
becomes destructive of these ends, it is the Right of the People to alter or to
abolish it, and to institute new Government, laying its foundation on such
principles and organizing its powers in such form, as to them shall seem most
likely to effect their Safety and Happiness.
Correcting
and amending the Constitution would be a form of "instituting" a new government,
founded on the principle of individual rights and defining the concept of the
initiation of force – especially that of a government. The federal government needn't
be overthrown physically by violence, or even abolished; it should be overthrown or leashed by an
idea, by reason, and that can be done with Narragansett's corrections. That is,
it should be radically altered to effect the safety and happiness of Americans.
But,
what "rights" should be secured, what "rights" are
destroyed by government force and unlimited power?
Novelist/philosopher
Ayn Rand
wrote:
A “right” is a
moral principle defining and sanctioning a man’s freedom of action in a social
context. There is only one fundamental right (all the others are its
consequences or corollaries): a man’s right to his own life….The concept of a
“right” pertains only to action—specifically, to freedom of action. It means
freedom from physical compulsion, coercion or interference by other men.***
By
"other men," Rand meant the agents of government force, and the
politicians who empowered them to initiate force with their legislation. That includes
every bureaucrat, department head, and even the occupant of the White House.
There
is a question circulating about whether or not a third political party would
serve the purpose of ensuring the preservation of our rights. I think that
question misses the point and it has not been answered in any practical or
meaningful way.
The
solution to the problem of the number of political parties lies in those last
pages of Atlas Shrugged. Judge
Narragansett is writing on a copy of the Constitution , "Congress shall
make no law abridging the freedom of production and trade…."
That
clause or amendment would prohibit any politician, Republican, Democrat, or
third party, from acquiring any power over the economy and our lives. It's that
simple. Any scheme originating in the House – assuming it could even pass –
would ideally be scotched and rejected by the Senate. The legislation would
never make the trip to the White House to be vetoed. The Senate, after all, was
designed to quash any and all populist or "democratic" legislation. Modeled
on the British Parliament's Houses of Commons and Lords, it was created to be
the ultimate protector of the individual rights, private property, and so on. It has fallen down on that task, or forgotten
its purpose (virtually every politician in Congress has but a very fuzzy grasp
of what their chambers are for, never mind understanding the purpose of the
Constitution), often conspiring with the House on how to write and pass statist
legislation.
If
our representatives were prohibited from concocting any legislation that would abridge
the freedom of production and trade, and held accountable for it by their
constituents and the courts, then no politician could take action to expand the
power of government without being opposed by his colleagues. Most politicians
would stay home or not even run for office if there were no prospect of passing
such legislation.
Ideally,
Congress would sit for perhaps two weeks a year – at most, a month – to clear
up issues that might have arisen since the last session. Senators and Representatives
would have no sumptuous salaries, have to make do with a minuscule staff (which
they'd pay for from their pockets, unless their constituents chipped in to pay
for staff), they would have no pensions, no medical or transportation perks, no
junkets, little or nothing for free or paid for them. And when they retired or
weren't reelected, they'd go back to their private businesses and live like
everyone else.
Above
all, they would not be granted immunity from the consequences of their actions,
as they are now. They would be held accountable and liable for criminal prosecution,
as any other citizen would be for initiating force or committing fraud. One of
the most laughable and recent instances of the absence of this brand of justice
is Secretary of State Hillary Clinton's admission during a Senate hearing of
responsibility for the Benghazi terrorist raid. Yet she will leave the post
with lifetime pensions and perks and be able to prepare herself to run for
president in 2016.
This
is rewarding irresponsibility. That has been the Washington way for decades of
holding politicians guilty of criminal or maleficent behavior
"accountable." That has got to stop. And stopping it would serve as a
deterrent against any one with political ambitions that go beyond the proper functions
of government in domestic and foreign policies.
Not
being able to pass rights-violating legislation – or seeing that it would be an
onerous project – would act as a disincentive for any ambitious statist. Rand
put her finger on a fundamental political principle in that one scene in the
novel. The Constitution, after all, was created to define the limits of government,
not serve as a recipe for the expansion of federal powers. And that was the
intention of that Narragansett scene.
And
what might be the other clauses in what hypothetically could be the Twenty-Eighth
Amendment to the Constitution?
For starters, the nullification of the Sixteenth
Amendment, the income tax amendment, which technically was never ratified
except on one politician's say-so. Then there is the Seventeenth Amendment,
which provides for the direct election of Senators, which has contributed to
the prostitution of the Senate, turning its members from Solons to electoral
street walkers. This correction might necessitate a separate amendment, and not
just a clause. The direct election of Senators has caused incalculable damage
and mischief.
The
Eighteenth Amendment, sanctioning Prohibition, was repealed by the Twenty-First.
The
Twenty-Sixth Amendment, which provides for the voting rights of anyone eighteen
years old or older, is a questionable amendment. Is the age of eighteen one in which
an individual has acquired enough knowledge of politics and his rights to have
a say in government? I doubt it. I think two or three years should be added to
ensure that an individual acquires that knowledge once he has become a
productive individual supporting his own life.
The
Twenty-Seventh Amendment, under Judge Narragansett's pen, would become moot.
Revenue
might be collected (non-coercively) for the upkeep of the Capitol Building, the
White House, and other necessary federal buildings, and also for maintaining the
military and federal courts. But for little else. A separate amendment might be
required to cover these contingencies, but would also require a new set of Federalist Papers to iron out the ways and means.
Today's politicians and political thinkers, however, are just not qualified to
write those papers. One may as well assign the task to the Three Stooges and
appoint Karl Marx, David Axelrod, Barack Obama, and Nancy Pelosi as their
mentors.
Judge
Narragansett's twelve words in a Twenty-Eighth Amendment could make all the difference
in the world – and in our lives.
*Atlas Shrugged, by Ayn Rand. 1957. New
York: Dutton/Penguin 35th Anniversary Edition, 1992. pp. 1167-1168.
**For
his explanation of why he went on strike, see pp. 742-743 of the novel.
***"Man's
Rights," The Virtue of Selfishness.
January 30, 2013
Rights vs. "Rights"
I
developed a dislike for Franklin D. Roosevelt in high school because he was
oversold by my history teachers. He was portrayed as a kind of canonized
secular saint who had saved the nation and the world from the ghastly phenomena
of the Depression and the Axis. Too young to judge FDR's political accomplishments,
what inculcated an unshakable suspicion in me was the tone with which FDR was
uncritically presented by the teachers to my history classes. (They were still
called "history" classes back then, not "social science.") He
could do no wrong, his intentions were unquestionably noble, he had sacrificed
himself for the greater good, and to criticize him was to belabor the picayune
and the arcane and reveal oneself as an ignorant, reactionary lowbrow. So it
was also with JFK and Woodrow Wilson.
Of
course, my real education began after leaving school and by not going on to college. I learned much,
much more about FDR, JFK and Wilson without the benefit of teachers whose eyes
would shine brightly in adulation when their names were mentioned and who would
brook no disagreement (mostly with a sneering ad hominem), and maintained my status as a reactionary, but highly
knowledgeable lowbrow.
Cass
Sunstein's eyes also shine brightly when he speaks or writes about FDR and
President Barack Obama. Sunstein, former administrator of the White House
Office of Information and Regulatory Affairs (a post he left to return to Harvard
Law School) had an op-ed on the Bloomberg
View on January 28th, "Obama, FDR and the Second Bill of
Rights." In it he approves of, promulgates, and sells Obama's alleged
desire to establish that "Second Bill of Rights" while keeping the
"old" Bill of Rights.
George
Orwell noted in his Appendix to Nineteen
Eighty-Four about the totalitarian take-over of language, in his novel
called "Newspeak," that a full translation of Jefferson words about
"self-evident truths" from the Declaration of Independence [into
Newspeak] "could only be an ideological translation, whereby Jefferson's
words would be changed into a panegyric on absolute government."*
Sunstein's
article is such a panegyric on absolute government, written not in
indecipherable Newspeak jargon, but in one in which certain terms are dropped
into the text without justification or validation, and intended to allay the
suspicion that a fast one was being pulled on the reader. Sunstein claims that
FDR was not an enemy of capitalism, nor, he claims, is Obama, simply because
Obama mentioned "free enterprise" in his inaugural
address without making a face.
Sunstein
pulls his own Newspeak shell game when he writes:
Drawing on
Thomas Jefferson, Roosevelt insisted that “these economic truths have become
accepted as self-evident. We have accepted, so to speak, a second Bill of
Rights under which a new basis of security and prosperity can be established
for all regardless of station, race or creed.”
It is important
to be clear about what FDR meant. He did not propose to amend the Constitution. He did not think that the Supreme
Court should enforce the Second Bill of Rights. He believed in free markets and
free enterprise; he had no interest in socialism.
What
twaddle! Roosevelt did not believe in free markets. If he had believed in them,
he would not have pushed for all the welfare legislation he did. He would not
have tried to pack the Supreme Court with justices friendly to his economic and
social welfare programs. He would have advocated getting the government out of
the economy, beginning with the abolition of the income tax and the Federal
Reserve System. Roosevelt took the side-door approach to socialism, as
leftist/progressives do today, not calling it that, but instead the
government's "responsibility" to do something about all the
government-caused and perpetuated problems and crises that existed in his time.
So it is with Obama.
Except
that Obama is a nihilist whose agenda on the surface appears to be fascist or
"national socialist," but which fundamentally is geared for
destruction for destruction's sake in the name of "transforming" the
country.
But,
what are rights? Novelist/philosopher Ayn Rand wrote:
A “right” is a
moral principle defining and sanctioning a man’s freedom of action in a social
context. There is only one fundamental right (all the others are its
consequences or corollaries): a man’s right to his own life….The concept of a
“right” pertains only to action—specifically, to freedom of action. It means
freedom from physical compulsion, coercion or interference by other men.**
Let
us look at and analyze Roosevelt's schedule of "rights," a list he
included in his 1944 State of the Union address
and which Sunstein cited as a model on which Obama and Congress might create a
"Second Bill of Rights." Roosevelt prefaced his address with a
statement which contradicted what followed:
"This
nation in the past two years has become an active partner in the world's
greatest war against human slavery.
We have joined with like-minded people in order to defend ourselves in a world
that has been gravely threatened with gangster rule." (Emphasis mine.)
The
right to a useful and remunerative job in the industries or shops or farms or
mines of the nation.
Well,
where does this "right" come from? If you, the individual, exist,
then that somehow automatically entitles you to a job. Your mere existence
creates the "right" to someone else's property, money, or livelihood.
Conversely, owners of industries, shops, farms and mines have a
"duty" to provide you with that job. This is a formula for mutual
slavery, not trade. In the leftist/progressive or cultural Marxist political
agenda, "rights" are not validated on man's nature as a being of
volitional consciousness who must establish his own values and pursue them
without physical compulsion, coercion or interference by other men, and without
resorting to force, but privileges that emanate from society and are doled out
by the state acting for society. Your metaphysical existence is accepted as a
cipher of society, but rejected as a free, independent individual.
The
right to earn enough to provide adequate food and clothing and recreation.
Who
is to determine what is "enough" to provide food, clothing and
recreation? A government bureau or agency or department, staffed by individuals
who assume the infallibility of the Pope and the omniscience of a deity? Who is
to determine what is "adequate"? The same bureaucrats and regulatory
"czars." And if producers refuse to "provide" these things,
what then?
The
right of every farmer to raise and sell his products at a return which will
give him and his family a decent living.
Who
is to determine that "rate of return," and by what measure can
"a decent living" be established? Again, government bureaus and
agencies are the arbiters. Between 1995 and 2011 government farm subsidies ran to $277 billion to
growers of everything from corn to dairy products to tobacco to sunflowers.
The
right of every businessman, large and small, to trade in an atmosphere of
freedom from unfair competition and domination by monopolies at home or abroad.
An
"atmosphere of freedom," to Roosevelt and his economic managers and
regulators, meant punishing the successful for putting the unsuccessful out of
business with laws against "unfair" competition. Who defines
"unfair"? Lobbyists for industries and businesses jeopardized by the
successful, who press Congress to save their skins with laws and regulations
that amount to physical compulsion, coercion and interference. "This
business is under-selling its widgets
for $1.50 retail, and I don’t want to think about its wholesale rates! I can
only sell my widgets for $2.50, because of unforeseen conditions and economic
down-turns. This isn't fair! I have a right to succeed, and this other business
is trying to monopolize the trade! Do
something, and I'll foot the bill for you for a trip to Bermuda, all expenses
paid."
In
a fully capitalist economy, this lobbyist would be out of luck and have to
successfully compete against the other company or fold, and the congressman
would be stymied by a new amendment in the Constitution that would prohibit any
abridgement of trade. In a truly free economy, legally-enforced monopolies are
government-created monopolies, either run by the government or regulated by it.
Remember
General Motors? It, too, was saved from dissolution by government compulsion,
coercion, and interference, chiefly to save its unions'
"entitlements."
The
right of every family to a decent home.
Shall
I mention the subprime
mortgage melt-town and TARP? The Federal Reserve and Treasury Department and
other government agencies encouraged and often compelled banks and financial
institutions to underwrite everyone's "right" to a "decent
home." That house of cards collapsed. When it collapsed, who paid for the
rescues and the lost billions? American taxpayers through direct taxation and
inflation, which is a form of tax, to the tune of billions of dollars.
Who
defines a "decent home"? Any government agency and NGO from the Department
of Health and Human Services to your local community organizing racket and
municipal housing authority.
The
right to adequate medical care and the opportunity to achieve and enjoy good
health.
This
"right" was achieved incrementally with Medicare and Medicaid programs
and climaxed with Obamacare
(aka The Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act of 2010). All the alleged
benefits of this compulsory legislation accrue to the compulsorily insured
citizen at the expense of the indentured servitude of doctors, surgeons, and
other medical professionals, many of whom are leaving their careers in protest
to the servitude. In the legislation, the predictable consequences of doctors
abandoning their careers in such a protest, such as a shortage of doctors to
act as "health providers," there is nothing in it that prohibits the
government from drafting retired doctors (regardless of their ages) into
"service."
The
right to adequate protection from the economic fears of old age, sickness,
accident and unemployment.
This
is Social
Security and all disability and
unemployment legislation ever passed by Congress, which costs billions of
dollars and are called, not "rights," but "entitlements,"
because everyone has been compelled to pay into the system. But the retirees of
today are getting more for their confiscated money than younger, still-working
adults will ever see in the way of their own "entitlements."
Post-WWII "baby boomers" are the most fortunate recipients of their
"entitlements." Their sons and daughters will not be so fortunate.
They'll be expected to pay in more and get less.
The
right to a good education.
What
is a "good education," and why does anyone have a right to one?
There's really no answer. The right is picked out of the ethereal realms of
leftist/progressive political philosophy. The Department of Education spends
about $30 billion a year on subsidies,
the "bulk of that funding goes toward student aid programs,
with the balance going toward grants to educational institutions." For all
the billions spent on education, from nursery schools on up to graduate
schools, America has been dumbed down and brainwashed and "socially
conditioned" to "serve" society, to "give back."
Every
Roosevelt-Sunstein "right" cited above is plank in a socialist
program. Every one of them has been legislated for, with the right to
"adequate medical care" represented by Obamacare.
Sunstein
winds up his article with:
Obama’s second
inaugural did not refer explicitly to the Second Bill of Rights, but it had an
unmistakably Rooseveltian flavor. Just after a serious economic crisis, Obama emphasized
"that a great nation must care for the vulnerable, and protect its people
from life’s worst hazards and misfortune.” Recalling Roosevelt’s central theme,
Obama said that “every citizen deserves a basic measure of security and
dignity.”
I have
news for Mr. Sunstein: There is no dignity in servitude and being chained to
one's fellow men, and even less security. But, I think he knows that. He
doesn't need to be told. Sunstein, too, is a practicing nihilist.
A "Second
Bill of Rights" would render the original Bill of Rights redundant and
superfluous. It would be supplanted with a list of state-dispensed privileges. It
should be called instead a "Manifesto of Entitlements for the Hoi Polloi."
*Appendix,
"The Principles of Newspeak," Nineteen
Eighty-Four, by George Orwell. Ed. by Irving Howe. New York: Harcourt Brace
Jovanovich. P. 205.
**"Man's
Rights," The Virtue of Selfishness.
developed a dislike for Franklin D. Roosevelt in high school because he was
oversold by my history teachers. He was portrayed as a kind of canonized
secular saint who had saved the nation and the world from the ghastly phenomena
of the Depression and the Axis. Too young to judge FDR's political accomplishments,
what inculcated an unshakable suspicion in me was the tone with which FDR was
uncritically presented by the teachers to my history classes. (They were still
called "history" classes back then, not "social science.") He
could do no wrong, his intentions were unquestionably noble, he had sacrificed
himself for the greater good, and to criticize him was to belabor the picayune
and the arcane and reveal oneself as an ignorant, reactionary lowbrow. So it
was also with JFK and Woodrow Wilson.
Of
course, my real education began after leaving school and by not going on to college. I learned much,
much more about FDR, JFK and Wilson without the benefit of teachers whose eyes
would shine brightly in adulation when their names were mentioned and who would
brook no disagreement (mostly with a sneering ad hominem), and maintained my status as a reactionary, but highly
knowledgeable lowbrow.
Cass
Sunstein's eyes also shine brightly when he speaks or writes about FDR and
President Barack Obama. Sunstein, former administrator of the White House
Office of Information and Regulatory Affairs (a post he left to return to Harvard
Law School) had an op-ed on the Bloomberg
View on January 28th, "Obama, FDR and the Second Bill of
Rights." In it he approves of, promulgates, and sells Obama's alleged
desire to establish that "Second Bill of Rights" while keeping the
"old" Bill of Rights.
George
Orwell noted in his Appendix to Nineteen
Eighty-Four about the totalitarian take-over of language, in his novel
called "Newspeak," that a full translation of Jefferson words about
"self-evident truths" from the Declaration of Independence [into
Newspeak] "could only be an ideological translation, whereby Jefferson's
words would be changed into a panegyric on absolute government."*
Sunstein's
article is such a panegyric on absolute government, written not in
indecipherable Newspeak jargon, but in one in which certain terms are dropped
into the text without justification or validation, and intended to allay the
suspicion that a fast one was being pulled on the reader. Sunstein claims that
FDR was not an enemy of capitalism, nor, he claims, is Obama, simply because
Obama mentioned "free enterprise" in his inaugural
address without making a face.
Sunstein
pulls his own Newspeak shell game when he writes:
Drawing on
Thomas Jefferson, Roosevelt insisted that “these economic truths have become
accepted as self-evident. We have accepted, so to speak, a second Bill of
Rights under which a new basis of security and prosperity can be established
for all regardless of station, race or creed.”
It is important
to be clear about what FDR meant. He did not propose to amend the Constitution. He did not think that the Supreme
Court should enforce the Second Bill of Rights. He believed in free markets and
free enterprise; he had no interest in socialism.
What
twaddle! Roosevelt did not believe in free markets. If he had believed in them,
he would not have pushed for all the welfare legislation he did. He would not
have tried to pack the Supreme Court with justices friendly to his economic and
social welfare programs. He would have advocated getting the government out of
the economy, beginning with the abolition of the income tax and the Federal
Reserve System. Roosevelt took the side-door approach to socialism, as
leftist/progressives do today, not calling it that, but instead the
government's "responsibility" to do something about all the
government-caused and perpetuated problems and crises that existed in his time.
So it is with Obama.
Except
that Obama is a nihilist whose agenda on the surface appears to be fascist or
"national socialist," but which fundamentally is geared for
destruction for destruction's sake in the name of "transforming" the
country.
But,
what are rights? Novelist/philosopher Ayn Rand wrote:
A “right” is a
moral principle defining and sanctioning a man’s freedom of action in a social
context. There is only one fundamental right (all the others are its
consequences or corollaries): a man’s right to his own life….The concept of a
“right” pertains only to action—specifically, to freedom of action. It means
freedom from physical compulsion, coercion or interference by other men.**
Let
us look at and analyze Roosevelt's schedule of "rights," a list he
included in his 1944 State of the Union address
and which Sunstein cited as a model on which Obama and Congress might create a
"Second Bill of Rights." Roosevelt prefaced his address with a
statement which contradicted what followed:
"This
nation in the past two years has become an active partner in the world's
greatest war against human slavery.
We have joined with like-minded people in order to defend ourselves in a world
that has been gravely threatened with gangster rule." (Emphasis mine.)
The
right to a useful and remunerative job in the industries or shops or farms or
mines of the nation.
Well,
where does this "right" come from? If you, the individual, exist,
then that somehow automatically entitles you to a job. Your mere existence
creates the "right" to someone else's property, money, or livelihood.
Conversely, owners of industries, shops, farms and mines have a
"duty" to provide you with that job. This is a formula for mutual
slavery, not trade. In the leftist/progressive or cultural Marxist political
agenda, "rights" are not validated on man's nature as a being of
volitional consciousness who must establish his own values and pursue them
without physical compulsion, coercion or interference by other men, and without
resorting to force, but privileges that emanate from society and are doled out
by the state acting for society. Your metaphysical existence is accepted as a
cipher of society, but rejected as a free, independent individual.
The
right to earn enough to provide adequate food and clothing and recreation.
Who
is to determine what is "enough" to provide food, clothing and
recreation? A government bureau or agency or department, staffed by individuals
who assume the infallibility of the Pope and the omniscience of a deity? Who is
to determine what is "adequate"? The same bureaucrats and regulatory
"czars." And if producers refuse to "provide" these things,
what then?
The
right of every farmer to raise and sell his products at a return which will
give him and his family a decent living.
Who
is to determine that "rate of return," and by what measure can
"a decent living" be established? Again, government bureaus and
agencies are the arbiters. Between 1995 and 2011 government farm subsidies ran to $277 billion to
growers of everything from corn to dairy products to tobacco to sunflowers.
The
right of every businessman, large and small, to trade in an atmosphere of
freedom from unfair competition and domination by monopolies at home or abroad.
An
"atmosphere of freedom," to Roosevelt and his economic managers and
regulators, meant punishing the successful for putting the unsuccessful out of
business with laws against "unfair" competition. Who defines
"unfair"? Lobbyists for industries and businesses jeopardized by the
successful, who press Congress to save their skins with laws and regulations
that amount to physical compulsion, coercion and interference. "This
business is under-selling its widgets
for $1.50 retail, and I don’t want to think about its wholesale rates! I can
only sell my widgets for $2.50, because of unforeseen conditions and economic
down-turns. This isn't fair! I have a right to succeed, and this other business
is trying to monopolize the trade! Do
something, and I'll foot the bill for you for a trip to Bermuda, all expenses
paid."
In
a fully capitalist economy, this lobbyist would be out of luck and have to
successfully compete against the other company or fold, and the congressman
would be stymied by a new amendment in the Constitution that would prohibit any
abridgement of trade. In a truly free economy, legally-enforced monopolies are
government-created monopolies, either run by the government or regulated by it.
Remember
General Motors? It, too, was saved from dissolution by government compulsion,
coercion, and interference, chiefly to save its unions'
"entitlements."
The
right of every family to a decent home.
Shall
I mention the subprime
mortgage melt-town and TARP? The Federal Reserve and Treasury Department and
other government agencies encouraged and often compelled banks and financial
institutions to underwrite everyone's "right" to a "decent
home." That house of cards collapsed. When it collapsed, who paid for the
rescues and the lost billions? American taxpayers through direct taxation and
inflation, which is a form of tax, to the tune of billions of dollars.
Who
defines a "decent home"? Any government agency and NGO from the Department
of Health and Human Services to your local community organizing racket and
municipal housing authority.
The
right to adequate medical care and the opportunity to achieve and enjoy good
health.
This
"right" was achieved incrementally with Medicare and Medicaid programs
and climaxed with Obamacare
(aka The Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act of 2010). All the alleged
benefits of this compulsory legislation accrue to the compulsorily insured
citizen at the expense of the indentured servitude of doctors, surgeons, and
other medical professionals, many of whom are leaving their careers in protest
to the servitude. In the legislation, the predictable consequences of doctors
abandoning their careers in such a protest, such as a shortage of doctors to
act as "health providers," there is nothing in it that prohibits the
government from drafting retired doctors (regardless of their ages) into
"service."
The
right to adequate protection from the economic fears of old age, sickness,
accident and unemployment.
This
is Social
Security and all disability and
unemployment legislation ever passed by Congress, which costs billions of
dollars and are called, not "rights," but "entitlements,"
because everyone has been compelled to pay into the system. But the retirees of
today are getting more for their confiscated money than younger, still-working
adults will ever see in the way of their own "entitlements."
Post-WWII "baby boomers" are the most fortunate recipients of their
"entitlements." Their sons and daughters will not be so fortunate.
They'll be expected to pay in more and get less.
The
right to a good education.
What
is a "good education," and why does anyone have a right to one?
There's really no answer. The right is picked out of the ethereal realms of
leftist/progressive political philosophy. The Department of Education spends
about $30 billion a year on subsidies,
the "bulk of that funding goes toward student aid programs,
with the balance going toward grants to educational institutions." For all
the billions spent on education, from nursery schools on up to graduate
schools, America has been dumbed down and brainwashed and "socially
conditioned" to "serve" society, to "give back."
Every
Roosevelt-Sunstein "right" cited above is plank in a socialist
program. Every one of them has been legislated for, with the right to
"adequate medical care" represented by Obamacare.
Sunstein
winds up his article with:
Obama’s second
inaugural did not refer explicitly to the Second Bill of Rights, but it had an
unmistakably Rooseveltian flavor. Just after a serious economic crisis, Obama emphasized
"that a great nation must care for the vulnerable, and protect its people
from life’s worst hazards and misfortune.” Recalling Roosevelt’s central theme,
Obama said that “every citizen deserves a basic measure of security and
dignity.”
I have
news for Mr. Sunstein: There is no dignity in servitude and being chained to
one's fellow men, and even less security. But, I think he knows that. He
doesn't need to be told. Sunstein, too, is a practicing nihilist.
A "Second
Bill of Rights" would render the original Bill of Rights redundant and
superfluous. It would be supplanted with a list of state-dispensed privileges. It
should be called instead a "Manifesto of Entitlements for the Hoi Polloi."
*Appendix,
"The Principles of Newspeak," Nineteen
Eighty-Four, by George Orwell. Ed. by Irving Howe. New York: Harcourt Brace
Jovanovich. P. 205.
**"Man's
Rights," The Virtue of Selfishness.
January 28, 2013
Gun Control: Lexington Green Arising?
Barack
Hussein Obama was no sooner elected than his propaganda vehicles were loosened
on the nation. In my column, "Obama's Anti-Absolutism Club" article,
in which I demonstrate just how smitten the Mainstream Media are with Obama, what
I could also have highlighted was the lengths to which the MSM will go in the
way of excuses, covering up his failures and the peril he poses to the nation
as a wannabe tyrant, and just plain forgiving him for his executive trespasses
and crimes (all done in the name of "progress" and "moving
forward").
It
would have been neatly just to compare the MSM with that instance of brainwashing
and indoctrination in schools, when a class of grade school children was taught
to sing his praises. Remember the scandal that erupted when people learned about
the class chanting,
"Barack Hussein Obama! Um, um, um!" and so on?
That's
the MSM. Substitute full-grown adults for the kids and different lyrics and a
journalistic snapping of fingers, and you have the character and substance of
the left/liberal news media. In a nutshell.
The
subject here is how the MSM, Obama, and Congress wish to ban guns – "assault"
weapons, pistols, anything private citizens could own and use to defend their
lives and homes against predators, rapists, murderers, burglars, and even government
agents – in the name of "public safety." That desire is nearly
synonymous with the policy the British tried to enforce in the 1770's in the American
colonies. Those who remember their American history will recall that when some
700 British soldiers marched out of Boston in April 1775, their purpose was to
find, seize, or destroy the colonials' caches of guns
and powder to better ensure that the colonials had no means to resist or
threaten the Crown's occupation of the city and its environs.
Paul
Revere and others rode out to the towns and hamlets outside Boston to warn them
of the approaching menace. Citizens' militias quickly assembled to oppose the
soldiers. About sixty of them encountered the army on Lexington Green on April 19th.
A shot was fired – one that was heard "round the world," and no one
knows from which side it came, and it hardly matters now, because the militia
stood its ground and wasn't about to disperse on command from the British
officer in charge. The militia opened up, and the British fired four volleys in
return, killing eight of the militia. The outnumbered militia was routed. On their
way back to Boston after failing to find the caches of guns and powder, the
British were mercilessly harried by other militias – composed of farmers, coopers,
tradesmen, blacksmiths, and even freed blacks – leaving behind scores of dead
and wounded on the twenty mile march back to safety.
While
most rebelling colonials owned or used old British muskets from the Seven
Years' War and French-made muskets,
which the British unsuccessfully tried to ban from importation, the most deadly
weapon in Americans' hands was the Kentucky or Pennsylvania rifle. Muskets employed
"smooth bore" barrels which did not control the trajectory of the
ball blasted from them. Aiming a musket and hitting a target was a haphazard
affair. This is why both American and British forces (and later the French,
when they entered the fray) would line up in columns against each other and
fire volleys en masse, counting not
on accuracy but on numbers to cause casualties on the opposing side. Too often
a ball leaving the barrel would not fly straight ahead, but alter course left
or right.
However,
the most feared weapon in British hands, from the Americans' standpoint, was
not the Brown Bess musket,
but the bayonet at close quarters. Most colonial muskets and rifles were not
designed to accommodate bayonets. When the British finally ascended Bunker and Breed's
Hills after sustaining horrific losses (some 1,500, especially among officers) in
three assaults in June of 1775, most of the American casualties (some 450) were
bayoneted to death.
Rifles,
on the other hand, employed grooved barrels that more accurately directed the
ball at a target. It flew flawlessly in a straight line at a greater range, up
to 500 yards. American snipers using rifles killed or wounded many especially British
officers. Throughout the ensuing war and fight for independence, British military
policy was to immediately execute any captured American using a rifle by
hanging or firing squad.
Rifles,
however, were just as slow-loading as were muskets. The "bullet" had
to be assembled quickly with powder, paper, and ball; pre-packaged cartridges
and rifles that could accommodate them were not in common use until long after
the Revolution. Assembling a bullet took almost as much time as frying a couple
of eggs. The standard time which trained and drilled British soldiers took to
fire and reload was about four shots a minute. Their Prussian allies boasted of
six. Moreover, rifles needed more maintenance and care than did muskets. As
with "guns" – that is, with cannon on land and sea – they needed to
be swabbed and dried before preparing the next shot, because embers would
remain in the grooves or powder pans and cause premature firing. Rifles were
put on equal par with muskets in any close engagement between American and
British forces. Their effectiveness was reserved to snipers or flankers on the
sides of a main army.
"Assault"
weapons, particularly those with multi-cartridge clips, are the new "rifle"
feared by gun-control advocates, and, of course, by the government. "Assault"
weapons put a civilian on nearly equal terms in the way of fire power. However,
in any engagement between Americans fighting for their liberty and government forces
– local, state, or federal – civilians will still be at a distinct
disadvantage. SUVs and Mercedes cars and even Hummers are no match for armored
vehicles equipped with considerably more fire power, nor will impromptu civilian
militias be a match for trained SWAT teams and the like. But, nonetheless, such
confrontations may still occur. That is the mood of the country.
Sheriffs
and other law enforcement personnel around the country are advising citizens to
refuse to surrender their guns to federal authorities, and even advising them
to purchase them now and learn
how to use them. Other
law enforcement people and state legislators are vowing to oppose any federal
gun controls that may be legislated (or dictated by Obama via "executive
order") and threatening to arrest any federal official or officer trying
to seize, confiscate, or control private weapons. Their statements are based on
a reverence for the Constitution – particularly the Second Amendment –
completely lacking in the White House, Congress, and the MSM.
Following Oregon
Sheriff Tim Mueller's lead, three more Sheriffs in parts of Oregon announced
Wednesday in letters to U.S. Vice President Joe Biden that they would refuse to
enforce any federal gun laws that are unconstitutional.
Crook County
Sheriff Jim Hensley local reporters, “I’m going to follow my oath that I took
as Sheriff to support the constitution.” “I believe strongly in the Second
Amendment,” Hensley added, urging “If the federal government comes into Crook
County and wants to take firearms and things away from (citizens), I’m going to
tell them it’s not going that way.”
Meanwhile,
back East,
Minnesota, Pine
County Sheriff Robin Cole wrote an open letter to his residents to inform them
that he does not accept that the federal government supersedes State
authorities when it comes to regulation of firearms. “I do not believe the
federal government or any individual in the federal government has the right to
dictate to the states, counties or municipalities any mandate, regulation or
administrative rule that violates the United States Constitution or its various
amendments.” Cole wrote.
Cole said that
the right to bear arms is “fundamental to our individual freedoms and that
firearms are part of life in our country.”
Even
in liberal New York, gun-owners,
stung by the Journal
News stunt of publishing a map of legal gun-owners,
are vowing never to register or surrender their weapons to the federal government.
Now, in what is
sure to be a growing trend across the entire country, New York gun owners are
organizing a resistance against what many believe to be the most, “brazen
infringement on the right to keep and bear arms anywhere in the nation,”
according to The New American:
Preparations are already being made for mass resistance. “I’ve heard from
hundreds of people that they’re prepared to defy the law, and that number will
be magnified by the thousands, by the tens of thousands, when the registration
deadline comes,’’
said President Brian Olesen with American Shooters Supply, among the biggest
gun dealers in the state, in an interview with the New York Post.
Even government
officials admit that forcing New Yorkers to register their guns will be a tough
sell, and they are apparently aware that massive non-compliance will be the
order of the day. “Many of these
assault-rifle owners aren’t going to register; we realize that,’’ a source in
the Cuomo administration told the Post, adding that officials
expect “widespread violations” of the new statute.
However,
Senator ("Ma'am") Dianne Feinstein
is determined that the nation shall bow. She has introduced gun-control legislation
in the Senate that conforms to Obama's rhetorical emotionalism about guns.
In January, Senator Feinstein will introduce a bill to stop the sale,
transfer, importation and manufacturing of military-style assault weapons and
high-capacity ammunition feeding devices.
Feinstein
misses the point: Any weapon – revolver,
Colt or Mauser type pistols with ammo clips, hunting rifles, shotguns, and so
on – can be used "military-style" in any conflict between men. The rapidity
and efficiency with which such weapons can be loaded and fired are irrelevant. Reducing
an ammo clip to nine rounds from twenty is futile; more ammo clips would just be needed
to be carried and handy in such engagements. That may or may not work to the
disadvantage of a "new rebel," and that is also irrelevant.
The
whole thrust of Feinstein's bill is to further disarm Americans as a first step
to disarming them completely and permanently, so that they would need to resort
to bows and arrows, rocks, and rubber bands. Such a move will be touted as
being for their own good, for the "public good."
Is
America edging closer to another Lexington Green? Time will tell. Americans are
beginning to stand their ground. Will it be a war, or a civil war? If armed
conflict occurs between Americans and their government, where will it begin? And
when? Will such a conflict be premature, timely, or too late? Whatever the scenario,
it would be good to remember Captain John Parker's
immortal words at Lexington Green, words that were also "heard round the
world":
"Stand your
ground! Don't fire until fired upon! But if they want to have a war, let it
begin here!"
Hussein Obama was no sooner elected than his propaganda vehicles were loosened
on the nation. In my column, "Obama's Anti-Absolutism Club" article,
in which I demonstrate just how smitten the Mainstream Media are with Obama, what
I could also have highlighted was the lengths to which the MSM will go in the
way of excuses, covering up his failures and the peril he poses to the nation
as a wannabe tyrant, and just plain forgiving him for his executive trespasses
and crimes (all done in the name of "progress" and "moving
forward").
It
would have been neatly just to compare the MSM with that instance of brainwashing
and indoctrination in schools, when a class of grade school children was taught
to sing his praises. Remember the scandal that erupted when people learned about
the class chanting,
"Barack Hussein Obama! Um, um, um!" and so on?
That's
the MSM. Substitute full-grown adults for the kids and different lyrics and a
journalistic snapping of fingers, and you have the character and substance of
the left/liberal news media. In a nutshell.
The
subject here is how the MSM, Obama, and Congress wish to ban guns – "assault"
weapons, pistols, anything private citizens could own and use to defend their
lives and homes against predators, rapists, murderers, burglars, and even government
agents – in the name of "public safety." That desire is nearly
synonymous with the policy the British tried to enforce in the 1770's in the American
colonies. Those who remember their American history will recall that when some
700 British soldiers marched out of Boston in April 1775, their purpose was to
find, seize, or destroy the colonials' caches of guns
and powder to better ensure that the colonials had no means to resist or
threaten the Crown's occupation of the city and its environs.
Paul
Revere and others rode out to the towns and hamlets outside Boston to warn them
of the approaching menace. Citizens' militias quickly assembled to oppose the
soldiers. About sixty of them encountered the army on Lexington Green on April 19th.
A shot was fired – one that was heard "round the world," and no one
knows from which side it came, and it hardly matters now, because the militia
stood its ground and wasn't about to disperse on command from the British
officer in charge. The militia opened up, and the British fired four volleys in
return, killing eight of the militia. The outnumbered militia was routed. On their
way back to Boston after failing to find the caches of guns and powder, the
British were mercilessly harried by other militias – composed of farmers, coopers,
tradesmen, blacksmiths, and even freed blacks – leaving behind scores of dead
and wounded on the twenty mile march back to safety.
While
most rebelling colonials owned or used old British muskets from the Seven
Years' War and French-made muskets,
which the British unsuccessfully tried to ban from importation, the most deadly
weapon in Americans' hands was the Kentucky or Pennsylvania rifle. Muskets employed
"smooth bore" barrels which did not control the trajectory of the
ball blasted from them. Aiming a musket and hitting a target was a haphazard
affair. This is why both American and British forces (and later the French,
when they entered the fray) would line up in columns against each other and
fire volleys en masse, counting not
on accuracy but on numbers to cause casualties on the opposing side. Too often
a ball leaving the barrel would not fly straight ahead, but alter course left
or right.
However,
the most feared weapon in British hands, from the Americans' standpoint, was
not the Brown Bess musket,
but the bayonet at close quarters. Most colonial muskets and rifles were not
designed to accommodate bayonets. When the British finally ascended Bunker and Breed's
Hills after sustaining horrific losses (some 1,500, especially among officers) in
three assaults in June of 1775, most of the American casualties (some 450) were
bayoneted to death.
Rifles,
on the other hand, employed grooved barrels that more accurately directed the
ball at a target. It flew flawlessly in a straight line at a greater range, up
to 500 yards. American snipers using rifles killed or wounded many especially British
officers. Throughout the ensuing war and fight for independence, British military
policy was to immediately execute any captured American using a rifle by
hanging or firing squad.
Rifles,
however, were just as slow-loading as were muskets. The "bullet" had
to be assembled quickly with powder, paper, and ball; pre-packaged cartridges
and rifles that could accommodate them were not in common use until long after
the Revolution. Assembling a bullet took almost as much time as frying a couple
of eggs. The standard time which trained and drilled British soldiers took to
fire and reload was about four shots a minute. Their Prussian allies boasted of
six. Moreover, rifles needed more maintenance and care than did muskets. As
with "guns" – that is, with cannon on land and sea – they needed to
be swabbed and dried before preparing the next shot, because embers would
remain in the grooves or powder pans and cause premature firing. Rifles were
put on equal par with muskets in any close engagement between American and
British forces. Their effectiveness was reserved to snipers or flankers on the
sides of a main army.
"Assault"
weapons, particularly those with multi-cartridge clips, are the new "rifle"
feared by gun-control advocates, and, of course, by the government. "Assault"
weapons put a civilian on nearly equal terms in the way of fire power. However,
in any engagement between Americans fighting for their liberty and government forces
– local, state, or federal – civilians will still be at a distinct
disadvantage. SUVs and Mercedes cars and even Hummers are no match for armored
vehicles equipped with considerably more fire power, nor will impromptu civilian
militias be a match for trained SWAT teams and the like. But, nonetheless, such
confrontations may still occur. That is the mood of the country.
Sheriffs
and other law enforcement personnel around the country are advising citizens to
refuse to surrender their guns to federal authorities, and even advising them
to purchase them now and learn
how to use them. Other
law enforcement people and state legislators are vowing to oppose any federal
gun controls that may be legislated (or dictated by Obama via "executive
order") and threatening to arrest any federal official or officer trying
to seize, confiscate, or control private weapons. Their statements are based on
a reverence for the Constitution – particularly the Second Amendment –
completely lacking in the White House, Congress, and the MSM.
Following Oregon
Sheriff Tim Mueller's lead, three more Sheriffs in parts of Oregon announced
Wednesday in letters to U.S. Vice President Joe Biden that they would refuse to
enforce any federal gun laws that are unconstitutional.
Crook County
Sheriff Jim Hensley local reporters, “I’m going to follow my oath that I took
as Sheriff to support the constitution.” “I believe strongly in the Second
Amendment,” Hensley added, urging “If the federal government comes into Crook
County and wants to take firearms and things away from (citizens), I’m going to
tell them it’s not going that way.”
Meanwhile,
back East,
Minnesota, Pine
County Sheriff Robin Cole wrote an open letter to his residents to inform them
that he does not accept that the federal government supersedes State
authorities when it comes to regulation of firearms. “I do not believe the
federal government or any individual in the federal government has the right to
dictate to the states, counties or municipalities any mandate, regulation or
administrative rule that violates the United States Constitution or its various
amendments.” Cole wrote.
Cole said that
the right to bear arms is “fundamental to our individual freedoms and that
firearms are part of life in our country.”
Even
in liberal New York, gun-owners,
stung by the Journal
News stunt of publishing a map of legal gun-owners,
are vowing never to register or surrender their weapons to the federal government.
Now, in what is
sure to be a growing trend across the entire country, New York gun owners are
organizing a resistance against what many believe to be the most, “brazen
infringement on the right to keep and bear arms anywhere in the nation,”
according to The New American:
Preparations are already being made for mass resistance. “I’ve heard from
hundreds of people that they’re prepared to defy the law, and that number will
be magnified by the thousands, by the tens of thousands, when the registration
deadline comes,’’
said President Brian Olesen with American Shooters Supply, among the biggest
gun dealers in the state, in an interview with the New York Post.
Even government
officials admit that forcing New Yorkers to register their guns will be a tough
sell, and they are apparently aware that massive non-compliance will be the
order of the day. “Many of these
assault-rifle owners aren’t going to register; we realize that,’’ a source in
the Cuomo administration told the Post, adding that officials
expect “widespread violations” of the new statute.
However,
Senator ("Ma'am") Dianne Feinstein
is determined that the nation shall bow. She has introduced gun-control legislation
in the Senate that conforms to Obama's rhetorical emotionalism about guns.
In January, Senator Feinstein will introduce a bill to stop the sale,
transfer, importation and manufacturing of military-style assault weapons and
high-capacity ammunition feeding devices.
Feinstein
misses the point: Any weapon – revolver,
Colt or Mauser type pistols with ammo clips, hunting rifles, shotguns, and so
on – can be used "military-style" in any conflict between men. The rapidity
and efficiency with which such weapons can be loaded and fired are irrelevant. Reducing
an ammo clip to nine rounds from twenty is futile; more ammo clips would just be needed
to be carried and handy in such engagements. That may or may not work to the
disadvantage of a "new rebel," and that is also irrelevant.
The
whole thrust of Feinstein's bill is to further disarm Americans as a first step
to disarming them completely and permanently, so that they would need to resort
to bows and arrows, rocks, and rubber bands. Such a move will be touted as
being for their own good, for the "public good."
Is
America edging closer to another Lexington Green? Time will tell. Americans are
beginning to stand their ground. Will it be a war, or a civil war? If armed
conflict occurs between Americans and their government, where will it begin? And
when? Will such a conflict be premature, timely, or too late? Whatever the scenario,
it would be good to remember Captain John Parker's
immortal words at Lexington Green, words that were also "heard round the
world":
"Stand your
ground! Don't fire until fired upon! But if they want to have a war, let it
begin here!"
January 23, 2013
Obama's Anti-Absolutism Club
The Mainstream Mafia
– excuse me, Media – oblivious to
their own death throes and their glaring irrelevancy in contemporary American political
discourse, continue to fawn over President Barack Obama and his second inaugural
address of January 21st. They behave as though everyone in the
nation were breathlessly glued to CBS, CNN, ABC, NBC, Washington Week, Face the
Nation and PBS's variety show of round table analytical yak fests. The MSM
erroneously presume that the nation receives their dollops of wisdom from them.
The truth is that even Obama's supporters and worshippers rely less on what the
MSM have to say and more on Internet news outlets, as well as on Twitter and
Face Book, where they can "inter-react" with each other and play virtual
paddy cake with their Progressive/Marxist idols.
Still, the MSM believe
they set the terms of the discourse. Let's examine some examples. Keep in mind
that these are all from a left-wing perspective.
Ruth Marcus
of the Washington Post broke out her rosary or worry beads and fretted over how
The One will accomplish all he has set out to do during his second term. Also keep
in mind that, to The One and his titillated throngs of admirers, there are no
such things as "absolutes,"
except the "absolute" of the moment, which must be "seized"
and made an absolute before it fluxes into something distasteful. After scoring
Obama on the "blustery naiveté" of his first inaugural address, she
forgives him.
The battle-scarred
Obama of the second
inaugural address was simultaneously more realistic and more confident. He
spoke like a man who, in the course of four long years, has developed a far
sharper vision of the role of government: first, “that preserving
our individual freedoms ultimately requires collective action”; second,
that “our country cannot succeed when a shrinking few do very well and a
growing many barely make it.”
The Marxist theme
of those assertions may or may not have escaped Marcus. But they are definitely
Marxist, and more and more liberals are admitting it. "This was a speech
that tilted decidedly to the left, far more so than four years ago." Left,
but not Marxist.
Another aging Washington
Post resident tyro, Harold Meyerson,
crowed that Obama's majority is now everyone's majority, even if everyone didn't
show up on the Mall to "witness history." He, too, forgives Obama for
his narcissistic and tautologically confusing words in 2008.
But in the
aftermath of Obama’s 2012 reelection and his second
inaugural address, his 2008 remarks seem less a statement of
self-absorption than one of prophecy. There is an Obama majority in American
politics, symbolized by Monday’s
throng on the Mall, whose existence is both the consequence of profound
changes to our nation’s composition and values and the cause of changes yet to
come.
The Mall throng was
a bizarre menagerie of groups "from Seneca Falls and Selma and
Stonewall" that represent Obama's constituency, not the nation's majority.
Meyerson, too, waits breathlessly for him to cause "changes yet to
come." Meyerson takes a swipe at Obama's principled and absolutist
opponents.
Our history,
Obama argued, is one of adapting our ideals to a changing world. His speech
(like recent books
by Michael Lind and my Post colleague E.J.
Dionne Jr.) reclaimed U.S. history from the misrepresentations of both
constitutional originalists and libertarian fantasists. “Fidelity to our
founding principles requires new responses to new challenges,” the president
said. “Preserving our individual freedoms ultimately requires collective
action. For the American people can no more meet the demands of today’s world
by acting alone than American soldiers could have met the forces of fascism or
communism with muskets and militias.”
Well, just throw
out those copies of The Federalist Papers,
The Anti-Federalist Papers, all those
interminable scribblings of Jefferson, Madison, Mason, Henry, and even of
Hamilton. They had their absolutes. We have ours. Besides, they were just a
bunch of privileged white
men with bones to pick with tyranny. Reality changes absolutes. Freedom is
slavery, don’t you know?
In the astrological
readings of Meyerson, individual freedoms are not obliterated by "collective
action" – that is, by organized and channeled mob rule – but somehow
remain in force, somewhere, somehow, but, don't bother him with
causo-connections. And one supposes that he has never read Orwell's Nineteen Eighty-Four, in which the
reigning Party rewrote history twenty-four hours a day to counter the
"misrepresentations of both constitutional originalists and libertarian
fantasists." There are no "absolutes,"
just the "will of the people" who somehow establish absolutes by
picking them out of the thin air with some guidance from the administration and
university professors and the Supreme Court and the ACLU, and then hand them to
Obama, saying, "Here's your mandate. Where's my stuff?"
But, beware, Mr.
Meyerson. The nation is in a rotten mood, that is, that part of it fed up with
the fascist populism and mob rule and the arrogance of a man who thinks he's
God's or Nature's gift to the masses. The time will come – and there are bellwether
stirrings among the newly disenfranchised of the middle class, the rich, the
constitutionalists, the originalists, the "libertarian fantasists" –
when men will take up their illegal muskets and semiautomatics and oppose the
mobs and SWAT teams and the OWS Stoßtruppen. You will call them
"reactionaries" or "flunkies of the old order" or
"running dogs of the offshore wealthy." They will call themselves
revolutionaries. They will be wearing the tricorns of old and brandishing
banners that proclaim, "Tread on me no longer" and "Disperse, or
die, so we can live free."
Or, try this
scenario: They will go on strike, à la
Atlas Shrugged.
The New York Times
is timidly lifting its veil and admitting to itself, after all these years,
that Obama is Marxist. Jennifer Schuessler,
in "A Young Publisher Takes Marx Into the Mainstream," celebrates the
founding of a blatantly Marxist publication, Jacobin. Hailing the founder,
Bhaskar Sunkara, as an example of an unexpurgated activist journalist, she
writes:
…In 2009,
during a medical leave from his sophomore year at George Washington University,
Mr. Sunkara turned to Plan B: creating a magazine dedicated to bringing jargon-free neo-Marxist thinking to the masses.
It's about time
some brave soul decided to dispense with the dissembling verisimilitude of left/liberal
Aunt Hildegard and her Gray Lady Progressive code-talkers and speak frankly in
Marxist jargon.
The
resulting magazine, Jacobin, whose ninth issue just landed, has certainly been
an improbable hit, buoyed by the radical stirrings of the Occupy movement and a
bitingly satirical but serious-minded style. Since its debut in September 2010
it has attracted nearly 2,000 print and digital subscribers, some 250,000 Web
hits a month, regular name-checks from prominent bloggers, and book deals from
two New York publishers.
But, who are
"the masses"? The nation's
unemployed? The food stamp brigade? The battalions of single-parent welfare
recipients? Is Jacobin destined to
replace The Village Voice and Rolling Stone? Why the curious name,
"Jacobin"? During the French Revolution, the Jacobin Club was a
far-left organization that demanded ideological purity from the central government,
in this case, "pure" democracy. Or, unchecked mob rule. Off with
their heads! That doesn’t refer to the command of Lewis Carroll's Queen of Hearts,
but to Charles Dickens' Madame Defarge.
Meanwhile
the magazine was also attracting attention from more established figures on the
left, who saw it as raising fundamental questions that had been off the table
since the collapse of the Soviet Union. Corey Robin, an associate professor of
political science at Brooklyn College who became a contributing editor last
winter, pointed in particular to articles by Mr. Ackerman and Peter Frase,
another early Jacobin recruit, debating the possibility of a post-capitalist
economy involving, among other things, drastically reduced working hours.
“So many
people are not working or already getting wages subsidized by the state -- maybe
there’s something already at play that we haven’t paid enough attention to,”
Mr. Robin said.
What Mr. Robin hasn't
been paying attention to is the creeping statism and increments of fascist
economics, disguised as unadulterated socialism. And, in a
"post-capitalist economy" (and the U.S. has never had a wholly
"capitalist" economy), "drastically reduced working hours"
are for millions translating into no
working hours. But, that's all right with Robin. It would be ideal for him if
everyone had state-subsidized wages, even if most of them weren’t working at
all. They have a right to security and dignity, you see.
Finally, ABC
is tiptoeing up to the truth. Yes. Obama is a "progressive" and a
"liberal."
After years
of downplaying ideological labels for Barack Obama, ABC has seemingly accepted
the idea that the President is a "progressive" and a
"liberal." While recapping the inauguration, Good Morning
America's journalists used the terms four times in just two minutes and 45
seconds. Yet, when Obama was a Democratic primary candidate in 2007, the
networks deployed the L-word
just twice – in the entire year.
The dreaded
"L-word" is now acceptable in polite political discourse among, well,
liberals. "Progressive"? All that can mean is to "progress"
forward. The contemptible "C-word,"
"conservative, was repeatedly
pronounced with sneers and jutting lower lips, meaning to its speakers to regress, or move backward, that in turn being synonymous with (however erroneously
among conservatives and progressives)
absolutist notions of individual rights, original meanings of the Constitution,
the sanctity of private property, and even gun ownership.
Media Research
Center provided a transcript of some of the unprecedented exchange among George
Stephanopoulos and Jon Karl, as they assured themselves that Obama will kiss
our wounds and make everything all right.
GEORGE
STEPHANOPOULOS: We're going to turn to President Obama now, and what's in store
for the second term after yesterday's inaugural. The speech, a call to action, an uncompromising enunciation of liberal
principles. The question, now, what can actually get done on those big
issue like gun control, gay rights and climate change? ABC's Jon Karl has more on that from the White House. And, Jon, liberals
were cheering yesterday. Republicans, not so much.
KARL: With
that, he invited all Americans to celebrate the changing landscape of American
culture.
Obama (video
montage): We have always understood that
when times change, so must we. But preserving our individual freedom ultimately
requires collective action.
KARL: He unapologetically laid out a progressive
agenda, promising action on climate change, equal pay for women and
immigration.
Obama (video
montage): Progress does not compel us to
settle the centuries-long debates about the role of government for all-time.
But it does require us to act in our time.
You see. Absolutes are not for "all time." Absolutes are the Spam
of politics. They look like meat, feel like meat, even taste like meat. But really
aren't meat. Or absolutes. They can change. The centuries of bickering are
over. The debate stops now, in
"our time." It's settled political science, just as man-caused global
warming is settled science. Obama promises to do something about that, too,
even if it means emulating King Canute and commanding the sun to stop affecting
the weather. Government is the end-all and be-all of all things. It alone can
move men "forward." It alone can "Organize for
America."
So says the Club of the Mainstream Mafia. Those of you who don’t wish to be
"organized" or to move "forward," please leave the room. Outside,
give the nice TSA man your shoe size, be prepared to be measured for your
concrete boots.
– excuse me, Media – oblivious to
their own death throes and their glaring irrelevancy in contemporary American political
discourse, continue to fawn over President Barack Obama and his second inaugural
address of January 21st. They behave as though everyone in the
nation were breathlessly glued to CBS, CNN, ABC, NBC, Washington Week, Face the
Nation and PBS's variety show of round table analytical yak fests. The MSM
erroneously presume that the nation receives their dollops of wisdom from them.
The truth is that even Obama's supporters and worshippers rely less on what the
MSM have to say and more on Internet news outlets, as well as on Twitter and
Face Book, where they can "inter-react" with each other and play virtual
paddy cake with their Progressive/Marxist idols.
Still, the MSM believe
they set the terms of the discourse. Let's examine some examples. Keep in mind
that these are all from a left-wing perspective.
Ruth Marcus
of the Washington Post broke out her rosary or worry beads and fretted over how
The One will accomplish all he has set out to do during his second term. Also keep
in mind that, to The One and his titillated throngs of admirers, there are no
such things as "absolutes,"
except the "absolute" of the moment, which must be "seized"
and made an absolute before it fluxes into something distasteful. After scoring
Obama on the "blustery naiveté" of his first inaugural address, she
forgives him.
The battle-scarred
Obama of the second
inaugural address was simultaneously more realistic and more confident. He
spoke like a man who, in the course of four long years, has developed a far
sharper vision of the role of government: first, “that preserving
our individual freedoms ultimately requires collective action”; second,
that “our country cannot succeed when a shrinking few do very well and a
growing many barely make it.”
The Marxist theme
of those assertions may or may not have escaped Marcus. But they are definitely
Marxist, and more and more liberals are admitting it. "This was a speech
that tilted decidedly to the left, far more so than four years ago." Left,
but not Marxist.
Another aging Washington
Post resident tyro, Harold Meyerson,
crowed that Obama's majority is now everyone's majority, even if everyone didn't
show up on the Mall to "witness history." He, too, forgives Obama for
his narcissistic and tautologically confusing words in 2008.
But in the
aftermath of Obama’s 2012 reelection and his second
inaugural address, his 2008 remarks seem less a statement of
self-absorption than one of prophecy. There is an Obama majority in American
politics, symbolized by Monday’s
throng on the Mall, whose existence is both the consequence of profound
changes to our nation’s composition and values and the cause of changes yet to
come.
The Mall throng was
a bizarre menagerie of groups "from Seneca Falls and Selma and
Stonewall" that represent Obama's constituency, not the nation's majority.
Meyerson, too, waits breathlessly for him to cause "changes yet to
come." Meyerson takes a swipe at Obama's principled and absolutist
opponents.
Our history,
Obama argued, is one of adapting our ideals to a changing world. His speech
(like recent books
by Michael Lind and my Post colleague E.J.
Dionne Jr.) reclaimed U.S. history from the misrepresentations of both
constitutional originalists and libertarian fantasists. “Fidelity to our
founding principles requires new responses to new challenges,” the president
said. “Preserving our individual freedoms ultimately requires collective
action. For the American people can no more meet the demands of today’s world
by acting alone than American soldiers could have met the forces of fascism or
communism with muskets and militias.”
Well, just throw
out those copies of The Federalist Papers,
The Anti-Federalist Papers, all those
interminable scribblings of Jefferson, Madison, Mason, Henry, and even of
Hamilton. They had their absolutes. We have ours. Besides, they were just a
bunch of privileged white
men with bones to pick with tyranny. Reality changes absolutes. Freedom is
slavery, don’t you know?
In the astrological
readings of Meyerson, individual freedoms are not obliterated by "collective
action" – that is, by organized and channeled mob rule – but somehow
remain in force, somewhere, somehow, but, don't bother him with
causo-connections. And one supposes that he has never read Orwell's Nineteen Eighty-Four, in which the
reigning Party rewrote history twenty-four hours a day to counter the
"misrepresentations of both constitutional originalists and libertarian
fantasists." There are no "absolutes,"
just the "will of the people" who somehow establish absolutes by
picking them out of the thin air with some guidance from the administration and
university professors and the Supreme Court and the ACLU, and then hand them to
Obama, saying, "Here's your mandate. Where's my stuff?"
But, beware, Mr.
Meyerson. The nation is in a rotten mood, that is, that part of it fed up with
the fascist populism and mob rule and the arrogance of a man who thinks he's
God's or Nature's gift to the masses. The time will come – and there are bellwether
stirrings among the newly disenfranchised of the middle class, the rich, the
constitutionalists, the originalists, the "libertarian fantasists" –
when men will take up their illegal muskets and semiautomatics and oppose the
mobs and SWAT teams and the OWS Stoßtruppen. You will call them
"reactionaries" or "flunkies of the old order" or
"running dogs of the offshore wealthy." They will call themselves
revolutionaries. They will be wearing the tricorns of old and brandishing
banners that proclaim, "Tread on me no longer" and "Disperse, or
die, so we can live free."
Or, try this
scenario: They will go on strike, à la
Atlas Shrugged.
The New York Times
is timidly lifting its veil and admitting to itself, after all these years,
that Obama is Marxist. Jennifer Schuessler,
in "A Young Publisher Takes Marx Into the Mainstream," celebrates the
founding of a blatantly Marxist publication, Jacobin. Hailing the founder,
Bhaskar Sunkara, as an example of an unexpurgated activist journalist, she
writes:
…In 2009,
during a medical leave from his sophomore year at George Washington University,
Mr. Sunkara turned to Plan B: creating a magazine dedicated to bringing jargon-free neo-Marxist thinking to the masses.
It's about time
some brave soul decided to dispense with the dissembling verisimilitude of left/liberal
Aunt Hildegard and her Gray Lady Progressive code-talkers and speak frankly in
Marxist jargon.
The
resulting magazine, Jacobin, whose ninth issue just landed, has certainly been
an improbable hit, buoyed by the radical stirrings of the Occupy movement and a
bitingly satirical but serious-minded style. Since its debut in September 2010
it has attracted nearly 2,000 print and digital subscribers, some 250,000 Web
hits a month, regular name-checks from prominent bloggers, and book deals from
two New York publishers.
But, who are
"the masses"? The nation's
unemployed? The food stamp brigade? The battalions of single-parent welfare
recipients? Is Jacobin destined to
replace The Village Voice and Rolling Stone? Why the curious name,
"Jacobin"? During the French Revolution, the Jacobin Club was a
far-left organization that demanded ideological purity from the central government,
in this case, "pure" democracy. Or, unchecked mob rule. Off with
their heads! That doesn’t refer to the command of Lewis Carroll's Queen of Hearts,
but to Charles Dickens' Madame Defarge.
Meanwhile
the magazine was also attracting attention from more established figures on the
left, who saw it as raising fundamental questions that had been off the table
since the collapse of the Soviet Union. Corey Robin, an associate professor of
political science at Brooklyn College who became a contributing editor last
winter, pointed in particular to articles by Mr. Ackerman and Peter Frase,
another early Jacobin recruit, debating the possibility of a post-capitalist
economy involving, among other things, drastically reduced working hours.
“So many
people are not working or already getting wages subsidized by the state -- maybe
there’s something already at play that we haven’t paid enough attention to,”
Mr. Robin said.
What Mr. Robin hasn't
been paying attention to is the creeping statism and increments of fascist
economics, disguised as unadulterated socialism. And, in a
"post-capitalist economy" (and the U.S. has never had a wholly
"capitalist" economy), "drastically reduced working hours"
are for millions translating into no
working hours. But, that's all right with Robin. It would be ideal for him if
everyone had state-subsidized wages, even if most of them weren’t working at
all. They have a right to security and dignity, you see.
Finally, ABC
is tiptoeing up to the truth. Yes. Obama is a "progressive" and a
"liberal."
After years
of downplaying ideological labels for Barack Obama, ABC has seemingly accepted
the idea that the President is a "progressive" and a
"liberal." While recapping the inauguration, Good Morning
America's journalists used the terms four times in just two minutes and 45
seconds. Yet, when Obama was a Democratic primary candidate in 2007, the
networks deployed the L-word
just twice – in the entire year.
The dreaded
"L-word" is now acceptable in polite political discourse among, well,
liberals. "Progressive"? All that can mean is to "progress"
forward. The contemptible "C-word,"
"conservative, was repeatedly
pronounced with sneers and jutting lower lips, meaning to its speakers to regress, or move backward, that in turn being synonymous with (however erroneously
among conservatives and progressives)
absolutist notions of individual rights, original meanings of the Constitution,
the sanctity of private property, and even gun ownership.
Media Research
Center provided a transcript of some of the unprecedented exchange among George
Stephanopoulos and Jon Karl, as they assured themselves that Obama will kiss
our wounds and make everything all right.
GEORGE
STEPHANOPOULOS: We're going to turn to President Obama now, and what's in store
for the second term after yesterday's inaugural. The speech, a call to action, an uncompromising enunciation of liberal
principles. The question, now, what can actually get done on those big
issue like gun control, gay rights and climate change? ABC's Jon Karl has more on that from the White House. And, Jon, liberals
were cheering yesterday. Republicans, not so much.
KARL: With
that, he invited all Americans to celebrate the changing landscape of American
culture.
Obama (video
montage): We have always understood that
when times change, so must we. But preserving our individual freedom ultimately
requires collective action.
KARL: He unapologetically laid out a progressive
agenda, promising action on climate change, equal pay for women and
immigration.
Obama (video
montage): Progress does not compel us to
settle the centuries-long debates about the role of government for all-time.
But it does require us to act in our time.
You see. Absolutes are not for "all time." Absolutes are the Spam
of politics. They look like meat, feel like meat, even taste like meat. But really
aren't meat. Or absolutes. They can change. The centuries of bickering are
over. The debate stops now, in
"our time." It's settled political science, just as man-caused global
warming is settled science. Obama promises to do something about that, too,
even if it means emulating King Canute and commanding the sun to stop affecting
the weather. Government is the end-all and be-all of all things. It alone can
move men "forward." It alone can "Organize for
America."
So says the Club of the Mainstream Mafia. Those of you who don’t wish to be
"organized" or to move "forward," please leave the room. Outside,
give the nice TSA man your shoe size, be prepared to be measured for your
concrete boots.
January 22, 2013
Obama's Second Declaration of War on America
Sitting down to
parse President Barack Obama's second inaugural
address of January 21st, one's eyes begin to glaze over while
scanning the transcript of the speech. There again are the same old platitudes,
bromides, and catch phrases and secret coded messages. There again is the
sanctimonious delivery of a person who wants to be remembered for something,
because otherwise he is a zero who can only recite a speech someone else wrote
and polished and ensured that no gaffes or unintended meanings were in the
text. But he read the speech, he vetted it and approved of it, and he delivered
it, so, it's his speech. He owns it, for better or for worse. And the
unrelenting theme is worse.
Worse for the
country, because he means to "transform" it. Which, to anyone who
values freedom and governing his own destiny, means to damage it, perhaps irreparably.
Without Secret
Service tut-tuts, you really want the chance, instead of laboriously construing
the content of his inaugural spiel, to slap the man silly and hard across that
smug, arrogant phiz of his for uttering words like "liberty," and
"free markets," and "We hold these truths to be
self-evident…" and other words and phrases that occur in the speech. Why? Because
the words mean nothing but trouble to him. They meant nothing to the
speechwriter. He is an enemy of those words. He is a power-luster. Liberty,
free markets, freedom, and self-evident truths are his nemesis. He worked hard
in his first term to denigrate and diminish them. He will work harder in his
second term to eradicate them altogether.
He as much as said
so. "I'm here, and I'm going to do
as I please – 'transform' the nation from a mixed economy/welfare state – which
was bad enough (chuckle, chuckle) – into a full-scale Progressive/Socialist
utopia, and what're you gonna do about it?" Boil away all the rhetoric,
and that's thug talk. That's Chicago talk, the Rahm Emanuel gangster persona and approach to politics that never
left the White House when the master of expletives and crisis-exploiter
departed to return to his old stomping grounds.
In Congress, there
is no one to oppose him. The Republicans may as well charter themselves as a
dues-paying affiliate of the Democratic Party. The appellation
"republican" for these compromisers and appeasers is undeserved and
obscene. The Republican Party has, for just about a century now, behaved like a
Chihuahua riding on the back of a Doberman. It goes wherever the Doberman goes,
and yaps when the Doberman barks, and dares not jump off, because the Doberman
will have it for lunch.
The Republicans,
after all, helped to midwife the birth of the Progressives and the inauguration
of socialism in the nation and of its economy in 1912,
by Teddy Roosevelt's split with William Howard Taft over Taft's using the Sherman Anti-Trust Act
to break up U.S. Steel, a pet of Roosevelt's. The conflict between the
conservative and Progressive Republicans handed Woodrow Wilson, a committed
advocate of nascent fascism, the election of 1912. Virtually everything on the
Republican Progressive platform – such as an income tax, the director election
of Senators, an inheritance tax, and so on – comported easily with the official
Democratic Progressive agenda. That's bipartisanship with a capital B.
Having the
Republicans and the conservatives for lunch is what is explicitly advocated by John
Dickerson,
political director of CBS News, in his battle plan that would allow Obama to
consolidate his autocratic powers.
"The president who came into
office speaking in lofty terms about bipartisanship and cooperation can only
cement his legacy if he destroys the GOP. If he wants to transform American politics,
he must go for the throat."
In explaining how Obama
can divide and conquer the Republicans by abandoning attempts at bipartisanship,
Dickerson
advises:
Obama’s only
remaining option is to pulverize. Whether he succeeds in passing legislation or
not, given his ambitions, his goal should be to delegitimize his opponents.
Through a series of clarifying fights over controversial issues, he can force
Republicans to either side with their coalition's most extreme elements or
cause a rift in the party that will leave it, at least temporarily, in
disarray.
The "extremists,"
Dickerson suggests, should be so demonized that the Republicans will disavow
any connection with them. Obama, he writes, has an opportunity "to hasten
the demise of the old order by increasing the political cost of having the GOP coalition
defined by Second Amendment absolutists, climate science deniers, supporters of
'self-deportation' [of illegal immigrants], and the pure no-tax wing."
Obama's inaugural
agenda has that precisely in mind, and more. Dickerson needn't hold his breath.
Conservative talk show host Mark Levin
agrees with Dickerson's assessment of the state of the "Grand Old
Party" and its inability to block the Obama agenda:
How to fight
that agenda? Levin said the answer certainly doesn’t lie in the current
Republican Party leadership. “I think the Republican Party, its apparatus, its
so-called leadership, the parasitic consultants, represent an institution that
is tired, old, almost decrepit, full of cowardice and vision-less. It has
abandoned the Declaration of Independence and any serious defense of
constitutional republicanism. The Democrat Party is now a radical 1960s party;
it’s the anti-Constitution, anti-capitalism, anti-individual party. It largely
controls the federal government, including the massive bureaucracy and much of
the judiciary -- what I call the permanent branches of the federal government.
The Democrat Party represents the federal government, and the federal government
expands the power of the Democrat Party.
And, to paraphrase
that comic line from Monty Python's The
Life of Brian ("What have the Romans ever done for us?"), what
have the Republicans ever done for us? Levin nails it:
On the other
hand, the GOP today stands for capitulation, timidity, delusion -- so mostly
nothing. Republicans may speak of the Constitution, limited government, low
taxes, etc., but what have they done about them? Next to nothing if not
nothing. Even when Bush 43 was president and the Republicans controlled
Congress. What did they do? They went on a spending binge. They expanded
Medicare, the federal role in local education, drove up the debt, etc.
Meanwhile, we are lectured by putative Republicans like Colin Powell,
Condoleezza Rice, Tom Ridge, and a conga line of others trashing often
viciously NOT Obama and what the Democrats are doing to our nation, but
conservatives, constitutionalists, and tea party activists who are the only
people left standing for liberty against tyranny in this country."
And why did the
Republicans go on spending binges and expand the role and scope of government? Because
they are morally and politically bankrupt. That was evident in 1912. They have
been too obsessed with measuring up to the Democrats' and Progressives' notions
of an ideal moral polity – which is collectivist, socialist, and ultimately
fascist. But this would be news to the Republicans. When the Democrats bark,
most Republicans yap in concurrence. Levin also nails Obama and his ideological
origins and commitments:
I think
Obama sees himself as correcting historic wrongs in this country, as delivering
the fruits of the labor of other people to people who he believes have
historically been put upon. I think there’s a lot of perverse thinking that
goes on in his mind, radical left-wing thinking. He was indoctrinated with Marx
and Alinksy [sic] propaganda. You not
only see it in his agenda but in his words -- class warfare; degrading
successful people unless, of course, they help finance his elections, causes,
and organizations; pretending to speak for the so-called middle class when, in
fact, he is destroying their jobs, savings, and future. Obama's war on our
society is intended to be an onslaught in which the system is overwhelmed.”
I can think of a
number of historical figures who saw themselves as "correcting historical
wrongs": Mussolini, Hitler, Lenin, Stalin, Mao, Policy Pot, Hugo Chavez,
the Perons. And I think I can count on the fingers of one hand who have had the
temerity to compare Obama with any one of them. Levin, perceptive as he is, is
not of that number. It takes a species of honesty to make that comparison. I have
heard no Republican or conservative courageous enough to make it.
Jerome Corsi of the
Tea
Party reveals that the
"executive orders" concerning guns was just a lot of official puffery,
being little more than toothless presidential "proclamations."
What Obama signed were 23
presidential memoranda and proclamations that have no binding effect of law
whatsoever.
But Congress is
sure to help him making them lawfully binding in some form. No is not an operative verb in its
lexicon. Maybe is. So, on to a little
parsing of Obama's inaugural address. There is a wealth of assertions and
statements that one can highlight. While not focusing how many times Obama said
we (61 times) and together (seven) – he had to make sure
that his audience identifies with his aims and that they will "share"
the struggle with him – let's analyze a few, beginning with:
But we have always understood
that when times change, so must we; that fidelity to our founding principles
requires new responses to new challenges; that preserving our individual
freedoms ultimately requires collective action.
Meaning? Those "founding
principles" no longer apply in the modern world. Reality is in flux and we
must adapt to its new requisites. "New responses" are called for, such
as abandoning those principles in favor of "collective action." Which
means surrendering one's freedom as individuals for the sweaty warmth of the
populist mob. It's just like squeezing into a packed subway car during rush
hour. We're all going in the same direction, and have a right to be in that
subway car. Fidelity to principles must
be replaced with loyalty to the state. To the leader. To the Führer.
My fellow Americans, we are made
for this moment, and we will seize it – so long as we seize it together.
Yes,
"seize" it before it disappears again. "We are made for this
moment" because we are all shapeless, malleable, interchangeable hunks of
protoplasm, with no special claims on life. And if we "seize it together,"
that will make things all right.
For we, the people, understand
that our country cannot succeed when a shrinking few do very well and a growing
many barely make it. We believe that America’s prosperity must rest upon the
broad shoulders of a rising middle class.
Here's his
watered-down Marxism, omitting to mention that anyone connected with government
contracts and lobbying and special interests comprise the new "shrinking
few," except that the shrinkage is actually the unchecked growth of an oligarchy
of a federal elite, in and out of government. Fox
News reports on the locus of class:
The American Community Survey released last Thursday found seven of the
nation's top 10 wealthiest counties now surround Washington, D.C. They include
Loudoun County, Va., ranked No. 1, with a median household income over $119,000
dollars a year. Fairfax County, Va., was second with $105,000 and Arlington
County, Va., third with just over $100,000 a year in median household income.
That "rising
middle class" is chiefly a class of unproductive parasites of almost
limitless description, from Congressional interns and staffers to Congressmen
and Senators and lawyers and lobbyists and their staffers and thousands of
organizations that have the ear of the power dispensers. I've left out the
brigades of White House staffers and their sumptuous salaries and perks, as
well as those of the Cabinet.
We understand that outworn
programs are inadequate to the needs of our time. We must harness new ideas and
technology to remake our government, revamp our tax code, reform our schools,
and empower our citizens with the skills they need to work harder, learn more,
and reach higher. But while the means will change, our purpose endures: a
nation that rewards the effort and determination of every single American. That
is what this moment requires. That is what will give real meaning to our creed.
And Obama's creed
is to "move forward," shoulder to shoulder, in lockstep, and he will
reward us with higher taxes, more money for indoctrination camps otherwise
known as "our schools," and special programs to enable "our
citizens" to work harder and know more so they can become toiling tax
cows. The "moment" requires that everyone surrender his individuality
and become the one of the many, the Seven of Nine, the Sixteen of Two Million,
and a loyal cipher unable to breathe free.
We, the people, still believe
that every citizen deserves a basic measure of security and dignity. We must
make the hard choices to reduce the cost of health care and the size of our
deficit. But we reject the belief that America must choose between caring for
the generation that built this country and investing in the generation that
will build its future.
That "basic
measure of security and dignity" means the welfare state, government-guaranteed
golden parachutes, and the dodgy trampolines of safety nets. As for the
"generation that will build" the future? It's already saddled with a
debt that can never, ever be paid off – "fiscal cliff" or no fiscal
cliff – yet the government expects everyone to be happy and to whistle while
they work in a state of indentured servitude. Let's see, the $700,000 share of
the national debt has been assigned to five-year-olds, but that figure won’t remain
static, it will grow. Their generation – should it survive – will be asked to
make more sacrifices. As for working, productive adults today – they're screwed
already, so there's no need to make any appeals to them. The next time a doorbell rings, it's the government
calling on your kids.
They'll be in it
"together," you see. All for the common good. Forward!March!
parse President Barack Obama's second inaugural
address of January 21st, one's eyes begin to glaze over while
scanning the transcript of the speech. There again are the same old platitudes,
bromides, and catch phrases and secret coded messages. There again is the
sanctimonious delivery of a person who wants to be remembered for something,
because otherwise he is a zero who can only recite a speech someone else wrote
and polished and ensured that no gaffes or unintended meanings were in the
text. But he read the speech, he vetted it and approved of it, and he delivered
it, so, it's his speech. He owns it, for better or for worse. And the
unrelenting theme is worse.
Worse for the
country, because he means to "transform" it. Which, to anyone who
values freedom and governing his own destiny, means to damage it, perhaps irreparably.
Without Secret
Service tut-tuts, you really want the chance, instead of laboriously construing
the content of his inaugural spiel, to slap the man silly and hard across that
smug, arrogant phiz of his for uttering words like "liberty," and
"free markets," and "We hold these truths to be
self-evident…" and other words and phrases that occur in the speech. Why? Because
the words mean nothing but trouble to him. They meant nothing to the
speechwriter. He is an enemy of those words. He is a power-luster. Liberty,
free markets, freedom, and self-evident truths are his nemesis. He worked hard
in his first term to denigrate and diminish them. He will work harder in his
second term to eradicate them altogether.
He as much as said
so. "I'm here, and I'm going to do
as I please – 'transform' the nation from a mixed economy/welfare state – which
was bad enough (chuckle, chuckle) – into a full-scale Progressive/Socialist
utopia, and what're you gonna do about it?" Boil away all the rhetoric,
and that's thug talk. That's Chicago talk, the Rahm Emanuel gangster persona and approach to politics that never
left the White House when the master of expletives and crisis-exploiter
departed to return to his old stomping grounds.
In Congress, there
is no one to oppose him. The Republicans may as well charter themselves as a
dues-paying affiliate of the Democratic Party. The appellation
"republican" for these compromisers and appeasers is undeserved and
obscene. The Republican Party has, for just about a century now, behaved like a
Chihuahua riding on the back of a Doberman. It goes wherever the Doberman goes,
and yaps when the Doberman barks, and dares not jump off, because the Doberman
will have it for lunch.
The Republicans,
after all, helped to midwife the birth of the Progressives and the inauguration
of socialism in the nation and of its economy in 1912,
by Teddy Roosevelt's split with William Howard Taft over Taft's using the Sherman Anti-Trust Act
to break up U.S. Steel, a pet of Roosevelt's. The conflict between the
conservative and Progressive Republicans handed Woodrow Wilson, a committed
advocate of nascent fascism, the election of 1912. Virtually everything on the
Republican Progressive platform – such as an income tax, the director election
of Senators, an inheritance tax, and so on – comported easily with the official
Democratic Progressive agenda. That's bipartisanship with a capital B.
Having the
Republicans and the conservatives for lunch is what is explicitly advocated by John
Dickerson,
political director of CBS News, in his battle plan that would allow Obama to
consolidate his autocratic powers.
"The president who came into
office speaking in lofty terms about bipartisanship and cooperation can only
cement his legacy if he destroys the GOP. If he wants to transform American politics,
he must go for the throat."
In explaining how Obama
can divide and conquer the Republicans by abandoning attempts at bipartisanship,
Dickerson
advises:
Obama’s only
remaining option is to pulverize. Whether he succeeds in passing legislation or
not, given his ambitions, his goal should be to delegitimize his opponents.
Through a series of clarifying fights over controversial issues, he can force
Republicans to either side with their coalition's most extreme elements or
cause a rift in the party that will leave it, at least temporarily, in
disarray.
The "extremists,"
Dickerson suggests, should be so demonized that the Republicans will disavow
any connection with them. Obama, he writes, has an opportunity "to hasten
the demise of the old order by increasing the political cost of having the GOP coalition
defined by Second Amendment absolutists, climate science deniers, supporters of
'self-deportation' [of illegal immigrants], and the pure no-tax wing."
Obama's inaugural
agenda has that precisely in mind, and more. Dickerson needn't hold his breath.
Conservative talk show host Mark Levin
agrees with Dickerson's assessment of the state of the "Grand Old
Party" and its inability to block the Obama agenda:
How to fight
that agenda? Levin said the answer certainly doesn’t lie in the current
Republican Party leadership. “I think the Republican Party, its apparatus, its
so-called leadership, the parasitic consultants, represent an institution that
is tired, old, almost decrepit, full of cowardice and vision-less. It has
abandoned the Declaration of Independence and any serious defense of
constitutional republicanism. The Democrat Party is now a radical 1960s party;
it’s the anti-Constitution, anti-capitalism, anti-individual party. It largely
controls the federal government, including the massive bureaucracy and much of
the judiciary -- what I call the permanent branches of the federal government.
The Democrat Party represents the federal government, and the federal government
expands the power of the Democrat Party.
And, to paraphrase
that comic line from Monty Python's The
Life of Brian ("What have the Romans ever done for us?"), what
have the Republicans ever done for us? Levin nails it:
On the other
hand, the GOP today stands for capitulation, timidity, delusion -- so mostly
nothing. Republicans may speak of the Constitution, limited government, low
taxes, etc., but what have they done about them? Next to nothing if not
nothing. Even when Bush 43 was president and the Republicans controlled
Congress. What did they do? They went on a spending binge. They expanded
Medicare, the federal role in local education, drove up the debt, etc.
Meanwhile, we are lectured by putative Republicans like Colin Powell,
Condoleezza Rice, Tom Ridge, and a conga line of others trashing often
viciously NOT Obama and what the Democrats are doing to our nation, but
conservatives, constitutionalists, and tea party activists who are the only
people left standing for liberty against tyranny in this country."
And why did the
Republicans go on spending binges and expand the role and scope of government? Because
they are morally and politically bankrupt. That was evident in 1912. They have
been too obsessed with measuring up to the Democrats' and Progressives' notions
of an ideal moral polity – which is collectivist, socialist, and ultimately
fascist. But this would be news to the Republicans. When the Democrats bark,
most Republicans yap in concurrence. Levin also nails Obama and his ideological
origins and commitments:
I think
Obama sees himself as correcting historic wrongs in this country, as delivering
the fruits of the labor of other people to people who he believes have
historically been put upon. I think there’s a lot of perverse thinking that
goes on in his mind, radical left-wing thinking. He was indoctrinated with Marx
and Alinksy [sic] propaganda. You not
only see it in his agenda but in his words -- class warfare; degrading
successful people unless, of course, they help finance his elections, causes,
and organizations; pretending to speak for the so-called middle class when, in
fact, he is destroying their jobs, savings, and future. Obama's war on our
society is intended to be an onslaught in which the system is overwhelmed.”
I can think of a
number of historical figures who saw themselves as "correcting historical
wrongs": Mussolini, Hitler, Lenin, Stalin, Mao, Policy Pot, Hugo Chavez,
the Perons. And I think I can count on the fingers of one hand who have had the
temerity to compare Obama with any one of them. Levin, perceptive as he is, is
not of that number. It takes a species of honesty to make that comparison. I have
heard no Republican or conservative courageous enough to make it.
Jerome Corsi of the
Tea
Party reveals that the
"executive orders" concerning guns was just a lot of official puffery,
being little more than toothless presidential "proclamations."
What Obama signed were 23
presidential memoranda and proclamations that have no binding effect of law
whatsoever.
But Congress is
sure to help him making them lawfully binding in some form. No is not an operative verb in its
lexicon. Maybe is. So, on to a little
parsing of Obama's inaugural address. There is a wealth of assertions and
statements that one can highlight. While not focusing how many times Obama said
we (61 times) and together (seven) – he had to make sure
that his audience identifies with his aims and that they will "share"
the struggle with him – let's analyze a few, beginning with:
But we have always understood
that when times change, so must we; that fidelity to our founding principles
requires new responses to new challenges; that preserving our individual
freedoms ultimately requires collective action.
Meaning? Those "founding
principles" no longer apply in the modern world. Reality is in flux and we
must adapt to its new requisites. "New responses" are called for, such
as abandoning those principles in favor of "collective action." Which
means surrendering one's freedom as individuals for the sweaty warmth of the
populist mob. It's just like squeezing into a packed subway car during rush
hour. We're all going in the same direction, and have a right to be in that
subway car. Fidelity to principles must
be replaced with loyalty to the state. To the leader. To the Führer.
My fellow Americans, we are made
for this moment, and we will seize it – so long as we seize it together.
Yes,
"seize" it before it disappears again. "We are made for this
moment" because we are all shapeless, malleable, interchangeable hunks of
protoplasm, with no special claims on life. And if we "seize it together,"
that will make things all right.
For we, the people, understand
that our country cannot succeed when a shrinking few do very well and a growing
many barely make it. We believe that America’s prosperity must rest upon the
broad shoulders of a rising middle class.
Here's his
watered-down Marxism, omitting to mention that anyone connected with government
contracts and lobbying and special interests comprise the new "shrinking
few," except that the shrinkage is actually the unchecked growth of an oligarchy
of a federal elite, in and out of government. Fox
News reports on the locus of class:
The American Community Survey released last Thursday found seven of the
nation's top 10 wealthiest counties now surround Washington, D.C. They include
Loudoun County, Va., ranked No. 1, with a median household income over $119,000
dollars a year. Fairfax County, Va., was second with $105,000 and Arlington
County, Va., third with just over $100,000 a year in median household income.
That "rising
middle class" is chiefly a class of unproductive parasites of almost
limitless description, from Congressional interns and staffers to Congressmen
and Senators and lawyers and lobbyists and their staffers and thousands of
organizations that have the ear of the power dispensers. I've left out the
brigades of White House staffers and their sumptuous salaries and perks, as
well as those of the Cabinet.
We understand that outworn
programs are inadequate to the needs of our time. We must harness new ideas and
technology to remake our government, revamp our tax code, reform our schools,
and empower our citizens with the skills they need to work harder, learn more,
and reach higher. But while the means will change, our purpose endures: a
nation that rewards the effort and determination of every single American. That
is what this moment requires. That is what will give real meaning to our creed.
And Obama's creed
is to "move forward," shoulder to shoulder, in lockstep, and he will
reward us with higher taxes, more money for indoctrination camps otherwise
known as "our schools," and special programs to enable "our
citizens" to work harder and know more so they can become toiling tax
cows. The "moment" requires that everyone surrender his individuality
and become the one of the many, the Seven of Nine, the Sixteen of Two Million,
and a loyal cipher unable to breathe free.
We, the people, still believe
that every citizen deserves a basic measure of security and dignity. We must
make the hard choices to reduce the cost of health care and the size of our
deficit. But we reject the belief that America must choose between caring for
the generation that built this country and investing in the generation that
will build its future.
That "basic
measure of security and dignity" means the welfare state, government-guaranteed
golden parachutes, and the dodgy trampolines of safety nets. As for the
"generation that will build" the future? It's already saddled with a
debt that can never, ever be paid off – "fiscal cliff" or no fiscal
cliff – yet the government expects everyone to be happy and to whistle while
they work in a state of indentured servitude. Let's see, the $700,000 share of
the national debt has been assigned to five-year-olds, but that figure won’t remain
static, it will grow. Their generation – should it survive – will be asked to
make more sacrifices. As for working, productive adults today – they're screwed
already, so there's no need to make any appeals to them. The next time a doorbell rings, it's the government
calling on your kids.
They'll be in it
"together," you see. All for the common good. Forward!March!
January 20, 2013
Barack Obama: Our Orc-in-Chief
Daniel Greenfield, in his January 20th Sultan Knish column, observed that "Obama is truly fake. He is authentically unreal. There is absolutely nothing to him. If you take away all the work that was done to make him famous, there would be nothing there. And that is exactly why he is the perfect avatar for the media age."
How true. Of course, a man who is nothing but who seeks to be something by pursuing political power is, root and branch, a nihilist. And that is what Obama is, at core. Down deep, he knows he is nothing. But in the eyes of his worshipping electorate, he is something. He is a leader. A Messiah. A Führer. The Thirteenth Imam. The Mahdi. The Prophet. The savior of the ages, the man on horseback who comes to save a nation from itself. Because he is nothing, he must work miracles, and turn gold into lead. He must prove that he is something.
His identity depends on pulling the wool over his electorate's heads. He is what he imagines himself to be, which is an illusion. As Greenfield notes, remove the illusion, switch off the hologram, strip away the prancing king's clothes, and there is nothing there. The garb seemed to hang in mid-air, held there by invisible strings. Everyone who doubts Obama's "goodness" and values the truth, has Superman's X-ray vision. They can see that there's nothing there. Obama back in 2008 promised the nation "transparency." It's the only promise he kept – for those who choose to take a good, hard look at the nothingness that is there for all to see.
Except that his admiring electorate, egged on and abetted by the MSM, has no X-ray vision. They see what they see, which is nothing garbed in imaginary vestments of sanctimony and the self-righteous. Truth is their enemy, their nemesis. Truth is what they wish it to be. So they wish very hard – call it praying, or banging one's head against a brick wall, or bowing to the Mecca of statism three times a day – and the unreal becomes the truth.
It is the inherent, ineluctable nature of a state of zero in a person that a man who is lacking in character and values must be a destroyer. He becomes something when he is able to demonstrate his capacity for destruction. He must act to sustain the illusion. Destruction is his own proof of power.
He is the secular version of Christ. With a modicum of showmanship, with much assistance from an adoring MSM, he performs "miracles," and turns loaves into fishes, and fishes back into loaves, and water into wine, and wine into Jim Jones's brand of Kool-Aid, and pig pen muck into French pastries. It's all as bogus as a TV reality show, as Greenfield notes.
But, because he can't create anything – to be able to create something, a person must have a measure of what is the good, and Obama is a vacuum, a hollow man with no conception of any life-affirming good – he can only destroy. And when he destroys, to his minions, it passes as proof of his goodness and efficacy. They get free cell phones and Obamacare and bailed-out companies that fail anyway and solicitude and assurances that they have a right to destroy what they never really built but which he assures them they helped to build, anyway.
And that is the leitmotif of Barack Obama, America's first truly nihilist president. Bad as they were, he makes Jimmy Carter and Bill Clinton look like hired clown magicians at a children's birthday party, faking finding quarters behind children's ears and making funny creatures from squeaky, multi-colored balloons. Only Obama's quarters are counterfeit ones that are the government's multi-trillion dollar debt pulled from Americans' wallets and savings accounts, and the squeaky balloons are his back-firing foreign policies.
What most people can't grasp is that the debt is deliberately impossible to erase or correct, and that the back-firing policies are going according to plan. They are meant to back-fire.
How else to explain Obama's Mideast policies, which loose countless Tolkien-like Islamic Orcs on that region and on the world? Al Qada, the Muslim Brotherhood, Hamas, Boko Haram, Hezbollah, the Taliban – all the Islamic jihad groups – they are real-world counterparts of Tolkien's subhuman, flesh-eating brutes, eager to slaughter the good because they are the good. They are slobbering, drooling beasts that are but gross, unsightly clones of Barack Obama's true soul or character, ready to kill for the sake of killing, ready to rip men and women apart and roast their limbs over fires of kindled with the remnants of freedom of speech and the right to property and gun ownership.
Obama is a nihilist at work. He knows what he is doing. As he pretends to saw a woman in half, his believers chuckle and think it's just a trick, and isn't he such a masterful illusionist? What entertainment! But the red spewing from the box isn't Teresa Heinz-Kerry's ketchup, it's real blood, and the screaming victim is but a proxy for everyone in the adulatory audience. They all presume that the woman in the box will go home after the show, coddle her kiddies, and watch "Nature" on PBS while spooning Yoplait and munching on Granola bars.
When the audience gets home and checks its bank accounts and payroll stubs and insurance premiums and tries to devise a personal budget that is in mortal conflict and in a losing race with a limitless federal budget, it represses its screams and consoles itself that it's all for the good. Out of destruction comes construction, isn't that the way things are done? The country is being remade, "reframed."
But, what is being "constructed," what are the constituents of the remaking, in what square is the country being "reframed"? Obama's audience doesn’t want to know. It prefers fairy tales and illusions. It prefers pretty Technicolor pictures of a City on the Hill, with people dancing on cobblestone streets inlaid with gold, and choruses of flowers singing at their passing, and buildings and houses swaying in rhythm under a cloudless sky, and everyone guaranteed a chicken in every pot and an environment-friendly hybrid car in every garage.
Greenfield calls the fakery a "consensual illusion." That, also, is true, and it takes a willingness by both parties, the One at the Podium, and the ones in the audience, to sustain the illusion. It requires a habitual, subconscious, but still volitional desire to "blank out," to evade the knowledge, the truth, and the reality of things. Or it takes a criminal ignorance, which is much the same thing.
The dish-rattling rumble you hear are the hordes of Orcs coming for you and your life. They are advancing from several directions: from 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue, from Capitol Hill, from the Justice Department, from the Supreme Court, and from their auxiliaries, the EPA, and the AFT, the TSA, and the DEA, the HHS, and other phalanxes of statism.
How true. Of course, a man who is nothing but who seeks to be something by pursuing political power is, root and branch, a nihilist. And that is what Obama is, at core. Down deep, he knows he is nothing. But in the eyes of his worshipping electorate, he is something. He is a leader. A Messiah. A Führer. The Thirteenth Imam. The Mahdi. The Prophet. The savior of the ages, the man on horseback who comes to save a nation from itself. Because he is nothing, he must work miracles, and turn gold into lead. He must prove that he is something.
His identity depends on pulling the wool over his electorate's heads. He is what he imagines himself to be, which is an illusion. As Greenfield notes, remove the illusion, switch off the hologram, strip away the prancing king's clothes, and there is nothing there. The garb seemed to hang in mid-air, held there by invisible strings. Everyone who doubts Obama's "goodness" and values the truth, has Superman's X-ray vision. They can see that there's nothing there. Obama back in 2008 promised the nation "transparency." It's the only promise he kept – for those who choose to take a good, hard look at the nothingness that is there for all to see.
Except that his admiring electorate, egged on and abetted by the MSM, has no X-ray vision. They see what they see, which is nothing garbed in imaginary vestments of sanctimony and the self-righteous. Truth is their enemy, their nemesis. Truth is what they wish it to be. So they wish very hard – call it praying, or banging one's head against a brick wall, or bowing to the Mecca of statism three times a day – and the unreal becomes the truth.
It is the inherent, ineluctable nature of a state of zero in a person that a man who is lacking in character and values must be a destroyer. He becomes something when he is able to demonstrate his capacity for destruction. He must act to sustain the illusion. Destruction is his own proof of power.
He is the secular version of Christ. With a modicum of showmanship, with much assistance from an adoring MSM, he performs "miracles," and turns loaves into fishes, and fishes back into loaves, and water into wine, and wine into Jim Jones's brand of Kool-Aid, and pig pen muck into French pastries. It's all as bogus as a TV reality show, as Greenfield notes.
But, because he can't create anything – to be able to create something, a person must have a measure of what is the good, and Obama is a vacuum, a hollow man with no conception of any life-affirming good – he can only destroy. And when he destroys, to his minions, it passes as proof of his goodness and efficacy. They get free cell phones and Obamacare and bailed-out companies that fail anyway and solicitude and assurances that they have a right to destroy what they never really built but which he assures them they helped to build, anyway.
And that is the leitmotif of Barack Obama, America's first truly nihilist president. Bad as they were, he makes Jimmy Carter and Bill Clinton look like hired clown magicians at a children's birthday party, faking finding quarters behind children's ears and making funny creatures from squeaky, multi-colored balloons. Only Obama's quarters are counterfeit ones that are the government's multi-trillion dollar debt pulled from Americans' wallets and savings accounts, and the squeaky balloons are his back-firing foreign policies.
What most people can't grasp is that the debt is deliberately impossible to erase or correct, and that the back-firing policies are going according to plan. They are meant to back-fire.
How else to explain Obama's Mideast policies, which loose countless Tolkien-like Islamic Orcs on that region and on the world? Al Qada, the Muslim Brotherhood, Hamas, Boko Haram, Hezbollah, the Taliban – all the Islamic jihad groups – they are real-world counterparts of Tolkien's subhuman, flesh-eating brutes, eager to slaughter the good because they are the good. They are slobbering, drooling beasts that are but gross, unsightly clones of Barack Obama's true soul or character, ready to kill for the sake of killing, ready to rip men and women apart and roast their limbs over fires of kindled with the remnants of freedom of speech and the right to property and gun ownership.
Obama is a nihilist at work. He knows what he is doing. As he pretends to saw a woman in half, his believers chuckle and think it's just a trick, and isn't he such a masterful illusionist? What entertainment! But the red spewing from the box isn't Teresa Heinz-Kerry's ketchup, it's real blood, and the screaming victim is but a proxy for everyone in the adulatory audience. They all presume that the woman in the box will go home after the show, coddle her kiddies, and watch "Nature" on PBS while spooning Yoplait and munching on Granola bars.
When the audience gets home and checks its bank accounts and payroll stubs and insurance premiums and tries to devise a personal budget that is in mortal conflict and in a losing race with a limitless federal budget, it represses its screams and consoles itself that it's all for the good. Out of destruction comes construction, isn't that the way things are done? The country is being remade, "reframed."
But, what is being "constructed," what are the constituents of the remaking, in what square is the country being "reframed"? Obama's audience doesn’t want to know. It prefers fairy tales and illusions. It prefers pretty Technicolor pictures of a City on the Hill, with people dancing on cobblestone streets inlaid with gold, and choruses of flowers singing at their passing, and buildings and houses swaying in rhythm under a cloudless sky, and everyone guaranteed a chicken in every pot and an environment-friendly hybrid car in every garage.
Greenfield calls the fakery a "consensual illusion." That, also, is true, and it takes a willingness by both parties, the One at the Podium, and the ones in the audience, to sustain the illusion. It requires a habitual, subconscious, but still volitional desire to "blank out," to evade the knowledge, the truth, and the reality of things. Or it takes a criminal ignorance, which is much the same thing.
The dish-rattling rumble you hear are the hordes of Orcs coming for you and your life. They are advancing from several directions: from 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue, from Capitol Hill, from the Justice Department, from the Supreme Court, and from their auxiliaries, the EPA, and the AFT, the TSA, and the DEA, the HHS, and other phalanxes of statism.
