The Rule of Reason

Parsing Obama

noreply@blogger.com (Edward Cline) — Mon, 06 Jul 2009 03:33:00 +0000

To grasp the magnitude of the national debt Obama (and his Republican predecessor) has been ringing up, a comparison should help illustrate the task. Bernard Madoff’s robbery and defrauding investors of some $50 billion can be represented by the diameter of the solar system. The federal government, using the same scamming tactics, is amassing a debt about the diameter of the Milky Way galaxy. Madoff’s scheme can be measured in millions of miles. The federal government's, in almost limitless parsecs. That measurement ought to suffice to dramatize the scale of the hole he is deliberately digging for the country in his role as Community-Organizer-in-Chief.

Since it is only productive work -- whether in a factory making widgets, or in a research lab creating new medicines or computer software -- that gives the dollar bill its value, Obama’s galactic debt will be expected to be funded from taxes paid from the productive, private sector. I make that distinction because the government is non-productive; it produces nothing, not even the paper its one hundred thousand commandments are printed on, not even the pens with which presidents sign legislation into law. That growing, astronomical debt, however, will serve to shrink the productive sector and make it less productive in exponential leaps and bounds -- off a cliff. It must inexorably reach a point that the productive sector can no longer sustain the debt it is expected to pay. Then we will have reached the economic status of, say, Zimbabwe.

The sentencing of Madoff to 150 years in prison for his crime elicited an outpouring of sanctimonious news coverage, complete with quotations from angry victims of his scheme and a sated passion for justice. Of course, Madoff deserved his sentence. Given his age, 71, perhaps he will serve just ten of it before dying in prison.

What clashes with the news media coverage of Madoff’s trial, conviction and sentencing for his crime is the studied obtuseness of the news media for the same crime being committed by the government. Madoff, you see, was “greedy” or “avaricious,” and that, according to the morality of altruism and selflessness, is immoral and antisocial. The government, however, is committing the same crime, but that is in order to “do good.” So its orgy of debt-creation, its extortionate policies of roping all Americans into a “dog-eat-dog” welfare state, and its targeting the most productive and the wealthiest in society for special punishment, are all acceptable and laudable.

Even though the news media has knowledge of this multi-trillion dollar scam, that knowledge elicits not an iota of outrage among the photogenic news anchors and highly paid print pundits. No respectable TV or print journalist even thinks of the scam in terms of a continuing and expanding bilking of Americans from their wealth, investments and taxes. (Except, perhaps, John Stossel of ABC, whose “20/20” report on the cost and dishonesty of the proposed socialist health care program was conveniently cancelled and replaced with a special on the life and death of Michael Jackson -- as though we weren‘t already gagging on the nonstop adulatory and scandal sheet coverage of this very disturbed person.)

“There is no plea agreement,” Assistant U.S. Attorney Marc Litt said at the hearing, meaning Madoff must plead guilty to 11 counts that he now faces in a criminal information filed today. Madoff is charged with securities fraud, investment advisor fraud, mail fraud, wire fraud, three counts of money laundering, false statements, perjury, false filings with the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission and theft from an employee benefit plan, Litt said.

No one is calling for the indictments of Barney Frank, Nancy Pelosi, Christopher Dodd, Henry Waxman, and all the usual suspects in Congress and the White House, even though they are all parties to the same crime. Examine the definitions of each of the counts with which Madoff was charged and convicted of, and ask how the actions of the co-conspirators differ any from what Madoff was found guilty of. One fundamental difference between Madoff’s crime and the federal government’s is that Madoff did not employ direct, legalized force to take his victims’ money. Another is that it was not in Madoff’s agenda to make his victims dependent on his benefice. In court, when he faced his victims, he (rather belatedly) apologized to them, and did not say, “But I did it for your sakes.”

“The U.S. government gets funds in three ways. It can look for increased revenues (through higher taxes). It can look to cut expenses (through lower spending). Or it can borrow by issuing new Treasury bonds. Replacing old bonds with new bonds is called “rolling over the debt,” and is done every day by households, businesses, and governments.”

Which of these ways will the Obama administration adopt to raise revenue? Count out number two. The productive sector of the economy will be expected to fund numbers one and three -- for as long as it survives.

On July 4th, President Barack Obama sent a holiday greeting to his supporters, via the Democratic National Committee. Obama’s presumptuousness, of course, knows no bounds or limits. His July 4th greeting was all about the importance of Independence Day. This commentary will examine the fallacies and fabrications contained in his greeting. At first glance, the message appears vacuous and commonplace. But beneath its blandness is poison.

This weekend, our family will join millions in celebrating America. We will enjoy the glow of fireworks, the taste of barbeque, and the company of good friends. As we all celebrate this weekend, let’s also remember the remarkable story that led to this day.

The story that led to the 4th of July is not merely “remarkable,” it is epochal. It is the story of men who decided that the idea that they owned their own lives, and not a tyrant, must be taken seriously enough to sever all political ties with that tyrant. What is Obama doing today? Taking actions to guarantee that our lives are tied to his whims and wishes, just as they were with Old World tyrants. If he had any valid recollection of that “remarkable story,” he would see that he is the villain.

Two hundred and thirty-three years ago, our nation was born when a courageous group of patriots pledged their lives, fortunes and sacred honor to the proposition that all of us are created equal.

No. They pledged themselves to the proposition that men (not politically correct “all of us”) should exist in a state of freedom and not in one of subservience. Here is an instance of how disconnected Obama and his allies in Congress are from not only history, but from reality -- and how indifferent or hostile they are to that history and to reality. It is precisely the lives, fortunes and sacred honor of Americans that they are so busy expropriating, redistributing or destroying. The certain rights of life, liberty, the pursuit of happiness and property are to them not unalienable, but disposable and eminently open to violation in the name of the “public good.” It is their operating premise that whenever any form of government becomes destructive of the ends of government, that is, to securing individual rights and deriving its limited powers from the consent of the governed, the people have no right to alter or abolish that government, or even to criticize it.

Our country began as a unique experiment in liberty -- a bold, evolving quest to achieve a more perfect union. And in every generation, another courageous group of patriots has taken us one step closer to fully realizing the dream our founders enshrined on that great day.

No, the United States did not begin as a “unique experiment in liberty.” It began as an assertion of that liberty. No, a “more perfect union” was not the end of the Founders, but the establishment of a government that could best guarantee life, liberty, property, and the pursuit of happiness. A “more perfect union“ to Obama is all Americans marching in lockstep to an ideal collectivist state. “Quests” do not “evolve,” not unless one is not certain of one’s end. And ever since the Civil War, generations of politicians and political thinkers have been moving away from the end that our Founders sought to achieve. It takes no courage to advocate slavery and servitude to a confused and ignorant citizenry.

Today, all Americans have a hard-fought birthright to a freedom which enables each of us, no matter our views or background, to help set our nation’s course. America’s greatness has always depended on her citizens embracing that freedom -- and fulfilling the duty that comes with it.

It is that “hard-fought birthright” which Obama the constitutional “scholar” is busily cheating us out of with the skill of a shyster lawyer. Ideas set a nation’s course and determine its future or its fate. Freedom and duty are literal antipodes. No one has a duty to sanction his own servitude or slavery, which is what Obama is advocating as the “price” of the freedom he is hurriedly destroying and which he hopes we do not embrace so selfishly that we will not relinquish it to satisfy the democratic mob and to perpetuate the comfort and peace of mind of a corrupt, prostituted Congress.

As a free people, we must each take the challenges and opportunities that face this nation as our own. As long as some Americans still must struggle, none of us can be fully content. And as America comes ever closer to achieving the perfect union our founders dreamed, that triumph -- that pride -- belongs to all of us.

Obama’s challenges and opportunities to expand federal power are not those of Americans who value their freedom. Americans must always “struggle” to achieve their personal happiness, and can be content with having achieved it without being asked to live for the sake of others. That happiness cannot be achieved if men are chained to each other’s needs.

So today is a day to reflect on our independence, and the sacrifice of our troops standing in harm’s way to preserve and protect it. It is a day to celebrate all that America is. And today is a time to aspire to all we can still become.

With very best wishes, President Barack Obama July 4th, 2009

Yes, many Americans are reflecting upon their independence, not only on that of this country, but on their independence from each other as individuals who own their own lives and pursue their own happiness -- which is not what Obama is asking of either our troops or any Americans. Sacrifice for unselfish, altruist ends is what he promotes -- not the defense of this country, not its prosperity, not its freedom. That reflection by many thoughtful, concerned Americans has been deemed “right wing extremism” by the Department of Homeland Security deserving of surveillance, scrutiny, and police action.

In summary, one must agree in spirit with conservative columnist Charles Krauthammer that it is not Obama’s words that one must pay attention to, but what he does. But one must disagree with Krauthammer because collectivism is what he and the Democrats have been quite obviously preaching for the last two years. One merely needs to read between the lines and the lies.

The New Sons of Liberty

noreply@blogger.com (Edward Cline) — Fri, 26 Jun 2009 13:47:00 +0000

A good friend wrote me about the speed with which the government is erasing freedom and establishing a fascist regime, and the despair this phenomenon can cause: “If presented with an existential crisis, I don‘t see a modern day Sons of Liberty around to fight for liberty.”

I will reply that we are the new Sons of Liberty. We’re all over the place. You will recall that the Sons of Liberty, for about ten years leading up to Concord and Bunker Hill, communicated with each other all over the colonies through committees of correspondence, trading intelligence, ideas, strategies, and progress reports. The new committees are facilitated by the Internet. Fundamentally, there is no difference between their functions, except the element of time. It might have taken two weeks for correspondence from Boston and Sam Adams to reach Richmond and Richard Henry Lee. Now, it takes mere seconds for anyone‘s communications to reach a hundred times the number of addressees.

Another chief difference is that the committees of yore were guided in their policies and actions by many of the Founders, who acted as intellectual workmen. Today, many of the movers behind the Tea Parties are acting in the same capacity. They are not especially intellectuals, but they will come around eventually, out of necessity, in order to present arguments, and not just stage ad hoc demonstrations of anger and disgust. Objectivists are making their presence known at the Tea Parties, and they are attracting lots of attention, especially from protestors looking for moral and intellectual guidance and not more of the “same old, same old.”

Here’s another parallel: In the Founders’ time, before the Declaration, opposition to Crown policies was expressed by a number of groups. Call them 18th century “libertarians,” religious based groups, conservatives, and the like. But by the time of Bunker Hill and the second Continental Congress, most of them were agreed on the fundamentals of why the colonies should separate from the Crown. We are in the same situation today. Religious groups, libertarians, conservatives, and other groups opposed to Obama and the Democratic Congress’s policies are all vying for attention and trying to dominate especially the Tea Parties. But Objectivism is the only philosophy that offers a consistently rational politics. None of the other forces do.

If Yaron Brook and ARI don’t exhaust themselves with speeches and appearances, in time Objectivism will come to dominate the political thinking. All the other groups are capable of compromise, whereas Objectivism is not. This stops the rationalizers and compromisers cold, and they have nothing to say, nothing to add, nothing to refute. You’ve heard especially Yaron on TV and on the radio expound the philosophy of individual rights and handily discard or rebut objections and reservations about the necessity of a consistent policy of individual rights, that is, a moral philosophy based on the nature of man, and not on religion or utilitarianism (capitalism and freedom promote the greatest good for the greatest number, etc.). He doesn’t give an inch. He doesn’t concede the fallacies of any of his opponents.

I agree with you that many Americans are now emerging tentatively from what Jack Frake and Hugh Kenrick might have called their “Plato’s caves.” Some are blinking, others are shutting their eyes or sidling back into the caves. They don’t matter. And some are bravely moving ahead. But it is we, the new Sons of Liberty, who never inhabited those caves, who are the point men in this conflict. Objectivists are now running and contributing to dozens of “committees of correspondence” today.

Remember also that all throughout the pre-Revolutionary period and during the war itself, the population here remained roughly divided in thirds: one-third loyalist, one-third neutral dross, and one-third that fought for independence or supported it. You cite the overwhelming number of people in the “masses.” The “masses” don’t count. Look what happened in Iran. For days hundreds of thousands of Iranians took to the streets and had running fights with the mullahs’ armed thugs and their “thought police,” but the numbers of the protestors didn’t matter. They probably outnumbered the thugs. They were moved not by radical ideas, but by emotions. Their protests had to peter out. They have only a vague glimmering of “freedom” and worse yet some notion of “democracy,” which they associate with freedom. Well, “majority rule,” or those who support Ahmadinejad, spoke, and that was “democracy.” I haven’t observed any evidence, through the news, that anyone there has grasped that. (And I think that the U.S.’s Voice of America broadcasts to Iran and other countries ruled by dictatorships do more harm than good, because in a mealy mouthed way, they also promote “democracy”; this is the confused confusing already confused minds.)

Of course, victory for us isn’t guaranteed. It wasn’t guaranteed for the Founders, either. How it will all end, and when, is an open question. If Obama and the Democrats move to their final folly, which is censorship (and we know they very much would like to silence any and all moral opposition), then we may see actual rebellion against government force, and that may or may not be a good thing, given the state of the culture. It could backfire, as some Objectivists elsewhere have noted, and only provoke the government to impose even more stringent controls, and possibly result in the arrest of the most outspoken and rational critics. The statists are too close to their final goal, a “democratic” dictatorship in which everyone exists in support of and for the sake of the state, to concede rationality in any quarter or on any issue. If that end can only be achieved by becoming bestial, they’ll have nothing to lose and won’t hesitate to bloody a few heads (and that may be their undoing -- or not).

One thing we should not doubt -- and I noted this in “Obama contra Churchill” and in past commentaries -- is that if they cannot exercise complete political power over the country, they would rather see it die or descend into anarchy. That’s their death premise. No one should underestimate their viciousness. The obvious glee with which they legislate our freedom away will be matched by their bottomless malice for any resistance. Fundamentally, it’s as much “either/or” for the statists as it is for the advocates of a philosophy of reason, who act on the life premise. You can see it in their faces and hear it in their words. Their capacity for evil is sustained only by the confusion and mixed premises of their current and future victims. Atlas Shrugged dramatized that in no uncertain terms.

A major problem is the state of the American spirit. Generations of dumbing-down and educational indoctrination can’t be undone during a single repressive administration (which is how the Obama administration can only be characterized). Perhaps Americans will wake up quickly to their peril, perhaps not. They must be taught the value of freedom. Many do not even know what it is, and many don’t put a value on it. Where the Founders had the advantage of the spread of Enlightenment ideas, and a population receptive to them, we have the disadvantage of the decline of those ideas, and a population largely indifferent to or ignorant of them. This is quite an obstacle.

All we can do for now is keep on arguing, talking, writing, and protesting, to get as many people on our side as possible. To paraphrase Rand, by fighting for our future, we are living it now. For the moment, this is all that is within our power to do.

Long Live Lady Liberty!

Objectivist Blog Round-Up #102

noreply@blogger.com (Nicholas Provenzo) — Thu, 25 Jun 2009 04:01:00 +0000

Welcome to the February 19th, 2009 edition of the Objectivist Round-Up. This week presents insight and analyses written by authors who are animated by Objectivism, the philosophy of Ayn Rand. According to Ayn Rand:

My philosophy, in essence, is the concept of man as a heroic being, with his own happiness as the moral purpose of his life, with productive achievement as his noblest activity, and reason as his only absolute.

"About the Author," Atlas Shrugged, Appendix.

So without any further delay (and in no particular order), here's this week's round-up:

Andy Clarkson presents On WBT With Pete Kaliner Last Night posted at The Charlotte Capitalist, saying, "Was on WBT-AM 1110/99.3 FM in Charlotte "The Colossus of The South" asking the question why there has been no moral condemnation of the Flint, Michigan policies to buy, tear down and"green over" private property. Principles vs. pragmatism."

Lucy Hugel presents National Service: An Immoral Ideal posted at The Undercurrent, saying, "This spring the President signed into law The Edward M. Kennedy Serve America Act, much of which specifically targets young adults. This legislation means more than just spending a summer in a soup kitchen or a year in a South American village, although these are not small matters..."

Sarah presents The Enchanted World of Pushing Daisies posted at Art, Love, & Philosophy, saying, "A review of ABC's delightful, though recently canceled, TV series."

Grant Jones presents Buka: 16 June 1943 posted at The Dougout, saying, "Action in the nearly forgotten Southwest Pacific"

Diana Hsieh presents The News posted at NoodleFood, saying, "What happened at my dissertation defense? In short, Diana Hsieh became Dr. Diana Hsieh. Hooray!"

Kirk presents Anti-Trust Part One posted at A is A, saying, "A two part case study on Anti-Trust legislation and the damages they cause."

Paul Hsieh presents The Unfree Market in Health Care posted at We Stand FIRM, saying, "Don't blame the free market for our current health care problems!"

Ari Armstrong presents Sotomayor On Abortion posted at AriArmstrong.com, saying, "The reasons to oppose Sotomayor's nomination do not include her support for the right to get an abortion."

JStotts presents Objectivism and Sexuality posted at Erosophia, saying, "Overview of the speech I recently gave to the Ohio Objectivist Society on the Objectivist theory of sexuality as understood through its underlying operations. Instructions for how to obtain the full version of the speech are in the post."

Khartoum presents The Sparrowhawk series – Book One: Jack Frake posted at Philosophy, Law and Life., saying, "A review of the book, Jack Frake, the first in the Sparrowhawk series.

Ryan Krause presents Governance Issue at Apple posted at The Money Speech, saying, "What Apple has started doing right with its governance, and how Sarbanes-Oxley impedes the process, in general."

Ryan Krause presents Fighting Back by Opting Out (Or Going Galt, If the Term Appeals to You) posted at The Money Speech, saying, "What some capitalists are NOT doing to deal with encroaching government."

Daniel presents One Question, One Answer with Burgess Laughlin posted at The Nearby Pen, saying, "Burgess Laughlin answers the question 'If a biography is a selective account of someone's life according to the author's judgments about what is important, what makes for a good (or bad) biography?'"

Amy Mossoff presents A Baby Maybe posted at The Little Things, saying, "Book review of "A Baby? Maybe" - an excellent book to assist in considering whether or not to have children."

Gus Van Horn presents Second-Hander posted at Gus Van Horn, saying, "The Atlantic has published a glowing eulogy of William F. Buckley by Garry Wills which I highly recommend -- but with one proviso..."

C. August presents A Blind, Indifferent Juggernaut posted at Titanic Deck Chairs, saying, "I discuss what appears to be the recent acceleration of tyranny and how Americans are (or aren't) dealing with it in light of how tyranny was dealt with in the Founding Era. Some commenters offer an interesting historical perspective as well."

Rational Jenn presents A Little Bit About My Day posted at Rational Jenn, saying, "Helping the kids through the steps of solving their own conflicts--rather than solving their problems for them--gives them good chances to practice Objectivist virtues. Even though the process sure takes a long time!"

Miranda Barzey presents Mia Michaels is Anti-Life posted at Ramen & Rand, saying, "So You Think You Can Dance choreographer Mia Michaels is brilliant in her craft, but her sense of life is horrible. Looking through her work there is evidence of her malevolent idea of life."

Doug Reich presents To Know Capitalism Is to Love Capitalism posted at The Rational Capitalist, saying, "Modern writers implicitly define capitalism by non-essentials with the consequence that capitalism is often regarded to be something approximating its antithesis. Properly defining the concept of capitalism is half the battle."

Peter Cresswell presents If this is ‘not so bad,’ then what have you got for afters? posted at Not PC, saying, "When one of your country's parliamentarians quotes Ayn Rand at the head of a speech on the recession -- the very parliamentarian who once cut a swathe through New Zealand's big government -- in a speech that counsels facing up to reality -- it's appropriate to take heed, don't you think? And to celebrate the power of good ideas to capture the mainstream, however tentatively."

Edward Cline presents Obama contra Churchill posted at The Rule of Reason, saying, "The joke may be on President Barack Obama. One of his first “house cleaning” chores was to order the removal from the White House Oval Office of the bust of Winston Churchill, a temporary gift from Britain in the wake of 9/11, and to replace it in that same spot with one of Abraham Lincoln. After all, didn’t Lincoln oversee a calamitous Civil War to free the slaves? One wonders just how well versed Obama is in the speeches of one of his political heroes."

Brian Phillips presents What Can One Do? posted at Houston Property Rights, saying, "In response to a question regarding what one person can do to spread rational ideas, Ayn Rand once said: “Speak on any scale open to you, large or small--to your friends, your associates, your professional organizations, or any legitimate public forum. You can never tell when your words will reach the right mind at the right time.” A friend recently demonstrated this in a simple, but effective way."

That concludes this edition of the round-up. Submit your blog article to the next edition of Objectivist round-up using our carnival submission form. Past posts and future hosts can be found on our blog carnival index page.

Obama contra Churchill

noreply@blogger.com (Edward Cline) — Tue, 23 Jun 2009 14:36:00 +0000

The joke may be on President Barack Obama. One of his first “house cleaning” chores was to order the removal from the White House Oval Office of the bust of Winston Churchill, a temporary gift from Britain in the wake of 9/11, and to replace it in that same spot with one of Abraham Lincoln. After all, didn’t Lincoln oversee a calamitous Civil War to free the slaves? One wonders just how well versed Obama is in the speeches of one of his political heroes. Here is an excerpt from a Lincoln speech, cited in Judge Andrew Napolitano’s icon-dissolving book on Lincoln, Dredd Scott‘s Revenge, from a debate with Stephen A. Douglas in Illinois in September 1858:

“I will say then that I am not, nor ever have been, in favor of bringing about in any way the social and political equality of the white and black races -- that I am not, nor ever have been, in favor of making voters or jurors of Negroes, nor of qualifying them to hold office, nor to intermarry with white people, and I will say in addition to this that there is a physical difference between the white and black races which I believe forever forbid the two races living together on terms of social and political equality. And in as much as they cannot so live, while they do remain together there must be the position of superior and inferior, and I as much as any other man am in favor of having the superior position assigned to the white race.”*

That is just one of many revealing quotations from Lincoln’s written record on the issue of slavery. The evidence has been available to scholars for decades. Napolitano’s book dissects Lincoln’s role in empowering the federal government to override the Constitution and to consciously misinterpret especially the commerce and general welfare clauses in it to excuse its intervention in the economy and to reduce the scope of individual liberty. (See also Napolitano’s remarks on the Department of Homeland Security memo of April 7.)

Lincoln’s chief motivation for prosecuting the Civil War was to preserve the Union, not to free the slaves. The obvious evil of slavery is not the subject here. We have little to thank Lincoln for. He endorsed the country’s first income tax and the first military draft, and suspended habeas corpus. These were precedent-setting exercises of government power to confiscate wealth and life, in pursuit of a “noble cause,” emulated later by his successors in office and certainly countenanced by Congress in pursuit of causes arguably less “noble.”

Countless other Americans at the time desired to abolish slavery and enlisted in the army and navy for that reason, or were involved in the abolitionist movement, but Lincoln’s motivation was highly ambivalent. The myth surrounding Lincoln, one that has been propagated in textbooks for over a century, that he regarded slavery as a moral abomination and fought a war to eradicate it, is no less a myth than the one surrounding Franklin D. Roosevelt, that he saved the country from the alleged excesses of unregulated capitalism. Of course, Obama also admires FDR.

Does Obama value Lincoln for the slavery issue, or for Lincoln’s wholesale violations of the Constitution and the ensuing, steady diminution of freedom? If he reveres Lincoln as an emancipator, then he is a posturing fool. If he reveres him as a symbol of a successful usurpation of Constitutional limitations in the guise of “liberation,” then he is slyer than most critics have credited him for being.

On the other hand, Obama might have chucked Churchill out because he was a reproach, in that he spoke eloquently against dictators and men who pursued power for the sake of power and had a more contentious political career. Perhaps Obama is better versed in Churchill’s speeches than he is in Lincoln’s. Or, it may have something to do with Churchill’s suppression of the Mau Mau terrorism in colonial Kenya, when Obama’s grandfather, Hussein Onyango Obama, was jailed on suspicion of being a Mau Mau subversive. Which, if true, suggests that Obama approves of terrorism and can boast of having a terrorist sympathizer for a relative.

One can even score Churchill for his early praise of Hitler and Mussolini long before World War II. He repudiated and withdrew that praise when he grasped the nature of their tyrannies. Obama’s praise is silent. For example, under the pretence of not wanting to “meddle” in the Iranian election turmoil, his remarks have been tepid and reluctant. How can he criticize an authoritarian soul-mate, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, for having won a rigged election? He and the Democratic Congress have a demonstrable affinity for fascism and are gathering to themselves unprecedented political power over virtually every aspect of American life. Everything -- the truth behind the Lincoln and FDR myths and the myth that Obama loves this country and is only trying to save it by emulating his predecessors -- is buried beneath the excelsior of irrelevancies and inconsequentials.

(The bust itself, by Sir Jacob Epstein, is an artistic malignity. Churchill’s features are barely discernible through a leprous percolation of bumps and swellings, leading one to imagine the work was rescued just in time from a blaze, damaged but still intact. But it is doubtful that Obama’s esthetic sense was so offended by the bust that he decided to rid the Oval Office of it.)

In his “The Lights are Going Out” speech of October, 1938, broadcast to the United States, in which he discusses the triumphs of Hitler in Europe, and the victories of fascist Italy and Spain, Churchill had this to say about dictators:

“You see these dictators on their pedestals, surrounded by the bayonets of their soldiers and the truncheons of their police. On all sides they are guarded by masses of armed men, cannons, airplanes, fortifications, and the like -- they boast and vaunt themselves before the world, yet in their hearts there is unspoken fear. They are afraid of words and thoughts: words spoken abroad, thoughts stirring at home -- all the more powerful because forbidden -- terrify them. A little mouse of thought appears in the room, and even the mightiest of potentates are thrown into panic. They make frantic efforts to bar out thoughts and words; they are afraid of the workings of the human mind. Cannons, airplanes, they can manufacture in large quantities; but how are they to quell the natural promptings of human nature, which after all these centuries of trial and progress has inherited a whole armory of potent and indestructible knowledge?”**

In the “A Hush over Europe,“ August 1939 speech, also broadcast to the U.S., he noted:

“One thing has struck me as very strange, and that is the resurgence of the one-man power after all these centuries of experience and progress. It is curious how the English-speaking peoples have always had this horror of one-man power. They are quite ready to follow a leader for a time, as long as he is serviceable to them; but the idea of handing themselves over, lock, stock and barrel, body and soul, to one man, and worshipping him as if he were an idol -- that has always been odious to the whole theme and nature of our civilization. The architects of the American Constitution were as careful as those who shaped the British Constitution to guard against the whole life and fortunes, and all the laws and freedom of the nation, being placed in the hands of a tyrant.” [Italics mine.]

Obama’s Cairo speech was his “Munich” gesture. The West, he said, is not at war with Islam. The difference between Neville Chamberlain’s capitulation and Obama’s, however, is that Chamberlain believed that Hitler’s words, promises and signature on a sheet of paper would bring “peace in our time.” It is unlikely he saw no radical distinction between Britain and totalitarian Nazi Germany. He simply and disastrously believed that evil was good at its word, that it saw no benefit in war, and that it had exhausted its ambition for conquest and expropriation.

Obama clearly makes no such distinction, nor will he ever make it. Individual rights, liberty, freedom, the rule of law, the sanctity of contract, private property, freedom of speech -- these he is dedicated to trampling and extinguishing, so he could see no difference between them and the abject selflessness required of and demanded by Islam. He is envious of anyone who holds absolute power elsewhere in the world -- King Abdullah of Saudi Arabia, Hugo Chavez of Venezuela, to name a few -- and has a vested interest in Americans “handing themselves over, lock, stock and barrel, body and soul, to one man, and worshipping him as if he were an idol.” Has he not managed to achieve that goal among his supporters and the news media?

Those to whom he should show respect, he slights. Those whom he should slight, he gushes over and establishes a grinning rapport with. Those whom he should be wary of -- such as the growing portion of the electorate that was never enamored of his alleged charisma and never dazzled by his populist rhetoric, together with those of his supporters who are having second thoughts about him -- he is oblivious to, or told by his staff and advisors are merely disaffected with his programs and policies and can be ignored.

The worst one can say about Churchill is that his record is spotty on the issue of totalitarians. He was not in a commanding position when FDR made Stalin and Soviet Russia allies to fight Nazi Germany. Speaking in 1921, Churchill had this to say about Lenin, whom he was never tempted to praise, and the totalitarian slaughter being revealed in the West:

“He was told that private property existed as the reward of human toil and thrift. He did not believe it. He killed many thousands of people with whom he disagreed, and caused the deaths of many thousands more, in order to find out the truth of that proposition before he came to the conclusion that they were right and he was wrong….Monsieur Lenin then turned his attention to the currency, and, seeing machines making bank notes, he had a flash of pure Communistic genius. He thought that all he had to do to solve the social problem was to keep the machine going as fast as possible. He thought he had thus found a way of making everybody rich, and paying every workman several thousands a year. He destroyed the currency of Russia….He has not yet started on the Ten Commandments -- ‘Thou shall not steal,’ and ‘Thou shall do no murder’….As we watch this terrible panorama of Russian misery, let us abstract a moral which should be a guidance and an aid. Russia cannot save herself by her exertion, but she may at least save other nations by her example. The lesson from Russia, writ in glaring letters, is the utter failure of this Socialist and Communistic theory, and the ruin which it brings to those subjected to its cruel yoke.”

The lesson has not been lost on Obama and the Democratic Congress. It is precisely that yoke they are fitting over the necks of Americans. Hopefully, they will be voted out of power in the next general election, or perhaps checkmated in the next round of Congressional contests. But one may be sure of this: that should that happen, he and Congress will do as much damage to this country as they can before vacating the halls and committee rooms of power. Even after the votes have been counted and the winner has been announced, they will try to take what is left of the country with them. The legislation they are hastily writing and enacting now is intended for perpetuity. It will take some kind of revolution to cause its permanent repeal, and the repeal of all such legislation that preceded it.

In her novel Atlas Shrugged, Ayn Rand dramatized the workings of the death premise. This point cannot be over-emphasized. If they cannot live to exercise their power, if they cannot reap the benefits of usurpation, if they cannot take satisfaction in the spectacle of men blindly taking orders and in forcing the recalcitrant to act against their will, they will want the country to die. That is, as well and after all, the jihadist way. Obama and his allies wish Americans to submit, or else perish as a free people. In that respect, they share the goals and means of the Islamists.

Which returns us to 9/11, and Tony Blair presenting President Bush with the Churchill bust, which Obama understandably did not want.

*Dredd Scott’s Revenge: A Legal History of Race and Freedom in America, by Judge Andrew Napolitano. Nashville: Thomas Nelson, 2009. P. 89.
**All Churchill quotations are from Never Give In! The Best of Winston Churchill’s Speeches, selected by his grandson, Winston S. Churchill. New York: Hyperion, 2003.

ABC News aka OBC News

noreply@blogger.com (Edward Cline) — Wed, 17 Jun 2009 15:39:00 +0000

The Drudge Report was the first to announce the latest step in the fascist/socialist march to dictatorship in the United States. To guarantee that there is no “debate” on the government’s plan to impose mandatory health care “reform” on the nation, President Barack Obama has made a deal with ABC News to conduct a phony prime time “town hall” style meeting from the Blue Room of the White House on June 24. The sanctimonious and overly chummy anchor Charles Gibson will host “World News” from that precious vantage point. He will welcome the nation to the to the first airing of the Obama Broadcasting Corporation.

Not even FDR was brazen enough to co-opt a broadcaster to shill for the New Deal.

No one in the Reichstag -- excuse me, in Congress -- is protesting this blatantly bogus “reality show” except in the most wimpish manner. Republican National Committee chief of staff Ken McKay, according to Drudge, “fired off a complaint to the head of ABC News.” The text of his letter is really just a complaint that the Republicans have not been invited to participate in the “debate.”

“Today, the RNC requested an opportunity to add our Party’s views to those of the President’s to ensure that all sides of the health care reform debate are presented. Our request was rejected.”

Drudge reported that ABC News Senior Vice President Kerry Smith replied to the RNC, claiming it contained “false premises.”

“ABC News prides itself on covering all sides of important issues and asking direct questions of all newsmakers -- of all political persuasions -- even when others have taken a more partisan approach and even in the face of criticism from extremes on both ends of the political spectrum. ABC News is looking for the most thoughtful and diverse voices on this issue. ABC News alone will select those who will be in the audience asking questions of the president….ABC News will have complete editorial control. To suggest otherwise is quite unfair to both our journalists and our audience.”

Kerry Smith’s rebuttal must be taken with a hefty dose of sea salt. She is as much a liar as Obama when he states he doesn’t want to run a car company, or the banking industry, or any American business. “Thoughtful and diverse voices” are the last thing she and Obama want to hear. Note the disparagement of any political opposition that is to be excluded as a “partisan approach,” and the dismissal of “criticism from extremes on both ends of the political spectrum” as a kind of unnecessarily divisive “polarization.” There is no such thing as an objectively verifiable truth, according to Smith, just a comfortable, non-judgmental middle ground amenable to the wishes of an administration willing to initiate force in its quest to “do good.”

Given the leftist bias of ABC News (and of its rivals, CBS and NBC), one can guess the composition of the audience and predict the kinds of prearranged questions that will be asked Obama. Sure, ABC News will “select” the audience and have “complete editorial control,” but not without every person and virtually every word first being vetted by chief of staff Rahm Emanuel and press secretary Robert Gibbs and whoever else on Obama’s staff is responsible for scripts. This kind of circus will not be put on without an enormous amount of preparation, and every precaution will be taken to prevent any untoward “dialogue” between Obama and any of the dupes in the audience. The June 24th broadcast will have all the spontaneity of a White House press conference. Furthermore, ABC News has always broadcast from one extreme end of the political spectrum, that of total government control over everything. It is immaterial, however, which network was chosen to be Obama’s stalking horse. They are all equally culpable.

The denial for “equal time” should have come as no surprise. The Republicans, because they abandoned individual rights and reason, can only suggest a watered-down version of socialized health care. They will not oppose the idea of socialized medicine. Why should Obama and Congress settle for less when they have demonstrated they can go the limit with no fundamental opposition?

Did ABC deny the request? Yes. On its own initiative? Doubtful. Neither Obama nor his allies in Congress want to hear any other “views“ on socialized medicine. Therefore, any request for “equal time” is unwelcome. Rational arguments against socialized medicine and health care would only prove to be distractions, or worse, illuminating. The arrangement is a preview of the reinstatement of the “Fairness Doctrine” under another label, a doctrine whose very nature guarantees the suppression of dissent for as long as the government controls the airwaves and has the power to dictate the content and character of speech. Obama and the Democrats want to enact that doctrine without it being called censorship. If ABC wishes to continue to be the favored network, it will take orders. Apparently, that will be voluntarily.

There must be more behind ABC’s anointment than just a “deal.” One can imagine the bidding war for Obama’s favor between ABC, CBS and NBC; one cannot help but wonder what promises ABC made to the White House for this show and for all future “town halls.“ One can even speculate on the reasons behind the choice of Gibson as the “moderator” of the forthcoming broadcast. CBS anchor Katie Couric has little or no verisimilitude. Anchor Brian Williams of NBC is even more abrasively sanctimonious and authoritarian than is Gibson. One can only suppose it was decided that Gibson’s features are less annoying and patronizing. Image is everything. They don’t want to bore or frighten the kiddies.

Drudge reports that the arrangement has “ignited an ethical firestorm.” But this development represents more than an issue of ethics. It represents a paucity of moral courage, which I do not believe ABC News ever knew the meaning of or was ever bothered by, coupled with a blind avarice for high ratings. Most importantly, ABC News endorses the government’s rapidly expanding control of not only the economy but of virtually every aspect of the lives of this country’s citizens. But the fact remains that all three news anchors and their co-anchors report the government’s wishes as the metaphysically given. “It is raining outside.” “You will be fined by the government for not enrolling in its health care program.” Period.

The print press is no less guilty. Frank Rich, for example, in his New York Times article of June 14, “The Obama Haters’ Silent Enablers,“ was moved to smear any verbal opposition to the Obama agenda as goading “violent extremists.” This position is in complete agreement with the DHS memo of April (discussed in “A Cavalcade of Collectivism,” April 17), which lumped together all opposition, rational, semi-rational and irrational, as phenomena to be monitored and possibly stymied by the authorities, and insinuates that it is this kind of “free speech” that provokes assassins and civil unrest. To judge by the frenetic tone of his op-ed, Rich would likely welcome an Obama and Congressional version of Hitler’s 1933 Enabling Act, one that would suppress all “provocative” speech.

One cannot doubt the news media’s complicity in bringing fascism to this country. It is a complicity whose root is not some vast ignorance of what was being done. Ignorance of the law of identity is no excuse for breaking it; in an individual, reality will correct such ignorance. But there is no possible excuse, either, for a news organization that poses as politically sophisticated. It acts with full knowledge of the fraud and deception perpetrated by the Democrats on the country ever since Obama announced his candidacy for the presidency.

The accession of ABC News as a de facto department of the Obama administration ought to serve as convincing evidence of that complicity.

Obama’s Lexicographer

noreply@blogger.com (Edward Cline) — Wed, 10 Jun 2009 02:05:00 +0000

The New York Times ran an interesting article on June 4, “Obama Names a Republican to Lead the Humanities Endowment.” The nominee, Jim Leach, is a former representative for Iowa who endorsed Barack Obama for president. “He founded and was co-chairman of the Congressional Humanities Caucus, which advocates on behalf of the humanities in the House and seeks to raise the profile of humanities nationwide.” Leach is currently a professor at Princeton University’s Woodrow Wilson School of Public and International Affairs. His appointment must be confirmed by Congress.

There is no Frédéric Bastiat (1801-1850) School of Individualism and Laissez-Faire Studies at any university, so where else is a retired congressman to go? To The Woodrow Wilson School, named after the president who, more than any of his predecessors in office, set the United States on its course to the welfare state and fascism by signing the income tax act, the federal reserve act, and a host of other government interventionist legislation, and got the country into a European war whose issues and terms were beyond his power to set. As president, he was an unqualified failure. As a humanitarian, he was a great success. Americans owe him a debt of boundless ingratitude.

“The endowment is a federal agency with a budget of $155 million that gives grants to support research, education, preservation and public programs in the humanities.”

Leach is one of those men who wishes to see America organized and collectively committed to furthering a more “humane” society. According to the Times article, he is a member of the Council on Foreign Relations, vice chairman of the Century Foundation, and has been a board member of the Social Sciences Research Council and of the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace. Like Wilson, who spent much of his life in “public service,” Leach “served” the public for thirty years in Congress, and of course, expects everyone else to serve with the same ardor, as well. And if Americans won’t voluntarily serve, he wants to ensure that they involuntarily serve by having the NEH direct their taxes to causes and programs they may or may not approve or even have heard of. A satirist could not have invented a more copasetic surname for the nominee. It is almost as good as Ayn Rand’s Wesley Mouch, the economic dictator in Atlas Shrugged, or Sheridan’s Mr. Puff or Mrs. Malaprop in The Critic and The Rivals.

What is interesting about the article, however, besides the presumptuous assertions by both Leach and the article’s author that the nation needs a humanities czar to promote and exercise federal powers not anywhere enumerated in the Constitution, are some of Leach’s statements about words. These statements underscore just how disconnected he and the political leadership are from reality.

When Leach was interviewed for the article, he revealed a clue to that disconnection:

“He suggested that the National Endowment for the Humanities could depoliticize terms that have been co-opted by interest groups. ‘There are words bandied about that are being misused -- words like socialism, words like communism, words like fascism,’ he said.” [Italics mine.]

Perhaps those “interest groups” do not want to be looted and enslaved by communism, socialism, or fascism. Those “words” mean what they stand for. They cannot be “depoliticized.” They did not just pop into existence without any referents or any attached definitions and then were arbitrarily “co-opted” by those interest groups, who appended their own portentous meanings to them. Why would Leach think that they could have other than their established and recognized political meanings? The answer is in the paragraph that follows his charge of “misuse”:

“I think America is going to have to think through whether it wants to uplift the political dialogue or advance an approach that divides and, frankly, can lead to violence. I think this is a time to reflect vibrant differentnesses with greater decency. And that is an enormous challenge.” [Italics mine; “differentnesses“ is Leach’s neologism, not a misspelling, and may be his genteel euphemism for “diversity.”]

The imposition on a country of communism, socialism or fascism has always been accompanied by violence between the imposers and men opposed to those political systems. The approach that “divides” and leads to violence has always been the one adopted by the initiators of force. Does Leach believe that if those terms are defanged or stripped of their concrete, political denotations, that is, of their definitions, they can be used safely without concern that the populace will begin to riot or rebel, if someone perchance names or identifies the system? Given the dumbing down of Americans over the course of several generations, he may be justified in thinking that it is possible. Witness how the liberals have gotten away with dropping the label “liberals” and prefer now to be identified as “progressives,” confident that no one will be curious enough to read the political and educational history of the country from the end of the 19th century through the first decade of the 20th. What the term “Progressivism” meant was a program of incremental socialism.

But the terms communism, socialism, and fascism still retain their denotative powers among those whose minds have not been turned into mush by their education.

Note that Leach’s disparaging reference to “interest groups” presumably excludes his own interest groups, that is, the ones that wish the government to “uplift the political dialogue” by reflecting “differentnesses with greater decency.” Earlier he referred to the current administration as a “unique, uplifting presidency.” These favored “interest groups” will not turn “violent,” except to spend money coerced from taxpayers on what they deem to be “uplifting” and “different.”

Note also that Leach did not say he wants to see these terms abolished or banished as politically incorrect speech. Rather, he wants them to connote “positive” things. Since he does not have the power to discard the terms or erase them from men‘s minds, he seeks to subject them to a cosmetic makeover.

Announcing his pick to head the NEH, Obama stated:

“I am confident that with Jim as its head, the National Endowment for the Humanities will continue on its vital mission of supporting the humanities and giving the American public access to the rich resources of our culture.”

However, a far more culturally significant individual wrote about definitions, words and their proper usage over forty years ago, Ayn Rand.

“A definition is a statement that identifies the nature of the units subsumed under a concept.

“It is often said that definitions state the meaning of words. This is true, but it is not exact. A word is merely a visual-auditory symbol used to represent a concept; a word has no meaning other than that of the concept it symbolizes, and the meaning of a concept consists of its units. It is not words, but concepts that man defines -- by specifying their referents.

“The purpose of a definition is to distinguish a concept from all other concepts and thus to keep its units differentiated from all other existents.”*

So, according to Leach, the units subsumed under the concepts of communism, socialism and fascism should be toyed with like the letters on Scrabble tiles to mean anything the chairman of the moment of the NEH wishes them to mean. Imagine the possibilities: Communism could mean “a universal system of joyous penury,” socialism “a design for responsible frugality,” and fascism “to follow my leader to glorious pauperism.”**

The implications in Leach’s statement invite the obvious parallels to George Orwell’s three inverted, totalitarian maxims in Nineteen Eighty-Four: “War is peace. Freedom is slavery. Ignorance is strength.”

One is naturally tempted to wonder who or what prompted Leach to make such a bizarre statement. Obama and his staff cannot help but know that, all over the Internet, but certainly not in the mainstream media, he and his cohorts are being linked to or associated with communism, socialism and fascism. It may be coincidence, or happenstance.

Or it may be, as the villain in Ian Fleming’s Goldfinger remarked, “enemy action” in the most unlikely of battlefields: the dictionary.

*From Introduction of Objectivist Epistemology, by Ayn Rand (1966-1967). New York: Meridian-Penguin, 1990, eds. Harry Binswanger and Leonard Peikoff. P. 40.
**With thanks to the title of Terence Rattigan’s unproduced 1938 play, Follow My Leader, a satire on Hitler and Nazi Germany, which he co-wrote with Tony Goldschmidt. “As the Munich crisis loomed and the British government shilly-shallied about standing up to Hitler, Rattigan and Goldschmidt wanted to rush their play into immediate production. However, their script got no further than the Lord Chamberlain’s office. He banned it outright as likely to give offence to a friendly country.” From Terence Rattigan: The Man and His Work, by Michael Darlow and Gillian Hodson. London: Quartet Books, 1979. P. 97.

Obama Submits

noreply@blogger.com (Edward Cline) — Sat, 06 Jun 2009 21:09:00 +0000

One could devote a career to dissecting President Barack Obama‘s speech at Cairo University in Egypt on June 4th and point out in detail its numerous errors, fallacies and untruths. One could even dwell on how apparently naïve his is about the nature of Islam, an ignorance of it that is all the more revealing because he claims to have been exposed to Muslim instruction in Indonesia as a child. His patronizing boast of having come from a Kenyan family “that includes generations of Muslims” is utterly irrelevant. A man is not made by his ancestors -- not unless he chooses to be.

On minor errors, Daniel Pipes, the prominent authority on Islam, noted that:

“Barack Obama’s mention of ’seven million American Muslims’ in the course of his rambling and complex six-thousand-word address to the Muslim world from Cairo symbolizes the whole message….Study after study has found that demographic figure about three times too high. But Islamist organizations like the Council on American-Islamic Relations [CAIR] and the Islamic Society of North America [ISNA] relentlessly promote the notion of seven or even ten million American Muslims. Obama’s accepting their version amounts to a giveaway, a cheap way to win the approbation of Islamists who so widely influence Muslim opinion.”

In short, Obama was soap-boxing for an American voting bloc. But it would be profitable to first dismiss his assertion that America and Islam are “not exclusive and need not be in competition. Instead they overlap and share common principles, principles of justice and progress, tolerance and the dignity of all human beings,” an assertion he echoes throughout the rest of his speech whose theme could only be called, to second Pipes’ appraisal, “sucking up to the Muslims.”

America and Islam are not only “exclusive,” but political and philosophical antipodes. America stands for individual rights, freedom of thought and speech, objective justice, progress, and the liberty to live and conduct one’s life without encountering or resorting to force. Islam has never stood for those things, which are in fact objects of its scorn and hostility. Islam is a political/religious ideology that does not tolerate intellectual or religious freedom and which requires of its adherents complete and unquestioning submission to the words and wishes of a ghost and its marauding prophet. Its concept of justice is barbaric and tribal. Very little of that brutal “justice” as it is practiced in Muslim countries makes headlines in the West; but then again, such murders, mutilations, “honor” killings and the like also occur in the West and the U.S., but do not attract any news coverage, because that would be construed as “stereotyping” Islam and Muslims.

There is no “dignity” to be observed in seeing a single person prostrate himself in obeisance to Mecca, while the spectacle of hundreds performing the same submission is obscene. (It could be humorous; I oft times hope that some comedy group would be brave enough to satirize Islam and Muslims, just as the Monty Python group satirized Christianity.) There is no “dignity” to be observed in Muslim women forced to wear drab, de-sexing traditional garb. Muslims would probably agree with the latter evaluation. What is there in Islam or any of its practitioners to “respect”?

Islam, after the Catholic Church, was the most intolerant creed in history and in existence now. One is either a Muslim, a conquered kaffir or dhimmi -- or dead. Islamists believe in progress only if there is something to loot and that can be had without violating the primitive precepts of the Koran -- such as camels, slaves, oil fields, or foreign property -- but Islam itself is not by its nature a genesis of progress, nor can it ever be. A moral code that requires the voluntary or enforced stunting or compartmentalization of the mind is not going to invent air-conditioning or nuclear power plants or open heart surgery. It can appropriate the products of a free mind, but never originate them. That makes it a preeminently parasitical ideology.

Islam’s chief source of moral authority is the Koran, which, like the Torah and the Bible, is a hodge-podge of fanciful, disparate, and unintegrated casuistic imperatives and fables of questionable moral import. Moreover, it encourages and sanctions holy war or jihad against non-believers and their conquest by force or taqiya or deception. There is no theological “subtext” in its exhortations to kill or enslave Jews, Christians and other non-Muslims “wherever you find them”; these and similarly belligerent injunctions throughout the Koran are not euphemistic commands to “love thy neighbor“ and “cast not the first stone.” They are to be taken literally. The “violent extremists” Obama inveighed against in his speech are only practicing the core tenets of Islam; as I have remarked in past commentaries, remove those tenets from Islam, and what would be left would not be Islam, but a creed as insipid and pacific as that of the Amish.

Yet, the fundamental, anti-mind, anti-philosophy, and anti-moral character of the Koran was selectively overlooked, allowing Obama to quote from it three times during his speech. Those taken-out-of-context nuggets were lifted from a mountain of contaminated verbal slag. But, then, Obama and his aides are not particularly finicky about where they find “wisdom.” Look at the composition of his White House staff and the character of his appointees.

In one section of his speech, Obama delivers a series of compliments to “Islam” which are in fact calumnies against the West, in which he credits Islam with technological and medical achievements. But the Arabs who largely rediscovered Greek and Roman thought and science a millennia ago were exceptions to the rule of Islam. “Tolerant” Islam snuffed out the Arab Enlightenment. For an excellent refutation of Obama’s assertion that the West owes Islam any kind of cultural debt, see Andy Clarkson’s “The United States of America and Islam have nothing fundamental in common.”

As ideas, America and Islam are mutually exclusive and fundamentally incompatible. There is no reconciliation possible between freedom and servitude, between reason and faith, between progress and stagnation, between the sanctity of property and legalized theft, between individual rights and societies policed by priestly castes. As with reason versus any other faith or religion, it is a matter of “either-or.” Obama repeated what he said in Ankara, Turkey in April, that the United States “is not and never will be at war with Islam.” That may be true, however, Islam has been and is certainly now at war with the U.S. and with the West. Obama refuses to acknowledge that reality, because, politically, psychologically, and morally, he would be at home in any Muslim society. One can easily imagine him rising through the echelons of such a society to become a power in it or over it.

“I know that Islam has always been a part of America’s story. The first nation to recognize my country was Morocco. In signing the Treaty of Tripoli in 1796, our second president, John Adams, wrote ‘The United States has in itself no character of enmity against the laws, religion or tranquility of Muslims.’ And since our founding, American Muslims have enriched the United States.”

He knows no such thing. One cannot imagine how a collection of undifferentiated manqués can “enrich” any nation. Look at what is happening to Britain and Europe. True, Islam has “always” been a part of America’s story in that Muslim pirates preyed on American merchant vessels and Muslim monarchs seized American oil fields. In fact, well into the first quarter of the 19th century, Muslims raided European port towns from Iceland to Ireland to Britain to France and Spain, and in the Mediterranean, for slaves. And, with all due respect to John Adams, he never had to deal personally with Muslims. If he had ever gone to Morocco or Algiers or any other part of the world in which Islam held sway, he might have agreed with Winston Churchill’s evaluation a century later of how pathetic and miserable the life of a Muslim was.

Furthermore, given all the research facilities in Washington available to Obama and his speech-writers, one wonders where they find this “history.” The treaty of 1786 with Morocco, which implicitly recognized the United States, was secured with what can only be called a bribe of gifts worth $10,000 to the Emperor of Morocco. Had it not been paid, it would have been piracy as usual, in competition with the potentates of Tripoli, Algiers, and Tunis to seize American merchant vessels and hold the crews for ransom.

France was the first nation to recognize the United States as an independent nation, when it assisted the Revolution with money, troops, and naval support. Britain necessarily recognized the U.S. when it agreed in 1782 to negotiate a treaty with the “13 U.S.,” signed in Paris in 1783 and ratified by Congress in 1784. Next to recognize the U.S. was the Netherlands. For a summary account of American relations with the Barbary States, see the Avalon Project at Yale Law School.

See also my commentaries, Barbary Pirates: Old and New, on Rule of Reason, from August 2007; The Janus Face of Islam from September 2006; or Our Islamic Nemesis, Then and Now from August 2006 for further discussions of the impossibility of “peace” with Islam, a political/religious ideology fundamentally and necessarily driven to conquest by the same psychopathic forces that drove Nazism, with which Islamic leaders sympathized then and probably still do, although they are keeping that under their headdresses. The paramilitary organizations of Hamas and Hezbollah have adopted the Nazi military parade style; their mass salutes are merely closed-fist versions of the Nazi “sieg heil.”

The latter subject is not one much known in this country. Muslim hatred of the Jews in the Middle East predates World War I. Amin el-Husseini, the Grand Mufti of Jerusalem, was especially eager to exterminate Jews in Palestine and personally discussed the project with Hitler. Saudi Arabia was another pro-Nazi sympathizer. In point of fact, I cannot recall a single Middle Eastern, 20th century dictator or strongman who at one time or another had not expressed admiration for the Nazis, except, perhaps, the Shah of Iran (the son, 1919-1980). For a revealing account of how the Nazis planned to exploit the Arab “liberation movement” by assigning special military units to the region to direct the Middle Eastern branch of the Holocaust, see Klaus-Michael Mallmann and Martin Cuppers’ “’Elimination of the Jewish National Home in Palestine‘: The Einsatzkommando of the Panzer Army Africa, 1942.” These units were modeled on the ones that directed the massacres of Jews in Poland, Czechoslovakia and Russia, or aided in rounding them up for transport to the death camps.

Before flying to Cairo, Obama stopped in Saudi Arabia to “consult” with King Abdullah, the creature he bowed to at the London summit. Saudi Arabia and its repressive Wahhabist monarchy are ample proof that Islam can only appropriate the products of free minds, not originate or create them, in this instance, having seized Western created oil fields and investing the loot from them in the West. And, one must question Obama’s apparent fascination with the Saudis. Is it rooted in power-envy, or an obsession founded on pragmatism?

“Saudi Arabia and the United States have a near 60-year-old relationship based on guaranteeing oil supplies in return for U.S. protection for the Saudi monarchy.”

The “relationship” can only be characterized as extortionate, one made possible by American willingness to prop up a medieval oligarchy by prohibiting the development of oil deposits in the U.S. One can bet that the Saudis have an army of well-paid lobbyists in Washington who ensure that an “environmentally conscious” Congress perpetuates that extortion.

It is a significant clue to how receptive the 3,000 guests at Cairo University who listened to Obama were to the idea of coexisting with Jews and Israel when they remained silent and unresponsive when he touched on anti-Semitism, the Holocaust and Buchenwald. As one ABC correspondent remarked, “You could’ve heard a pin drop.” But each statement of capitulation and compromise earned him applause. Every Islamist knows that a “two-state” solution to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict is but a formula for bringing about the destruction of Israel. Obama, Secretary of State Hillary Clinton and their policymakers do not know it. Or perhaps they do, but are counting on “empathy” to prevent it from happening.

All this is aside from the manner in which Obama began his address to the Muslim world.

“We meet at a time of great tension between the United States and Muslims around the world, tension rooted in historical forces that go beyond any current policy debate. The relationship between Islam and the West includes centuries of coexistence and cooperation but also conflict and religious wars.”

You can’t get more Marxist-Hegelian than that. America and Islam are thesis and antithesis struggling against each other in what must ultimately result in a tension-releasing starburst of collectivist union -- of pure communism, or socialism, or fascism, or a global caliphate, or whatever facilitates “global amity” and animates our “collective conscience.” This belief in the mystical powers of “coexistence and cooperation” and wishing they would work, of course, is stressed by Obama in his assertion that “Islam has demonstrated through words and deeds the possibilities of religious tolerance and racial equality.” That assertion must have provoked disgust in the defenders of the West, and laughter among Islamists.

What is Obama’s solution? What rain dance of his is expected to promote the climax of those impersonal “historical forces”? Not ideas. Not principles. Not the assertion of reason and rights. But “dialogue.” That is, compromise and give-and-take. It cannot mean anything else but have-not Muslims negotiating what they will take from the haves, and Islamists looting the carcass of Israel. It also means, as Obama stated, pouring more billions of dollars into the corrupt cesspool economies of Pakistan and Afghanistan and other areas of Islamist hegemony. “Humanity” and Immanuel Kant will it; Obama is dutifully unmindful of the deleterious consequences to the West. Or, perhaps not.

There is so much more in Obama’s Cairo speech that could be dissected. All his verbiage about freedom of religion, freedom of speech, “human rights” and “democracy“ is just one pre-packaged, mandatory shibboleth undercut by his demonstrable penchant for statism. In summary, however, his speech was one which George W. Bush himself could have delivered. It simply reaffirmed the evasive, non-judgmental, accommodating policies of the Bush years and broadened their scope.

It was a defining act of submission.

Obama’s Assault on the Mind

noreply@blogger.com (Edward Cline) — Thu, 04 Jun 2009 14:38:00 +0000

White House press secretaries have earned the reputation over the last half dozen administrations of being practiced in the arts of obfuscation, deception and lying with straight faces as opaque as plastomer. The White House press corps, for their part, have become inured to the hyperbolic and elliptical rhetoric. Depending on whether the corps are friendly or hostile to the administration, individual members can read the subtexts of a press secretary’s statements and, governed by their biases and subjectivist preferences, tailor their interpretations one way or the other and project them as kinda-sorta news or analyses of what may or may not be official policies or positions. Their talent is to describe a pea-soup fog. This is what passes for modern journalism.

The press corps of President Barack Obama’s White House are not a true press corps. The majority of its members have betrayed their vocation and attend these rigged press conferences as a formality. The events seem to be more dumb-show and noise for groundlings than opportunities for news-gathering. One gets the sense that the White House would rather just dispense with the formality. The corps may as well be animated mannequins; they rise on cue to ask pre-screened questions of the press secretary or president; the latter will have prepared answers to those questions, the former is a skilled fog-making machine. Teleprompter or no teleprompter, nothing could be phonier than give-and-take spontaneity that may as well be rehearsed.

Former President George W. Bush at least had a modicum of honesty and, during his infrequent press conferences, faced a largely hostile press corps and did not do well. His advisors kept him off-stage as much as possible and let his press secretary run interference. But now the news media have largely become a collective shill for Obama’s policies, allies who give him a free pass for his contradictions and flip-flop policies, and who can be trusted to pass on to the public the latest official ukase. If any one of them decides not to play ball, presumably he will be put on a press conference “do not recognize” list.

Robert Gibbs, 38, a career political creature, has been Obama’s press secretary since January, and has worked for Obama before, during and after the latter’s Senate days. It should come as no surprise that he was also press spokesman for Senator John Kerry and other Democratic politicians. While he is no Joseph Goebbels, the maniacal propaganda chief of Nazi Germany whose obfuscations, deceptions, and lies were dutifully repeated as news by an unfree press, Gibbs performs much the same role for a press that chooses to be unfree. As Goebbels did, as the “public image” managers of tyrants in the past have done, he helped to create the myth of infallibility and the populist persona of Barack Obama, and now is responsible for preserving them. In that unconscionable fraud he is aided by a largely obliging news media.

But cracks are appearing in the façade of Obama’s “open presidency.” They are becoming more and more evident in Gibbs. On May 27, in response to a blog statement by Newt Gingrich that Judge Sonia Sotomayor, Obama’s nominee for the Supreme Court, ought to withdraw from consideration or be withdrawn because of racist and feminist remarks she made, Gibbs said something that was in the spirit of Goebbels. Responding to the Republicans’ opposition to Sotomayor, one based on her past affiliations, her less than stellar record of understanding the Constitution or even being cognizant of it, her apparent hostility to white males, and the media-generated myth that she is the daughter of immigrants (who, being Puerto Ricans, were actually U.S. citizens) who rose by her own efforts against tremendous odds (but, like Obama, probably the beneficiary of affirmative action or racial, gender, or “diversity” quota policies). Gibbs said, in the innocuous, undramatic tone of a garage mechanic recommending a certain grade of engine oil:

“I think it is probably important for anybody involved in this debate to be exceedingly careful with the way in which they’ve decided to describe different aspects of this impending confirmation.”

Briefly, there is no “aspect“ of Sotomayor‘s character or record which should be open to description, identification or debate. If anyone breaks that rule, Gibbs implied, the offending party will be smeared as a racist, bigot, and misogynist. Gibbs and chief-of-staff Rahm Emanuel are in charge of the White House machinery that can manufacture a backlash of outrage. Ask Sotomayor legitimate questions at your own risk. Her confirmation hearing will be a “debate” in name only. Besides, her confirmation is “impending,” in the cards, a sure thing, so why bother dredging up inconvenient truths about her?

When you watch Gibbs fielding questions from the press corps, you do not have the sense that you are observing evil incarnate. You do not see a Goebbels-like maniac. What you see is a person who very likely never once placed a value on truth or honesty. You see a non-entity whose existence is assured by his willingness to obfuscate, deceive, lie and juggle banalities commensurate with his character and task. You see a human face that reflects little else but calculation of how best to say nothing that could be interpreted as an absolute, a nondescript face with blank, evasive eyes and a self-effacing manner that expects and gets the cooperation of his auditors in putting one over on themselves and on the whole country.

Whether Gibbs’ warning to the Republicans not to press too hard on Sotomayor’s qualifications to sit on the Supreme Court was a conscious flouting of the First Amendment -- he should know that even Senators have First Amendment rights that should not be threatened or abridged by a mere press secretary or anyone else, let alone by a president -- or was an impromptu rebuke that was insensible to that Amendment, is irrelevant. What matters is that, for a moment, in a handful of incautious but revealing words, the mask of respect for anyone’s right to freedom of speech was dropped. His warning was aimed not just at Senators, Internet bloggers and Newt Gingrich, but at the press and the news media. It was an all-encompassing growl of disapproval of any questioning of the alleged wisdom of his employer and of resentment for any questioning of his own assertions.

In the real world, the one beyond the White House and Congress, one would not give anyone like Gibbs or his assertions a second thought. His ilk are many, mean, and small. But threats emanating from the representative of a man who is consciously wreaking destruction on this country, who is contemptuous of the Constitution, individual rights, private property, and freedom of speech, should not be taken as a matter of routine. This is not the first time Obama‘s gofers have warned individuals away from speaking out on certain issues and facts. Gibbs’ statements are uttered with the tacit approval of the president. Neither the president, nor Gibbs, nor anyone else on the White House staff, wishes anyone to think and speak with any gravity about Sotomayor or to trouble her with inopportune questions, which, under oath, she must answer with possibly damaging truths, during Senate confirmation hearings or in any other setting. They are all prepared to take retaliatory measures if anyone does.

What remains to be seen is whether or not any member of the Senate committee will be brave enough to take his First Amendment rights seriously enough to pose a single inopportune question, one that may suggest why Obama is so ideologically comfortable with her.

Gibbs’ admonitory “advice” to critics of Sotomayor is an order not to think. A prohibition of thought necessarily extends to a prohibition from action, in this instance, to voluntarily refrain from asking questions lest the White House become “exceedingly“ nasty. After all, why bother thinking about a matter when one is proscribed from acting on it? It is a blatant and unforgivable attack on the mind. Further, Sotomayor’s silence on Gibbs’ mealy-mouth diktat speaks volumes about her own position on the issue of the First Amendment; she does not seem to be aware that Gibbs violated it, or perhaps she is hoping that no one has noticed.

But then, this has been the constant leitmotif of Obama’s conduct in office.

A Doomsayers Postscript

noreply@blogger.com (Edward Cline) — Sat, 30 May 2009 14:30:00 +0000

This is in reply to some readers of “The Doomsayers.”

IMH: Yes, “global-cooling” was the sky-is-falling mania back in the 1970’s and I guess the mid-1980’s, before the alarmists discovered that no one was listening or buying it; so they switched to “global-warming” and ramped up their propaganda efforts, using the same but tweaked gossamer computer data. Which is why I wrote “a little over a decade ago.” It seems like a century ago, given the current level of thinking (or non-thinking). I don’t wonder about the root motivation of climate alarmists, either, which must be the same species of man-hatred as that of Waxman, Obama and company.

Michael Smith: Thanks for the CEI (Competitive Enterprise Institute?) run-down on the House committee votes. Yes, I agree that Waxman’s and his ilk’s purpose, through their bill, is to compel Americans to commit economic suicide and reduce the survivors to rags and handouts from the government. They know that this would be the sole consequence, not as objective knowledge, but as the same kind of feral knowledge that Floyd Ferris exhibited in Atlas Shrugged. (They are practiced evaders of objective knowledge and of reality.) The worst thing anyone could do is what the Republicans did when they proposed the amendments to Waxman’s climate bill (which were predictably defeated), which was to assume that Waxman and his ilk have the best interests of the country at heart; thus the futility of proposing amendments to a piece of legislation they ought to know was authored by killers; all their amendments would have accomplished, had they been adopted, was to soften the blow and prolong the death-throes of this country.

Waxman and his ilk are not “misguided idealists.” They are killers posing as “public servants” in service to the “ideal” of non-existence. They know what they are doing. The Republicans and conservatives do not know what they are doing, because they are obsessed with concrete issues (such as vote-rigging, which I‘m certain Obama is guilty of through ACORN and George Soros and the Democratic National Committee), or God, or “traditional” values, or all three irrelevancies and so miss the whole point of such legislation. There is no one in either the House or Senate who understands the evil and who can call Waxman out on his malignancy and ulterior agenda. Or Obama, Pelosi, Reid, Dodd, et al.

And, we mustn’t forget the role that George Bush played in this on-going tragedy. John Lewis commented with his usual clarity on Bush’s responsibility for it on the Oactivists blog. Obama is simply his anxious, in-a-hurry successor to the very same policies that Bush initiated and endorsed for eight years. (Some years ago on Rule of Reason I called Bush a socialist.) Even some Democrats are noticing the similarities between Bush‘s rhetoric and actions and Obama‘s. If Obama had been president on 9/11, he would have committed the same treason as Bush’s, which was to not eradicate states that sponsor terrorism or ask Congress for a declaration of war against them, but to evade knowledge of the evil of our enemies, and commit American lives and treasure to a no-win “police” action against the Muslim “bad guys” and those who attacked this country.

Observe Obama‘s “patriotic” commitment of more troops to Afghanistan; do you really think he wants to defeat the Taliban, or is it to expend and sacrifice our military vitality and resources? I have never believed that his words and actions stem from ignorance or un-intelligence. He is a valueless man who seeks to destroy values. I curse every time I hear him “honor” our soldiers, and wish I could tell him he has no right to lay wreathes on their tombs or set foot on any American battlefield or even to visit Normandy. If any of the Marines or Secret Service assigned to his protection had an ounce of moral certitude, they should quit, rather than guard the life of this anti-American, anti-life president.

Note that Obama, like Bush, constantly harps on the necessity of “sacrifice,” not only of American civilians, but of our troops. Is or is not that the same code of altruism? What matters the Republican or Democratic label? And now that the United Nations and the European Union have taken Obama’s measure, they have become even more obviously our “drooling beasts.” They know he is one of them.

Note also that Warren Buffett, Bill Gates, and other wealthy apologists for their wealth, and many other Obama supporters, as well, haven’t said much lately, because Obama and Congress have marked them for poverty, too. As far as Obama and other socialists are concerned, their past philanthropy won’t be enough to admit them to Marxist heaven; they must give and give and give until it really hurts. If I weren’t going to be affected by Obama’s “spread the wealth around” plans, I would say that is perfect justice for having supported the irrational from either conviction or from pragmatism and got this creature elected.

Jim Douthit’s analogy of Osama bin Laden as president who enacts policies designed to destroy this country is a brilliant piece of thinking (forwarded to me after I posted “The Doomsayers“) that ought to be sent to every member of Congress, and to the White House, as well, if only to put them all on notice that men of reason know what they’re up to (which may or may not stall them, probably not). So, we have every right, every justification, every piece of evidence, to dub Barack “Obama bin Laden.”

If bin Laden’s purpose on 9/11 was to plunge the country into economic and political chaos as a prelude to its downfall and takeover by an Islam-friendly dictator -- one who is also friendly with other America-haters, such as Hugo Chavez and the Saudis, to name a few -- Obama is accomplishing that very same purpose; but Bush, as John Lewis emphasized, was there first. Waxman and his ilk have been and continue to be only their accessories to the crime-in-progress.

The Doomsayers

noreply@blogger.com (Edward Cline) — Thu, 28 May 2009 17:16:00 +0000

President Barack Obama has implied more than once that the current system of “capitalism“ is doomed in the face of his intended “reorganization“ of American society -- oblivious to the fact that full-scale, unregulated capitalism has never existed in this country or anywhere else in the world. “Capitalism” was blamed for the financial debacle of last fall; spokesmen for government policies and the news media deftly shifted the blame for it from those policies to the private sector with the swiftness of a card sharp.

Watching these spokesmen and the news media discuss the crisis, one has the unique experience of watching men identify the causes -- such as the government extorting the cooperation of banks and other loan institutions to accept bad loans tied to discounted mortgage obligations, or bribing them with the carrot of federal guarantees, yet refuse to acknowledge the fact that it was, and continues to be, government interference that is the root of the problem -- and then call for more of the same or greater intervention as a solution.

This is not evidence of stupidity. The phenomenon is a demonstration of evasion of the facts of reality, a decision to disconnect from reason, and an overriding urge to make reality conform to an ulterior agenda, an urge driven by a hatred of freedom, prosperity, and man.

It is the same policy of craven evasion and dishonesty that accounts for the phenomenon of little over a decade ago, when climate alarmists, moved by a panic and “concern” that seemed like scientific certainty, disseminated computer models that predicted catastrophic, man-caused global cooling that would cause falling sea levels, galloping glaciers crushing everything in their path, mass extinctions of animal species, a “nuclear winter," and the deaths of millions. Those predictions had the substance of gossamer, because none of those things occurred.

Now, when the average “global” temperature has fallen by one or a fraction of a degree, indicating -- but not predicting -- a cooling trend, the same alarmists are predicting catastrophic, man-caused global warming leading to melting icecaps, rising sea levels, retreating glaciers, mass extinctions of animal species, a “greenhouse summer“ of indefinite length, and the deaths of millions. (Hollywood, always loyal to fantasy and fallacy, did its bit to propagate apocalyptic doom with disaster movies such as “Soylent Green” and “The Day After Tomorrow.“) The evidence is that these predictions likewise are not coming to pass, and have also been proven to be made of gossamer. Politicians and anti-industrial groups resist or ignore the scientific evidence. The facts do not fit their wishes or their agenda.

Such mental stonewalling underscores the religious character of the global warming movement, a character reminiscent of the heyday of the Catholic Church (or, today, of Islam) when it had the power to punish those of little or no faith. Anyone who questions the “proofs” and pseudo-science of the creed is branded a skeptic, a heretic, or an unbeliever, is granted few or no chances of rebuttal, and is punished in a multitude of ways, such as professional ostracism or excommunication.

As reported in an earlier commentary, British scientist Lord Christopher Monckton was disinvited by Henry Waxman and his House energy and commerce committee to testify with former vice president Al “the debate is closed” Gore, lest Monckton’s testimony embarrass Gore and burn their ears and incinerate their premises. While the truth will free many men, it can deflate liars, charlatans, and politicians. Truth is a prison that will not allow them to fantasize and enact an alternative universe. They hate the truth-sayers as much as they hate the truth.

But, Obama and Gore are not the only doomsayers. There are others.

On May 23 the Townhall site published one of its very few articles that did not parenthetically sabotage its reasoning and allegiance to truth by citing, faith, God or religion, “Climate Change ‘morality,'” by Paul Driessen, an apostate from the Sierra Club and Zero Population Growth and a prolific champion of free enterprise and the truth. Not a wrinkle of mysticism taints it. His article excoriates the whole premise of anthropogenic global warming and in addition cites the projected catastrophic costs of the Waxman-Markey climate bill, which, if ever enacted and enforced, would guarantee this country’s economic collapse and the impoverishment of Americans who would be expected to shut up and put up.

“Global average temperatures stabilized in 1998 and have even cooled slightly, despite steadily rising CO2 levels. [Which can be attributed to what? An increasing world population that exhales CO2? The effects on the atmosphere of the emission of industrial “greenhouse“ gases cannot even be measured. A single volcanic eruption spews more “pollutants“ into the air than the total emissions since the beginning of the Industrial Revolution.] Except in its Western Peninsula, Antarctica is gaining ice. Arctic ice is seasonably normal. Land-based temperature data have been corrupted by air-conditioner exhausts and other heat sources.”

As for the computer models on which extortionate and confiscatory environmentalist legislation is based, Driessen notes that:

“Climate models are no more reliable than computer predictions of future Super Bowl winners and scores. Their Frankenstein scenarios are no more valid as a basis for law and policy than the special effects in The Day After Tomorrow or Jurassic Park.”

Driessen cites several studies that project costs to the economy and to taxpayers that rocket up to the billions and accomplish little or nothing except the redirection of industry to produce “green” energy sources such as thousands of wind turbines and hundreds of square miles of solar panels, aside from adding thousands of dollars to the average taxpayer’s cost of living. These projections have been made by the Congressional Budget Office, the Heritage Foundation, Harvard economists, and independent think tanks not suborned by federal study grants. The only catch, however -- although Driessen does not raise the issue, the logic must sit in the back of his mind -- is that these dire projections are based on the assumption that the economy and nation could survive such costs without plummeting us into civil strife, political and economic disintegration, and probable dictatorship.

“President Obama says the Bush administration ‘made decisions based upon fear, rather than foresight, and all too often trimmed facts and evidence to fit ideological predispositions.’ He and his Democrat allies in Congress should take that critique to heart on global warming.”

Obama, Waxman, and their global warming card sharps are, in short, pots calling the kettle black.

Driessen ends his article with:

“As it stands, this Congress is rapidly shaping up to be the most unethical, immoral and dictatorial in history. When the people finally rebel, it won’t be a pretty sight.”

Driessen, author of Eco-Imperialism: Green Power, Black Death (2003), also wrote another interesting article for The National Free Press, “Back To The ‘Good Old Days’” (May 1), in which he projects a regression in living standards back to 1905 or 1862. In 1905,

“Coal and wood heated homes. Few had telephones or electricity. AC units were handheld fans. Ice blocks cooled ice boxes. New York City collected 900,000 tons of vehicle emissions -- horse manure -- annually, and dumped it into local rivers. Lung and intestinal diseases were rampant. Life expectancy was 47.”

The facts Driessen cites for 1862 are even more horrendous. These facts are readily accessible to Obama, Waxman, Congress and anyone else who might value the truth. Yet facts and truth play no role in their decisions.

“None of this seems to matter to the Obama administration or liberal Democrats. The 648-page Waxman-Markey climate bill would compel an 80% CO2 reduction, by imposing punitive cap-and-tax restrictions on virtually every hydrocarbon-using business, motorist and family.”

Later on in his hard-hitting article, Driessen notes that the alarmists’ computer models

“…cannot accurately replicate last year’s regional climate shifts or predict changes even one year in the future. They ignore Earth’s history of repeated climate changes and failed to anticipate the slowly declining global temperatures of 1995-2008.”

“Failed to anticipate” them, or deliberately discounted them, because they did not fit?

Driessen writes that

“President Obama says cap-and-trade will ‘raise’ $656 billion over the next decade. The National Economic Council and other analysts put the tax bite at $1.3 to $3.0 trillion.”

Presumably that does not take into account the hyper-inflated cost of living and of doing business. Again, the scenario is predicated on a functioning, productive economy and a civil society that could pay the tax, which is aside from the trillions of dollars in Medicare and Social Security entitlements and other programs to be funded also by a surviving but crippled private sector, not to mention the trillions spent on government pork barrel projects and government subsidies to maintain the “infrastructure.”

How can any rational person claim that the “computer model” of a regulated, nationalized, fascist economy has more credibility than any gossamer-woven climate forecast and which would last any measurable length of time? It is expecting that the hydraulic press of government force, fraud and deception can continue to squeeze blood from a rock and that the rock will not crack and explode under the pressure. The Tea Parties of March and April were cracks appearing in that rock.

No rational person would vouch for such a computer model. But career looters and enemies of freedom, such as Representative Henry Waxman of California, would. To him, men in the private sector are just so many serfs who will automatically keep creating wealth and values to tax and regulate for the government and its dependents to consume. And should the serfs realize that they have been indentured to a life of sacrifice, service and toil for the sake of the elderly, the lame and the halt, for the environment and what-not, and show signs of rebellion, Waxman and his ilk would prefer they not be able to do anything about it. During an interview on MSNBC in 2001, Waxman stated:

“If someone is so fearful that they’re going to start using their weapons to protect their rights, [it] makes me very nervous that these people have these weapons at all.”

Why would Americans protecting and asserting their rights make Waxman nervous? Does or does not the Second Amendment of the Constitution recognize that our government can become an enemy of the citizenry and that the citizenry had the right to form militias in self-defense? Did or did not the Founders mean that it was the federal and state governments that could become hostile to the citizenry?

Is he suggesting that his record in Congress, for example, in which he has voted for every proposed extension of federal power, and voted against every proposed limit on that power, has justifiably caused worry among the citizenry that the federal government is squeezing it dry, and that he, Henry Waxman, is in prominent, enabling and culpable company responsible for those encroachments? What doom does he wish to delay?

Just as climate alarmists ignore facts which do not fit into or which contradict their doomsday global warming scenarios, Waxman and his ilk ignore the facts stated in the Bill of Rights which do not fit into or which contradict their collectivist, and fundamentally man-hating vision of America.

Waxman’s offensively imperious and arrogant attitude is that of a privileged oligarch who believes he has first title to the lives, productive work and futures of Americans. Like Obama, like Nancy Pelosi, like Harry Reid, like the majority of Democrats and Republicans, he does not concede that Americans are the owners of their own lives. But his expression of fear is an invaluable clue to his deepest premises and outlook. One does not fear what one knows cannot harm or destroy one. That kind of man secretly fears retribution or justice, and so hates it and the prospect of it. He would prefer to dispense with the fear by emasculating the power of the citizenry to question and oppose him and his policies, so he can get on with further “public service.” Other men, after all, he believes, have mastered reality, and so they must be mastered in turn, necessarily with lies, whips, and government guns.

He would rather such rebellious Americans did not exist at all, so he could effortlessly lord it over a nation of selfless, obedient, dependent serfs, and thus postpone his own doom and that of the nation. He would hate the idea and fear the chance that Americans would say “no” to his power-grubbing, and so necessarily hate them. Ultimately, in the final analysis, he would rather they just shut up, or go away -- or die.

That is what Ayn Rand called the death premise. It is the core death-worshipping nature of such men which the Paul Driessens and other advocates of the paramount role of reason and facts in man’s existence must first grasp in order to understand why their arguments fall on so many deaf ears and have no effect on so many self-induced, comatose minds. It is the death premise that renders such minds in such men impervious to any presentation of reality and of the destructive consequences of their actions and policies.

Such men understand and know that if their wishes and fantasies cannot be “realized” in reality, then their chosen fate is to perish with those whom they have sentenced to certain death. When the champions of reason and man compel such men to face the nature of their hatred, as Driessen noted, that will not be a pretty sight, either.

But that will be a first step in freeing ourselves from them and their morality of death.

Obama the “Empath”

noreply@blogger.com (Edward Cline) — Wed, 20 May 2009 13:39:00 +0000

One of the most bizarre characters in the huge menagerie of odd creatures in the “Star Trek” corpus is Deanna Troi, counselor on the starship Enterprise in the “Next Generation” series. She is a half-alien “empath” and telepath who can not only “feel” what others are feeling, but read minds, as well. These talents saved Captain Picard and his ship and crew a number of times, and have also solved more mundane episodes of angst and dementia on the Enterprise. She was even able to “sense” the presence of another psychic on a hostile warship from thousands of miles away, somehow allowing the Enterprise to spot and target it for a photon hit. She was a combination séance medium and crystal ball reader.

Believe it or not, the Pentagon’s Darpa division is investigating the feasibility of employing telepathy on the battlefield; to date, the cost has reached $8 million. That is a measure of the state of the culture. It is no longer inconceivable that West Point and the Naval Academy will include tarot card reading and horoscopes in their war-fighting curricula.

Back in the real world, or what he perceives is the real world, President Barack Obama wants to investigate the feasibility of appointing an empath to the Supreme Court. That is, he would like to see someone, preferably from a “minority” (gender optional), team up with the other liberals on that bench to find more often in favor of those whose injured feelings and tort-worthy pain are a consequence of an unjust society governed by a code of laws that allegedly favors the rich and oppresses the poor. He wishes to install someone who, like him, regards empathy more important than facts or the sanctity of contracts or personal responsibility.

Empathy is included in the “traits he admires in a Supreme Court justice…intellect, integrity, respect for the Constitution and the law.” These attributes, however, are just semantic eye-candy spoken by a man who does not embody either intellect or integrity, and who has shown no evidence, given his actions during his first one hundred days in office, that he respects the Constitution or the law. In the real world, in practice, “empathy” in a person would contradict and negate any intellect, integrity and respect for the Constitution and the law he might have, provided he even developed them.

“Obama, preparing to nominate a successor to Justice David H. Souter, has often said that the best judges take note of the real world. By making empathy a core qualification, he is uniting his own eclectic experience as a community organizer and constitutional-law professor while demanding what he has called ‘a broader vision of what America should be.’”

“Six months after he was elected on a promise to change the country’s direction, Obama will be the first Democrat since 1994 to name a new justice. His choice will be informed by his conviction that the United States has become a meaner, less fair society and his belief that the court should play a ‘special role.’”

But, what is the “real world” to Obama? What is his “broader vision“ of America? And what “special role” should the court play? Should it help change the country’s direction, or simply act as a passive imprimatur of the administration‘s collectivist policies?

The answer to all of these questions is easy: It is a Democratic version of a “kinder, gentler America” that is his agenda, or, in other words, an essentially fascist/socialist one whose legal dice are loaded in favor of whoever can claim victimhood, social inequality, need or any other imagined inequity. A society in which no incompetent, parasite or mediocrity is left behind. Not even pirates or enemy combatants or foreign terrorists who attack Americans here or abroad. All may become litigants in the pursuit of “social justice.”

In fact, the whole character of his administration to date -- and there is no reason to think it will ever change -- has been marked by “empathy” for everything but individual rights, reason and freedom, and certainly not for the Constitution or for any objective, reason-based law. He wishes Justice to remove her blindfold, discard her scales, and become a be-robed grief counselor to anyone who can demonstrate his hostility or indifference to individual rights, reason and freedom, or who can itemize all the ways he has suffered because of them.

One of the leading candidates to replace Souter is Judge Sonia Sotomayor of the Second Circuit Court of Appeals. Apparently she does not believe in blindfolds or scales, either. She

“…gave a speech declaring that the ethnicity and sex of a judge ‘may and will make a difference in our judging.’ In her speech, Judge Sotomayor questioned the famous notion -- often invoked by Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg and her retired Supreme Court colleague, Sandra Day O’Connor -- that a wise old man and a wise old woman would reach the same conclusion when deciding cases.

“’I would hope that a wise Latina woman with the richness of her experiences would more often than not reach a better conclusion than a white male who hasn’t lived that life…’”

Race and gender are the determining -- and supposedly deterministic -- ingredients that govern her thinking. I say “supposedly deterministic” because that is what she chooses to allow into her thinking.

She’s no Judge Judy. And certainly no Justice Clarence Thomas. The New York Times wrote:

“This month…a video surfaced of Judge Sotomayor asserting in 2005 [during a panel discussion for law students] that a ‘court of appeals is where policy is made.’ She then immediately adds: ‘And I know -- I know this is on tape, and I should never say that because we don’t make law. I know. Okay. I know. I’m not promoting it. I’m not advocating it. I’m -- you know.’”

No, I don’t know. I doubt if any of the other panelists or any of the law students knew, either. But one doesn’t need to be a mind reader or an empath to make an educated guess. Sotomayor makes it clear what she knows:

“…[H]er remarks at Berkeley, which were published by the Berkeley La Raza Law Journal, went further, asserting that judges’ identities will affect legal outcomes.

“’Whether born from experience or inherent physiological or cultures differences,’ she said, for jurists who are women and nonwhite, ‘our gender and national origins may and will make a difference in our judging.’”

She and Obama are on the same pragmatist page. Wrote the Washington Post on May 13 about Obama‘s years as a lecturer on constitutional law:

“Former colleagues and students say he incorporated the real world into his legal approach by asking how rulings would affect people. He explored the Supreme Court’s power, along with its limits.

“’He didn’t seem to really want to talk theory in the classes,’ said onetime student David Franklin….’He wanted to talk about what worked and what the real-world testing of those theories had yielded.’”

Later the Post observes:

“After Souter’s plans to retire became public, Obama spoke of empathy as ‘an essential ingredient for arriving at just decisions and outcomes.’ He said he would look for someone ‘who understands that justice isn’t about some abstract legal theory.’”

He did not need to look far. Sotomayor is a legacy of President George H.W. Bush, who appointed her to a federal district court in 1991, and of President Bill Clinton, who raised her to the appeals court in 1997. Now she is Obama’s first choice to be elevated to the Supreme Court.

And if anyone doubted that Obama is not only not intellectual, but anti-intellectual, that disdain for “abstract legal theory,” which the Founders absorbed and mastered in order to write a Constitution which Obama swore to protect in his oath of office (but is not protecting), ought to alert anyone that his intentions are not only bad, but intentionally bad.

Understanding others is “at the heart of my moral code,” he wrote in his second book The Audacity of Hope. It is his smiley faced, soft-shoe version of Reverend Jeremiah Wright’s, “God damn America.” Obama may have publicly distanced himself from his controversial (and retired) pastor, but morally he is still in that minister‘s congregation. At the hearts of their moral codes, their empathy or “understanding” is symphonious. In the person of Barack Obama, Wright is enacting his hatred of America and his vengeance on it by proxy in his protégé’s march to the same “broader vision of what America should be.”

What do the Republicans and conservatives think of Sotomayor and her telegraphed intention to indulge in judicial activism and gender- and race-flaunting in the highest court in the land?

“Republicans have signaled that they intend to put the eventual nominee under a microscope, and they say they were put on guard by Mr. Obama’s statement that judges should have ‘empathy,’ a word they suggest could be code for injecting liberal ideology into the law.”

It is much too late to worry about injecting liberal ideology into the law. One did not need to exert much effort to “decode” Obama’s disingenuous campaign rhetoric, and one certainly doesn’t need to decipher his statements now, now that Obama is in the White House and has made his ideology all too obvious. American law on all levels of government and the judiciary is top-heavy with liberal collectivist ideology -- how else to account, for example, for the welfare state and the ten thousand commandments of regulatory law? -- much of which the Republicans proposed and helped the liberals make possible over the decades. On philosophical and ideological levels, the Republicans have more “empathy” with Obama and the Democrats than either group will concede. It is the Republicans’ own moral premises which they ought to examine under a microscope.

The Republicans, too, lack any intellect or integrity. If they had any, they would not waste time attacking Speaker Nancy Pelosi for lying about the intelligence community or bothering with any of the administration’s and Congress’s other scandals and peccadilloes, and instead ruthlessly attack their moral philosophy root and branch.

That would require a consistent philosophy of reason, one absolutely and without exception anchored in the real world, but that is what the Republicans disdain and reject, as well, in the name of God and pragmatism. They are the buffoonish Witch Doctor to Obama’s Attila.

Obama’s “Blood-Tax”

noreply@blogger.com (Edward Cline) — Wed, 06 May 2009 03:38:00 +0000

I have emphasized in the past why the Republicans and conservatives are becoming irrelevant, chiefly because they dare not challenge the political philosophy and political agenda of the Democrats, for the philosophy and agenda are fundamentally their own, as well, but in watered-down form. In morality, it is altruism; in politics, collectivism. The Democrats brazenly advocate socialism (under the euphemism of “progressivism”), fascism in various newly-instituted government-business “partnerships,” and involuntary servitude, and rush through Congress bailouts, more controls, and expropriating legislation. The Republicans clamor that such tactics will not work and will lead to collapse and disaster. Their solution, under the cloak of moderation, is to creep up on the same things using different labels, and then they will work.

The Democrats, being consistent pragmatists, claim neither omnipotence nor omniscience; they simply hope their policies and actions will work. They have often said so. They are the “brave” pragmatists. The Republicans and conservatives do not challenge the Democrats on that score; instead, they protest the policies of the Democrats on the issues of speed and scale. They are the “moderate” pragmatists. Individual rights, capitalism, freedom of speech -- these issues do not exist in either camp.

In his May 2 article “National Service: Now Bigger than Ever,” Carl Horowitz questions, for example, the speed and scale of the AmeriCorps volunteer service legislation signed into law by President Barack Obama on April 21. He does not question the idea that young Americans ought to serve.

“Who could argue with so noble an idea as ’national service’? On the surface, the idea is irresistible.”

Who could? Individuals who value their freedom would find the idea not only iniquitous, but ignoble, and condemn it as slavery. Horowitz, however, questions only the cost and scope of the bill and suspects that Obama and the Democrats are preparing the way for compulsory national service, with which he is uncomfortable.

“Underlying such noble intentions…is the reality that the track record of service programs has been less than stellar. And more problematic, ‘voluntary’ service, as supporters themselves have admitted over the years in unguarded moments, contains more than a whiff of compulsion. That’s why, if fully realized, national service programs would capture an enormous portion of the entry-level labor market and, worse, militarize our national identity.”

Yes, that might happen. He does not understand that, to the Obamacrats and their allies in and out of Congress, the term “compulsion” is synonymous with “obligation” vis-à-vis “giving back,” the latter being their preferred term. The mental gymnastics of collectivists does not view paying a “debt” to society as a matter of force or extortion. “Society” is the master unit, the individual its indebted but often ungrateful servant. After all, runs the patter, if it were not for the existence of society, where would the individual be? Society makes his life tolerable and comfortable; it is only fair that he “give back” something.

The bill signed by Obama is the Senate version, called the Edward M. Kennedy Serve America Act. The House version was called the Generations Invigorating Volunteerism and Education Act (GIVE). I leave to the reader to decide which name is more objectionable.

“…The law would more than triple the number of available AmeriCorps volunteer slots from the current 75,000 to 250,000 by fiscal year 2017, with 50 percent or more of these positions eventually being full time. The measure would also tie college tuition aid to demonstrated favorable community impacts….”

Horowitz discusses throughout his article the history of “volunteerism” and asserts that the trend towards federally mandated compulsion is impractical, and cites the “volunteerism” possible through private programs as being more effective and practical. He concludes:

“…The line between service and servility is often blurred. The Edward M. Kennedy Serve America Act would blur it further.”

He does not see that the blurring is intentional. People drilled all throughout their lives that “service” is their natural duty will not regard it as servitude. The advocates of compulsory service understand this, if he does not.

There was the War on Poverty, followed by wars on smoking, obesity, salt-consumption, ability, ageism, sexism, homophobia, and “harmful“ speech and whatever else the social engineers frowned upon. In the course of reprising the political history of “volunteerism” in this country, including the Peace Corps, Volunteers in Service to America (VISTA) and the role of the Clinton-inspired Corporation for National and Community Service (CNCS), Horowitz at least credits the intellectual inspiration for these fascist programs: American philosopher William James (1842-1910) and his seminal essay, published in 1910, “The Moral Equivalent of War” (adapted from his 1906 address at Stanford University).

James, a pragmatist with strong subjectivist, religious and deterministic elements in his world view, argues that, lacking a cause, such as war, that would unify a nation and instill it with altruist vigor, a policy of civilian conscription should be implemented. Without such a program, he argues, a nation cannot help but grow soft, degenerate, and distracted by materialism. James could be deemed the father of American fascism.

The Britannica Concise Encyclopedia offers a general description of National Socialism, or Nazism.

“It had its roots in the tradition of Prussian militarism and discipline and German Romanticism, which celebrated a mythic past and proclaimed the rights of the exceptional individual over all rules and laws. Its ideology was shaped by Hitler’s beliefs in German superiority and the dangers of communism and need for an enemy.”*

James advocated compulsory servitude -- but to oppose what enemy? He also claimed that the nation needed an enemy to rouse its citizens from the spiritual laxness of industrial civilization. Men, he said, had a natural instinct for war. James was a pacifist and abhorred war. But at the same time he asserted that the fear of being conquered could unite citizens as nothing else could in terms of being imbued with the spirit of a “peaceful” common cause. If making war was in man’s nature, he asked, why not direct that instinct to more constructive purposes?

“If now -- and this is my idea -- there were, instead of military conscription, a conscription of the whole youthful population to form for a certain number of years a part of the army enlisted against Nature, the injustice would tend to be evened out, and numerous other goods to the commonwealth would remain blind as the luxurious classes now are blind, to man’s relations to the globe he lives on, and to the permanently sour and hard foundations of his higher life. To coal and iron mines, to freight trains, to fishing fleets in December, to dishwashing, clothes washing, and window washing, to road-building and tunnel-making, to foundries and stoke-holes, and to the frames of skyscrapers, would our gilded youths be drafted off, according to their choice, to get the childishness knocked out of them, and to come back into society with healthier sympathies and soberer ideas. They would have paid their blood-tax….”

What injustices would be “evened out”? James mentions that the rich are rich through no credit of their own, and the poor are poor for no fault of their own. A nationalistic spirit would level everything out; the rich would not mind paying taxes to defeat an enemy; the poor would find a better purpose in life. James conceded, even in the early twentieth century, before the income tax and central banking were legislated in this country, that the country was on a path to socialism. What might help make it work would be to instill a militaristic, self-sacrificing ethic in Americans.

“All the qualities of a man acquire dignity when he knows that the service of the collectivity that owns him needs him. If proud of the collectivity, his own pride rises in proportion. No collectivity is like an army for nourishing such pride; but it has to be confessed that the only sentiment which the image of pacific cosmopolitan industrialism is capable of arousing in countless worthy breasts is shame at the idea of belonging to such a collectivity. It is obvious that the United States of America as they exist today impress a mind…as so much human blubber. Where is the sharpness and precipitousness, the contempt for life, whether one’s own or another’s? Where is the savage ‘yes’ and ‘no,’ the unconditional duty? Where is the conscription? Where is the blood-tax? Where is anything that one feels honored by belonging to?”

Substitute “race“ for “collectivity” and “Germany” for “the United States,” and one would discern little difference between James’s rhetoric and any one of Hitler’s public harangues to a rally of the Nazi converted. Remember that James uttered these words in 1906, when Hitler was just a “troubled teen“ and Mussolini was a twenty-something feeling his socialist oats. Indeed, as Leonard Peikoff points out, Mussolini credited James with much of his corporatist/fascist ideology. (The ultimate credit, as Peikoff points out in The Ominous Parallels, goes to Immanuel Kant and G.F. Hegel.) James wrote glowingly of what he considered to be adult sobriety:

“Martial virtues must be the enduring cement; intrepidity, contempt of softness, surrender of private interest, obedience to command, must still remain the rock upon which states are built….”

These are some of the “healthier sympathies” and “soberer ideas” already being taught in American schools and absorbed by countless children, who have always been treated as the “rock” upon which statism is built.

James’s proposal is as far from the animating ideas of the Founders as one can go without falling off the edge of comprehension. And his notion of waging war against “nature” has been substituted with waging war against man himself. As Jon Roland of the Constitution Society notes in his introduction to James’s essay:

“This concept is regarded by some as the origin of the idea of organized national service. The line of descent can be traced directly from this address to the depression-era Civilian Conservation Corps, to the Peace Corps, VISTA, and AmeriCorps. Though some phrases grate upon modern ears, particularly the assumption that only males can perform such service, several racially-biased comments, and the now discredited notion that ‘nature’ should be treated as an enemy, it still sounds a rallying cry for services in the interests of the individual and the nation….The solution to the problem remains an open question, now that ‘nature’ is not to be regarded as an ‘enemy.’ The real ‘enemy’ is our own darker human nature….”

The “green revolution” and the anti-industrial movement have supplanted James’s “warfare against nature,” which means warfare against man. To the pragmatist open to the vociferous moral proposals of others (so long as they “work“), reason and reality can be dismissed as the subjectivist leanings of others and disregarded. Man is destroying the planet, those others claim, so something must be done about it, even if that means compulsion. For example, the Democrats would rather not hear the testimony of Britain’s Lord Christopher Monckton which would have shredded former Vice President Al Gore’s assertions about man-caused climate change in his movie, “An Inconvenient Truth,” and retracted the invitation to Monckton to appear with Gore before a House Energy and Commerce subcommittee.

This was more than just politicians wishing to save Gore the “climate authority” the humiliation of being trounced in a debate about climate change by a genuine scientist and consequently creating doubt about the efficacy of environmentalist legislation. If they do not hear the truth, then it can’t be real and can be ignored. (Recall Mr. Thompson’s first response after hearing Galt’s speech in Ayn Rand’s Atlas Shrugged -- “It wasn’t real, was it?”) Monckton has his assertions, the politicians have theirs, they think, but the politicians’ assertions carry more weight because they have the power and the guns and dubious opinion polls and a pliable news media, and all that comprises the “truth.” Reality is what the political elite make it. They are willing to bet the lives, fortunes and property of Americans on it.

While he is only the latest in a line of presidents and politicians who have advocated national service, Barack Obama wants to enact his own version of a “blood-tax.”

“…We need to create opportunities to serve. I’ll ask more young people to serve in uniform and expand the size of our military. And I’ll increase AmeriCorps -- our network of local, state and national service programs -- from 75,000 slots to 250,000.…That service should be directed toward pressing national challenges. We need more Americans to teach and an Energy Corps to help develop renewable and efficient energy….We need to invest in grass-roots ideas, because the ‘next great innovation’ usually doesn’t come from government [Never, in fact, but from unconquered minds and the freedom to act]. So I’ll create a Social Investment Fund Network and bring together faith-based organizations and foundations to expand successful programs across the country….We need to integrate service into education. We should help schools develop service programs outside the classroom….”

So, instead of being sent to coal and iron mines and the frames of skyscrapers, young Americans will be sent to assemble solar panels and windmills and hybrid plug-in cars, in addition to mentoring children of the poor and cleaning up public spaces and keeping the elderly company -- many of them lured by the carrot of college tuition, others by the prospect of wielding the stick themselves. Instead of adopting James’s bombastic “manly virtues,” Americans will be expected to become humble servants of society and believers in causes “higher than themselves,” especially the one that demands that restitution and reparations be paid to a despoiled planet. And if not enough Americans “volunteer” to serve, they can be made to. Obama’s and the Democrats’ “blood-tax” can take two forms: direct conscription, or a special tax on the recalcitrant and the non-volunteers to fund the $5.7 billion national service price tag of the bill Obama signed.

This also means drafting business and industry into the “army” by, among other measures, restricting CEO pay, taxing “unpatriotic“ offshore wealth, strong-arming solvent banks into participating in inflationary and risky “recovery” programs, and regulating industries and power companies to reduce “greenhouse” emissions. William James would be impressed. A whole nation has been put on a war footing -- to commit suicide.

Commenting on why Americans fell for the pragmatists’ assurances that they offered a way to live on earth, Leonard Peikoff observed that:

“…Americans…believed that they were joining a battle to advance their essential view of reality and of life. They did not know that they were being marched in the opposite direction, that the battle had been calculated for a diametrically opposite purpose, or that the enemy they were being pushed to destroy was: themselves.”**

The task before the advocates of reason and individual rights is to inform Americans and our political leaders in no uncertain terms that a volte-face is needed, beginning with the repeal of the administration’s blood-tax, before the destruction is too advanced to stop.

*See Chapter 3: Hitler’s War Against Reason, and Chapter 6: Kant Versus America, in Leonard Peikoff’s The Ominous Parallels: The End of Freedom in America (Stein & Day, 1982) for a more thorough discussion of James’s contribution to the philosophical and political underpinnings of American statism.
**Op. cit. Chapter 6: Kant Versus America, pp. 137-138.

The Irrelevancy of Conservatism

noreply@blogger.com (Edward Cline) — Tue, 28 Apr 2009 14:30:00 +0000

It must be an uncontrollable compulsion in conservatives that in almost any discussion of the role of government, they cannot help taking a swipe at novelist-philosopher Ayn Rand, denying that she was much of a novelist or even a philosopher, and devoting at least a few derogatory words to her and her novels, if not launching into a nearly frenzied tirade characterized by ad hominem charges against her and sneers at her work. Three of her most notorious American detractors were Whittaker Chambers, William F. Buckley, Jr., and Granville Hicks, the latter a Marxist-cum-“humanist” editor, novelist and book critic. Since their scurrilous reviews were published decades ago, Rand-bashing has become a kind of fraternity initiation ritual for Right and Left alike.

Speculation on the root causes of the compulsion can range from envy for the sales of her books, which far outstrip the sales of anything ever written by any conservative, to moral opposition to her philosophy of selfishness and individualism, which they abhor, to a fear that she is and has been right about everything she ever wrote and spoke about, a fear and hatred hidden behind a mask of occasional dispassionate criticism.

Of her novels, Atlas Shrugged has drawn the largest dose of their venom, and that dosage has grown larger ever since the outset of the financial debacle last fall. Newspapers and other periodicals have noted, with a degree of objectivity and respect never granted to the novel in the past by the Left or Right, the parallels between the events in the novel and events in reality, which have helped to spur sales of the novel. No novel ever written by a member of the Right or Left has proven to be so prophetic in its essentials and even in some of its concretes.

Yaron Brook, president and executive director of the Ayn Rand Institute, however, cautioned in an interview that Atlas Shrugged should not be seen exclusively as a prophetic playbook of how to cause economic disasters:

“Many of these commentators seem to view Atlas Shrugged as a novel that’s primarily about politics and economics. The main issue…and which we feel is extremely important to address…is that the origins of the crisis in Atlas Shrugged and the origins of today’s crisis are much deeper than that. They result from the prevailing morality of the culture, of which political systems are an extension. In Atlas Shrugged the political system is crumbling because of the morality of altruism, and that is also the root source of our current crisis. So Rand is relevant, and she’s relevant on a level far more fundamental than politics and economics.”

Historically, on a moral and political level, the Left has objected to her philosophy because it claimed the individual owes his existence to society or the state and so should not be free to act against it, while the Right claimed that the individual owes his existence to God and society, so his mind should not be free to question either. Over the last few decades, Left and Right have been converging to the same points of agreement: that the individual owes his existence to the state or society (God’s role being optional) and should not be free at all.

Rand herself marked the malaise of conservatism in 1962 in her essay, “Conservatism: An Obituary.” Identifying why conservatism was finished as a distinct political ideology and political force, she wrote:

“If the ‘conservatives’ do not stand for capitalism, they stand for and are nothing; they have no goal, no direction, no political principles, no social ideals, no intellectual values, no leadership to offer anyone. Yet capitalism is what the ‘conservatives’ dare not advocate or defend. They are paralyzed by the profound conflict between capitalism and the moral code which dominates our culture: altruism.”*

The compulsion can be explained. They must attack Rand because her philosophy contradicts and refutes their core premises and assumptions. Atlas Shrugged demonstrates and dramatizes the moral and practical consequences of those premises and assumptions. It is not merely a matter of details. As Rand once put it, it is a matter of philosophical nuclear warfare. Conservatives cannot hide their recognition that Rand’s is not merely a rival philosophy; it is their chief, mortal enemy. In the meantime, the “atheistic” Left is their principal ally, today aggressively applying the collectivist and altruist principles which it shares with the Right.

A critic does not, as a rule, devote thousands of words and his best verbal pyrotechnics to dismissing a novel which he asserts in the beginning of a review should not be taken seriously. Granville Hicks (1901-1982) and Whittaker Chambers (1901-1961), however, did take Atlas Shrugged seriously when it appeared in 1957, not because they placed any personal importance on it, but because they feared with quivering, incensed certainty that it would be taken seriously and earn, over time, an esteemed place in the culture (which it has achieved). Their reviews of the novel were essentially flippant and snarling pleas to the reading public to ignore the novel. They protested too much the novel’s supposed insignificance.

Hicks, once an associate editor for the publisher that debuted Rand’s first novel, We the Living, but who fought against it, resigned from the Communist Party in 1939 over the Nazi-Soviet Warsaw “non-aggression” Pact.** Chambers, who was a courier between the Soviets and several Communists working in various federal bureaucracies, left the Party in 1937 or 1938 over the Soviet purge trials, and also because he did not want to risk being summoned to Moscow only to be “purged” from existence for having supposedly “ratted” on fellow American Communist agents in the U.S. He went into hiding, joined the staff of Time Magazine, and eventually became a conservative.

But a putative renunciation of communism (or of any other collectivist ideology) does not necessarily trigger an automatic recognition of the efficacy of reason and a concomitant endorsement of egoism, individual rights, and capitalism. Nor does it guarantee the acquisition of a better set of literary standards or values. Both Hicks and Chambers are cases in point. After “repudiating” communism, they remained hard-core collectivists to their dying days – Chambers would today probably be a “big-government” neoconservative – hostile to and consistently deprecatory of any degree of political and economic liberty, in fiction or in fact.

As for Buckley (1925-2008), I will simply repeat here some remarks from my March, 2008 obituary notice on the occasion of his death in February that year, “The Philosophic Postmortem of William F. Buckley, Jr.” He uttered and wrote numerous vicious comments about Rand over the years, but showcased conservative-convert Whittaker Chambers’ review of Atlas Shrugged in the National Review, Chambers acting as his proxy critic. On his role in serving as a moral guide for the morally bankrupt Republican Party, I noted:

“Buckley saved their necks and provided them with a ‘system’ of ideas they could feel at home with. He persuaded a spent and ideologically rudderless conservative movement to base its political philosophy on religion, altruism, and self-sacrifice as an alternative to the ‘atheistic’ liberal welfare state of society, altruism and self-sacrifice. Individual rights were nothing to him if not ‘God-given.’ He was as much an enemy of freedom – and of freedom of speech – as any holy-roller Democrat. Fundamentally, there is no difference between the policies advocated by ‘atheistic’ or secular collectivists and ‘religious’ ones. Buckley never seriously challenged the ‘status quo’ of controls, deficit spending, or the regulation of business and industry. He was one of the original advocates of volunteerism or mandatory public service.”

Sound familiar? Are these not points on which Republicans and Obamacrats agree? As for Buckley’s style and tone, I observed:

"Learned, glibly articulate with a penchant for obscure words and noted for a complex, obfuscating verbosity nearly as convoluted as Immanuel Kant’s, master of sardonic humor, often self-deprecatory, Buckley was the Ellsworth Toohey of the Right."

There is little irony in the fact that Atlas Shrugged was reviewed in two publications ostensibly on opposite ends of the political spectrum, the left-liberal The New York Times and the religious-right National Review. Both publications were then, and still are, united in their opposition to laissez-faire capitalism, individual rights, and man the individual with no duty or obligation to “serve society.” Although their political affiliations are hardly irrelevant, they are not the subject here. In the long run, it is the evaluations by Chambers, Hicks and Buckley of Atlas Shrugged that have been proven to be not only wrong, but themselves insignificant and futile.

As proof of how Left and Right are merging into a single, mongrelized enemy of capitalism and individual rights, Family Security Matters (FSM), a conservative Internet site, on April 23 ran a long article on the financial crisis by William R. Hawkins, who is billed as “a consultant specializing in international economic and national security issues.” In his article, “Conservatism After the Tea Parties,“ Hawkins decries the Tea Parties of April 15 and expresses anger that they have been largely governed by the political thought of “libertarians” such as Rand. The problem, he claims, is not “big government,” but “big government” that has not behaved responsibly. And the protesters should not have sported signs and placards that cited Ayn Rand. Rather, he claims, these protesters should look to arch-conservative Russell Kirk and economist Milton Friedman for moral and economic guidance.

About the April 15 Tea Parties, Hawkins writes:

“More precise thought needs to be given to what the protests are about if effective reform is to result. The cry cannot simply be to oppose ‘government’ per se. In a major financial crisis like the current one, when comparisons to the Great Depression are not unwarranted, it is the responsibility of the Federal authorities to take action to stabilize the economy and lay the groundwork for recovery.”

Is this not what the Obama administration is attempting to do now? And why should it be the responsibility of the Federal authorities to have any role in the crisis? Is it not the government’s regulation of private sector banking and financial actions that was and continues to be the cause of the crisis? And is not “reform” of the economy along socialist/fascist lines what is on the administration’s agenda? Hawkins does not address these issues, except to endorse government action. By way of an authoritative sanction of government interventionist policies, he cites Milton Friedman, in his words, “the guru of modern capitalist ideology and foe of socialism.”

“Milton Friedman…laid out this responsibility in his monumental A Monetary History of the United States. He makes the now standard interpretation of what made the ‘great contraction’ so severe. During the years 1930-33, a wave of bank failures reduced the money supply by a third. Federal authorities did not take action on the scale needed to counteract the impact of the financial collapse on the real economy. No advocate of Big Government, Friedman could nevertheless declare this earlier dilatory attitude ‘confused and misguided.’”

Significantly, Hawkins states that Federal Reserve Board chairman, Bernard Bernanke, “is a student of Friedman, and his decision to buy $1.2 trillion of government bonds and mortgage-related securities last month makes more sense than trying to rebuild a financial system crippled with $2.7 trillion in toxic assets (according to the IMF) with tax money.” Echoing the assurances of Treasury Secretary Timothy Geithner and others in the administration, Hawkins agrees with their conclusions:

“These losses are too large to replace with fiscal measures, and the public is rightfully worried that to try would burden future taxpayers (and their children) with too much debt.”

How much debt is “too much”? Should there be any debt? Is there a feasible, non-coercive method to finance legitimate government functions -- that is, the courts, the military, and police -- that would not entail debt and economic interventionist policies and a wealth-redistributing welfare state? And will not the debt being rung up by the Obama administration be a burden for several generations of taxpayers, and not just future taxpayers and their children, provided the economy and country do not first collapse into anarchy and dictatorship because of that debt? Hawkins does not essay any suggestions on these issues. He sticks to the conservative line, and refuses to venture outside the boundaries of traditional conservative thought into the Uncharted Forest of reason.

More importantly, however, the article reveals that conservatives are afraid that men are realizing that Ayn Rand is fundamentally relevant to today’s political, moral and economic crises, and that they have grown irrelevant. The “transcendent order” of Russell Kirk (1918-1994), cited by Hawkins as a source of moral and political wisdom, was based “variously on tradition, divine revelation, or natural law,” but has made way for the “transcendent order” of the brute collectivism of the state, to which Americans are more and more expected to defer.

“What should really agitate the public is not the principle of government intervention to prevent an economic collapse, but how the politicians have seized the opportunity to spend huge sums on non-emergency, special interest programs.”

Where was Hawkins on April 15? The Tea Parties featured protests on a variety of issues, including Congress’s pork barrel projects, in addition to government intervention. And should anyone worried about the consequences of government interventionist policies discard the principle, and settle for just emoting against special interest programs?

Hawkins criticizes the $787 billion stimulus package, the Obama administration for exploiting the crisis to rush through social programs, the Republicans and Democrats for being corrupt, and “the very Wall Street entities whose blunders plunged the country into economic disaster.”

“These are the proper targets for outrage, not some formless chanting against ‘government’ per se. Such chanting is the nonsense of anarchists (known in polite circles as libertarians), not the wisdom of conservatives.”

And what is the wisdom of conservatives? It is the “dean of conservative thinking” Russell Kirk’s, which the reader may sample here, beginning with:

“….Conservatism is the negation of ideology: it is a state of mind, a type of character, a way of looking at the civil social order.”

So it is an anti-ideology, or a set of “sentiments” and non-ideas, or a “state of mind” which is supposed to animate anyone to try to dam the advancing, liberty-destroying lava of statism. Hawkins offers his conservative credentials in this outburst:

“The most alarming sign that the anarchists are trying to take over the Tea Party movement is the sudden revival of the amoral and anti-social screeds of the late and unlamented Ayn Rand. Her name has been bantered around far too often on talk radio and by Fox News commentators.”

Hawkins should wonder why her name is so frequently “bantered around,” and not Buckley’s or Russell Kirk’s. Perhaps it is because men are searching for answers and ideas, Rand has had them for decades, and answers and ideas are not to be found in conservatism. He should also learn that Rand was neither an anarchist nor a libertarian.

As if to underscore the religious, anti-reason color of conservatism, Hawkins manages to introduce Original Sin as an ingredient of the financial crisis:

“True conservatives know the character of Mankind is ’fallen’ and that there is a dark side to human nature to which bankers and fund managers are just as vulnerable as anyone else. Freedom without responsibility, and rights without duties, leads to license and wrong-doing.”

To which Presidents Bush, Ronald Reagan, Barack Obama, and Senator John McCain would say, “Amen.” Hawkins then descends into pure fantasy. He falls back on and endorses the assertions of Constitutional scholar Walter Berns.

“He warned that our modern problem is the retreat of government, not its growth. We have already instituted too much of a libertarian state, one ‘that does not get involved in censorship, in moral education….’”

This is Hawkins’ most bizarre statement. If a “libertarian” state is one of limited government whose powers are defined and delimited by the Constitution, how can he explain, as examples, court-upheld speech codes, restrictions on tobacco and pharmaceutical advertising, subsidies to banks and automakers, and the indoctrination of children in public schools in the guise of “moral education”? Where, exactly, is the government retreating, and not growing? What sector of the Twilight Zone has Hawkins emerged from?

Hawkins ends his article with more advice for the Tea Party movement:

“Hopefully, those attracted to the Tea Parties will follow the path of Kirk and not of Rand.”

Far be it from Hawkins to risk soiling his fingers by opening a copy of Atlas Shrugged to check on the spelling of names and the roles of the characters. So he misquotes another writer (of an April 20th Forbes article on the resurgence of interest in Rand) by describing Henry Rearden, the steel manufacturer and inventor of Rearden Metal, as Rand’s “most famous fictional character Hank Riordan.” Had he paid closer attention to the news coverage of the Tea Parties, he might have observed several protesters’ signs that read, “Who is John Galt?” and none that read, “Who is Hank Riordan?” He might have himself asked, “Who is John Galt?” but the connection between the name and the novel eluded him, because apparently he has never read that “amoral and anti-social screed.”

Conservatives were once noted, if not for their God-fearing rationalizations of why men should or should not be free, then for their fastidiousness concerning the facts and ideas they were attacking or twisting out of recognition. Now, in their desperate rush to de-emphasize the influence of Ayn Rand and her ideas, they are just growing sloppy. They are hurling spit balls at a photo of Rand pinned to a dartboard, but hitting only the wall around it.

Finally, I have gone to this length to rebut Hawkins because I have not encountered any better arguments by conservatives elsewhere; their common denominator is a congenital hostility to reason, Ayn Rand, and freedom. So this should serve as a blanket answer to any one or all of them. (Note: Appearance on the FSM site does not indicate endorsement of its overall political philosophy. FSM re-posts my commentaries at the peril of persuading its regular readers of the fallacies of conservative thought.)

*In Capitalism: The Unknown Ideal. New York: Signet softcover, 1967, pp. 193-201.
**See Essays on Ayn Rand’s We the Living. Lanham, Maryland: Lexington Books, 2004. Rand’s determination and confidence in the value of the novel allowed her to break through the “Red ceiling” of the New York publishing world in 1936. Richard Ralston’s essay on the novel’s publishing history is informative and illuminating.

A Guns of Nihilism Postscript

noreply@blogger.com (Edward Cline) — Fri, 24 Apr 2009 14:09:00 +0000

When I began composing brief answers to some reader comments on my “The Guns of Nihilism” post, I decided to elaborate just to cover some ground I could not cover in the original post, and also to clear up some issues in my own mind.

One commentator asked:

“What I don’t understand about these nihilist pacifist leftists is: Don’t they understand that by undermining America they are putting their own lives in danger? Also, if they weaken America’s military strength they open up the possibility that America will fall. But this would destroy their power and all leftists lust for power. What it is so hard for me to understand is the phenomenon of power lusting leftist/fascists who are nevertheless suicidal….”

What is hard for any rational, life-loving person to understand is the death premise of such nihilists. But, it’s that very premise which you must grasp and take seriously. Then you won’t be so puzzled by their words and actions. If America fell, nothing would please them more, even if that fall entailed their own deaths. That is why they are nihilists, worshippers of nothing, champions of nothing, advocates of non-existence. Rand dramatized it perfectly in the character of James Taggart in Atlas Shrugged, and Galt explicated the phenomenon in his speech.

It’s obvious in Obama’s words and actions, and also in the rhetoric and actions of environmentalists. Environmentalism has moved from being a pseudo-science to being a virulent anti-science religion, attracting all sorts of people searching for a mystical sanction that will allow them to coexist alongside but with apologies to plants, animals and rocks. Nihilists are secular Buddhists, hankering for a means to exist and not exist at the same time, but preferring their own non-existence if they can take the lovers of life they depend on with them into it. (The actual Buddhists at least keep to themselves.) If they can’t kill or have the lovers of life killed by some means, then they want to make their lives as painful and joyless and burdensome as possible.

Thus Taggart’s confession that he wants to hear Galt scream as Galt is being tortured on the “Ferris Persuader.” Thus the whole “green” movement, which philosophically clueless automakers and “renewable energy” technocrats and all sorts of bizarre, rudderless people are submitting to. Thus the militancy of political, economic, and cultural egalitarians. From top to bottom and across the board, the nihilists’ motivating premise is death, or pain, or destruction, or all three. Concede any of their arguments at your own peril -- and concession to their arguments is what our policymakers have made, guaranteeing the economic decline of this country, not to mention its inability to defend itself from global predators.

For example, environmentalists object strenuously to the Navy’s use of sonar in the oceans, because it allegedly “disorients” whales. They place no value on this country being able to defend itself, which they would benefit from, and ostensibly some mystical value on the uninterrupted freedom of whales, from which they derive no conceivable or measurable benefit. This is altruism, or the application of that code to the relationship between man and nature. Since environmentalists treat man and nature as coequals, or nature as intrinsically superior to man, if nature is in any way imperiled, man is expected to do “the right thing” (à la Kant), and erase himself from existence. Altruism and nihilism are natural partners.

The Dadaists and the avant garde of abstract art and atonal composers in the early 20th century posed as “artists” and professed a passion for art. But their primary motivation was to destroy art which they couldn’t begin to match and which their “souls“ nevertheless would not permit them to emulate; their “passion“ was actually a hatred of it. They were as value-impoverished as Obama is. They had no values to preserve or betray. The art historian who tells you that a urinal with a Barbie doll sitting in it is just as great a work of art and an instance of a profound esthetic appreciation or statement on the meaning of life as Michelangelo’s David or Daniel French’s The Minute Man, is a nihilist seeking to sabotage your mind, your values, and art as such. (I include French’s statue here because it is a special symbol of what Obama and his nihilist cohorts wish to obliterate in Americans’ minds, the necessity and willingness of men to fight for freedom.)

The critic who tells you that someone like Willie Nelson or Ice-Cube or John Cage is just as great an artist and composer as Rachmaninoff and that there is no difference in spirit or talent between them, is such a nihilist. And for years whole schools of nihilists were busy in the literary and academic realms as constructionists, deconstructionists, and post-deconstructionists, actively destroying the value of great literature in the minds of college students. That carnage, wrought over decades of that kind of “education,” is responsible for the arid, colorless, and windless landscape of modern literature.

Toohey’s speech to Peter Keating near the end of The Fountainhead about his means and ends to power is but an introduction to that part of Galt’s speech which deals with the means and ends of the nihilists, of the murderers of man’s spirit.

As for the Department of Defense’s brass-shredding program, regardless of the caliber of ammo, it is just the start. The anti-gun advocates and legislators won’t stop there, as the commentator pointed out about the move to ban lead in private-sector ammunition. It’s their way of weaseling around the accusation that they are against Americans protecting themselves, just as their ilk in another venue duck the charge of censorship by rationalizing the establishment of “speech codes” or “fairness doctrines” that won’t hurt anyone’s “feelings” or “self-esteem” or to assure anyone of his “right” to speak on someone else’s time, dime or property.

Finally, some further remarks are in order on the Department of Homeland Security’s Assessment, “Rightwing Extremism: Current Economic and Political Climate Fueling Resurgence in Radicalization and Recruitment.” I have read the entire document, and it is noteworthy that while it focuses on “rightwing paranoia” as a potential catalyst for violence, it is itself written from a state of left-wing paranoia. It dwells almost exclusively on the alleged nemesis of a supposedly rival ideology, on any group purportedly governed by “rightwing” thinking, from white supremacists to returning “disgruntled” veterans to antigovernment militias, and just about anyone or any group that questions the wisdom, rightness, and efficacy of government interventionist and extra-Constitutional policies. That Assessment is one of the crudest instances of political “package-dealing” I have ever read.

As I read this document, I could not help but suspect that it is an expression of the left’s worst nightmares. Remember that the DHS was created with Republican President George W. Bush’s encouragement and blessing, and is the child of the “right” intended to detect and combat Islamic terrorism. Predictably, an agency vested with extra-legal powers such as those possessed by the DHS must sooner or later regard itself as the end-all and be-all of national policy, see itself as a permanent adjunct to any political party that assumed the reins of power, and turn against the population it was intended to safeguard. The April 7th Assessment assumes the possibility of a general “rightwing” uprising against the federal government, or at least general civil disobedience in revolt against a federal government encroaching upon and obviating freedom, to which the government would have no answer and only two options open to it: to “back off” or to impose martial law, including censorship.

The DHS, in cooperation with the FBI, monitored the Tea Parties of April 15th and presumably recorded the faces and identities of thousands of Americans who took part in the “antigovernment” events. Doubtless all that information has gone into the DHS database.

The Assessment is also noteworthy in regards to its omissions. If the DHS is concerned about the potential for violence and “rightwing” terrorism, there is not a single mention in the memo of the terrorism the agency was originally created to detect and combat, Islamic jihad. But it does cite instances of “rightwing” violence, such as the “shooting deaths of three police officers in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania on 4 April 2009.”

“The alleged gunman’s reaction reportedly was influenced by his racist ideology and belief in antigovernment conspiracy theories related to gun confiscations, citizen detention camps, and a Jewish-controlled ‘one world government.’”

Of course, the DHS can argue that Islamic jihadists are hardly “rightwing extremists,” and so were not the subject of the memo, but it cannot deny that Islamic “extremists” also subscribe to conspiracy theories, train for urban warfare on private compounds in this country, are anti-Semitic in principle, seek to convert this country to Islam and replace the Constitution with Sharia law, and dream of a “one world government,” as well, in the form of a global caliphate. Why discriminate between them and Aryan race skinheads or white supremacist militias? I found it interesting that while the Assessment memo cited the Pittsburgh killings, it did not cite the recent killings of the four Oakland, California police officers by a Muslim, nor any of the numerous attacks on non-Muslims by Muslims in this country since 9/11.

One can only suppose that the DHS considers some “extremist” violence, even if it has not occurred, more equal than other “extremist” violence, even though that violence is a matter of record. And the “extremism” of the current administration, which is hard left-wing cloaked in populist rhetoric, receives a free pass from the DHS.

“Rightwing extremism,” according to the DHS mindset (and that of the Obama administration and of left-wingers everywhere), is synonymous with fascism. But fascism, which is government control of nominally private businesses, industries and property, is simply the “right wing” of the left. The only element that distinguishes the two political and ideological phenomena is the role of religion. They are otherwise one and the same.

Had he been elected, there is no reason to believe that Senator John McCain, based on his political record, would have acted any differently from Obama over the subprime mortgage crisis, except that we would have heard more about God and patriotism as he was busy proposing bailouts, firing company executives, and holding CEOs accountable to the government. McCain and Obama are in the same fascist/socialist camp. McCain would have moved only a little more slowly in the direction of fascism. Obama and his fellow felons are in a hurry to establish a fascist/socialist state before any credible opposition to it can rally its forces and point out to Americans the false spectrum of “left-wing vs. right-wing.”

We can only hope that we can persuade Americans of the deception of that yardstick, and show that the only political alternative beyond it is laissez-faire capitalism and freedom.

The Guns of Nihilism

noreply@blogger.com (Edward Cline) — Wed, 22 Apr 2009 12:43:00 +0000

One of the best accounts of what actually happened between the Somali pirates, the U.S.S. Bainbridge, Navy SEALS, and President Barack Obama last week can be found here, in Jack Wheeler’s Half-Full Report of April 17. Note: “Zero“ is his nickname for the man who would be president:

“We can raise a full glass of your favorite adult beverage to all the Tea Party participants - and to the one group of Americans the Zerocrats despise above all others: our soldiers in the US military.

All of us want to raise our glass the highest this week to the Navy SEALs who popped those three Somali pirates. And I'm sure you want to hear the real story of what happened. Especially because there is a revoltingly opportunistic and cowardly side to it. Guess which side Zero is on.

Why, for example, did it take SEAL Team Six (aka DEVGRU, Navy Special Warfare Development Group, the Navy's equivalent of Delta Force) over 36 hours to get to the scene?

Because Zero refused to authorize the SEAL deployment for those 36 hours, during which the OSC - the on-scene commander, Cmdr. Frank Castellano of the USS Bainbridge - repeatedly requested them.

Once the SEALs arrived - parachuting from a C-17 into the ocean near the ship - Zero then imposed Rules of Engagement (ROE) specifying the SEALs could not do anything unless the life of the hostage, Captain Richard Phillips, was in "imminent" danger.

Thus, when Capt. Phillips attempted to escape by jumping off the lifeboat into the ocean, the SEAL snipers had all four pirates (one later surrendered) sighted in and could have taken them out then and there - but they could not fire due to Zero's ROE restrictions.

When the SEALs approached the lifeboat in a RIB (rigid-hull inflatable boat) carrying supplies for Capt. Phillips and the pirates, the pirates fired upon them. Not only was no fire returned due to the ROE, but as the pirates were shooting at the RIB, SEAL snipers on the Bainbridge had them all dialed in. No triggers were pulled due to the ROE.

Two specific rescue plans were developed by Cmdr. Castellano and the SEAL teams. Zero personally refused to authorize them.

After the second refusal and days of dithering, Cmdr. Castellano decided he had the Operational Area and OSC authority to ‘solely determine risk to hostage’ and did not require any further approval of the president.

Four hours later, the White House is informed that three pirates are dead and Capt. Phillips has been rescued unharmed. A WH press release is immediately issued, giving credit to the president for his ‘daring and decisive’ behavior that resulted in such success.

Zero has absolutely no military knowledge or experience whatsoever. He demanded decisional control over the entire hostage drama to the last detail. All actions required his personal approval. He dithered like a coward while the world laughed at our warships flummoxed by four illiterate teenagers with AKs in a lifeboat.

Only when the Navy Commander decided to ignore his Pantywaist-in-Chief and take action and responsibility himself, were the incredible skills of the SEALs put into play.

That Zero could cynically and opportunistically claim that his ‘bold,’ ‘calm,’ ‘tough’ leadership was responsible should remind everyone that not a single action, not a single word of this man can be trusted. He is bereft of honesty and moral character. That's why he's Zero.

The HFR raises a glass full of pride and gratitude to Navy Commander Frank Castellano, the Navy SEALs for their incredible competence, and our military. Let's hold a Tea Party in their honor.”

Wheeler’s report differs in some minor points from others. World Net Daily’s account states that the SEALs were fired on by the pirates when they tried to take supplies in the RIB to the Maersk Alabama, which had already left the scene and was on its way to Kenya.

But most accounts on the Internet credit the commander of the Bainbridge with acting to save Phillips’ life, not Obama. It is only in the sycophantic news media that truth and falsehood grappled, and truth lost. For example, the Associated Press reported that Obama gave the Navy commander the go-ahead to use force.

“…[I]t goes some way toward dispelling the notion that a liberal Democrat with a known distaste for war – Obama campaigned on his consistent opposition to the Iraq invasion – doesn’t have the chops to fire on the pirates holding the cargo ship captain at gunpoint.”

No, the notion has not been dispelled, not even a little way. Obama lacked the “chops” to call on U.S. military power, as most non-news media accounts can testify to. In fact, he sent professional hostage-negotiators from the FBI to the Bainbridge to try to talk the pirates into releasing Phillips, as though the Indian Ocean was a domestic crime scene. If Phillips had been murdered by the pirates, it is certain that the negotiators or the commander of the Bainbridge or the SEALs would have been blamed, not the pirates, not the policy of appeasing the enemy by pulling the punches our military could deliver with devastating effect.

The Indian Ocean is not your usual dangerous neighborhood too risky for an ice-cream truck or lunch wagon to venture into. And the Somali pirates declared war on commercial shipping and private pleasure vessels long ago. They very likely have strong links to al-Qada and other Islamic terrorist gangs, and must share ransoms with them. That part of the Indian Ocean is a war zone.

And Obama – a liberal Democrat?? Hubert Humphrey was a liberal Democrat, as was Lyndon Johnson. They were relatively amateur shoplifters compared to the likes of Jimmy Carter and Bill Clinton. Obama, however, is a doctrinaire, committed fascist/socialist, dedicated to turning a proud, free nation into a submissive wallflower and a minimum security prison of indentured servitude.

I differ with Wheeler over his perception of cowardice. A coward is afraid to protect his values, unwilling to risk his life (or reputation) to preserve or keep them. The U.S. is not a value to Obama, except as a thing to betray, ruin and destroy. Obama has no moral character; ergo, no honesty, no integrity, no respect for truth. He has no values to keep or preserve. He is a nihilist to the core. I agree with Wheeler that Obama and his staff are opportunistic; what exponents of pragmatism-as-policy are not? Their pragmatism, in addition, makes possible their cynicism. Confrontation is not Obama’s “style”; he is surpassing “Slick Willy” with his penchant for weaseling out of any crisis and emerging from it unscathed.

No, Obama, during the whole “man-caused” disaster, behaved true to his career goal and followed Saul Alinsky’s Rules for Radicals to the letter. He is our Community-Organizer-in-Chief. It was just a neighborhood thing to him, you know, nothing to begin shooting guns off about, and the pirates were just poor, troubled teenagers trying to “spread the wealth around“ with armed extortion. Obama did not order anyone to fire on anyone. He hung ten in hopes that everything would just come out all right, with no bruises or bloodshed.

And instead of reducing every pirate’s den, mud hut and palace to smoldering rubble, and every pirate anchorage and boat to unrecyclable floating debris, the U.S. and other nations will continue to spend fortunes patrolling the Indian Ocean in a fruitless policing mission, hamstrung by rules of non-engagement, rather than risk one more pirate’s life or collateral casualties among the pirate’s camp followers.

I dread to speculate on the future career of Commander Frank Castellano of the Bainbridge for having belayed Obama’s orders and followed his own standing orders as the officer commanding on the scene, which are to take action against an enemy to preserve American lives and property.

Speaking of “man-caused” disasters, Homeland Security Secretary Janet Napolitano will have the everlasting, notorious credit for coining one of the most evasive, cowardly euphemisms in the lexicon of diplomacy. In an interview with Spiegel on March 13, she explained why she did not pronounce the term “terrorism” in her Congressional testimony:

“…I presume there is always a threat from terrorism. In my speech, although I did not use the word ‘terrorism,’ I referred to ‘man-caused’ disasters. That is perhaps only a nuance, but it demonstrates that we want to move away from the politics of fear toward a policy of being prepared for all risks that can occur.”

Napolitano “nuanced” what is a moral issue into a mere sociological conundrum. Never mind that Islamic terrorists have a political agenda, which is either the destruction of the U.S. or its submission to Islam. To terrorists, fear is as much a political weapon as bombs and stealth jihad. When Osama bin Laden or one of his henchmen issues another warning that Americans will die and Islam will bury the West, Napolitano wants to reply with cotton-candy language. She would rather oppose the chain-mail armor of Islamic Janissaries with tie-dyed T-shirts. Doubtless she agrees with her boss that the U.S. should engage Russia, China, Iran and North Korea in new talks leading to a revived version of the Strategic Arms Limitation Treaty (SALT), knowing that it would effectively disarm this country and leave it to the mercies of rogue governments and nuclear-armed terrorists.

One cannot believe that Napolitano and her ilk do not understand that a defenseless America is a beaten America. They, as well as any rational being (not to confuse the two), can see the consequences of unleashed force and organized mayhem practiced by every dictator and tyrant, in the past as well as in the present. One cannot believe that they actually believe in the efficacy of regurgitated pacifist policies of the hippies. One cannot even believe that they take seriously the notion that if they feel strongly enough about peace and goodwill, universal amity will somehow, magically reign.

One can only conclude, through a rational process of elimination of possible motives, that they bear this country so much ill will that they wish to see it punished because it is great. What other creatures, for example, would imply in the recent DHS “Rightwing Extremism” memo that returning American military personnel from Iraq and Afghanistan are likely to resort to “rightwing extremist” violence because they are “disgruntled, disillusioned, or suffering from the psychological effects of war?” [Section U/(FOUO)DHS/IAA]

“Napolitano, on a Fox News appearance today [April 17], backtracked a little, saying ‘To the extent veterans read it as an accusation…an apology is owed.’”

And not a resignation or a firing for impugning the character of servicemen returning from combat? The “Rightwing Extremism” memo reveals that the DHS regards all Americans as suspect in terms of their possibly resisting the state, and exhibits a natural predilection for defending itself and the state over defending the nation. Its authority overrides that of all legitimate law enforcement agencies. It ought to be dismantled.

Fascism is taking on an unusual and unprecedented form.

Adolf Hitler, a nihilist, acted to expand Germany’s borders and impose a Pax Germany over Europe. He envisioned a mighty, invincible Germany that would rule the world. His self-worth was dependent on the successes of his aggressions. And when his power was reduced to the confines of a Berlin bunker, he muttered that, as punishment for its failure, Germany should be exterminated as undeserving of existence.

Barack Obama, a nihilist, is acting to diminish an America that never sought to rule the world, and his self-worth is dependent on how much he can enable the world to rule America. He bows to feudal monarchs, joshes with South American dictators, and is moving to betray this country’s only ally in the Middle East, Israel. He snubs this country’s allies and ingratiates himself with its enemies.

It is not enough that Obama and his hand-picked administration wish to render America “harmless and blameless.” They wish to disarm Americans, as well. The DHS memo complements the administration’s virulent anti-gun policy, and reveals that the government fears armed resistance to its express-speed, liberty-destroying statist policies.

The Georgia Arms Company, the nation’s fifth largest retailer of .223 ammo, received a notice from the Department of Defense advising it that the company could no longer buy spent brass cartridges from the DoD used for training on military bases. Formerly, Georgia Arms and other manufacturers and retailers bought the shells to reload for resale to law enforcement, gun shops, gun clubs, and other commercial outlets.

“…[F]rom now on the DoD will be destroying the brass – shredding it. It is no longer available to the ammo makers, unless they just buy it in a scrap shredded condition (which the makers have no use for). The shredded brass is now going to be sold by the DoD to China as scrap metal….”

Furthermore, if any ammo seller is compelled to purchase newly manufactured brass shells,

“…then the cost of ammunition to the buyer will double and triple…plus Obama wants to add a 500% tax on each shell.”

Hardworking, productive American citizens who successfully undergo lengthy criminal background checks before being allowed to purchase guns will still be disarmed if they cannot afford to buy ammo. Criminals, terrorists, and the mentally unbalanced such as the Virginia Tech and Binghamton, New York mass murderers, will acquire guns and ammo regardless of the stringency of gun controls. Moral Americans will be caught between an armed and growing police state and armed criminals.

In Book Five: Revolution of my Sparrowhawk series, the Crown-appointed lieutenant-governor of Virginia suppresses a lone, private newspaper by sending a bailiff and his men to shut down the paper. Instead of confiscating or destroying the printing press, they seize the owner’s type cases, effectively silencing the paper.

Readers will appreciate the parallels.

I freely admit to parodying the title of a great adventure film here, "The Guns of Navarone" ( 1961, directed by J. Lee Thompson, based on Alistair MacLean's novel). This finely directed and superbly cast "war" move reflects a morality largely absent in film for decades, not to mention skill in creating conflict and drama. And there is a relevance to be noted between Obama's nihilism and the pro-life, goal-directed character of the film.

Like the Castellano/Bainbridge/Navy SEAL episode, “Navarone” is also a nonpareil suspense story. In 1943, a British commando team is sent to destroy a pair of massive German anti-ship guns that can pulverize any warship attempting to evacuate British troops surrounded on a Greek island. The position of the fortified guns atop a 400-foot cliff overlooking the Aegean Sea renders them impregnable against Allied naval and air action. They can only be destroyed from within -- by the commandos. By the end of one of the most suspenseful action films ever made, they accomplish their mission.

Fast forward to the Indian Ocean, April 2009. American warships are stymied, not by mammoth German guns, not by a disciplined German army, not even by four pirates in a rowboat, but by the value-negating morality of altruism and by an American president who is, in the most fundamental moral sense, on the side of the pirates.

A Cavalcade of Collectivism

noreply@blogger.com (Edward Cline) — Fri, 17 Apr 2009 13:44:00 +0000

So many things are happening now that, as I take time off to participate in the Tea Party in Newport News, Virginia on April 15, I have decided to devote just brief commentary on a selection of events.

Legislated Slavery

Presumably to give themselves more time to sweeten the idea of slavery or indentured servitude for future “volunteers,” Congressmen have dropped a provision from the GIVE Act, HR 1388, to establish a commission to study the idea, and included it in HR 1444 and called the provision the “Congressional Commission on Civic Service Act.” “GIVE’ is the acronym for the hokey, cumbersomely named “Generations Invigorating Volunteerism and Education Act,” passed by the House in March. That bill is intended to rope all Americans into servitude, regardless of age. The HR 1444 commission’s focus, however, is specifically Americans about to embark on adulthood. It is to ruminate on:

“The effect on the Nation, on those who serve, and on the families of those who serve, if all individuals in the United States were expected to perform national service or were required to perform a certain amount of national service.

“Whether a workable, fair, and reasonable mandatory service requirement for all able young people could be developed, and how such a requirement could be implemented in a manner that would strengthen the social fabric of the Nation and overcome civic challenges by bringing together people from diverse economic, ethnic, and educational backgrounds.”

This bill and its predecessor are absolutely immoral and antithetical to the idea of this country being a society of free individuals. What I found especially curious about HR 1444 was the term “social fabric” and the idea that it needed “strengthening.” Are the bill’s sponsors and advocates worried that the nation’s “social fabric” is coming apart at the seams? They would do well to worry, for there are signs it is, and they would need to look no further for its cause than the floor of the House, the scene of so much fiscal improvidence, theft of wealth, abridgement of liberty, and collectivist arrogance (not to mention pork barrel corruption).

But, whether or not HR 1444 reaches the Senate and passes there unmolested, the more unsettling news is a phenomenon I call “SDS: The Next Generation.” The White House and cabinet, agency, and department realms are now top-heavy with the Left of Old, from the 1960’s and 1970’s. Barack and Michelle Obama, ideally representing that next generation, are the plastic figures fixed atop the wedding cake. And far, far below in our “social fabric” is the generation educated and indoctrinated by the lefties who careered into education, à la William Ayers of the Weathermen, or by former Students for a Democratic Society and their countless fellow travelers who decided to wreak their vengeance on America by drilling its young in so many boot camps of selflessness and sacrifice, from kindergarten up through college. The new bills will ensure the line of succession of the Old Left so that the New Left can continue the campaign of producing selfless drones of service.

The New York Times of April 12 reported that many college graduates no longer look to Wall Street, business, industry, medicine, and science as fields of potential employment. An increasing number aspire to become community organizers, “just like the world’s most famous one, Barack Obama.”

“A job that has not been all that alluring to college graduates is in resurgence, according to leading community organizers and educators. Once thought of as a destination for lefty radicals committed to living lives of low pay, frustration and bitter burnout, community organizing is now seen by many young people an exciting career.

“With their jobs, students envision helping communities address urgent issues -- economics or the environment, education or social justice -- while developing leadership skills. And these jobs, students say, can actually lead to…well, you know.”

To the chancellorship of Nazi America? Well…you know. Further on in the article, its writer notes:

“Dr. [Marshall] Ganz, the veteran organizer, trained thousands of Obama campaign volunteers to organize communities and voters….Three years ago, Dr. Ganz, who earned a doctorate in sociology and is now a lecturer at Harvard, taught 40 students in his community organizing class at Harvard’s Kennedy School of Government….Three years ago, the University of Massachusetts, Amherst, began using Dr. Ganz’s curriculum. It is now taught at the College of the Holy Cross, Providence College and Wellesley. And more institutions, like M.I.T. and Northwestern, are calling him.”

The article does not once mention Ganz’s Old Left mentor, but clearly he, Obama, and thousands of college students and their current mentors are avid disciples of Saul Alinsky, the patron saint of “community organizers” everywhere.

Speaking of Harvard, Democratic congressman and domestic Somali pirate Barney Frank spoke at the Kennedy School of Government on April 13 and got into a verbal brouhaha with a law student who asked a fair question: “How much responsibility, if any, do you have for the financial crisis?” Note that the student did not accuse Frank of being up to his ears in responsibility.

Frank, of course, took personal exception to the question, as any guilty liar would, and accused the student of repeating what he called “right-wing talking points” and of ignorance of the issue. He more or less implied that the student should have come armed with all 1,000+ pages of the first stimulus package, or perhaps a copy of the Community Reinvestment Act and Frank’s voting record on the matter or perhaps a transcript of his statements from five years ago, which would contain, for example, Frank’s assertion that “Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac are not facing any kind of financial crisis.”

To his credit, the student stuck to his guns, and repeatedly asked Frank to simply answer the question. Frank repeatedly subjected the student and the audience to a bewildering kaleidoscope of half-truths and contextless concretes no one could examine and refute in anything less than a book, all the while the fingers of his left hand twitching nervously and his posture betraying a man on the point of panic.

Creeping Censorship

On April 3rd, an article by Democratic Senator Benjamin L. Cardin of Maryland appeared in The Washington Post, “A Plan to Save our Free Press.” I have already reported on this move to establish a more financially sound but suborned press in “Freedom of Speech: Silence is Not Golden,” about the plan to convert failing newspapers into nonprofit entities such as the Corporation for Public Broadcasting. Aside from the fact that Cardin’s Newspaper Revitalization Act would relieve these papers of significant tax obligations not enjoyed by papers not tottering on the brink of bankruptcy, it would be a first step to bring all newspapers under federal control, or at least marginalize those which do not succumb to the temptation to “go public.”

“My bill would allow newspapers -- if they choose -- to operate under 501(c)(3) status for educational purposes, similar to public broadcasters [read, government or tax-supported TV and radio stations]…. Under this arrangement, newspapers would not be allowed to make political endorsements but would be permitted to freely report on all issues, including political campaigns. They would be able to editorialize and take positions on issues affecting their communities. Advertising and subscription revenue would be tax-exempt, and contributions to support coverage or operations could be tax-deductible.”

How can a newspaper editorialize without making political endorsements? By doing exactly what PBS and all its affiliates around the country do every day: propagate ideas advocated by the persons they are not allowed to politically endorse or favor. That is, for example, editorialize positively about “hope” and “change,” wealth “redistribution” and “social equity,” but not blatantly agree with Obama or any other politician or candidate who promotes those things.

The Confiscation of Offshore Wealth

Reuters reported on April 13 that Credit Suisse will enable the U.S. government to more easily tax and/or confiscate money Americans once thought was safely deposited in Swiss bank accounts.

“Sonntagszeitung [a Swiss newspaper] said the bank had about 2,500-5,000 U.S. clients with undeclared offshore accounts worth about 3 billion francs….The paper said that Credit Suisse had started parting company with its U.S. offshore clients, giving them the option of moving their accounts to its CS Private Advisors subsidiary, which would report the accounts to the U.S. tax authorities, or writing them a check.

“The move comes after rival UBS said last year it would stop offering offshore services to U.S. citizens after U.S. authorities alleged that the Swiss bank has helped rich Americans hide money away from the taxman in Swiss accounts.”

Switzerland isn’t what it used to be. The Associated Press also reports that UBS, aside from losing about $18.41 billion in the subprime mortgage fiasco, also stands to lose about $14.8 billion in American deposits when it turns over the records of about 52,000 Americans to the IRS.

“UBS already has agreed in a deal with the U.S. Justice Department to pay $780 million and disclose up to 300 UBS account holders suspected of tax fraud.

“Oswald J. Gruebel told staff the bank had to stick strictly to the law in order to protect its reputation.”

Whose law? Swiss law, or American? What reputation? A Swiss bank now is no better a “safe” deposit vault than the shoe boxes of American banks.

When a politician, American or foreign, talks about the benefits of a global economy, take it for granted that he means a fascist global economy in which there are no sanctuaries or safe havens from government theft and pillaging. When Obama, a celebrity sensation at the G20 summit in London, where he agreed to place American companies under the authority of an international Financial Stability Board (with no recognized recourse to American courts) assured Joe the Plumber during the campaign that he just wanted to “spread the wealth around,” he meant instead that he intended to spread the poverty around. For that is his and his administration’s aim, to ensure that the rich are as destitute and defenseless as the middle class, and unable to escape anywhere from their “duty“ to sacrifice and serve. The U.S. government and the European Union have pressured Swiss banks to betray their customers.

Of course, the “undeclared” billions in those banks are but a drop in the bucket, compared to the Niagara Falls of trillions Obama and Congress wish to create out of nothing and spend on rearranging America along fascist/socialist lines. One might then ask: If that is true, why send posses after the individuals who own those billions? How can destroying that wealth make a difference? The answer: envy. To leave no slave behind in the quest for totalitarian control. To leave no cent behind that could be tossed into the bottomless pit of need. And the root motive behind such a quest is hatred of the good for being the good -- in this instance, hatred of anyone who has outwitted the looters and pillagers by preserving his wealth beyond their grasp. It is destruction for the sake of destruction.

The next time you hear someone ask, “Have you paid your taxes?” you should answer, “Whose taxes?”

Profile Muslims, no! Profile “Rightwingers,” si!

And the next time you brace yourself for a frisk and a search at the airport and watch helplessly as some otherwise unemployable drudge rifles through your luggage, you might also be want to be prepared to account for the copy of Atlas Shrugged you might have in your carry-on. Or perhaps one of those specially trained attitude detectors might interpret the sour look on your face as evidence of a probable terrorist, and have you pulled from the line to be interrogated in the TSA version of George Orwell’s Room 101.

The Department of Homeland Security (DHS) on April 7 released (or leaked) a “threat assessment” memo called “Rightwing Extremism: Current Economic and Political Climate Fueling Resurgence in Radicalization and Recruitment.” The Solons of the DHS just might correctly consider Ayn Rand’s novel as “radical,” though in its fathomless wisdom they wouldn’t be able to explain why. You, the advocate of individual rights, of limited, rights-protecting government, of the rule of objective law and not of power-lusting men, would be lumped together with racists, anarchists, neo-Nazis, basement-bomb conspirators, and any other group that could be identified as “anti-government” and your identity red-flagged for special attention. You, the cleanly rational radical for capitalism who opposes the initiation of force by criminals and government alike, might someday be locked in a holding pen with the ilk of Timothy McVey, the Unabomber, anti-abortion assassins, and other unsavory company.

The two troubling terms in the memo’s title and their usage throughout the memo itself are extremism and rightwing. Nowhere are they defined. The irony is that the term extremism is meaningless. As Ayn Rand notes in her 1964 essay, “Extremism, or the Art of Smearing”:

“The concept of ‘extreme’ denotes a relation, a measurement, a degree. The dictionary gives the following definitions: ‘Extreme, adj. -- 1. of a character or kind farthest removed from the ordinary or average. 2. utmost or exceedingly great in degree.’ It is obvious that the first question one has to ask, before using that term, is: a degree -- of what?”*

In the context of the memo and the alleged function of the DHS, which was created shortly after 9/11 to deter further terrorist attacks on the U.S., the term implies an unspecified potential for violent acts against the government and/or American citizens in this country. Michelle Malkin, in her dissection of the memo, questions the timing of the memo’s release a week before the hundreds of Tax Day Tea Parties and concludes that the memo exclusively targets conservatives, noting that no left-wing groups are cited.

“In Obama land, there are no coincidences. It is no coincidence that this report echoes Tea Party bashing left-wing blogs (check this one out comparing the Tea Party movement to the Weather Underground!) and demonizes the very Americans who will be protesting in the thousands on Wednesday for the nationwide Tax Day Tea Party.”

She managed to speak with persons in the DHS but was not able to persuade them to identify which “rightwing extremist” groups were busy “recruiting” people to join them, and no one in the DHS was willing to identify for her the nature of the “rightwing extremist chatter” on the Internet that alarmed the authors of the memo. (And the memo’s mention of that chatter confirms that the DHS, and probably the National Security Agency, monitor not only domestic phone calls but the Internet, as well.) Section U of the memo cites one cause of the alleged increase in “rightwing extremist” activity: the “economic downturn.” Another alleged cause is dissatisfaction with the new administration’s economic, spending, and social policies.

“Rightwing extremists are harnessing this historical [sic] election as a recruitment tool. Many rightwing extremists are antagonistic toward the new presidential administration and its perceived stance on a range of issues, including immigration and citizenship, the expansion of social programs to minorities, and restrictions on firearms ownership and use….From the 2008 election timeframe to the present, rightwing extremists have capitalized on related racial and political prejudices in expanded propaganda campaigns, thereby reaching out to a wider audience of potential sympathizers.”

Surely a news media in lockstep with promoting the administration’s policies would have jumped at the chance to report a swelling of the ranks of “rightwing” vigilante groups or a dramatic growth in subscriptions to conspiracy-theory newsletters, and issued their own dire warnings. But, as Malkin and other commentators point out, the DHS offers no evidence that substantiates the memo’s assertions. The only concrete thing that might have given insecure Homelanders the jitters is the reported spike in gun sales, but even the news media concedes that this is a result of the administration’s wish to gut the Second Amendment.

Every other section of the memo similarly smears anyone who opposes the new administration’s policies by implying that he is a potential terrorist or an unhinged malcontent frothing at the mouth, ready to mow down Mexicans, Muslims, blacks, and IRS clerks. Malkin is wrong to conclude that the memo libels only conservatives. Its insinuating language is broad enough to include all men of reason who oppose the socialization of America, and to include all Americans who know that Obama and Congress are guilty of exacerbating the logical and inevitable destructive consequences of government interventionist policies and of implementing a socialist agenda that would destroy what liberties remain to them.

All of which renders the term rightwing meaningless, as well, if it is implied that “rightwingers” are “capitalist” fascists, which would necessarily include left-wingers, or those who advocate government management of the economy, of private property, and the scrapping of the Bill of Rights. Fascists are fundamentally socialists. The terms left-wing and rightwing constitute a bait-and-switch game of terms. (I lost count of the number of Tea Party protesters I spoke with who no longer see a difference between the Republican and Democratic Parties.)

Further, it is noteworthy that the DHS felt it necessary to circulate the memo to law enforcement agencies and departments around the country on the eve of a phenomenon, the nationwide Tea Party. But the DHS and the Obama White House cannot but have helped to observe months before a grassroots opposition to Obama’s and Congress’s policies, long before the first Tea Parties in February.

The Wall Street Journal on April 15 ran an excellent analysis of the Tax Day Tea Party phenomenon, tracing its roots and discussing its portentous political consequences, and also the role of the Internet in making it possible. It concludes with these predictions:

“This influx of new energy and new talent is likely to inject new life into small-government politics around the nation. The mainstream Republican Party still seems limp and disorganized. This grassroots effort may revitalize it. Or the tea-party movement may lead to a new third party that may replace the GOP, just as the GOP replaced the fractured and hapless Whigs.”

The Republicans will ignore the Tax Day Tea Party at their own peril. The Democrats are not ignoring it, even though the news media largely did ignore it or downplayed the significance of over half a million Americans saying “No!” to the Obama administration.

Those half million Americans, drawn from almost every thread of the country’s “social fabric,” may be the answer to the government’s worried “Who is John Galt?” and may represent an unwelcome species of “volunteerism” that can scuttle the plans of “community organizers” everywhere. The Internet, as The Wall Street Journal article suggests, can turn all liberty-valuing Americans into Minute Men.

*In Capitalism: The Unknown Ideal. New York: Signet softcover, 1967, pp. 173-182. The reader is urged to read the entire essay for how the term “extremism” has been and continues to be employed politically to smear advocates of capitalism or anyone who takes a rationally principled stand on any given issue.

Fuel for the Fire

noreply@blogger.com (Nicholas Provenzo) — Wed, 15 Apr 2009 12:02:00 +0000

"If ye love wealth greater than liberty, the tranquility of servitude greater than the animating contest for freedom, go home from us in peace. We seek not your counsel, nor your arms. Crouch down and lick the hand that feeds you; and posterity forget that ye were our countrymen."

-- Samuel Adams

Of Obama and Obeisance

noreply@blogger.com (Edward Cline) — Wed, 08 Apr 2009 16:03:00 +0000

More disgusting than former President George W. Bush holding the hand of King Abdullah of Saudi Arabia (when the latter was but a “crown prince”) on Bush’s Crawford, Texas ranch years ago, was the signature demonstration of President Barack Obama’s foreign policy when he bowed before the king at the G20 meeting in London and presumably kissed that same hand. This was an uncalled-for gesture on the part of a man who poses as a friend of the “unwashed masses” but who apparently experiences a “high” when hobnobbing with the rich and powerful.

And as a politician who likes to place himself on the same historical plane with Abraham Lincoln and FDR, surely he must have known that Saudi Arabia and the Koran condone slavery, that Abdullah very likely owns a dozen or more slaves himself, and that Saudi Arabia is a repressive theocracy with designs to convert the U.S. to Islam with stealth jihad through CAIR and other Saudi “civil rights” organizations in this country.

Not that he cares. There is King Abdullah, and there is Prince Barack. A very tenuous excuse might be made for Bush; he was an unlikable and unliked man, who knew he was mocked by Congress, the news media, and the public. He wanted to be liked by everyone, even if it meant rubbing shoulders with Vladimir Putin, King Abdullah and other unsavory creatures in hopes of teasing a grin from them.

No excuse can be made for Obama. His contempt for the United States in his every action since taking office in January is so apparent that it would have been surprising had he not emphasized it by bowing to a relic of medievalism. It was his way of proving that he is not a product of what he claimed in Germany was American “arrogance,” a euphemism for the United States asserting its right to exist and for being the freest, most prosperous country in history (for the time being). I do not think that contempt for the U.S. has been lost on this country’s enemies. Obama has more or less telegraphed his willingness to damage this country with his domestic and foreign policies as much as they would were they in his shoes. He’s their man.

George Stephanopoulos, his unofficial press secretary on ABC (who does a better job of shilling for Obama‘s policies than the official press secretary, the Elmer Fuddish Robert Gibbs), last Sunday gave Obama high marks for “stagecraft” on his European tour. The term means a series of orchestrated hale-fellow-well-met magic moments in domestic and exotic locales, but apparently those high marks do not include preserving the dignity of the office of president. It is doubtful that Abdullah even expected a president of the United States to be so extraordinarily obsequious.

The American Thinker site, in reporting and discussing this shameful episode on April 7, poses the question in answer to any possible White House or State Department denial that bowing to Abdullah was not an act of subservient inferiority:

“If it was not a gesture of subordination, why did the Saudi king fail to respond with a similar bow?”

Because potentates do not bow to their subjects or inferiors. When I learned of this “stagecraft” on the Internet (it certainly wasn’t through the news media, not for them to report such a disquieting event), the final scene of “The Godfather” flashed in my memory, in which Michael Corleone, acknowledged head of a crime family, receives the hand-kissing fealty of his underlings.

At a time when rogue governments such as Iran’s and North Korea’s are working to develop nuclear weapons and delivery systems, Obama has reached a tentative agreement with another rogue government, Vladimir Putin’s, to reduce nuclear weapons stockpiles. Which means the emasculation of this country’s defense capabilities -- not Russia’s or Iran’s or China’s or North Korea’s offensive capabilities. No totalitarian government or other brand of dictatorship has ever felt morally bound or constrained by any weapons reduction treaty signed between it and another statist regime or between it and any coalition of Western “democracies.” Read the history and consequences of such agreements and treaties from long before World War One up through the twentieth century. One might then ask how such a self-proclaimed student of history could make such a concession when the overwhelming evidence points to a guarantee of aggression and war.

There are two possible answers to this question. The first is that Obama knows that history but is confident his wishes will overcome reality. He wants it to be so; ergo, it will be so. One might call it the King Canute syndrome. The tides will cease on command; dictators and enemies of this country will be nice enough to refrain from arming themselves and their proxies.

The more likely answer is that defenseless is how Obama imagines the U.S. should be against regimes that wish to harm or destroy this country, or at least compel it to submit under the threat of destruction. It would be fit punishment for its past “transgressions” and “arrogance.”

And in Turkey, he proclaimed that the U.S. “is not and will never be at war with Islam.” Maybe not. But Islam is certainly at war with the U.S. Surely he must know that, as well. It is fairly common knowledge in the Muslim world. If he doesn’t know it, then he’s not reading his intelligence reports, or their authors are not mentioning it for fear of offending his sense of “diversity” and risking their immediate redundancy. But, like Bush, he will not blame Islam for the attacks on the U.S. and the West, only its kamikaze pilots. Thus his grandstanding about “defeating” Al-Qada in Afghanistan and Pakistan.

Addressing the Turkish parliament on April 6, Obama asserted:

“We will convey our deep appreciation for the Islamic faith, which has done so much over so many centuries to shape the world for the better, including my own country.”

Excuse me? Were Thomas Jefferson, Patrick Henry and James Madison secret Muslims? Or Lincoln? Stating that Islam helped to “shape” the United States is as specious an assertion as the claim that a confederation of American Indian tribes served as a model for the U.S. government before ratification of the Constitution. In attempting to establish a détente with Islam, Obama either dismisses or is ignorant of the totalitarian nature of the Islamic faith and its record of destruction, massacre, rape, genocide and enslavement over the centuries, one that rivals only the Catholic Church’s and its wars with dissenting sects. In that sense, yes, the Islamic faith has done much to shape the world -- but not for the better.

One might even hypothesize that Obama envies the Islamic faith, because it requires immediate and unquestioning submission to its ideology, something he would like to see happen in this country at the snap of his fingers.

Obama has his own notion of submission. A power-luster will respect a power-holder; this would also help to explain his toady-ish behavior upon meeting the Saudi king. But, back home, submission is what he expects of American business executives. When he met with banking CEO’s for an hour and a half on April 2, he was in his Michael Corleone mode. He stopped the friendly chitchat and attempts by the bankers to explain why they and their employees needed bonuses, and went to the point, reports the Politico site:

“My administration,” the president said, “is the only thing between you and the pitchforks.”

Corleone couldn’t have said it better.

After ranting on about how he saw the economic crisis and why people were outraged over Wall Street’s executive bonuses (and the only people who seem to be outraged are the news media and the “man-in-the-street” dimwits they pick to emote angrily about the bonuses), he invited the bankers to talk.

They were true to their record of moral cowardice.

“JP Morgan’s Jamie Dimon complimented Obama on the economic team he’d assembled…Dimon also insisted that he’d like to give the government’s TARP [Troubled Asset Relief Program] money back as soon as practical and asked the president to ’streamline’ that process.”

Nix to that, replied Obama. Returning the money might “send a bad signal,” or create the wrong impression. Appearances trump reality. Appearances will become the reality. Reality is what he wishes it to be. Obama regards himself the master illusionist.

“Several CEO’s disagreed, arguing instead that returning the TARP money was their patriotic duty, that they didn’t need it anymore, and that publicity surrounding the return would send a positive signal of confidence to the markets.”

No dice. Apparently, career bankers know nothing about finance, markets or banking. Or perhaps Obama would concede that they do know those things, and that he and Treasury Secretary Tim Geithner and their economic advisors do not. None of that mattered. Barack Obama, who has never worked a productive, wealth-creating day in his life but spent years in unproductive “public service,” knows better, because he has a personal line to a higher authority. Call it the Kant-Hegel-Marx triumvirate.

Besides, it was more “patriotic” and safer to be his yes-men. And accepting the TARP money back from the banks might cause people to suspect that perhaps the government is the chief culprit behind the crisis and that it is attempting to paper over its responsibility by literally printing more paper money and granting itself more credit so that impoverished Americans can pay it off in about six generations.

Provided, of course, there are still an economy and an America. In fact, the debt Obama and his predecessors in the Oval Office and in Congress have rung up can never be paid off, not without the government garnishing and attaching the full incomes of every American and granting everyone an “allowance.” The catch is that such an economy is not productive and if it exists at all it is because there is a freer economy elsewhere propping it up. If there are no free economies, then the world is in another Dark Age.

If one ever sought proof that Obama and his gang do not want the economy to recover, there it was, in that meeting with the banking CEO‘s, the willing whipping boys for the government‘s policy failures. If the road to perdition is paved with good intentions, there is only one verdict to reach about a man and his clique whose intentions are not good.

From the Academy to Atlas Shrugged: An Appreciation

noreply@blogger.com (Edward Cline) — Thu, 02 Apr 2009 16:47:00 +0000

Were you alive in Aristotle‘s time, had attended his lectures at the Academy, and had read his works, as well, would you have grasped the importance of those works to your existence? Would you have evaluated his contribution to the lives of other men and gasped in unbounded gratitude? Would you have understood the scope and breadth of his bequest to posterity? Could you have projected how his philosophy would influence the actions of men yet unborn, and what effect his ideas would have on their lives? Could you have projected the consequences of his work, such as skyscrapers, or robots exploring Mars, or microscopic cameras and lasers eradicating cancer, or genetically perfected crops, or communications through radio waves?

Could you have imagined a tableau like Raphael’s “The School of Athens,” in the hall of philosophers, with Aristotle and Plato, deep in conversation, striding from beneath the arch, one pointing upward to the heavens, the other gesturing to the earth? Would you have rejected Plato, and venerated Aristotle?

After the eclipse of ancient Greece, and following the interim of ancient Rome before the heavy, impenetrable curtain of the Dark Ages fell to hide the Greco-Roman millennium from the knowledge and sight of men, it took another millennium for them to rediscover Aristotle. The ruins and artifacts of his and Rome’s civilizations lay buried or weed-grown and crumbling in the chaotic, terrifying landscape of the Dark Ages, presenting a paradox and mystery to men who did not understand the source and significance of those ruins and artifacts. His works were salvaged and preserved by a culture, Islam, which ultimately, logically, had to reject them. Aristotle’s rediscovery in the Middle Ages made possible the Renaissance, the Enlightenment, the Industrial Revolution -- and America.

In a dramatically telescoped way, Ayn Rand’s novel, Atlas Shrugged, is experiencing the same rediscovery in the 21st century. It was the most important book of the 20th century, published in New York City in 1957. Although its sales success has been steady and almost without precedent since its publication, until now the novel was ignored, relegated to the cultural sidelines, and deprecated by the cultural establishment. As far as modern philosophers and intellectuals were concerned, it did not exist as a work worthy of serious attention, or exist at all in their minds. It was, and still is, invariably dismissed by critics, leftists, collectivists of every stripe, and most academics as a badly written, unfeeling, hateful, overlong screed posing as a work of literature. Or, it was studiously ignored.

It has taken little over half a century for men to rediscover it and the significance of Rand’s mind and work. Men are gasping, if not in grateful appreciation, then in simple astonishment in the knowledge that she was right. The parallels between the events in the novel and those in the real world have become too obvious for even the novel’s detractors to ignore. They still hurry to denigrate it, but their protests sound peevishly feeble. Hardly a week goes by without Atlas Shrugged being discussed in newspapers, magazines, on the air, or on the Internet. (The latest mention, in the Drudge Report, can be seen here.) The instances are too numerous to cite here. The catalyst for the rediscovery is the current moral and economic crisis for which government actions are only the symptom. What men will do about it remains to be seen.

In an intellectual and philosophic sense, the works of Aristotle acted as a “prime mover” of human culture and civilization. Without them, no Renaissance and Enlightenment would have been possible. Their rediscovery and advocacy by the men of those periods accelerated human progress in terms of a mastery of the physical world, which manifested itself in the Industrial Revolution. But, as Rand herself so succinctly and eloquently observed in her numerous articles and speeches, the Aristotelian influence went only so far, because the skeleton hands of the philosophy of altruism and unreason remained clutched firmly to men’s notion of morality and men did not bother to throw them off. They believed that microwave ovens and cars could coexist with a morality that condemned the ovens and cars, as well as themselves.

Also in an intellectual and philosophic sense, Atlas Shrugged is acting as a “prime mover,” reemerging from behind its curtain of unrecognized existence as something to fear or to reexamine. Men are learning now that the philosophy which made possible their earthly well-being is irreconcilable with its antipode, which makes possible their recurring moral crises. Atlas Shrugged demonstrates that. They are beginning to see that contentment with their pragmatic, unstated “rapprochement” between the opposites can only lead to tyranny, destruction and death, to a condition of existence, as Rand once put it, worse than that of the Dark Ages, for if a partial application to reason fueled the rapid material progress of man, its total absence will cause an even more rapid collapse into anarchic savagery. And reason is what the world’s intellectuals and political leaders are asking men to abandon.

That is what we are beginning to witness now, here in America and abroad.

Atlas Shrugged is about the necessity of a full, unreserved commitment to reason, capitalism and freedom versus a careless, unthinking defaulting to mysticism, “duty,“ slavery and misery. Its theme is the role of the mind in man’s existence. It dramatizes what happens when the rational mind withdraws its power from a society that wishes to both enslave it and kill it. When statist laws and physical force become the “moral” norm in any society, rational minds, which do not take orders or obey edicts, begin to hide, vanish, and go on strike. Just as they did in the Dark Ages. Just as the heroes do in the novel.

In the broadest historic and philosophic sense, the American Revolution was a form of such a strike. As an historic event, it was unprecedented. Its “No, thank you!” was flung in the face of Crown tyranny. Unlike the heroes of Atlas Shrugged, however, the American revolutionaries had to fight a war to win their freedom from that tyranny. Someone has remarked that the novel was America’s second declaration of independence, a completion of the principles present in the first Declaration. That document contains the beginnings of a philosophy which ought to have been explicated, but which was merely implied. Given the enormity of their accomplishment, however, there is neither profit nor point in gainsaying its authors for what they did not do.

For the Founders, because of their circumstances and the means at their disposal, it was necessary to risk the fortunes of a violent separation, which could have ended with defeat and execution in their attempt to dissolve the political bonds which they realized were ensuring their enslavement. In our time, it will become necessary to repudiate and dissolve the bonds of a philosophy which is ensuring our own incremental enslavement. It will require the ratification of a consistent philosophy of reason, one which corrects even Aristotle’s errors. Once that is done, the execrable politics based on a morality of selflessness and sacrifice now robbing us of our own lives, fortunes and sacred honor, will dissolve, as well.

In 1782, replying to James Monroe about calls for Jefferson to abandon plans to retire from public service and return to his personal life, Jefferson wrote:

“In this country…since the present government has been established the point has been settled by uniform, pointed and multiplied precedents, offices of every kind, and given by every power, have been daily and hourly declined and resigned from the Declaration of Independence to this moment….If we are made in some degree for others, yet in a greater are we made for ourselves. It were contrary to feeling and indeed ridiculous to suppose that a man had less right in himself than one of his neighbors or indeed all of them put together. This would be slavery and not that liberty which the Bill of Rights has made inviolable and for the preservation of which our government has been charged. Nothing could so completely divest us of that liberty as the establishment of the opinion that the state has a perpetual right to the services of all its members. This to men of certain ways of thinking would be to annihilate the blessing of existence; to contradict the giver of life who gave it for happiness and not for wretchedness, and certainly to such it were better that they had never been born….”

Had he pursued the thought further, Jefferson might have concluded that neither the state nor society nor “others” had any right or claim to the services of any of its members. Had he done that, and in deference to his incomparable stature as a political thinker and child of the Enlightenment, Jefferson would have attained the heights of Aristotle and his philosophical heir.

One hundred and seventy-five years later, Rand, in Atlas Shrugged, completed that thought:

“I swear by my life and my love of it that I will never live for the sake of another man, nor ask another man to live for mine.”

It is as simple as that.

**Jefferson: Writings, New York: The Library of America (1984), “The Limits of Public Duty,” pp. 778-779.

Freedom of Speech: Silence is Not Golden

noreply@blogger.com (Edward Cline) — Sat, 28 Mar 2009 16:41:00 +0000

One demonstrable “toxic asset“ of the country‘s governing altruist philosophy comes in two forms: censorship and the “fairness doctrine,” or the suppression of free speech and its regulation. Of course, “regulated“ speech cannot be free, either; regulation is simply an overture to censorship. Call it “Censorship Lite.“ While in the economic realm the federal government is actively and noisily nationalizing the economy, the move to de facto censorship has recently bolted ahead, as well, from a fast walk to a gallop on padded hooves to better steal up on us and lop off our heads. Distracted by the gutting of Wall Street and the ongoing vilification of all business CEOs, and not just those who were seduced by the chance to profit from subprime mortgages, few people are paying attention to the peril in which their right to speak against Congress and the administration has been put.

The cyclone of legislation and engineered destruction of freedom and capitalism being whipped up by President Barack Obama and the Democratic Congress (the Republicans, a.k.a. the GOP, or Grand Old Pathetics, as I am want to call them, no longer can be said to count for opposition to anything) cannot help but be accompanied by an aggressive assault on the freedom of speech to suppress all spoken and written dissent and opposition, to silence those whose ideas the administration and Congress do not want to hear and do not want others to hear. This assault represents the logical amalgamation of Left and Right.

Historically, and by necessity, one of the first casualties of a collectivist “revolution,” such as we are witnessing today, has been the free press by either its complete abolition or its takeover by the usurpers. The goal of such physical force serves a number of purposes: to silence those whose ideas are a threat to the totalitarians’ ideological and economic hegemony; to impose conformity on the public, and thus create a population of passive, yeah-saying or silent slaves; to regulate the minds of the public by suffocating them with propaganda and with a fear of the consequences of open, public dissent.

In such circumstances, the guiltiest party is a “free” press which voluntarily parrots the government line, either from agreement with the government’s ends or from ignorance. The American news media today can be charged with a combination of both offenses.

But Congress and the federal government are not the only parties stealing a march on the First Amendment of the Constitution. The Jerusalem Post of March 12 reported:

“The Islamic states circulated a new resolution at the current session of the U.N. Human Rights Council in Geneva on Wednesday that could criminalize defamation of Islam as a human rights violation and encourage the imposition of Sharia.

“According to the nonbinding governmental resolution, titled ‘Combating Defamation of Religions,’ anything deemed insulting to Islamic sensitivities would be banned as a ‘serious affront to human dignity’ and a blatant violation of religious freedom.”

The Post reports that the only religion named in the resolution is Islam.

Of course, given the moral relativism of the Obama administration (not to mention that of the Bush administration), such a “law” would be granted legitimacy if it ever came to having to take an official position on Islam. “Defaming” Islam by identifying its brutal, anti-mind nature, by cataloging the crimes committed in its name, by highlighting the Koran’s invitation to murder, genocide and enslavement, and by reporting its pathological hatred of freedom and free minds and its barbarous conduct towards its own adherents, can be deemed “criminal.” It is the brother of secular “hate speech.” And the fact that hate speech laws exist in several states and are condoned by the judiciary does not bode well for anyone who wishes to tackle the issue of jihad.

“Introduced by Pakistan on behalf of the Organization of Islamic Conference (OIC), it passed by a 108-51 margin, with 25 abstentions….The resolution decries ‘the negative projection of Islam in the media’ and voices ‘deep concern that Islam is frequently and wrongly associated with human rights violations and terrorism.’”

I cannot recall the last time any member of the news media “negatively projected” Islam. Nor can I recall the last time the news media reported any of Islam’s “human rights” violations, either abroad or here in the U.S., such as the “honor” killings of teenage girls who stray from the deadening Muslim subculture. The news media’s knee-jerk deference to all things Muslim is rooted in non-judgmental fear. The Western press has been intimidated and practices self-censorship. Pakistan is an alleged ally of the U.S. in the war against the Taliban in Afghanistan. The resolution was also supported by our other “allies,” Egypt and Iraq. It is payback for all the billions of dollars in aid the U.S. has sent to those countries.

A more visceral method of censorship occurred in Fairfax County, Virginia, when over 600 Muslims packed an auditorium for a hearing of the county planning commission on whether or not to allow a Saudi Wahhabist school (or a mind-killing, anti-Western madrassa) to expand on property already leased to it by the county. The commissioners extended every courtesy to the Muslim mob, and none to the few who questioned the wisdom of allowing an incubator of jihad to grow in the “community,” who were bullied, shouted down, and surrounded by hostile Muslims with the sanction of the commissioners.

The Virginia of Patrick Henry, Thomas Jefferson, George Mason and James Madison -- the colony and state in the intellectual forefront of championing individual rights and limited government -- is not the Virginia that exists today. Its governor not only endorsed Obama and signed a bill banning smoking in bars and restaurants (in an exercise of eminent domain, or the partial seizure of property to benefit others), but went begging to Washington for a cut of the stimulus billions.

Here in the U.S., the federal government and its enablers in Congress are working frantically to suppress or discourage any kind of speech they deem “offensive” or “unfair.”

“Senior FCC staff working with acting Federal Communications Commissioner Michael Copps held meetings last week with policy and legislative advisers to House Energy and Commerce Committee Chairman Henry Waxman to discuss ways the committee can create openings for the FCC to put in place a form of the ‘Fairness Doctrine’ without actually calling it such.”

Waxman, one of the most power-lusting congressmen in politics, who also wants tobacco put under Food and Drug regulation, and who is practically a caricature of an Ayn Rand villain, “is also interested, say sources, in looking at how the Internet is being used for content and speech purposes.”

“One idea Waxman’s committee staff is looking at is a congressionally mandated policy that would require all TV and radio stations to have in place ‘advisory boards’ that would act as watchdogs to ensure ‘community needs and opinions’ are given fair treatment. Reports from those advisory boards would be used for license renewals and summaries would be reviewed at least annually by FCC staff.”

Those “advisory boards” would function as the Politburo did in Soviet Russia, to enforce compliance with federal criteria of what constituted “community needs” and to decide whose opinions were to be given “fair treatment.” (Are you ready for an all-Muslim version of “Dancing with the Stars” or a La Raza-approved interpretation of the Alamo?) Forgotten by the likely victims of this looming legislation is the fact that the FCC is already a component of the welfare state, having the authority to ration out the airwaves to the highest bidders and those with political pull in the name of “public service.”

The Internet poses a particular threat to the statists, because it can now replace not only newspapers and the airwaves, but serves as an alternative to those media for information, opinion, and objective journalism. The Waxman-Pelosi-Reid-Obama coalition and its allies wish to regulate it and tax it. The Internet cannot be controlled and taxed except by either the FCC or another, newer government body. Google, Yahoo, Microsoft Outlook and other Internet “providers” or “common carriers” could be forced to have “advisory boards,” as well. And given their cooperation with totalitarian regimes such as China’s, not much opposition to regulation should be expected from them.

For an excellent comment on the rise and possible fate of the Internet under Obama, see C. August's Titanic Deck Chairs site here.

From rationing out the airwaves, a power it should not have, the government may be moving to rationing out newsprint.

“With many U.S. newspapers struggling to survive, a Democratic senator on Tuesday [March 24] introduced a bill to help them by allowing newspaper companies to restructure as nonprofits with a variety of tax breaks.

“Cardin’s [Benjamin Cardin] Newspaper Revitalization Act would allow newspapers to operate as nonprofits for educational purposes under the U.S. tax code, giving them a similar status to public broadcasting systems [that is, to the various units of the Corporation for Public Broadcasting system, or PBS].”

There is an instance of beggar thy looting neighbor.

“Cardin’s office said his bill was aimed at preserving local and community newspapers, not conglomerates which may also own radio and TV stations. His bill would also let a nonprofit buy newspapers owned by a conglomerate.”

Except for government departments and agencies, big is always “bad.” And here is the logical catch to winning a government-granted “nonprofit” status:

“Under this arrangement, newspapers would still be free to report on all issues, including political campaigns. But they would be prohibited from making political endorsements. Advertising and subscription revenue would be tax-exempt, and contributions to support news coverage or operations could be tax deductible.”

And there you have it. Newspapers bailed out through the ruse of being dubbed “nonprofit” organizations would be required to gag themselves, in exchange for tax-exemptions on their revenue. The power to not tax can be as destructive as the power to tax, if the bribe or inducement is tempting enough to those who do not think ahead or who do not care to think at all. Of course, that would leave TV, radio, and the Internet as sources of news and opinions Americans want to search for, read or hear, and not what politicians and the government would prefer them to read or hear.

Theoretically, Americans would be compelled to listen to opposing viewpoints and opinions under a resuscitated “Fairness Doctrine,” a mongrel concept that purports to advance “diversity” in politics and culture but which was declared unconstitutional by the FCC in 1987 and abandoned. In reality, Americans would not listen to or watch what the government and “public service” advocates wished them to audit. The failure of Air America, a left-liberal radio station created to counter popular conservative talk radio, testifies to the power of volition. Radio stations across the country did not wish to syndicate or carry Air America because their owners or managers knew that their audiences did not wish to listen to it. (Americans already get enough of left-liberal perspectives and talking points in their newspapers and from politicians.)

“Senator Debbie Stabenow, D-Mich., told radio host Bill Press yesterday when asked about whether it was time to bring back the so-called ’Fairness Doctrine’: ’I think it’s absolutely time to pass a standard. Now, whether it’s called the Fairness Standard, whether it’s called something else -- I absolutely think it’s time to be bringing accountability to the airwaves….”

Which means: Any station that allows someone like Rush Limbaugh to publicly hope that Obama’s policies fail, would be held “accountable” and presumably penalized, taken over, or driven out of business. Stabenow, John Kerry, Nancy Pelosi and their cohorts are not working to see Rush Limbaugh debate someone like Bill Moyers (of PBS) on important issues; they know that Limbaugh, whatever his faults, would wipe the floor with Moyers and that countless Americans would cheer Limbaugh on with all the raucous gusto of a crowd watching a prize fight. The last thing the advocates of “fairness” and “balance” want is confrontation. They know they would lose.

But the fundamental purpose of the “Fairness Doctrine,” or whatever its new name might be, is not to establish “fair standards” or to enforce ‘accountability” or to “serve” the public. Its goal is to destroy the very concept of free speech, to reduce it to a contest of “he said-she said,” to give insupportable, arbitrary assertions the same weight as statements of fact -- in short, to sully the value of the freedom of speech, to nullify the role of ideas and to inculcate in one’s mind a cloying indifference to whatever anyone says about anything.

In June a ruling is expected from the Supreme Court on whether or not a documentary film, “Hillary: The Movie,” produced by a conservative group, Citizens United, is political speech or a political ad. It was shown in eight theaters during the primaries in 2008 and intended to criticize Hillary Clinton, then regarded as the favorite to win the Democratic nomination. The Federal Election Commission subsequently prohibited it from being aired on television.

“Government lawyers argued that conservative group Citizens United’s 90-minute documentary…is a political ad just like traditional one-minute or 30-second spots and therefore regulated by the McCain-Feingold law, the popular name for 2002 revisions to the nation’s campaign finance laws [the Bipartisan Campaign Reform Act].

“The FEC’s conclusion that the movie was nothing more than an overt attempt to persuade voters not to side with Hillary Clinton was affirmed by a three-judge panel last summer which ruled the film had ’no other interpretation’ other than as an advocacy message to voters that Clinton should not be elected.”

Whether or not the Court rules for or against the film, its decision will likely be grounded on non-fundamental reasons. The Court will not challenge the validity of McCain-Feingold, only the utterly arbitrary rules by which it is enforced and whether or not they are practical or “fair.” It will not venture to rule McCain-Feingold and every other statutory or legislative abridgement of the First Amendment unconstitutional. It will simply count beans and measure concretes and second-guess the intent of the film and of its producers.

Helping the Court dodge the issue is Citizens United itself:

“Citizens United appealed to the Supreme Court, arguing that ‘Hillary: The Movie’ should not be considered a political ad. The group says there is nothing in the movie urging people to vote against Clinton. The group says the film is more of a documentary comparable to critical television news programs such as ‘Frontline,’ ‘Nova,’ and ‘60 Minutes.’”

No political principle I know of was ever defended by artful insinuation, which is what the group’s argument before the Court amounts to. “It really isn’t what you think it is, it’s something else entirely, and shouldn’t be called a political ad. It is an ‘express advocacy’ of nothing. Clinton just happens to be the subject.”

Cringing is not an efficacious method of persuasion. Far be it from Citizens United to insist that the government has an obligation to defend anyone’s right to persuade voters about candidates and issues in any style or medium he wishes or thinks the most effective, at any time before, during, and after a campaign, paid for with as much funding as possible by whatever any individual or group is willing to provide it. Far be it from Citizens United to insist that the Court uphold the First Amendment.

With friends like that, freedom of speech does not need enemies.

Obama's “Extreme Makeover” of America

noreply@blogger.com (Edward Cline) — Sun, 22 Mar 2009 01:52:00 +0000

It is hard to decide any more which current government-spawned disasters and those to come one should dwell on. As on the popular TV program, ABC’s “Extreme Makeover: Home Edition,“ President Barack Obama is overseeing the demolition of the remnants of a republic that upheld individual rights and of the construction of a socialist “republic.“ The country is “needy,“ he claims, and must be housed in a new habitat, which is looking more and more like a minimum security prison, with all medical records managed by the government, movement monitored by the TSA, diet regulated by the warden, and one’s time spent on guarded work details (otherwise known as chain gangs).

For example, there is the move to draft all Americans into “voluntary” national service -- presumably a servitude with the encouragement of bribes if one submits or promised reprisals if one does not. In Congress, Senate and House Democrats and Republicans are shepherding through legislation which, taken altogether, is pretty much a civilian cradle-to-grave Selective Service System. For example:

“The House passed a bill yesterday; which includes disturbing language indicating young people will be forced to undertake mandatory national service programs as fears about President Barack Obama’s promised ‘civilian national security force’ intensify.

“The Generations Invigorating Volunteerism and Education Act, known as the GIVE Act, was passed yesterday by a 321-105 margin and now goes to the Senate.”

In the Senate, Chris Dodd, D-Connecticut, says that bills introduced by Thad Cochran, R-Mississippi, will “create the architecture and the structure that will serve as the invitation to everyone to serve.”

“The legislation would target everyone from schoolchildren to the elderly and aim to create new bases of volunteers beyond the usual young-adult pool of service-program participants, reports The Day.”

Accompanying the article on the Senate bills is a propaganda poster straight out of Nazi Germany or Soviet Russia: a drawn figure of a youth shouldering a shovel, his upward glance presumably focused on a cause higher than himself. The shovel could be used to dig ditches, or as a club against the recalcitrant, non-volunteer.

What about examining the “spontaneous” demonstrations by scruffy, soup-kitchen caliber “community activists” who take buses to the homes of AIG executives who received some of the $165 million in bonuses that Congress and the news media are frothing at the mouth over? These semi-literate individuals look suspiciously like recruits of ACORN, Obama’s public service alma mater. Wasn’t the list of AIG executives who received bonuses supposed to be confidential to protect the executives from harassment or worse? Are these demonstrators destined to be drafted into Obama’s “civilian national security force,” which he called for in July 2008, and sent to Rahm Emanuel’s Public Service Academy?

Or should one dwell on the possibility that the United States was subjected to a 9/11-style economic attack, one calculated to give Obama and the Democrats the excuse to take initial steps to nationalize the economy? Diana West, in her March 17th article, “Who Attacked Our Economy?” reports that in mid-September 2008, $550 billion was abruptly and unaccountably withdrawn within two hours from the country’s banks and money market funds, precipitating the eventual collapse of virtually every entity, governmental or private, linked to the vast gossamer web of government-sponsored subprime mortgages.

“Who or what was responsible for that electronic run on the banks to the tune of $550 billion?” West asks. Was it George Soros, who hates the freedom that allowed him to amass an incredible fortune, and who acted as Obama‘s chief campaign fund “angel“? A cabal of Russia, China and other countries hostile to the U.S., such as Hugo Chavez’s Venezuela, intent on bringing the U.S. into the fascist fold by guaranteeing the election of a man equally hostile to the U.S. and to what is left of its freedoms? Saudi Arabia and Iran in a rare bi-sectarian alliance between them to bring the U.S. into the Islamic sphere of influence by ensuring the election of a more accommodating and apologetic appeaser than was then-President George W. Bush?

Briefly, was Barack Obama some power’s “Manchurian Candidate”? That the electronic run on the banks occurred is beyond doubt. But it remains inexplicable and unreported by both the government and the news media.

Should one dwell on Obama’s proposed “cap and trade” energy policy that would clutter the landscape with wind turbines and solar panel arrays and ensure that Americans become dependent on the whims of the weather and on government management of power, and pay more for it? Or on his education policies, which will be inspired by his lurking left-wing, ex-Weatherman friend, William Ayers, whose “education” philosophy is nothing more than a kindergarten-through-high school curriculum of collectivist indoctrination?

Or, should one comment on Obama’s appearance on Jay Leno’s “The Tonight Show” on March 19th, when Obama did not answer Leno’s query that now that Congress has established the precedent of further violating the Constitution by punishing AIG executives for bonuses their employer was contractually obligated to pay them, what was to prevent Congress from making a habit of it, of targeting private individuals who incur the wrath of do-good sadists in government? In reply, Obama demonstrated that he is the doyen of dissemblers and delivered his usual spiel of vague assurances. He did not answer Leno’s question. Leno may as well have never asked it. And the news media was selectively deaf to it, focusing instead on Obama’s gaffe about the “Special Olympics” of the “disabled.”

A more honest answer to Leno’s question would have been: Nothing, not any more.

It is noteworthy that Obama’s bantering, unscripted comment about the disabled revealed a core contempt for those whom he professes a wish to help. This is characteristic of all professional, career altruists, as Ayn Rand demonstrated in Ellsworth Toohey in her novel, The Fountainhead. Does anyone with a modicum of self-respect believe that Barney Frank and Chris Dodd are acting from the milk of human kindness? Say, rather, they speak and act from the venom of malicious hatred for anyone not willing to submit and take orders.

Speaking of the disabled and the “Special Olympics,“ nothing is more obviously “disabled” and “special” than our government-subsidized cultural establishment, and Obama has capped his Creature Feature menagerie of political appointments by naming a half-blind crony, Kareem Dale, as his special assistant to oversee arts and culture. He was also named in February as special assistant for disability policy. He will work with Valerie Jarrett, another of Obama’s Chicago cronies, who heads the Office of Public Liaison and Intergovernmental Affairs.

“’It’s a big step forward in terms of connecting cultural and government with mainstream administration policy,’ said Mr. Ivey said in an interview on Friday…Mr. Ivey, a former chairman of the National Endowment for the Arts, said he expected that the job would mainly involve coordinating the activities of the National Endowment for the Humanities and the Institute of Museum and Library Services ‘in relation to White House objectives.’”

What is “mainstream administration policy”? What are the “White House objectives”? One can be certain the policy and the objectives constitute a mandatory wheelchair ramp for federally-funded arts organizations, from local bric-a-brac makers all the way up to Broadway plays and ethnic festivals.

“The challenge for culture boosters in Congress was to convince a House-Senate conference committee that the arts provide jobs as other industries do, while also encouraging tourism and spending in general.

“’We had the facts on our side,’ said Representative Louise M. Slaughter, a New York Democrat who is co-chairwoman of the Congressional Arts Caucus. ‘If we’re trying to stimulate the economy, and get money into the Treasury, nothing does that better than art.’”

Come again? What “facts”? Most reality-grounded observers would say that taxed capital investments and capital gains in the productive sector and technological innovations and freedom of trade send most of the money to the Treasury, not to mention stimulate the economy, and not the esoteric, non-objective sallies in “free expression” by dependent, pathetic, no-talent dilettantes of art.

“Taking the Obama past as prelude, there’s a fair amount of evidence to support arts partisans’ hopes for a White House attuned to music, theater, fine arts and dance….On his Facebook page, the president includes Bach’s cello suites and Shakespeare’s tragedies among his favorite works….If the president needs input on the arts, he’s plugged in with a chief of staff, Rahm Emanuel, who entered Sarah Lawrence College with dreams of becoming a ballet dancer.”

These are supposed to be assurances that Obama and Company mean well, that they are cultured and wouldn‘t harm a fly? Obama purportedly wrote two books, and attended a performance of the Alvin Ailey American Dance Theater at the Kennedy Center and applauded that group‘s meaningless gymnastics and gyrations. Emanuel “dreamed” of becoming a ballet dancer, and, as did many members of FDR’s Brain Trust, purportedly wrote a book about the necessity of government controls on the economy. It is certain that many of his staff and appointees have cultural pretensions, as well, and now may indulge them at taxpayer expense.

I’m sure that Valerie Jarrett and Kareem Dale, together with the National Endowment for the Arts, which will disperse the $50 million to “qualified” individuals, organizations, and states, will endorse the funding of such things as a Muslim production of Mozart’s “The Abduction from the Seraglio” and a WPA-style traveling exhibit of paintings by amateurs employed in pork barrel construction projects.

Well, Hitler once “dreamed” of becoming a famous painter, but had to settle for dictating Mein Kampf in prison (the German Koran, literally) and attending the opera. Stalin, Franco, and other dictators all aspired to contribute “culturally” to their serfs and sycophants and established bureaucracies to ensure that the culture conformed to political dogma.

When the federally-funded cultural “establishment” learned that its cut of the $787 billion “stimulus” bill had been removed from the House version by the Senate, I wrote in an earlier commentary that its spokesmen and lobbyists beat an undignified and hysterical path to Washington and succeeded in having the $50 million reinstated. But, as The Wall Street Journal reported on February 18, “fifty million dollars…is just a bubble on a wave.”

It has occurred to no one, not even to the author of the WSJ article, that the government has no business subsidizing any of the arts; its only legitimate role is to “promote the progress of science and useful arts, by securing for limited times to authors and inventors the exclusive right to their respective writings and discoveries” (Section VIII of the Constitution). Which means protecting individual rights and intellectual property. There is no mention in that document of funding quilts of cultural diversity or Third World music jamborees or the Corporation for Public Broadcasting. Taxpayer money has been and now will continue to be used to promote “noncommercial art.” (See Ayn Rand‘s 1973 article, “To Dream the Noncommercial Dream” in The Voice of Reason: Essays in Objectivist Thought for a discussion of the specious arguments of the champions of state-funded art.)

What this country desperately needs is an “extreme makeover” of its governing philosophy. The entire welfare state must be dismantled or be allowed to collapse before we can begin to regain our liberty. And that will take a philosophical revolution.

The Trouble with Republicans

noreply@blogger.com (Edward Cline) — Thu, 19 Mar 2009 15:53:00 +0000

“There has long been an element of the Republican Party that has felt a need to distance themselves from people who stand up for conservative principles, whether those with principles have been Ronald Reagan, Rush Limbaugh, or whomever.”

So observed Thomas Sowell on March 17 in his latest Townhall column, “The Republican Civil War.” Sowell is one of my favorite political commentators, together with Walter Williams and a few other conservative/“libertarian“ columnists. Author of many books that explode contemporary political and social fashions with bomb-squad precision, Sowell wrote what I consider the best critique of Marxism, Marxism: Philosophy and Economics (1985), in which he shreds the doctrine into countless specks of chad. And his columns can be depended on for their cogently piquant criticisms of what passes for modern political and social “received wisdom.” It is doubtful that any of his book titles will be found on President Barack Obama’s bookshelf -- if he has one.

His latest column, however, points up the main problem with the Republican Party, and with Sowell’s argument, which is chiefly that conservatism, as an ideology or a set of principles, is utterly bankrupt. Its adherents can only try to out-shout the Democratic Party that they could do a better job of “managing” the country and the economy, when the best solution is to get the government out of the economy and back to its Constitutional mandate of protecting individual rights. But such a solution is as abhorrent to the Republicans as it is to the Democrats. It would entail a relinquishment of power and the repudiation of not only the welfare state, but of the roles of God, family and other “traditional” values in the GOP platform. Any other course of action will guarantee a sentence of irrelevancy of the Republican Party.

Sowell takes the Republican Party to task for being bankrupt, citing its current infighting over whether or not to side with Limbaugh and Ann Coulter and other outspoken religious and secular conservatives. It is not so ironic that most Republicans wish to distance themselves from the likes of Limbaugh and Coulter, who regularly launch broadsides against liberals and the Democrats from their flip-flopping religious/common sense convictions. It is exactly those convictions on which the Republicans once campaigned and legislated.

The Republicans behave like private citizens cowering in fear of a roaming street gang, and seek to protect themselves by paying moral and political protection money to the gang -- the gang in this instance being the Democrats.

Sowell, however, does not name those principles, nor does he offer a constructive solution other than that the Republicans should stick to their principles and stop indulging in what novelist Ayn Rand called “me-too-ism.”

“There has even been an undercurrent among some Republicans of a sense that it is time to move away from the image of Ronald Reagan, to update the party and court newer and less embarrassing segments of the voters than their current base.”

One can wholeheartedly agree with that observation. The two Reagan administrations made no serious attempt to abolish or reduce the welfare state. Reagan did nothing to nip the Islamic jihad in the bud (remember the Marine barracks massacre in Lebanon?) when forthright and terminal action against our enemies, chiefly Iran and Saudi Arabia, would have spared us 9/11 and the two futile and costly Iraq wars under the Bush administrations. One is at a loss to understand why Reagan is upheld by conservatives as the template of “good government.” He is credited with making tax cuts. But what the government gave during his terms of office, can be taken away just as easily, as Obama and a Democratic Congress are eager to do.

And, of course, let us not forget that the Republicans, under both Bush administrations, were responsible for the largest expansion of the welfare state and intrusive government interventions, which the Democrats happily obliged them with, and which the Obama administration wishes to surpass FDR-style.

Jared Seehafer, in his article of March 17, “Jesus Christ or John Galt? The Republican Party’s Identity Crisis,” argues that if the Republican Party wants to regain Congress and the White House in the next election, it must abandon the religious foundation of its principles and discover and advocate capitalism. He also argues that conservatives largely recognize the value of capitalism and seek to ensure its existence, and that the Republicans must realize that religion and capitalism, as moral systems, are irreconcilable.

I agree with that evaluation, except that, from my experience and observations, I do not think the conservatives actually value capitalism. It is a secondary matter to them. But, Rand put it best in her 1973 article, “Censorship: Local and Express”:

“The conservatives see man as a body freely roaming the earth, building sand piles or factories -- with an electronic computer inside his skull, controlled from Washington. The liberals [the Democrats] see man as a soul freewheeling to the farthest reaches of the universe -- but wearing chains from nose to toes when he crosses the street to buy a loaf of bread.”

Further on, she notes:

“…Each camp wants to control the realm it regards as metaphysically important; each grants freedom only to the activities it despises…..‘Control,‘ to both camps, means the power to rule by physical force. The conservatives want to rule man’s consciousness; the liberals, his body.”*

Sowell raises the issue that Republicans could easily win more black voters to their party by charging the Democrats with the horrendous and ongoing debacle of their welfare state and educational policies.

“No segment of the population has lost more by the agendas of the liberal constituencies of the Democratic Party than the black population. The teachers’ unions, environmental fanatics and the ACLU are just some of the groups to whose interests blacks have been sacrificed wholesale. Lousy education and high crime rates in the ghettos, and unaffordable housing elsewhere with building restrictions, are devastating prices to pay for liberalism. Yet the Republicans have never articulated that argument, and their opportunism in trying to get black votes by becoming imitation Democrats has failed miserably for decades on end.”

All that is true. But what Sowell fails to grasp is that, for reasons of altruism, the Republicans largely endorse the programs that Democrats advocate and enact, but say that they would do a better job of it, just as left-wingers claim that Soviet communism would have triumphed if only it had been guided by “better men.” The Republicans are not going to garner any significant support by implicitly endorsing Obama’s aggressive takeover of the economy by bickering over such minor issues as the amount of pork in the stimulus legislation or by harping on whether or not Obama and the new Treasury Secretary “knew” about the AIG executive bonuses before taking an 80% ownership in the company.

(Abetting both the Democrats and the Republicans in that exercise in fascism are the news media, which continue to report the lie that American taxpayers “own“ that 80%. I have heard no Republican point this out. Nor have I heard any conservative warn the nation about the peril of forcing AIG executives to return their bonuses, which would be an assault on contract law via ex post facto taxation, regardless of those executives‘ culpability in the subprime mortgage fiasco. No Republican has upbraided Congressman Barney Frank for demanding a list of those executives‘ names, which he would hand over to a Congressional lynch mob.)

Seehafer is correct to ask what Sowell did not: What principles does the Republican Party uphold, other than religious-based ones, which Sowell does not even mention in his article? Another question to ask is: What intellectual leadership could cure the Republicans of their bifurcated political policies and persuade them to adopt a moral advocacy of capitalism?

It certainly will not be the Sermon on the Mount, nor even Adam Smith’s The Wealth of Nations. It must be John Galt. It must be a philosophy of reason, or Objectivism.

*In Philosophy: Who Needs It. New York: Signet softcover (1982), p. 187.

When Fools Rush In

noreply@blogger.com (Edward Cline) — Fri, 13 Mar 2009 14:15:00 +0000

The nation -- indeed, the world -- is waking up to the idea that ideas have consequences. One idea is that sacrificing is not a life-enhancing option and will lead to misery or death. Another is that the heedless policy of a spendthrift is not a rational course of action. Another is that adopting the policy of a spendthrift benefits no one but a politician who advocates it as a sound fiscal policy. Envy is not a paying proposition. “Class warfare” in the form of “soaking the rich” to help the poor assures mutual impoverishment. There are so many more altruist and collectivist ideas that are being grasped by millions as a collective prescription for penury and extinction.

The world seems to be emerging from a moral and intellectual coma, perhaps temporarily, perhaps permanently. It is discovering that other ideas have other consequences, as well, ideas that promote life, promote prosperity, promote ambition and personal success, and that they are possible only in political freedom, and that this freedom has been violated, abridged, and nullified by the first set of ideas. True, politics is the last thing to be affected by a philosophical revolution. But one cannot help but be pleased with how startled the collectivists and altruists are now by the knowledge that they have not successfully pulled a fast one on Americans. These Americans have come knocking on the doors of elitists or are leaning over the café railings or invading their legislated smoke-free bars and restaurants to ask: What in hell do you think you are doing?

The Americans who recently protested the spendthrift policies of the Obama administration and Congress with “tea parties,” and who plan to protest them on an even larger scale in the near future, one can wager are not regular readers of The New York Times. They cannot have much in common with its columnists and editors, nor with the news media. So the collectivist and altruist elite become very touchy when the people for whom they are “doing good” for their own sake, even to the point of enacting coercive and felonious legislation, exhibit signs of intelligence, resistance and anger. How dare these yokels!

And nothing raises their hackles higher than any mention of Ayn Rand. This is because they thought she and her philosophy had been buried by that arch-conservative, Whittaker Chambers, wielding a shovel on one side of the grave, while that fellow-traveler and critic Granville Hicks wielded another on the other side, in a true demonstration of bipartisanship half a century ago. And hadn’t all the academics and pundits and book writers since then refuted her and her philosophy over time and ensured that she would not return to haunt them?

The cultural and political elite are upset that she has not been forgotten. That philosophy has returned to haunt them and aggravate their guilt. And they are in high dudgeon because they are being cast in the role, not as saviors, but as her black-hearted villains. They are discovering that ideas cannot be interred as permanently as their authors. Atlas Shrugged is on their minds.

The Times blog, “Opinionator” (a round-up of positions expressed in other blogs) of March 6th, called “’Going Galt’: Everyone’s Doing It!“ is a testimonial to how the elite have been blind-sided in their arrogant complacency and sent spinning out of control on the Internet highway, and evidence of how thoroughly they have been indoctrinated in the belief that reality has nothing to do with their chosen “reality.” They are deer caught in the headlights of an oncoming train, but sneer that the train does not exist. They are stuffed animals crammed with the excelsior of worn-out bromides, mulched second-hand sociology, and the sawdust of a failed ideology.

Reading the denials of the cultural elite is almost as amusing as watching Sir Fretful Plagiary, the hack playwright in Richard Brinsley Sheridan’s comedy, The Critic, protest that his play does not fall off, is not tediously spun out, and does not want incident. Incredibly, these are the literary vices they ascribe to Rand’s novel Atlas Shrugged, and they claim they can’t understand why it is getting so much attention. Nor can they understand why President Obama is having problems putting over his disastrous policies. Why don’t these “Galtists” just shut up and do as he says?

That they protest too much is an indication that they do understand. These are the crusaders who crusaded to destroy literary, economic and political values, and made living in this culture as pointless as watching a snow-covered TV screen. They would not have campaigned to destroy them if they did not feel threatened by them.

Their truncated minds and shriveled souls will not permit them to concede defeat. They see the “relevance,” these programmed altruists and dispensers of others’ wealth, and join in a chorus of denials of the relevance. Many are loathe to admit their malice. Others, while not projecting their self-deception and hatred on Rand or on her admirers, confess their utter ignorance of the importance of Atlas Shrugged. Randomly, and to wit:

“I look to Atlas Shrugged more for conveniently totable beach reading than an economic blueprint…. If only the people in her novels had acted remotely like actual people, rather than [like] comic book characters, I, too, would be rereading the thing now.”

This is the kind of “missing link” mentality that never progressed beyond the concretes under her nose. The novel is a novel, not a blueprint for anything. It is an idealization of reality, and the events in it are necessarily telescoped. Those events in the novel are so grounded in reality -- and the heroes and villains are so concretely real -- that it would be futile to explain to such a person that “actual people” are moved by the same values or anti-values as are the novel’s characters. The task of induction would be impossible to her. One must ask, also: Whose fictional characters, in her mind, aren’t of “comic book” caliber? John Updike’s? Joyce Carol Oates’s?

Then there is another kind of arrested mentality, writing about those who may choose to go on strike:

“And of course none of these folks designed an engine that would have created basically free energy (and made global warming a non-issue). In the individual case, ‘going Galt’ smacks of a kind of self-aggrandizement in the same way that climate smuggery does. Because, really, your marginal contribution doesn’t matter that much….The point is that you are not John Galt. You don’t even know who he is! And this eventually leaves you weeping on abandoned train tracks.”

This is someone struggling to convince “you” that you aren’t important enough to make a difference, and himself that your quitting in protest wouldn’t affect him much. The desperation is in the sneer. This individual apparently has read the novel, and got nothing from it. He is a minuscule, belittling Ellsworth Toohey. Well, Hillary Clinton once said she’d read Ayn Rand’s novels in college, and that it was just a “passing phase.” Look at the kind of contemptible person she grew to be.

Other bloggers make equally irrelevant comments about Rand and her novel. Trying to make sense of them is like trying to make sense of a Picasso canvas. Just as interesting, however, are the kinds of responses their comments elicited from their readers, ranging from the malicious to the short-range to the certifiably dumb. To wit:

“Atlas Shrugged is a joke. A piece of ridiculosity.”

“I wish they would take a John Galt….Please feel free to go on strike. We would be better off without you.”

“Rand falsely assumes these innovative genius[es] work in a vacuum and don’t benefit from having a safe, civil society to work in.”

“Please show me anything that I can touch, or eat, or live in, or drive that the ‘productive rich’ have made?”

Then there are the obvious Obama supporters, individuals ready and willing to sacrifice and work for “the good of society.”

“It is not at all clear that we need to bribe people with promises of riches in order to get them to do useful work. If it turns out to be necessary with today’s crop of masters of the universe, then we’ll need to find a way to start over, once we have turned the spoiled brats out of their unearned positions of power.”

“Please, go Galt. Be my guest….Take that genius talent of yours right over to the bus station at Applebee’s. I can’t wait to watch you scraping uneaten peas into the garbage disposal. You and your genius Galt buddies Bernie Madoff and Sir [Allen] Stanford.”

“The top tax rate will go up approximately 5%, and this makes you decide to take your ball and go home? That seems silly to me.”

“One of the characters [Hugh Akston, the philosopher of reason] in Atlas Shrugged was working in a diner frying hamburgers when he encountered Dagny Taggart. He was one of the ones who ‘shrugged.’ It was honest work and he made a very good hamburger. If Malkin and [Rick] Santelli and some others ‘go Galt,’ hopefully we can count on an increase in hamburger quality across the nation.”

These are people who probably believe that “unearned income” is a valid concept and should be taxed and otherwise penalized, because no observable physical labor is involved in the rewards of risking investments in stocks and innovators and loans to productive enterprises. Intellectual labor is as much an unreal concept to them as it is to the IRS. Such labor is responsible for everything that the one individual “can touch, or eat, or live in, or drive.”

And, a number of these individuals view Bernard Madoff and Stanford as the symbols of capitalism and freedom. One newscaster on ABC this morning erroneously referred to Madoff as a “financier,” but then the news media suffer from a similar truncated mentality. They don’t “get it” that Obama, his appointees, and Congress are all guilty of the mother of all Ponzi schemes.

Two or three respondents answered with defenses of Rand and the novel. One promised to go on strike.

“I will cut back so that my hard-earned income is not taken by the government and redistributed to people who have not worked as hard. I will not subsidize others.”

One point of this commentary is to reveal the scope of hostility that exists in our culture to individualism, capitalism, freedom, and “the rich” -- and to the mind. Another is to prepare those who would argue in defense of those things for the levels of ignorance and species of malice they will encounter, not only in people they might personally engage in argument, but in politicians, academics, and the news media.

The thing to remember is that reason and reality are on our side. Most of our opponents and enemies know it. They are not the ones who need convincing or any kind of rational guidance. Beware especially of the ones who claim it is your duty to convince them. These creatures' minds are the truly truncated. Let reality be their ultimate persuader.

Focus on those who show genuine interest in answers, and never mind the fools.

The New Intolerable Acts

noreply@blogger.com (Edward Cline) — Sat, 07 Mar 2009 15:46:00 +0000

There are qualified parallels between what American colonists protested and rebelled against in 1774-1775, and what modern Americans ought to be rebelling against today. As Congress passes legislation intended to take over the economy, the British Crown passed legislation intended to take over that of the American colonies. President Barack Obama’s proposed budget is specifically worded to accomplish the near total nationalization of the economy. A succession of Acts of Parliament which virtually assured revolution and war were what were called the Intolerable or Coercive Acts.

The TARP and the American Recovery and Reinvestment Acts are more massive in scope than any of the Intolerable Acts -- which were mercantilist in nature, not socialist -- but not dissimilar from the British Acts in their specific ends: to achieve a captive economy intended to serve statist purposes.

A letter to the editor of The Tennessean of February 5, in the form of a letter to the IRS advising it that the writer would be late in paying his income tax, lists all the taxes the individual paid in the daily course of his life:

“I have paid these taxes: accounts receivable tax, building permit tax, CDL tax, cigarette tax, corporate income tax, dog license tax, federal income tax, unemployment tax, gasoline tax, hunting license tax, fishing license tax, waterfowl stamp tax, inheritance tax, inventory tax, liquor tax, Medicare tax, city, school and county property taxes (up 33 percent the last four years), real estate tax, Social Security tax, road usage tax, toll road tax, state and city sales taxes, recreational vehicle tax, state franchise tax, state unemployment tax, telephone federal excise tax, telephone federal, state and local surcharge tax, telephone minimum usage surcharge tax, telephone state and local taxes, utility tax, vehicle license registration tax, capital gains tax, lease severance tax, oil and gas assessment tax, Tennessee property tax, Kentucky, Mississippi, Virginia, Georgia and Alabama sales taxes, and many more that I can’t recall but I have run out of space and money.”

The average American citizen could also report an equal or greater number of taxes he pays, regardless of his state of residence.

A host of British and even colonial taxes burdened American colonists (in Virginia, for example, there was a local tax on carriages and their wheels) in the decades leading up to passage of the one that lit the fuse of rebellion, and then of revolution: the Stamp Act, passed by Parliament in March 1765. Its repeal almost exactly a year later by Parliament taught the Crown government nothing. Aside from the Revenue or Sugar Act of 1764, which was intended to reduce smuggling rum and goods from the West Indies and the European continent, the Act of Parliament which first proved “intolerable” was the Stamp Act. It is the Stamp Act which best parallels the situation of Americans today. The Intolerable or Coercive Acts of 1774-1775 were largely punitive in nature and not intended to raise Crown revenue.*

The Stamp Act was chiefly a wholesale levy on the commercial and legal structure of the colonies. Its gross effect was to encompass virtually every action taken by the colonists in their daily lives. An American colonist could not move without encountering a tax. Hardly a commodity -- tea, hats, furs, lumber, and so on -- could be purchased as either a necessity or a luxury that was not directly taxed or whose price reflected a tax paid by another party and passed on to the purchaser; often, both taxes added to the price.

Here is a sampling of some of the Stamp taxes**:

A three-pence tax was imposed on “declarations, pleas, replications, rejoinders, demurrers, or other pleading, or any copy thereof, in any Court.”

A four-pence tax was imposed on “bills of lading, for any kinds of goods for exportation, or any Cockett or Clearance granted within the Colonies and Plantations of America.”

A one-shilling tax was imposed on “monitions, libels, answers, allegations, inventories, or renunciations in ecclesiastical matters in any Court…informations or other Pleading in any Admiralty Court.”

A two-pound (£) tax was imposed on “donations, presentations, collations or institutions to any benefice, or registers, entries, testimonials or certificates of any degree taken in any university, academy, college or seminary of learning.”

A four-pound tax was imposed on “licenses for retailing wine, grants, appointments or admissions to any public beneficial office….” [A three-pound tax was imposed on the renewal of a license to retail wine.]

A one-shilling tax was imposed on “every pack of cards sold or used within the Colonies and Plantations of America.”

A ten-shilling tax was imposed on dice. [Packs of cards and dice were wrapped to accommodate the stamps, which were already affixed to the wrappers. Today, for example, state tax stamps are printed on packs of cigarettes and other tobacco products.]

The taxes which most outraged colonists were the ones imposed on newspapers, almanacs, and calendars, ranging from two to eight pence, depending on the item. Newspapers especially would have been crippled, since all newsprint (the paper on which newspapers were printed) was by law restricted to British-made and imported newsprint, for which a hefty premium was charged. Colonists regarded these taxes as taxes on knowledge. And the catch was that all stamp taxes had to be paid in British sterling or specie only, of which very little circulated in the colonies because most of it remained in Britain under the credit arrangements with British merchants in the mercantilist system. The average colonist handled little more than two or three pounds in one year.

Today, Americans pay a “stamp” sales tax on their newspapers, periodicals, and books, pay the numerous taxes passed on to them by the publishers of these things, in addition to taxes on virtually everything they buy and consume.

Whatever one’s verdict on the Crown’s failed Stamp Act, British politicians were counting on the Americans to keep producing in order to sustain the mercantilist system (chiefly as suppliers of raw materials; other legislation discouraged or prohibited development of manufacturing in the colonies). But one cannot say that about TARP and the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act. The ARRA and Obama’s budget proposal are designed to drain all private capital into federal coffers. Obama and his Congressional allies cannot help but realize that this would destroy what capitalism -- or freedom -- is left in the U.S.

The first “bailout” was intended to sustain the creations or beneficiaries of a mixed economy. Ayn Rand pointed out in her 1972 article, “The Establishment of an Establishment,” that:

“In business, the rise of the welfare state froze the status quo, perpetuating the power of big corporations of the pre-income tax era, placing them beyond the competition of the tax-strangled newcomers. A similar process took place in the welfare state of the intellect. The results, in both fields, are the same.”***

Thus General Motors, AIG, Bank of America, and many other older companies which grew to mammoth size not only have benefited from the rise of the welfare state, but are the beneficiaries of federal favors. (AIG, or the American International Group, I should remark here, is especially culpable; together with Armand Hammer and other amoral Western businessmen with connections to government trade officials, it had close dealings with the Soviet Union and helped to sustain that totalitarian regime.)

The Obama regime aims to buy “stakes” in nominally private entities for the purpose of “socializing” them by directing their purposes and revenue. This is what happened in Fascist Italy and in Nazi Germany. Fascism and Nazism are hardly “right wing” political systems, as left-wingers claim; they are left-wing to the core. Presidents Clinton and the two Bushes prepared the way for Obama and Company with their own legislation; Obama and Company are ready to finalize the destruction of this country.

There is another noteworthy parallel. In 1763, at the end of the French and Indian War, George III issued a proclamation prohibiting colonial settlement in the lands west of the tramontane, or the Allegheny Mountain range, the better to regulate, control and tax the American colonists. A similar move is brewing in Congress to cut off the escape of private capital from federal taxation and confiscation to offshore banking havens, such as the Bahamas and Switzerland.

Captive economies such as that contemplated by Obama, Congress and their supporters outside of the government remain command economies for very brief periods of time -- unless they are buttressed by relatively freer economies. It explains the longevity of such totalitarian regimes as the Soviet Union, Red China, Cuba and North Korea, which for decades benefited from loans, subsidies and “trade” agreements granted by Western governments. Otherwise, such economies, if left to their own devices, simply atrophy and ultimately collapse. They are naturally asphyxiated by the absence of freedom.

The only American colonies to generate revenue for the Crown from the Stamp Act were Georgia, East and West Florida, and the Canadian and West Indian colonies. In all the other colonies Americans rebelled and refused to pay the taxes. Shipments of stamps were burned or were warehoused by distributors until they could be sent back to Britain. Royally appointed governors were impotent to enforce the Act. Every Crown-appointed stamp distributor was compelled to resign his commission. The rebellion was an overture to the Boston Tea Party of 1773 and ultimately to Lexington and Concord, Bunker Hill, and to the Declaration of Independence.

Whether or not the recent, numerous “tea parties” held across the country in protest against Obama’s and Congress’s plan to guile Americans into accepting slavery or servitude will have any lasting consequence or effect on Washington, remains to be seen. Whether or not the stock market continues to refuse to “rally” in response to Obama’s economic agenda, also remains to be seen.

But the fact that they have occurred is evidence there are countless Americans who regard recent and proposed legislation as intolerable. At the moment, it is hard to gauge if they possess the moral stamina required to consistently confront the behemoth of federal power. They will need intellectual guidance as well as courage. They will need ideas to let them know they are right. They will need the philosophy of Ayn Rand.

It is not enough for Americans to merely sense that the only moral and practical “stimulus” to economic recovery is freedom. They must know it. Only philosophy can give them that certitude.

And it is hard to judge if Obama, Congress and the collectivists will have the malice and vengeful bottom to call for their own Coercive Acts in answer to such resistance. Having come so close to conquering America, they may be tempted to try it. Just as the Crown, long before the Stamp Act was even enacted, was contemplating turning the American colonies into one huge camp of indentured servants, the “progressives” in this country have for decades plotted and drooled over the chance to achieve the same end.

Americans, beware! Obama, Congress and the collectivists are not the rattlesnakes that appeared on American militia flags, but together one stalking monitor lizard that bites its prey, poisons it with the venom of altruism, and waits for it to die of it before feeding on the carcass.

Long live Lady Liberty!

*Source: English Historical Documents: American Colonial Documents to 1776, ed. Merrill Jensen. London: Eyre & Spottiswoode (1964).
**The 1765 Tax Stamps for America, ed. Adolph Koeppel. American Revenue Association (1962).
***In Philosophy: Who Needs It. New York: Signet softcover (1982), p. 170.

Uncle Obama Wants You

noreply@blogger.com (Edward Cline) — Sat, 28 Feb 2009 16:46:00 +0000

When I finished reading and marking up a transcript of President Barack Obama’s address to the joint session of Congress on February 24, there was possibly as much of my own ink on the pages as in the speech itself. Numerous triple question marks highlighted blatant lies, half-truths, fallacies, ambiguities and generalizations pregnant with unspecified meanings. Several “Huh?’s” were linked to statements that made no sense at all. And sixty-one checkmarks were penned over bracketed instances of applause by Congress.

That was the result of just one pass at the speech. The experience was much like editing a James Joyce novel, which would also be an oxymoronic task, because no rules of grammar or logic or clarity would apply to that task, either. As I had remarked in another post, an Obama speech is yadda-yaddaism elevated to a high art. It is appropriate that his press secretary, Robert Gibbs, is an equivocating ignoramus with all the charisma of Elmer Fudd, and that his thuggish chief-of-staff, Rahm Emanuel, is staying out of sight.

It was the number of checkmarks for the applause that was scary. Listening to and watching Hitler rant shrilly in front of thousands of cheering and saluting Nazis never fails to send shivers up my spine. But Hitler never frightened me as much as did the mob entranced by his messianism and in gestalt with his message. Listening to and watching Obama speak to crowds, however, does not affect me personally. I know that he is a power-luster imbued with far fewer oratorical skills than had FDR, JFK, or even Hitler, and that he wishes to complete the job begun by his “progressive” predecessors over a century ago and transform the country from a republic into a national socialist state. There are plenty of such creatures around, in and out of office. But listening to Obama speak bores me to distraction, almost as much as having listened to former president George W. Bush stumble through a speech or trip over words and contradictions during press conferences.

What scares me more than Obama are his worshippers, his supporters, and anyone else who would approve of putting a gun to my head, picking my pockets, and marching me to a make-work program to assemble solar panels or smoking-cessation kits or to lay track for Harry Reid’s Los Angeles-to-Las Vegas magnetic rail line.

As was Hitler, George Bush and Barack Obama are nonentities, mediocrities. As was Bush, Obama is in a position of power not for any special talent for reaching it or for out-maneuvering his competitors for it. He is simply the most accommodating zero willing to echo the wishes and intentions of lesser power-seekers, such as George Soros, Nancy Pelosi, Ted Kennedy and John Kerry, to name but a few. Obama is the beneficiary of the collapse of philosophy and the implosion of political pragmatism.

“Now is the time to act boldly and wisely -- to not only revive this economy, but to build a new foundation for lasting prosperity…..That is what my economic agenda is designed to do, and that is what I’d like to talk to you about tonight.” (Applause)

What is the nature of that “foundation”? There was no answer, except the implication that it is the government and the Democrats who will be laying that foundation along fascist/socialist lines, leaving a “tired ideology” behind, one that belabored “trivialities” such as property rights and freedom. And, it is a measure of Obama’s own ignorance of economics and history that “prosperity” has never been the hallmark of any police state or any collectivized nation or of any command economy.

His ignorance and arrogance notwithstanding, Obama stated:

“I reject the view that says our problems will simply take care of themselves; that says government has no role in laying the foundation for our common prosperity,” Obama declared, echoing generations of American progressives before him. “For history tells us a different story. History reminds us that at every moment of economic upheaval and transformation, this nation has responded with bold action and big ideas.”

Which resulted in vast expansions of government power over the economy. As for the history of the role of the Industrial Revolution, of freedom of thought and action, of free minds and free markets, of the prosperity those things made possible, that history Obama is utterly blind to. That history doesn’t fit his vision of what America must become for him to be seen as its “savior.”

E.J. Dionne Jr., writing for The Washington Post on February 25, fervently endorsed Obama’s vision and revealed that Obama’s “faith-based initiative” has little to do with religion:

"Like Franklin Roosevelt, Obama sought to restore the public’s faith that the private economy would recover by bolstering confidence in government’s capacity to act rationally, creatively and efficiently.”

I will go out on a limb here and credit Obama and the Democrats with the repressed knowledge that the best way to “stimulate” the economy is to suspend all income and excise tax collection for a year or so, freeze all federal regulatory enforcement by cabinet and non-cabinet departments and agencies, fire all “non-essential” federal employees -- in short, to paraphrase John Galt in Ayn Rand’s novel, Atlas Shrugged, to get the hell out of the way and allow the economy to function rationally, creatively, and efficiently. Those actions would certainly “stimulate” economic recovery beyond any politician’s comprehension. But that would mean a relinquishment of power, and that is the last thing Obama and the Democrats want to do. After all, the temporary suspensions might become permanent, once enough Americans realized they didn’t need the government to “jump start” the economy or to give purpose to their lives.

And, one must wonder: Is he so ignorant of economics and history? Are the Democrats?

“Now, I’m proud that we passed a recovery plan free of earmarks -- (applause) -- and I want to pass a budget next year that ensures that each dollar we spend reflects only our most important national priorities.”

Whose priorities? Not those of any individual with a shred of self-esteem, a nominal commitment to reason, and a desire to live his own life in freedom guided by his own values. No, when Obama said “our most important national priorities” he meant his and those of virtually everyone’s in that chamber, which are the impoverishment of America and its dependence on and compliance with government priorities.

Obama is not changing the course of the country. He is following it. In this sense, nothing he has ever said is “radical.”

Nearly all of the sixty-one instances of ovation were led by House Speaker Nancy Pelosi. It was odd the way she was repeatedly the first to shoot up and begin clapping, and odd as well what she thought merited applause, although Obama in most instances had said nothing remarkable. It was a cue to the rest of the chamber to rise and join her. It was almost as though she was trying to stop people from thinking about what Obama had just said by drowning his words with the noisy sanction of applause.

It explains why, for example, Obama was able to get away with the lie that the bill was “free of earmarks.” I kept imagining that the instant, hurried applause stopped most Democratic Congressmen from ribbing each other in ribaldry, or scoffing up their collective sleeve, or just sitting quietly in the stony-faced denial of a liar invoking the Fifth Amendment against self-incrimination. The applause was in the nature of a combination of a triumph of the statist manifesto and repeated blank-outs of what it would actually accomplish, which, in virtually every goal, will be precisely the opposite of what Obama claimed it would.

As though to answer the volume of criticism of his “plan” to “revive” the economy and command it to regain “prosperity,” a volume that must have been monitored by his staff and the Democrats, Obama felt it necessary to state:

“Now, I know there are some in this chamber and watching at home who are skeptical of whether this plan will work. And I understand that skepticism. Here in Washington, we’ve all seen how quickly good intentions can turn into broken promises and wasteful spending. And with a plan of this scale comes enormous responsibility to get it right.” (No applause here; why draw attention to the contrary?)

Skeptical is hardly the adjective to describe the anger and incredulity of the criticism in the press, in some segments of the news media, on political blogs, and on talk radio. Skepticism, in Obama’s and the Democrats’ lexicon, is a synonym for reason. In this instance, reason recognizes that the $787 billion “stimulus” bill is a testament to broken promises and wasteful spending. So, he said, let’s pooh-pooh reason and believe it is not those things.

But, enough of the speech before Congress and the “stimulus” bill. Both have been exposed as the frauds they are here and elsewhere. What also deserves attention is Obama’s next economic “plan.” Of all the newspaper coverage of Obama’s proposed $3.6 trillion budget, The Washington Post of February 27 was the most straightforward about how that budget plan meshes with the “stimulus” plan:

“President Obama delivered to Congress yesterday a $3.6 trillion spending plan that would finance vast new investments in health care, energy independence and education by raising taxes on the oil and gas industry, hedge fund managers, multinational corporations and nearly 3 million of the nation’s top earners.”

Further on, the Post lets the cat out of the bag:

“With its immense scope and bold prescriptions, Obama’s agenda seeks to foster a redistribution of wealth, with the government working to narrow the growing gap between rich and poor.”

Remember Obama’s patronizing assurance to Joe the Plumber during the campaign, that he just wants to “spread the wealth around”? The Post, however, was merely the first to admit that Obama’s plan is one of “redistribution” (without employing the qualifying term socialist). Now the news media sense it is safe to repeat the term. It is only a matter of time before Congress and the news media feel arrogant enough to use the term socialist. Perhaps not. But the consequences will be the same. The "rich," or those earning over $250,000 annually, will be punished, looted, and vilified. We, the lower middle classes, will be expected to cheer and throw rocks at limousines.

In his new website announcement, “Organizing for America,” Obama condescended to release this message to his followers and supporters:

“The budget isn’t just a reflection of President Obama’s priorities. It’s a reflection of yours. This is the change you worked for and Americans demanded. But to make sure it succeeds, the President will need your help.”

Of course. Just submit to his will, like a Muslim, like a feudal serf, like a selfless manqué. Too many Americans are ready to heed his “call to prayers,” too many who believe that all one needs is faith to make sure Obama’s plan succeeds. These are the gnomes who worry me the most.

This is “democracy” in action -- against me.