This Der Speigel article says it all so well there’s really no point in doing much to comment further, other than to welcome Europeans to the growing “Obama is a colossal failure” camp.

Searching in Vain for the Obama Magic

By Gabor Steingart

AFP

President Barack Obama’s Tuesday speech left a bad taste in many mouths.

Never before has a speech by President Barack Obama felt as false as his Tuesday address announcing America’s new strategy for Afghanistan. It seemed like a campaign speech combined with Bush rhetoric — and left both dreamers and realists feeling distraught.

One can hardly blame the West Point leadership. The academy commanders did their best to ensure that Commander-in-Chief Barack Obama’s speech would be well-received.

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// ]]> Just minutes before the president took the stage inside Eisenhower Hall, the gathered cadets were asked to respond “enthusiastically” to the speech. But it didn’t help: The soldiers’ reception was cool.

One didn’t have to be a cadet on Tuesday to feel a bit of nausea upon hearing Obama’s speech. It was the least truthful address that he has ever held. He spoke of responsibility, but almost every sentence smelled of party tactics. He demanded sacrifice, but he was unable to say what it was for exactly.

An additional 30,000 US soldiers are to march into Afghanistan — and then they will march right back out again. America is going to war — and from there it will continue ahead to peace. It was the speech of a Nobel War Prize laureate.

Just in Time for the Campaign

For each troop movement, Obama had a number to match. US strength in Afghanistan will be tripled relative to the Bush years, a fact that is sure to impress hawks in America. But just 18 months later, just in time for Obama’s re-election campaign, the horror of war is to end and the draw down will begin. The doves of peace will be let free.

The speech continued in that vein. It was as though Obama had taken one of his old campaign speeches and merged it with a text from the library of ex-President George W. Bush. Extremists kill in the name of Islam, he said, before adding that it is one of the “world’s great religions.” He promised that responsibility for the country’s security would soon be transferred to the government of President Hamid Karzai — a government which he said was “corrupt.” The Taliban is dangerous and growing stronger. But “America will have to show our strength in the way that we end wars,” he added.

It was a dizzying combination of surge and withdrawal, of marching to and fro. The fast pace was reminiscent of plays about the French revolution: Troops enter from the right to loud cannon fire and then they exit to the left. And at the end, the dead are left on stage.

Obama’s Magic No Longer Works

But in this case, the public was more disturbed than entertained. Indeed, one could see the phenomenon in a number of places in recent weeks: Obama’s magic no longer works. The allure of his words has grown weaker.

It is not he himself who has changed, but rather the benchmark used to evaluate him. For a president, the unit of measurement is real life. A leader is seen by citizens through the prism of their lives — their job, their household budget, where they live and suffer. And, in the case of the war on terror, where they sometimes die.

Political dreams and yearnings for the future belong elsewhere. That was where the political charmer Obama was able to successfully capture the imaginations of millions of voters. It is a place where campaigners — particularly those with a talent for oration — are fond of taking refuge. It is also where Obama set up his campaign headquarters, in an enormous tent called “Hope.”

In his speech on America’s new Afghanistan strategy, Obama tried to speak to both places. It was two speeches in one. That is why it felt so false. Both dreamers and realists were left feeling distraught.

The American president doesn’t need any opponents at the moment. He’s already got himself.

I hope you don’t feel lonely, Barry.  If it makes you feel any better, I’m your opponent, too.

MSNBC’s Chris Matthews put it into crystal-clear perspective.  When Barack Obama gave his Afghanistan speech at West Point, he was entering “the enemy camp.”

That is a shocking admission, coming from the Obama-approved media.

You can understand it being “enemy territory” if Obama were to go to Afghanistan and address a Taliban training camp.  But West Point?  A U.S. military academy?  Just what kind of president is this man that his own military must be regarded as “the enemy”?

How is this not profoundly wrong?

Now, you might argue that Chris Matthews is just using a metaphor.  But it is simply a fact that Matthews is pretty clear that the West Point cadets did not positively respond to what Obama said to them.  They didn’t receive him well.  They don’t like his agenda.  And maybe they don’t even like him.

Liberals might regard that as a positive point about this president.  A liberal high school LATIN teacher asked a 17-year old future West Point cadet, “Why would you want to become a mindless killing machine?”

I have to share the young man’s answer to that despicable teacher, in the words of his proud father:

But our son looked at this guy in the eye and said, “Sir, there are people out there who want to kill us and I feel like I’m called to keep that from happening,” and I’d like to add that it only took them about two seconds to identify the mission, not three months, and he’s only 17.  You can imagine how much pride I feel in him for making such a statement and how outraged I was his teacher would even ask him that.

Like I said: liberals might regard it as a wonderful thing that the President of the United States would have a hostile relationship with the United States military.  I regard it as an damning indictment against a less-than-pathetic commander-in-chief that the guardians of our freedom who sacrifice themselves so that others might live free neither like him nor respect him.

Obama-approved mouthpiece Chris Matthews is correct in asserting that the United States military is like an enemy camp to Barack Obama.

Obama gave his speech at West Point in order to use the venue as a photo-op, and in fact to co-opt the cadets into appearing to support his policies.

It didn’t exactly work, as Der Speigel pointed out:

Just minutes before the president took the stage inside Eisenhower Hall, the gathered cadets were asked to respond “enthusiastically” to the speech. But it didn’t help: The soldiers’ reception was cool.

Let us put aside that this order, or “suggestion,” is yet another example of the same sort of “politically-correct” postmodernist multiculturalism that the Obama-warped military establishment accorded to a Muslim officer who was promoted even though he had been in contact with al-Qaeda some thirty times, and had an acronym for “soldier of Allah” emblazoned on his business cards.  (Not to mention the fact that the military has now so degenerated into political correctness that it is now treating terrorists like citizens, and Navy SEALs like terrorists).

What is wrong with this president that our future Army officers have to literally be told to be “enthusiastic” toward him?  And even then refuse to do so?

The following two paragraphs provide an answer why our future military officers feel as they do:

One didn’t have to be a cadet on Tuesday to feel a bit of nausea upon hearing Obama’s speech. It was the least truthful address that he has ever held. He spoke of responsibility, but almost every sentence smelled of party tactics. He demanded sacrifice, but he was unable to say what it was for exactly.

An additional 30,000 US soldiers are to march into Afghanistan — and then they will march right back out again. America is going to war — and from there it will continue ahead to peace. It was the speech of a Nobel War Prize laureate.

I would argue that what Chris Matthews statement about West Point being an “enemy camp” for Obama means is that Barack Obama is openly hostile to the United States military and everything it stands for.  Barack Obama has said he wants to “fundamentally change America,” and has vowed to “remake America.”  You can understand why people who love our countries’ traditions wouldn’t appreciate a man who hates those very same traditions.  These young future officers did not sign up to fight and die for Obama’s “remade” America.  They love the America of their forefathers, rather than the America of Barack Hussein’s Marxist visions.

It’s not just the U.S. Army that has quiet contempt for Barack Obama.  The U.S. Marines don’t care much for him either, judging by the “polite” response they gave him versus the wild cheering for their last real commander-in-chief:

When the men and women who are willing to put their lives on the line to protect the rest of us are quietly disgusted by their commander-in-chief, you should seriously contemplate these valiant warriors’ judgment.

I took a nap in front of a television, and dreamed I was being lectured to by this incredibly annoying, pontificating nerd.  When I woke up, Barack Obama was speaking.

In a nationally televised speech, Barack Obama assured the Taliban fighting U.S. troops in Afghanistan that they will have an exit strategy out of a bitter conflict.

“Don’t worry, brave and noble Taliban fighters, your long fight will not be in vain.  We will be here today, but gone tomorrow.  I promise you as a Democrat and a liberal that in 18 months, the ultimate victory will be yours, and then you can invite those al-Qaeda friends of yours to come back.”

Don’t worry, Obama didn’t actually say that, at least not in so many words.  But that is nevertheless the clear outcome of his policy.

I feel sorry for our troops.  They have just been told that they are being committed not to a war that they will be allowed to fight and win, but an abandonment to a lost cause that will end with cutting and running.

From the AP:

As President Barack Obama outlined his plan to send 30,000 extra troops to Afghanistan — while pledging to start bringing them home in 2011 — soldiers, Marines and their families interviewed by The Associated Press felt a tangle of fresh concerns and renewed hopes. Some took in the televised announcement as they played darts in a barroom near their base, while others watched from their living rooms.

“All I ask that man to do, if he is going to send them over there, is not send them over in vain,” said 57-year-old Bill Thomas of Jacksonville, N.C., who watched Obama’s televised speech in his living room, where photos of his three sons in uniform hang over the TV.

One of his sons, 23-year-old Cpl. Michael Thomas, is a Marine based at neighboring Camp Lejeune. He’ll deploy next year to Afghanistan.

An ex-Marine himself, Thomas said he supports Obama’s surge strategy. But he shook his head when the president announced a 2011 transition date to begin pulling out troops.

“If I were the enemy, I would hang back until 2011,” Thomas said. “We have to make sure that we are going go stay until the job is done. It ain’t going to be as easy as he thinks it is.”

Some troops chose to ignore Obama’s promise of a timetable of victory for the Taliban:

The president also began outlining an endgame to the war, saying troops would begin pulling out of Afghanistan in July 2011 — though he did not say when a withdrawal could be completed.

Army 1st Lt. Emily Stahl, who is preparing to deploy from Fort Campbell next spring, said she’s not going to focus on the timetable.

“We have to get the job done,” Stahl, 24, said after watching the speech from her home outside the Army post, where she serves in the 101st Airborne Division. “If we do what we’re supposed to do, the end of the war will come when it comes.”

But whether they ignore it or not, the decision has already been made: another Democrat president has promised to snatch defeat out of the jaws of victory by assuring the enemy of a future American retreat.

Of course, in addition to the decision to commit not to commit, Obama has blessed our soldiers fighting in Afghanistan with the spirit of indecisive dithering:

At the John Hoover Inn, a bar in Evans Mills, N.Y., near Fort Drum, a dozen soldiers watched the speech on a large-screen TV, drinking beer out of red cups. When Obama announced the troop increase, only one cheered, and the rest remained silent. They continued to play darts while the president was speaking.

“I’m just relieved to know where we’re going,” said Spc. Adam Candee, 29, of Chicago.

Theresa McCleod said she worries what Obama’s plans might mean for her husband, a soldier in the 10th Mountain Division at Fort Drum. She said he’s already done a long combat tours in Afghanistan and Iraq, leaving her to care for their three children.

“First he was supposed to be pulling everyone out, and now all the sudden he’s throwing everybody back into Afghanistan and it’s like nobody can really make up their minds,” McCleod said of Obama.

Don’t worry, Theresa.  You’re not the only one who’s confused about what the president is doing.  I mean, Barack Obama is the president, and he doesn’t have a clue what the president is doing.

The Obama administration says it was surprised at the corruption in Afghanistan.  Because, after all, who would ever have thunk that the world’s largest producer of opium and heroin would be corrupt?

In similar news that caught the Obama administration completely off guard, it was revealed that there is something called “sand” on the beach.

McChrystal wanted 80,000 troops, and said that he’d probably be able to make do with 40,000.  Obama not only gave McChrystal the lowball commitment, but then proceeded to actually lowball the lowball commitment.  As it is, General Stanley McChrystal will only receive 3/4 of the minimum number of troops he told his president he would absolutely need.

McChrystal has been sitting on his hands since he had the report ready in August.  You should be able to see why he’s been impatient:

The top U.S. and NATO commander in Afghanistan warns in an urgent, confidential assessment of the war that he needs more forces within the next year and bluntly states that without them, the eight-year conflict “will likely result in failure,” according to a copy of the 66-page document obtained by The Washington Post.

// <![CDATA[// <![CDATA[
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// ]]>Gen. Stanley A. McChrystal says emphatically: “Failure to gain the initiative and reverse insurgent momentum in the near-term (next 12 months) — while Afghan security capacity matures — risks an outcome where defeating the insurgency is no longer possible.”

So Obama spends basically four months dithering, only to announce that he will lowball the lowball troop commitment.  It’s going to take several months to get the troops to Afghanistan and get them ready to fight.

There won’t be a whole lot of time left in McChrystal’s “next 12 months” to avoid the “outcome where defeating the insurgency is no longer possible.”

But Obama – the president who thinks of everything – has resolved this otherwise unresolvable dilemma by ensuring that we ultimately abandon the country we’ve been fighting to rid of the Taliban to the very Taliban we’ve been fighting.

One of the fundamental promises of Democrats is that their massive takeover of health care would deliver lower costs, delivering an economy of scale.

The problem is that government has never been very good at lowering the cost of anything.  Quite the contrary.

And what has always been true before turns out to be true again.

Let’s get right to the nitty gritty of the CBO report:

“CBO and JCT estimate that the average premium per person covered (including dependents) for new nongroup policies would be about 10 percent to 13 percent higher in 2016 than the average premium for nongroup coverage in that same year under current law. About half of those enrollees would receive government subsidies that would reduce their costs well below the premiums that would be charged for such policies under current law,” the report says.

Now, Democrats are trying to argue that about the “about half of those enrollees” who would have lower premiums due to receiving government subsidies.  But understand: the costs are objectively higher by 10-13% than they would have been had we done absolutely nothing at all.  The mere fact that some people are getting transfer (i.e., welfare) payments from the government (i.e., from still more government taxing and borrowing) doesn’t in any way change that fact.

Stop and think about it: it would be a lot cheaper for the government to provide people with subsidies based on the lower costs of doing nothing else to mess with the health care system.  It is an outright fraud for Democrats to say they will lower costs.

I like the way Mitch McConnell put it:

“The bottom line is this: After 2,074 pages and trillions more in government spending, massive new taxes and a half-trillion dollars in cuts to Medicare for seniors, most people, according to the Congressional Budget Office, will end up paying more or seeing no significant savings,” Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.) said in a statement. The health insurance industry’s lobbying arms also proclaimed that the report confirmed their similar warnings.

This is just a terrible bill, and a terrible philosophy.

Democrats have done absolutely NOTHING that will reduce the costs of healthcare.  They are diametrically opposed to tort reform, which would lower the costs of premiums by lowering doctors’ exposure to risks, simply because the sharks – I mean lawyers – who sue everything that walks, crawls, swims or flies are a major Democrat special interest group.

In the same way, Democrats talk about “increasing competition,” and yet they are fundamentally opposed to actually doing anything of the sort.  A primary reason healthcare costs have increased so much is due to the fact that insurance companies are specifically forbidden from being allowed to compete across state lines.  Republicans want competition; Democrats do not.  Rather, Democrats want to continue to mandate special interests-based coverage by dictating to insurance companies what coverage they must offer.

The other thing is that Democrats talk about the fraud they are offering is “deficit neutral.”  It is no such thing.  They played budget gimmicks, taxing for four years before having to pay out any benefits.  If you look at the costs of the NEXT ten years – when benefits will actually be paid out for all ten years – the cost will be $2.5 trillion, rather than the $848 billion that the Demcorats talk about in their tax-for-ten-year-spend-for-six plan.

Taxes will be raised by over $500 billion.  Medicare will be cut by $500 billion.  $500 billion is another way of saying half a trillion dollars.  That’s how the Democrats get their “savings”: they bleed it from taxpayers, and they steal it from their previous commitments to senior citizens.

The Democrats’ bill raises taxes, guts Medicare, and raises premiums.  You can start to understand why the Dean of the Harvard School of Medicine gave the bill a failing grade.

This is what a massive scientific hoax looks like.

November 29, 2009
Climate change data dumped
Jonathan Leake, Environment Editor

SCIENTISTS at the University of East Anglia (UEA) have admitted throwing away much of the raw temperature data on which their predictions of global warming are based.

It means that other academics are not able to check basic calculations said to show a long-term rise in temperature over the past 150 years.

The UEA’s Climatic Research Unit (CRU) was forced to reveal the loss following requests for the data under Freedom of Information legislation.

The data were gathered from weather stations around the world and then adjusted to take account of variables in the way they were collected. The revised figures were kept, but the originals — stored on paper and magnetic tape — were dumped to save space when the CRU moved to a new building.

The admission follows the leaking of a thousand private emails sent and received by Professor Phil Jones, the CRU’s director. In them he discusses thwarting climate sceptics seeking access to such data.

In a statement on its website, the CRU said: “We do not hold the original raw data but only the value-added (quality controlled and homogenised) data.”

The CRU is the world’s leading centre for reconstructing past climate and temperatures. Climate change sceptics have long been keen to examine exactly how its data were compiled. That is now impossible.

Roger Pielke, professor of environmental studies at Colorado University, discovered data had been lost when he asked for original records. “The CRU is basically saying, ‘Trust us’. So much for settling questions and resolving debates with science,” he said.

Jones was not in charge of the CRU when the data were thrown away in the 1980s, a time when climate change was seen as a less pressing issue. The lost material was used to build the databases that have been his life’s work, showing how the world has warmed by 0.8C over the past 157 years.

He and his colleagues say this temperature rise is “unequivocally” linked to greenhouse gas emissions generated by humans. Their findings are one of the main pieces of evidence used by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, which says global warming is a threat to humanity.

“Trust us.”  That’s what it all boils down to.

Silly me, but I thought “science” was supposed to amount to something more than that.

Here’s your bottom line: global warming, climate change, or whatever you want to call it, is a load of nonsense.  And the only anthropogenic or “man-made” problem is the giant sack of lies that an elitist group of pseudo-scientific ideologues  sold us.

One of the emails simply demonstrates what patently bad “science” global warming has been in the first place.  At its core, science is an endeavor which predicts a certain measurable outcome, and then attempts to determine whether that prediction is verified in nature according to a fair, open, and repeatable process.  Global warming isn’t even close to being science by the very standards of science:

At the end of 2008, the scientists at East Anglia predicted that 2009 would be one of the warmest years on record:

On December 30, climate scientists from the UK Met Office and the University of East Anglia projected 2009 will be one of the top five warmest years on record. Average global temperatures for 2009 are predicted to be 0.4∞C above the 1961-1990 average of 14 ∫ C. A multiyear forecast using a Met Office climate model indicates a rapid return of global temperature to the long-term warming trend, with an increasing probability of record temperatures after 2009.

We know now that the alarmists’ prediction for 2009 didn’t come true.

But bad science wasn’t all these global warming alarmists were guilty of.  They were also guilty of making skeptics of their bogus man-caused global warming alarmism modern versions of Galileo (I’ve previously written about this chilling development in postmodernized academia to punish politically “incorrect” academics and scientists).  They used the peer-review process as an ideological club to attack and undermine fellow scientists rather than using it as a means to get at the truth:

Dating back to 1996, the emails show that both U.S. and U.K. based scientists referred to any research offering alternate viewpoints as “disinformation”,“misinformation” or “crap” that needs to be kept out of the public domain.

The emails include deliberations amongst the scientists regarding efforts to make sure that reports from the UN’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change include their own research and exclude that of dissenting scientists.

In one of the emails, Phil Jones, the director of the East Anglia climate center, suggested to climate scientist Michael Mann of Penn State University We “will keep them out somehow — even if we have to redefine what the peer-review literature is!”

This is a startling quote, given that Jones and Mann as climate scientists have the authority to review papers and determine whether they are eligible to be published by scientific journals.

Mann even discussed how to destroy a journal that had published papers with contrary views, telling his colleagues that he believed it had been “hijacked by a few skeptics on the editorial board” who had “staged a coup”.

“Perhaps we should encourage our colleagues in the climate research community to no longer submit to, or cite papers in, this journal.” Mann wrote.

One article, entitled, how “The Alarmists Do “Science:” A Case Study,” describes just “one of many exchanges that shed light on the priority that the global warming alarmists give to politics and career advancement over science.”  The author provides a fairly lengthy segment of an email conversation that is frankly chilling.

Another article compiles emails under the title, “When In Doubt, Delete,” that documents a pattern of deceptive behavior by people who called themselves “scientists” and yet were more interested in destroying evidence than producing and preserving it.

There are so many emails to go over no single article can do so, but here’s a few tidbits:

From a Powerline article entitled, “Global Warming Bombshell“:

They also suggest that pro-global warming scientists fudge data to get the results they are looking for. Just over a month ago, on September 28, 2009, Tom Wigley wrote to Phil Jones of the Hadley Centre about his efforts to get the right-sized “blip” in temperatures of the 1940s:

Phil, Here are some speculations on correcting SSTs to partly explain the 1940s warming blip. If you look at the attached plot you will see that the land also shows the 1940s blip (as I’m sure you know). So, if we could reduce the ocean blip by, say, 0.15 degC, then this would be significant for the global mean — but we’d still have to explain the land blip.

I’ve chosen 0.15 here deliberately. This still leaves an ocean blip, and i think one needs to have some form of ocean blip to explain the land blip (via either some common forcing, or ocean forcing land, or vice versa, or all of these). When you look at other blips, the land blips are 1.5 to 2 times (roughly) the ocean blips — higher sensitivity plus thermal inertia effects. My 0.15 adjustment leaves things consistent with this, so you can see where I am coming from. Removing ENSO does not affect this.

It would be good to remove at least part of the 1940s blip, but we are still left with “why the blip”.

This and many other emails convey the impression that these theorists are making the “science” up as they go along, with data being manipulated until it yields the results that have been predetermined by political conviction.

One email from Phil Jones is particularly damning about “scientists” making up their own version of “science” in order to sell an ideology:

I’ve just completed Mike’s Nature trick of adding in the real temps to each series for the last 20 years (ie from 1981 onwards) amd [sic] from 1961 for Keith’s to hide the decline.

A RealClearPolitics article entitled, “ClimateGate: The Fix Is In” explains what the “trick” is:

Anthony Watts provides an explanation of this case in technical detail; the “trick” consists of selectively mixing two different kinds of data-temperature “proxies” from tree rings and actual thermometer measurements-in a way designed to produce a graph of global temperatures that ends the way the global warming establishment wants it to: with an upward “hockey stick” slope.

A “trick” to “hide the decline.”  And these demagogues call US “deniers.”

As loathsome of a collection of frauds as our global warming “scientists” have proven to be, they don’t hold a candle to the mainstream media propagandists who made this colossal hoax possible in the first place – and who are still trying to conceal the fraud even now.

Barack Obama is going to go to Copenhagen to sign some pathologically insane economy-destroying accord because he is a true believer in the religion of liberalism.

And that is what global warming has now been proven to be: a religion.  It is an ideology advanced by religious fanatics.  This latest admission proves they have no raw data; they have no “science”; all they have is a rabid faith commitment that their own self-created narratives must be true because they believe it is true.

Can someone give me an “Amen”?

Or maybe you can figure out how to sing the following story to the tune of “Ding Dong the Witch is Dead” from The Wizard of Oz.

Turning Point: Couric Rips Obama

Sunday, November 29, 2009
By: Special From Newsmax’ Most Informed Sources

Katie Couric may be best known for her unflattering interview with Sarah Palin. But her nightly news broadcast this past Monday night may be an indicator that the big liberal media are now turning their guns on Obama.

Couric said on “CBS Evening News” that Americans are growing “disenchanted” with Obama and are openly questioning his credibility.

“Is the honeymoon over?” anchor Couric said at the beginning of her correspondent’s report.

[Couric went on to say]:

“Although President Obama has been in office less than a year, many Americans are growing disenchanted with his handling of the enormous problems he and the country are facing, from healthcare to unemployment to Afghanistan.

“His poll numbers are sliding, and at least one poll shows his job approval rating has fallen, for the first time, below 50 percent.”

Correspondent Chris Reid chimed in: “The president is getting battered on everything from the economy to foreign policy.  Some polls show Americans are increasingly questioning his credibility.”

The report asserted that while Obama talks about dealing with unemployment, which is over 10 percent and expected to rise, he has developed “no new ideas” for dealing with the problem.

CBS also cited a poll showing that only 14 percent of Americans believe Obama’s claim that healthcare reform won’t add to the budget deficit, and only 7 percent believe that the stimulus has created any jobs at all.

The report also criticized the president for being “indecisive” on Afghanistan, and for returning from his recent Asian trip “with little to show for it.”

An expert was quoted as describing his trip as the “amateur hour,” as he did not line up agreements with foreign countries before venturing abroad.

You can just see a despairing Obama saying, “If I’ve lost Couric, I’ve lost snooty America.”

I’d pretty much put it this way:

Spot the fake poser in the following photo:

And, of course, your instantaneously supposed to form the conclusion, “Hey wait a minute: they’re both fake posers!”

You see, for me, Michaele Salahi is a metaphor for Barack Obama.  Because just as the White house is now growing “disenchanted” with the former guest whom they foolishly let in to a state dinner, the country is now growing “disenchanted” with the man they foolishly elected to the aforementioned White House.

But of course, in a moment of poetic justice, Katie Couric – who was so late to the game in even allowing any hint to come out of her in-the-tank network that the president she helped elect is a dishonest fraud and poser who doesn’t know the difference between the economy and the giant hole in the ground that he’s burying it in (whew!) – also posed with the same fake poser:

The big difference here is that Katie Couric – with all of her impressive “journalist” skills – has probably figured out that Michaele Salahi was a fake and a poser a lot faster than she figured it out about Barack Obama.

The mainstream media will be dragged kicking and screaming to the truth and to fair and honest reporting.  And the only reason they are beginning to tell the truth about what a loser Barack Obama is as a president is the fact that their viewers already realize that Obama is a loser, and will start leaving their networks in droves unless the “journalists” at least occasionally report the truth.

Liberals think that the title of Jonah Goldberg’s book Liberal Fascism is an oxymoron.  They’re wrong.  Goldberg himself writes:

“For more than sixty years, liberals have insisted that the bacillus of fascism lies semi-dormant in the bloodstream of the political right.  And yet with the notable and complicated exceptions of Leo Strauss and Allan Bloom, no top-tier American conservative intellectual was a devotee of Nietzsche or a serious admirer of Heidegger.  All major conservative schools of thought trace themselves back to the champions of the Enlightenment–John Locke, Adam Smith, Montesquieu, Burke–and none of them have any direct intellectual link to Nazism or Nietzsche, to existentialism, nihilism, or even, for the most part, Pragmatism.  Meanwhile, the ranks of the leftwing intellectuals are infested with ideas and thinkers squarely in the fascist tradition.  And yet all it takes is the abracadabra word “Marxist” to absolve most of them of any affinity with these currents.  The rest get off the hook merely by attacking bourgeois morality and American values–even though such attacks are themselves little better than a reprise of fascist arguments” [page 175].

“Foucault’s “enterprise of Unreason,” Derrida’s tyrannical logocentrism, Hitler’s “revolt against reason.”  All fed into a movement that believes action is more important than ideas.  Deconstructionism, existentialism, postmodernism, Pragmatism, relativism: all these ideas had the same purpose–to erode the iron chains of tradition, dissolve the concrete foundations of truth, and firebomb the bunkers where the defenders of the ancient regime still fought and persevered.  These were ideologies of the “movement.”  The late Richard Rorty admitted as much, conflating Nietzsche and Heidegger with James and Dewey as part of the same grand project” [Goldberg, Liberal Fascism, page 176].

It turns out that most of the moral and philosophical assumptions of liberalism have been shared by not only the Marxists, but the Nazis as well.  NAZI stood for “National Socialist German Workers Party,” and was merely a rival brand of the clearly leftist political ideology of socialism.  And given the fact that Marxism was in fact every bit as totalitarian and murderous as Nazism, in hindsight it seems rather bizarre that “Marxist” was ever an abracadabra word that the American left was willing to bear to begin with.

The purpose of this article is to explore how the foundational ideas that liberals uphold as being the opposite of fascism in fact actually fed the monster of fascist Nazism, and how the modern American left continue to fall prey to fascist premises and outcomes to this very day.

It is particularly interesting that the supposedly highly individualistic and influential school of thought known as “existentialism” became so ensnared by fascism and Nazism.  On the surface, existentialism would seem to be the very polar opposite of fascism and Nazism.  After all, a philosophy of radical freedom centered in the individual would surely be incompatible with a totalitarian social system that denies political liberty in the name of the community.  One would assume that existentialism would be a philosophy of rebellion against all such external authority.  And yet the Nazis quoted Frederich Nietzsche at great length in support of their ideology (see also here).  Martin Heidegger, one of the foremost existentialist thinkers in history, turned out to have been a proud member of the Nazi Party.  And even famed existentialist Jean-Paul Sartre – who fought to resist fascism in his Nazi-occupied France during WWII – ultimately merely chose another totalitarian ideology in its place (Sartre identified himself as a Marxist and a Maoist).

Georg Lukács observed (in The Destruction of Reason, 1954, page 5) that tracing a path to Hitler involved the name of nearly every major German philosopher since Hegel: Schopenhauer, Nietzsche, Dilthy, Simmel, Scheler, Heidegger, Jaspers, Weber.  Rather than merely being amoral monsters, the Nazis emerged out of a distinguished liberal secular humanist intellectual tradition.

Max Weinreich documented in Hitler’s Professors: The Part of Scholarship in Germany’s Crimes against the Jewish People, an exhaustive study of the complicity of German intellectuals with the Nazi regime.  Far from opposing the Nazi regime, we find that German academia actively provided the intellectual justification for Nazi fascism as well as the conceptual framework for the Holocaust.  Weinreich does not claim that German scholars intended the Holocaust, but he argues that the Holocaust would not have been possible without them.

He asks, “Did they administer the poison?  By no means; they only wrote the prescription.”

How could such a thing happen?

Very easily, it turns out.

The existentialists (along with the secular humanists and the liberals), deny the transcendent, deny objective truth, and deny the objective morality that derive from transcendence and objective truth.  Rather than any preordained system – whether moral or theological – existentialist anchored meaning not to any ideals or abstractions, but in the individual’s personal existence.  Life has no ultimate meaning; meaning is personal; and human beings must therefore create their own meaning for themselves.

One should already begin to see the problem: since existentialism, by its very nature, refuses to give objective answers to moral or ideological questions, a particular existentialist might choose to follow either a democrat or totalitarian ideology – and it frankly doesn’t matter which.  All that matters is that the choice be a genuine choice.

Existentialists didn’t merely acknowledge this abandonment of transcendent morality, they positively reveled in it.  In his book St. Genet, Jean-Paul Sartre celebrated the life of a criminal.  Genet was a robber, a drug dealer, and a sexual deviant.  By all conventional moral standards, Genet was an evil man.  But for Sartre, even ostensibly evil actions could be moral if they were performed in “good faith.”  And since Sartre’s Genet consciously chose to do what he did, and took responsibility for his choices and his actions, he was a saint in existentialist terms.

And the problem becomes even worse: by rejecting the concepts of transcendence, objective meaning, truth, and moral law, and by investing ultimate authority in the human will (i.e. Nietzsche’s “will to power”, Hitler’s “triumph of the will”), existentialism played directly into the hands of fascism — which preached the SAME doctrines.  If fascism can be defined as “violent and practical resistance against the process of transcendence,” as Ernst Nolte defined it, then it’s affinities with existentialism are crystal clear.  The two movements became part of the same stream of thought.

Modern Nietzsche followers argue that Nietzsche was not a racial anti-Semite.  For the sake of argument maybe he wasn’t; but he was without any question an intellectual anti-Semite, who attacked the Jews for their ideas and their ethics — particularly as they contributed to Western civilization and to Christianity (which he also actively despised).  And in addition to Nietzsche’s intellectual anti-Semitism was his utter contempt for any form of abstractions — particularly as they related to the transcendental categories of morality and reason.  Nietzsche maintained that abstraction of life resulted from abstraction of thought.  And he blamed Christianity – which he rightly blamed as a creation of the Jews – for the denial of life manifested in Christian morality.

And, unlike most pseudo-intellectuals of today, Nietzsche was consistent: in his attack against Christianity, he attacked Judeo-Christian morality.  He attacked the Christian value of other-centered love, and argued that notions of compassion and mercy favored the weak and the unfit, thereby breeding more weakness.  Don’t you dare think for a single nanosecond that Hitler didn’t take the arguments of this beloved-by-liberals philosopher and run down the field with them toward the death camps.

The Nazis aligned themselves not only against the Jews but against the the Judeo-Christian God and the Judeo-Christian morality the Jews represented.  A transcendent lawgiving God, who reveals His moral law on real tablets of stone for mankind to follow, was anathema to the fascists.  They argued that such transcendence alienates human beings from nature and from themselves (i.e., from their own genuine choices).  The fascist intellectuals sought to forge a new spirituality of immanence, focused upon nature, on human emotions, and on the community.  The fascists sought to restore the ancient pre-Christian consciousness, the ancient mythic sensibility in the form of the land and the blood, in which individuals experience unity with nature, with each other, and with their own deepest impulses.

Gene Edward Veith in his book Modern Fascism: Liquidating the Judeo-Christian worldview writes:

The fascist rebellion against transcendence restored the ancient pagan consciousness.  With it came barbarism, a barbarism armed with modern technology and intellectual sophistication.  The liquidation of the transcendent moral law and “Jewish” conscience allowed the resurgence of the most primitive and destructive emotions, the unleashing of original sin (page 14).

Nietzsche argued that God is dead, and Hitler tried to finish Him off by eradicating the Jews.  What is less known is that he also planned to solve the “church problem” after the war.  Hitler himself  said:

“The war is going to be over.  The last great task of our age will be to solve the church problem.  It is only then that the nation will be wholly secure” [From Hitler's Tabletalk (December 1941), quoted in The Nazi Years: A Documentary History, ed. Joachim Remak, 1990, page 105].

Hitler boasted that “I have six divisions of SS composed of men absolutely indifferent in matters of religion.  It doesn’t prevent them from going to their deaths with serenity in their souls.”  And Himmler said, “Men who can’t divest themselves of manners of previous centuries, and scoff and sling mud at things which are ‘holy’ and matters of belief to others, once and for all do not belong in the SS.”

With the creed “God is dead” and the resulting “death of God,” Nietzsche predicted that energizing conflict and revolution would reemerge in a great wave of nihilism.  Human beings would continue to evolve, he said, nodding to Darwinism.  And man would ultimately give way to Superman.  And Nietzsche said that this Superman would not accept the anachronistic abstract, transcendental meanings imposed by disembodied Judeo-Christian rationalism or by a life-denying religion.  Rather, this Superman would CREATE meaning for himself and for the world as a whole.

The Superman, according to Nietzsche, would be an artist who could shape the human race – no longer bound by putrefying and stultifying and stupefying transcendence – to his will.  “Man is for him an un-form, a material, an ugly stone that needs a sculptor,” he wrote.  Such a statement did not merely anticipate the Darwinist-based Nazi eugenics movement.  It demonstrated how the exaltation of the human will could and would lead not to general liberty, as one might have expected, but to the control of the many by the elite — with those of the weaker in will being subjugated to the will of the Supermen.

Nietzsche’s new ethic became the rationale for all the Nazi atrocities that would follow.  As Nietzsche himself put it, “The weak and the failures shall perish: the first principle of OUR love of man.  And they shall even be given every possible assistance.  What is more harmful than any vice? Active pity for all the failures and the weak: Christianity” (in “The Anti-Christ” in Portable Nietzsche, p. 570).  We see here also the exemplification of yet another legacy left behind by Nietzsche that was picked up by the Nazi and afterward by secular humanist atheists today: the Nietzschean attitude of flippant, sarcastic contempt for all the ordinary human values that had resulted from Judeo-Christianity.

One of the ordinary human values that had resulted from Judeo-Christianity was the fundamental sanctity of human life.  But the Nazis had their own concept – Lebensunwertes Leben (“life unworthy of life”).  And nearly fifty million of the most innocent and helpless human beings have perished as a result of an existentialist philosophy that survived the fall of the Nazis in liberal thought, which celebrates pro-existentialist “pro-choice” above human life.

Nietzsche’s philosophy underlies the thought of all the later existentialists, and the darker implications of his thought proved impossible to ignore.

And Martin Heidegger, in his own personal choice to commit himself to National Socialism, did not ignore them.

There is more that needs to be understood.

Martin Heidegger invoked Nietzsche in his 1933 Rectoral Address, in his speech entitled, “The Self-Assertion of the German University,” in which he articulated his commitment to the integration of academia with National Socialism.  He began by asking, if Nietzsche is correct in saying that God is dead, what are the implications for knowledge?

As Heidegger explained, if God is dead, there is no longer a transcendent authority or reference point for objective truth.  Whereas classical thought, exemplified by the Greeks, could confidently search for objective truth, today, after the death of God, truth becomes intrinsically “hidden and uncertain.”  Today the process of questioning is “no longer a preliminary step that is surmounted on the way to the answer and thus to knowing; rather, questioning itself becomes the highest form of knowing.”

Heidegger’s conclusion became accepted to the point of becoming a commonplace of contemporary liberal thought: that knowledge is a matter of process, not content.  With the death of God, there is no longer any set of absolutes or abstract ideals by which existence must be ordered.  Such “essentialism” is an illusion; and knowledge in the sense of objective, absolute truth must be challenged.  The scholar is not one who knows or searches for some absolute truth, but the one who questions everything that pretends to be true.

Again, one would think that such a skeptical methodology would be highly incompatible with fascism, with its practice of subjecting people to an absolute human authority.  And yet this betrays a fundamental misunderstanding of fascism.  In fact, Heidegger’s Rectoral Address was warmly endorsed by the National Socialists for a very good reason: the fascists saw themselves as iconoclasts, interrogating the old order and boldly challenging all transcendent absolutes.

We find that in this same address in which Heidegger asserts that “questioning itself becomes the highest form of knowing,” Heidegger went on to advocate expelling academic freedom from the university:

“To give oneself the law is the highest freedom.  The much-lauded ‘academic freedom’ will be expelled from the university.”

Heidegger argued that the traditional canons of academic freedom were not genuine but only negative, encouraging “lack of concern” and “arbitrariness.”  Scholars must become unified with each other and devote themselves to service.  In doing so, he stated, “the concept of the freedom of German students is now brought back to it’s truth.”

Now, the claim that freedom would somehow emerge when academic freedom is eliminated might be sophistry of the worst kind, but it is not mere rhetorical doublespeak.  Why?  Because Heidegger was speaking existentially, calling not for blind obedience, but for a genuine commitment of the will.  Freedom was preserved because “to give oneself the law” was a voluntary, freely chosen commitment.  Academic freedom as the disinterested pursuit of truth shows “arbitrariness,” parking of the old essentialist view that truth is objective and transcendent.  The essentialist scholar is detached and disengaged, showing “lack of concern,” missing the sense in which truth is ultimately personal, a matter of the will, demanding personal responsibility and choice.  In the new order, the scholar will be fully engaged in service to the community.  Academic freedom is alienating, a function of the old commitment to moral and intellectual absolutes.

And what this meant in practice could be seen in the Bavarian Minister of Culture’s directive to professors in Munich, that they were no longer to determine whether something “is true, but whether it is in keeping with the direction of the National Socialist revolution” (Hans Schemm, quoted in Hermann Glaser, The Cultural Roots of National Socialism, tr. Ernest A. Menze, 1978, p. 99).

I point all of the above out to now say that it is happening all over again, by intellectuals who unknowingly share most of the same tenets that made the horror possible the last time.

We live in a time and in a country in which the all-too modern left has virtually purged the university of conservatives and conservative thought.  This is simply a fact that is routinely confirmed.  And as a mater of routine, conservative speakers need not apply at universities.  If they are actually invited to speak, they are frequently shouted down by a relative few liberal activists.  And leftwing censorship is commonplace.  Free speech is largely gone, in a process that simply quashes unwanted views.  We have a process today in which a professor who is himself employing fascist tactics calls a student “a fascist bastard.”  And why did he do so?  Because the student gave a speech in a speech class choosing a side on a topic that the professor did not like.

We live in a society in which too many of our judges have despised a system of objective laws from an objective Constitution and have imposed their own will upon both.  Judicial activist judges have largely driven transcendent religion and the transcendent God who gives objective moral laws out of the public sphere.

Today, we live in a society that will not post the Ten Commandments – the epitome of transcendent divinely-ordained moral law – in public schools.  And why not?  Because judges ruled that:

“If the posted copies of the Ten Commandments are to have any effect at all, it will be to induce the schoolchildren to read, meditate upon, perhaps to venerate and obey, the Commandments,” which, the Court said, is “not a permissible state objective under the Establishment Clause.”

One can only marvel that such justices so cynically debauched the thought of the founding fathers whose ideas they professed to be upholding.

Justices of the Supreme Court agreed with this fallacious ruling even as the figure of Moses holding the Ten Commandments rules atop the very building in which they betrayed our nation’s founding principles.

And thus the left has stripped the United States of America bare of transcendent moral law, just as their intellectual forebears did prior to WWII in Nazi Germany.   And thus the intellectual left has largely stripped the United States of America from free debate within academia largely by pursuing the same line of reasoning that Nazi philosopher Martin Heidegger employed to do the same in Nazi Germany.  We saw this very feature evidenced by leftist scientists who threw aside their scientific ethics in order to purge climatologists who came to a different conclusion.

The climate that led to fascism and to Nazism in Germany did not occur overnight, even though the final plunge may have appeared to be such to an uninformed observer.  It occurred over a period of a half a dozen decades or so, with the transcendent and objective moral foundations having been systematically torn away.  And after that degree of cancer had been reached, it only took the right leader or the right event to plunge the world into madness.

The United States under Barack Obama look like a ship of fools captained by the grand fool.  The only question is whether Iran made Americans look like fools, or whether Obama made Americans look like fools.

I submit that the latter is the case.  Because any fool knew what game Iran was playing.  And yet Obama – out of arrogance, ignorance, and naivete – utterly failed to understand.  And continues to fail to understand.

A full month ago Iran reneged on an apparent deal to provide its nuclear fuel to France to process it for them.  Even had Iran fulfilled the deal, it was based on a fools’ premise; that premise being that Iran had not secretly processed any other uranium.

Iran’s negotiators have toughened their stance on the nuclear programme, signalling that Tehran will refuse to go ahead with an agreement to hand over 75 per cent of its enriched uranium. . .

Iran has amassed at least 1.4 tons of low-enriched uranium inside its underground plant in Natanz. If this was further enriched to weapons-grade level – a lengthy process – it would be enough for one nuclear weapon.

But Iran agreed to export 75 per cent of this stockpile to Russia and then France, where it would have been converted into fuel rods for use in a civilian research reactor in Tehran. This would have been a significant step towards containing Iran’s nuclear ambitions.

Before talks, however, Iranian officials signalled they would renege. “Iran wants to directly buy highly-enriched uranium without sending its own low-level uranium out of the country,” reported a state television channel.

What kind of people continue to negotiate with a country that has already said it would renege on whatever deal they subsequently make?  Does the word “fools” not seem in order here?

Three weeks ago we learned that Iran had secretly tested an advanced nuclear warhead design – a strange thing for a country that isn’t attempting to build nuclear weapons to do, one would think.

The UN’s nuclear watchdog has asked Iran to explain evidence suggesting that Iranian scientists have experimented with an advanced nuclear warhead design, the Guardian has learned.

The very existence of the technology, known as a “two-point implosion” device, is officially secret in both the US and Britain, but according to previously unpublished documentation in a dossier compiled by the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA), Iranian scientists may have tested high-explosive components of the design. The development was today described by nuclear experts as “breathtaking” and has added urgency to the effort to find a diplomatic solution to the Iranian nuclear crisis.

No harm, no foul.  And certainly no rush.  Remember, we’re fools.

Now the SAME IAEA which only a few weeks ago was saying, “Nothing to see here, folks,” is now saying that Iran has been systematically covering up what is very obviously a nuclear weapons program.

The outgoing head of the International Atomic Energy Agency said Thursday his probe of Iran’s nuclear program is at “a dead end” and that trust in Tehran’s credibility is shrinking after its belated revelation that it was secretly building a nuclear facility.

Mohamed ElBaradei’s blunt criticism of the Islamic Republic — four days before he leaves office — was notable in representing a broad convergence with Washington’s opinion, which for years was critical of the IAEA chief for what it perceived as his softness on Iran.

Six years of constant stonewalling all made up for by issuing one pitiful statement before leaving office.  Good job, ElBaradeid, you dirtbag.

If Iran does not comply this time, you can bet a politely-worded letter will surely follow.

JERUSALEM, Israel November 24, 2009
John Bolton Was Right After All

(CBS)   Richard Grenell served as the spokesman for the last four U.S. Ambassadors to the United Nations: Zalmay Khalilzad, John Bolton, John Danforth and John Negroponte.
I certainly don’t expect the New York Times to admit that one of their greatest bogeymen turned out to be correct about Iran’s nuclear game-playing. However, the Times Editorial Board did once say “John Bolton is right.  Kofi Annan is wrong.”

Unfortunately it wasn’t about the Iran nuclear issue they were talking about – it was about his opposition to the UN’s ineffective Human Rights Council.

Nevertheless, someone needs to say it now. John Bolton was right.

When the Obama Administration proclaimed victory on October 1st by announcing that a break-through had been reached in Geneva and that Iran had committed to shipping 2,600 pounds of fuel to Russia, expert Iran watchers were appropriately cynical. Bolton cautioned, yet again, that the Iranians had used some of the same diplomatic nuances they had been using for years to successfully buy more time to continue enriching uranium and fake cooperation with the international community.

Usually, the Europeans were the first to take the bait but this time the Obama Administration got hooked first. Bolton, however, was the first to stand up and call the Iranian pronouncement a sham – and he did it within hours of the announcement.

But as Obama officials were rushing to pat themselves on the back and the New York Times was proclaiming atop the paper “Iran Agrees to Send Enriched Uranium to Russia,” Iranian officials were telling reporters that they had not committed to anything. The Iranians called it “an agreement in principle” – code words for “we’d like to but…”

The Times’ reporter in Geneva, however, was taking what the Obama officials were saying and running wildly with the incredible news. Surprisingly, or maybe not, the Times had either not checked with Iranian officials or ignored their warnings in favor of the Obama Administration’s good news. Roughly a month later, the Iranian official statements confirmed the fact that the Obama Administration had been duped. The Times subsequently inched its way back to reality through multiple follow-up stories that increasingly showed skepticism in the Victory claims culminating with October 30th’s headline “Tehran Rejects Nuclear Accord.”

Today, while the Iranians reprocess more fuel, the Obama team continues to compromise and offer even more incentives to them. No wonder Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad is waiting – the deal keeps getting sweeter. President Obama has offered the Iranians more time, more sites to place their illegal fuel, more personal correspondence with the Ayatollah, more excuses as to what happened to the original deal they announced and no Chinese and Russian arm-twisting. The Obama team also keeps claiming that if Iran ships 2600 pounds of fuel out to Russia for re-processing then Iran will be unable to pose a nuclear threat for at least a year.

This often told claim is a dangerous calculation based on an assumption that Iran doesn’t have more hidden fuel (we just found out about another reprocessing plant in September) and can’t quickly convert what would remain if the plan had been accepted. Additionally, the low enriched uranium in question was produced in violation of UN Security Council resolutions so any deal to help Iran convert illegal fuel undermines Security Council credibility. The naivety of President Obama could be chalked up to hope and inexperience in foreign policy matters if it wasn’t routinely and consistently happening.

Bolton should know. No American Ambassador has produced more Security Council Resolutions on the issue of Iran than John Bolton. Bolton was able to produce three UN Security Council resolutions on Iran, two with the increasing pressure of sanctions. The deadlines in the resolutions that Bolton insisted upon were kept mainly because he held his counterparts to their word.

When Iran tried to manipulate the process by asking for more time, more talks or giving empty and last minute commitments, Bolton enforced the deadlines. Bolton was incredibly patient and willing to have round the clock negotiations but in the end forced a vote of the Security Council to the dismay of the Europeans and the consternation of Russian and China. It’s true that John Bolton would not win the most popular Ambassador award at the UN but being popular shouldn’t be the priority.

I hope that the Obama team can now see that being popular at the UN doesn’t get us support from the Europeans on sanctions resolutions or an affirmative vote from Russia and China. If it did, President Obama would have passed another Security Council Resolution on Iran, North Korea and Sudan by now. Obama is so popular in foreign countries that one begins to wonder who is happier. But being popular only means you aren’t asking Countries to do anything different.

This month, the world is seeing the pressure turned down on Iran to give up its nuclear ambitions. France’s Foreign Minister has signaled their refusal to block shipments of refined fuel to Iran, Russian Foreign Minister Lavrov called sanctions “counterproductive when there are talks underway” and China needs Iran’s oil so badly that it not only is refusing to consider further sanctions but is cutting new energy deals with Iran.

Where is the Obama Administration’s pressure on Iran to stop enriching uranium? Sadly, the Americans are getting hoodwinked by Iran and Europe is happy that they don’t have to vote for more sanctions or enforce the ones that are in place now. While the President gives up our missile shield to Russia, relaxes financial restrictions on Cuba, allows North Korea to violate their signed agreements and breaks campaign promises on a Sudan no-fly zone, the world applauds the most popular American President in history.

And here at home, Fareed Zakaria continues to call for more American compromises and more talk while characterizing Conservatives as unwilling to talk. It isn’t that Conservatives think speaking to Russia about Iran is bad, a claim Fareed Zakaria erroneously tries to tag Conservatives with, it’s that giving something without getting something in return is foolish and naïve. Zakaria and the other elites blinded by Obama’s global reset button want America to compromise and negotiate but fail to expect the same from the other side. Zakaria is that typical internationalist that views diplomatic success as merely sitting down to talk. Talking is the goal for them.

And if America needs to compromise in order to ensure that there are more talks, well, then so be it. Talking is success, right?

What I find almost as laughable as Obama’s never-failing ignorance and naivete is his weakness.

There’s that whole, “Fool me once, shame on you.  Fool me twice, shame on me” thing.  How many times does Obama have to be fooled?

How did Obama get China to sign on to the meaningless IAEA censure that doesn’t offer any sort of call to actual action at all?

The Sniveller-in-Chief says that – unlike gutless ObamAmerica – Israel will actually do something if Iran continues its nuclear program.  Get a load of the headline:

‘US warned China that Israel could bomb Iran’
By JPOST.COM STAFF AND AP

Two senior officials from the White House, Dennis Ross and Jeffrey Bader, made a trip to China on a “special mission” to garner support in Beijing over the Iranian nuclear program, according to a Thursday report in The Washington Post. The officials visited China two weeks before US President Barack Obama arrived in Beijing.

The officials reportedly carried the message that if China would not support the US on the issue, Israel would be likely to bomb Iranian nuclear facilities. The paper quoted the officials as saying that Israel saw the issue as “an existential issue,” and that “countries that have an existential issue don’t listen to other countries.”

They stressed that were Israel to bomb Iran, the consequences for the region would be severe.

Here is Obama, leader of the free world, telling communist Iran that they’d better do what he says or big tough Israel will fight.

Just gag me.

At least Obama understands something, though.  Obama himself is a gargantuan fool and a pathetic weakling, but he does at least have a clue that genuinely strong and courageous people won’t just sit idly by and allow Iran to develop nuclear weapons.  And Obama thought he’d better warn China.  Because that’s just the sort of stand-up guy he is [HURL!].

I have one thing to differ with Richard Grenell over: the story isn’t that John Bolton is right.  The story is that Barack Obama is as wrong as he has always been.

Iran will have nuclear weapons soon.  And Obama will ensure that outcome – every bit as much as Neville Chamberlain ensured that Adolf Hitler would invade Czechoslovakia followed by Poland.

Christians are hearing about the Manhattan Declaration with great excitement.  It is a tremendous document with tremendous support from some tremendous Christian figures.

The actual declaration (linked to above) is some 4,000 plus words long, and is available to read at the link above.  But here is the nutshell version:

Christians, when they have lived up to the highest ideals of their faith, have defended the weak and vulnerable and worked tirelessly to protect and strengthen vital institutions of civil society, beginning with the family.

We are Orthodox, Catholic, and evangelical Christians who have united at this hour to reaffirm fundamental truths about justice and the common good, and to call upon our fellow citizens, believers and non-believers alike, to join us in defending them. These truths are:

1. the sanctity of human life
2. the dignity of marriage as the conjugal union of husband and wife
3. the rights of conscience and religious liberty.

Inasmuch as these truths are foundational to human dignity and the well-being of society, they are inviolable and non-negotiable. Because they are increasingly under assault from powerful forces in our culture, we are compelled today to speak out forcefully in their defense, and to commit ourselves to honoring them fully no matter what pressures are brought upon us and our institutions to abandon or compromise them. We make this commitment not as partisans of any political group but as followers of Jesus Christ, the crucified and risen Lord, who is the Way, the Truth, and the Life.

I hope you stand with me – and with (at last count as of November 24, 2009) 106,738 other believers – and sign this declaration.

It reminds me of another time, and another declaration: the Barmen Declaration of 1934, which was a point-by-point denunciation of the fascist and racist ideological doctrines of Nazism and a positive expression of true Christian faith against a government and a culture that had become evil.

Adolf Hitler attempted to redefine – or “Nazify” – the Church and transform it into a component of his ideological agenda.  At one point in its history Germany had been the seat of the Protestant Reformation, and while Germany had since become the most secular humanist nation in Europe, there was still a vestige of Christianity remaining.  And Hitler wanted to harness that still-influential vestige toward his own ends.  The government thus passed resolutions to limit the influence or dictate the agenda of the church.  One demanded the purging of all pastors who rejected “the spirit of National Socialism.”  Another resolution categorically rejected the very foundations of Judeo-Christian transcendent morality even as it tried to conflate “being a German” with “being a Christian”:

“We expect that our nation’s church as a German People’s Church should free itself from all things not German in its services and confession, especially from the Old Testament with its Jewish system of quid pro quo morality.”

The German Confessing Movement was a reaction against the German government’s attempt to impose its agenda upon the Christian Church in Germany.  As Gene Edward Veith put it in his book Modern Fascism: Liquidating the Judeo-Christian Worldview:

The Barmen Declaration thus sets itself against not only the German Christian aberration but against the whole tradition of modernist syncretism that made it possible.

[Article 1 affirmed Christ as the transcendent authority and source of values (as opposed to the German race, the Nazi revolution, or the person of Adolf Hitler)].  Article 2 asserts the sovereignty of Christ over all of life.  Article 3 asserts Christ’s lordship over the church and rejects “the false doctrine, as though the Church were permitted to abandon the form of its message and order to its own pleasure or to changes in prevailing ideological and political conventions.”  That is to say, the world does not set the agenda for the church.  Article 4 teaches that church offices are for mutual service and ministry, not for the exercise of raw power.  Article 5 acknowledges the divine appointment of the state, but rejects the pretensions of the state to “become the single and totalitarian order of human life, thus fulfilling the Church’s vocation as well.”  Article 6 affirms the church’s commission to proclaim the free grace of God to everyone by means of the Word and the sacraments.  “We reject the false doctrine, as though the Church in human arrogance could place the Word and work of the Lord in the service of any arbitrarily chosen desires, purposes, and plans [pp. 60-61].

One article, entitled “Hitler’s Theologians: The Genesis of Genocide,” takes time to describe how various key German liberal theologians systematically tore apart the Bible and orthodox Christianity – and in so doing systematically undermined the ethics and morality of the German people in preparation for the hell to come.  The author begins with Friedrich Schleiermacher, called “the founder of Liberal Protestantism,” and profiles the “contributions” of Friedrich Nietzsche, Julius Wellhausen, and Adolf von Harnack.

Georg Lukacs has observed that tracing the path to Hitler involved the name of nearly every major German philosopher since Hegel: Schopenhauer, Nietzsche, Dilthy, Simmel, Scheler, Heidegger, Jaspers, and Weber [page 5, The Destruction of Reason].  And Max Weinreich produced an exhaustive study detailing the complicity of German intellectuals with the Nazi regime entitled Hitler’s Professors: The Part of Scholarship in Germany’s Crimes Against the Jewish People.  Ideas have consequences, and it was the ideas of these liberal theologians, philosophers and scholars who provided the intellectual justification and conceptual framework for the Holocaust.  Thus Nazism did not merely emerge from a liberal theological system, but from a distinguished secular humanist intellectual tradition as well — a distinguished intellectual tradition that had repudiated all the moral and spiritual values inherent to the orthodox Christianity of the Confessing Church.

Josef Hromadka wrote that:

“The liberal theology in Germany and in her orbit utterly failed.  It was willing to compromise on the essential points of divine law and of “the law of nature”; to dispose of the Old Testament and to accept the law of the Nordic race instead; and to replace the “Jewish” law of the Old Testament by the autonomous law of each race and nation, respectively.  It had made all the necessary preparation for the “Germanization of Christianity” and for a racial Church.”

Veith subsequently says, “in deciding whether or not to sign the Barmen Declaration … the dividing line was clear.”  And he states, “The German Christian theologians predictably denounced the confessional movement as being ‘narrow’ and ‘fundamentalist.’”  He rightly described the opponents of the Barmen Declaration as being “modernists,” “existentialists,” and “dialectical” in their thinking.  The theologians who rejected Barmen were men like Emanuel Hirsch, who taught that the resurrection of Christ was only a spiritual vision, and that the idea of a physical resurrection distorted Christianity by focusing attention to the hereafter rather than to the culture and community of the present.

In short, it was Christians who thought like the evangelicals and fundamentalists of today who signed the Barmen Declaration and openly opposed Nazism, and it was “Christians” who thought like the mainline liberals of today who stood for the German Christian Nazification of Christianity and for the resulting Nazification of German ethics and morality.

Confessing Church pastors and priests who resisted this Nazification of the church paid dearly.  Thousands of clergymen were hauled away to the concentration camps.  According to the Niemoller archives, 2,579 clergymen were sent to Dachau alone – and 1,034 of them died in the camp.  And that only refers to the priests and pastors – not the untold thousands of devout Christians such as the Ten Booms who perished in the death camps for their opposition to Nazism.

An article entitled “Asking ‘Why Nazism?’” reviewing a book by Dr. Karla Poewe has this:

“One of the dangers of liberal Christianity, where all sorts of interpretations are permitted, is that it can easily slip into becoming a new religion,” Poewe says. “This is what happened. In a bid to rid Germany of what it saw as Jewish Christianity, several home-grown practices sprang up, including some that incorporated Icelandic and pre-Christian sagas, as well as ideas from German Idealism.”

Although initially these new religions were separate and disorganized entities, they eventually came under the umbrella of what was known as the German Faith Movement. Hitler saw in it a mechanism for transmitting and reinforcing the National Socialist worldview. “He shaped its followers into a disciplined political force but dismissed its leaders later when they were no longer needed,” Poewe says.

We’re clearly not to the point where Jews, or Christians, or anyone else are being gathered by the thousands and placed in death camps.  But we’re beginning to see a trend that is frightening, as government, with the assistance of liberal “Christian” churches and organizations, are trying to impose their will upon the church and its agenda.

We’ve had a “hate crimes” law imposed upon us that makes homosexuality a protected behavior.  And one evangelical expresses the Confessing Church position in a nutshell:

Tony Perkins, president of the Family Research Council, said in a written statement the bill “is part of a radical social agenda that could ultimately silence Christians and use the force of government to marginalize anyone whose faith is at odds with homosexuality.”

In another recent case, a Christian mother who has homeschooled her child is being forced to put her ten-year old child in public school, not to improve her academic education, but to limit her exposure to Christianity and forcibly expose her to a government-approved “public” point of view:

According to the court order, the guardian concluded that Amanda’s “interests, and particularly her intellectual and emotional development, would be best served by exposure to a public school setting in which she would be challenged to solve problems presented by a group learning situation and…Amanda would be best served by exposure to different points of view at a time in her life when she must begin to critically evaluate multiple systems of belief and behavior.”

This is a shocking case, in which the government is usurping both parental and religious freedoms.  And there are many similar usurpations today, in which our government is actively opposing Christian values.

Nearly fifty million babies have been killed in this country by a government-sanctioned “pro-choice” system.  Gene Edward Veith addresses the “pro-choice” movement and its philosophical underpinnings:

Existential ethics brackets the objective issues on abortion entirely.  At issue is not some transcendent moral law, nor medical evidence, nor a logical analysis.  The content of that choice makes no difference.  If the mother chooses to have the baby, her action is moral.  If she chooses not to have the baby, her action is still moral.  If she bears a child against her will or aborts a child against her will — then and only then is the action evil.  Those who believe that abortion should be legal do not consider themselves “pro-abortion.”  They are “pro-choice.”  The term is not only a rhetorical euphemism but a precise definition of existential ethics.

Existentialism is also reflected in those who are “pro-choice” but personally oppose abortion.  They do not believe in abortion for themselves, but refuse to impose their beliefs on others.  In this view, a belief has no validity outside the private, personal realm of each individual.  Moral and religious beliefs are no more than personal constructions, important in giving meaning to an individual’s life, but not universally valid.  Or, to use another commonly accepted axiom, “what’s true for you may not be true for me.”

Such a view of truth flies in the face of all classical metaphysics, which sees truth as objective, universal, and applicable to all” (page 96, Modern Fascism: Liquidating the Judeo-Christian Worldview).

We can return to the historical analysis of Nazism presented by Karla Poewe, and what happened when such “anything goes” belief systems were allowed to rule.  [I have written an article describing how existentialism became a primary component of Nazism, and link to it HERE].

Before we leave the issue of abortion as a vile violation of Christian ethics and morality, let us consider one more voice:

“But I feel that the greatest destroyer of peace today is abortion, because it is a war against the child – a direct killing of the innocent child – murder by the mother herself. And if we accept that a mother can kill even her own child, how can we tell other people not to kill one another?” — Mother Teresa

Christians should fight for life.  And allowing a human being to live should not be a “choice,” but a duty.

In 2003 one David Allen Black wrote an article bearing the question, “Do We Need A New Barmen Declaration?“  No Christian with a knowledge of history can answer any other way than, “YES!“

The Barmen Declaration was written in 1934, but in many ways it was already too late: The Nazis were already in power.  Hitler was in his second year of power; and the ideas of the liberal theologians, the existentialist philosophers, and the amoral intellectuals were already firmly in place.

It is my fervent hope that we finally have that “New Barmen Declaration” to answer the evils of our own day.  If we already should have written one, then every day that passes is one more day wasted; if we are acting pro-actively, then let us thank God that we acting before it is too late.

From the UK Telegraph:

At last, Christians draw a line in the sand against their PC secularist persecutors

By Gerald Warner UK Last updated: November 24th, 2009

At long last, Christian leaders have faced up to their persecutors in the secularist, socialist, One-World, PC, UN-promoted axis of evil and said: No more. In the popular metaphor, they have drawn a line in the sand. For harassed, demoralised faithful in the pews it will come as the long-awaited call to resistance and an earnest that their leaders are no longer willing to lie down supinely to be run over by the anti-Christian juggernaut. This statement of principle and intent is called The Manhattan Declaration, published last Friday in Washington DC.

It is difficult to believe that so firm an assertion of Christian intransigence in the face of persecution will not have some beneficial effects even here. For this Declaration is no minor affirmation by a few committed activists: on the contrary, it is signed by the most important leaders of three mainstream Christian traditions – the Catholic Church, the Orthodox Church and Evangelical Protestants. For an ecumenical document it is heroically devoid of fudge, euphemism and compromise.

The Manhattan Declaration states that “the lives of the unborn, the disabled, and the elderly are severely threatened; that the institution of marriage, already buffeted by promiscuity, infidelity and divorce, is in jeopardy of being redefined to accommodate fashionable ideologies; that freedom of religion and the rights of conscience are gravely jeopardized by those who would use the instruments of coercion to compel persons of faith to compromise their deepest convictions”.

For Barack Obama, the PC lobby, the “hate crime” fascists and, by implication, their opposite numbers in Britain, the signatories have an uncompromising message: “We pledge to each other, and to our fellow believers, that no power on earth, be it cultural or political, will intimidate us into silence or acquiescence.” That is plain speaking, in the face of anti-Christian aggression by governments. The signatories spelled it out even more unequivocally: “We will fully and ungrudgingly render to Caesar what is Caesar’s, but we will under no circumstances render to Caesar what is God’s.”

In a world where a Swedish pastor has been jailed for preaching that sodomy is sinful, similar prosecutions have taken place in Canada, the European Court of Human Rights (sic) has tried to ban crucifixes in Italian classrooms, Brazil has passed totalitarian legislation imposing heavy prison sentences for criticism of homosexual lifestyles, Amnesty International is championing abortion, David Cameron has voted for the enforced closure of Catholic adoption agencies, and Gordon Brown’s government has just been defeated in its fourth attempt to abolish the Waddington Clause guaranteeing free speech – this robust defiance is more than timely.

The signatories are unambiguously expressing their willingness to go to prison rather than deny any part of their religious beliefs. Those signatories are heavyweight. On the Catholic side they include Justin Cardinal Rigali, Archbishop of Philadelphia; Adam Cardinal Maida, Archbishop Emeritus of Detroit; the Archbishops of Denver, New York, Washington DC, Newark, Saint Paul and Minneapolis, Kansas City, and Louisville; and other Bishops. The Orthodox include the Primate of the Orthodox Church in America and the Archpriest of St Vladimir’s Orthodox Theological Seminary. There are also the Anglican Primates of America and Nigeria, as well as a host of senior Evangelical Protestants.

In terms of influence on votes and public opinion, this is a formidable coalition. It has served notice on the US government that further anti-Christian legislation will provoke cultural trench warfare and even civil disobedience. As regards the sudden stiffening of resistance among the usually spineless Catholic leadership, it is impossible not to detect the influence of Benedict XVI.

We need more declarations like this, on a global scale, and the requisite confrontational follow-up. This is Clint Eastwood, make-my-day Christianity – and not before time. From now on, any governments that are planning further persecution of Christians had better make sure they have a large pride of lions available for mastication duties. The worm has turned.

As a young Christian, I was inspired by the music, lyrics, and album cover of Keith Green’s album, No Compromise.  The cover says it all:

The Manhattan Declaration – like the Barmen Declaration – calls for Christians who are willing to stand up and be singled out even in the face of persecution or punishment.

I hope you are willing to be one of those Christians.

Rasmussen – the nation’s most accurate polling organization – says the numbers are crystal clear: America doesn’t want ObamaCare.

Just 38% of voters now favor the health care plan proposed by President Obama and congressional Democrats. That’s the lowest level of support measured for the plan in nearly two dozen tracking polls conducted since June.

The latest Rasmussen Reports national telephone survey finds that 56% now oppose the plan.

Half the survey was conducted before the Senate voted late Saturday to begin debate on its version of the legislation. Support for the plan was slightly lower in the half of the survey conducted after the Senate vote.

Prior to this, support for the plan had never fallen below 41%. Last week, support for the plan was at 47%. Two weeks ago, the effort was supported by 45% of voters.

Intensity remains stronger among those who oppose the push to change the nation’s health care system: 21% Strongly Favor the plan while 43% are Strongly Opposed.

Rasmussen Reports is continuing to track public opinion on the health care plan on a weekly basis. Next week’s Monday morning update will give an indication of whether these numbers reflect a trend of growing opposition or are merely statistical noise.

Only 16% now believe passage of the plan will lead to lower health care costs. Nearly four times as many (60%) believe the plan will increase health care costs. Most (54%) also believe passage of the plan will hurt the quality of care.

As has been the case for months, Democrats favor the plan while Republicans and voters not affiliated with either major party are opposed. The latest numbers show support from 73% of those in the president’s party. The plan is opposed by 83% of Republicans and 70% of unaffiliated voters.

Other recent polling shows that Democrats consider health care reform to be the top priority for the president. Republicans and unaffiliated voters see deficit reduction as most important.

Among the nation’s senior citizens, 34% favor the health care plan and 60% are opposed. A majority of those under 30 favor the plan, but a majority of all other age groups are opposed (Premium Members can see full demographic crosstabs).

Support for health care has declined along with President Obama’s approval ratings. For the first time in the Obama era, the Rasmussen Reports daily Presidential Approval Index has been in negative double digits for nine straight days.

Despite the decline in support for the health care plan, 50% still say it is at least somewhat likely to become law this year. That figure includes 17% who say passage is Very Likely.

While Senate Democrats this weekend assembled enough votes to begin debate on the plan, many challenges remain. All Republican Senators and several Democrats, for example, have expressed opposition to the so-called “public option.” Sixty-three percent (63%) of voters nationwide say guaranteeing that no one is forced to change their health insurance coverage is a higher priority than giving consumers the choice of a “public option” government-run health insurance company. Most liberal voters say giving people the choice of a “public option” is more important. But most moderates take the opposite view and say guaranteeing that no one is forced to change their health insurance is the top priority.

Overall, 46% favor the creation of a government-sponsored non-profit health insurance option that people could choose instead of a private health insurance plan. However, if the plan encouraged companies to drop private health insurance coverage for their workers, support for the public option falls to 29%, and opposition rises to 58%.

As Scott Rasmussen, president of Rasmussen Reports, wrote in the Wall Street Journal: “The most important fundamental is that 68% of American voters have health insurance coverage they rate good or excellent. … Most of these voters approach the health care reform debate fearing that they have more to lose than to gain.”

Other challenging issues in the Senate debate include abortion and illegal immigration. Ever since the House’s passage of the Stupak Amendment which says the “public option” would not cover elective abortions and that recipients of federal insurance subsidies could not use them to buy abortion coverage, the divide among Democrats has been visible.

Earlier polling showed that 48% nationwide favored the abortion ban, but most supporters of health care reform didn’t want to address the issue. Just 13% of all voters wanted abortion coverage mandated in the legislation.

The Democrats are on the wrong side of health care – and every single element within their health care plan.  And yet here they are, determined to ram it through (especially before the public can get a chance to know how truly bad the plan is) and impose it on a country that doesn’t want it.

Obama’s approval is now at minus 15 – his lowest recorded number yet.  Only 45% of the country approves of him, versus 54% that disapprove.

You’d think that would matter.  But Democrats seem on a suicide mission to destroy America and destroy our way of life.  Your key words for understanding why: the Cloward-Piven strategy.  First ruin the country and cause it to implode, then assume total control over a desperate and hungry population by offering government as their only savior.

Elections have consequences.  A foolish America may literally pay for electing Democrats with their country.

Americans need to begin giving Democrats hell, or else Democrats will most assuredly give hell to Americans.