Even Liberals Beginning To Warn Of Obama ‘Debt Tsunami’

We are heading for a cliff, and Barack Obama keeps pushing the accelerator to the floorboard.

It is bad.  It is so bad even the liberals on the editorial board of the Washington Post are aware of it.

The Debt Tsunami: The CBO’s latest warning on the long-term deficit is scarier than ever

Sunday, June 28, 2009

THE CONGRESSIONAL Budget Office has a tough job: to provide America’s lawmakers with a reality check on their tax and spending plans. Not surprisingly, the CBO’s projections are not always received cheerfully. Both President Obama and leading congressional Democrats were less than thrilled when the CBO estimated that the costs of universal health coverage would be much higher than advertised. To be sure, projecting the cost of legislation involves making assumptions and constructing models that may or may not prove accurate 10 years down the road. Nonetheless, the CBO, with its tradition of scholarly independence, is the best available arbiter, and Congress must heed its numbers — like them or not.

Now comes the CBO with yet more news of the sort that neither Capitol Hill nor the White House is likely to welcome: its freshly released report on the federal government’s long-term financial situation. To put it bluntly, the fiscal policy of the United States is unsustainable. Debt is growing faster than gross domestic product. Under the CBO’s most realistic scenario, the publicly held debt of the U.S. government will reach 82 percent of GDP by 2019 — roughly double what it was in 2008. By 2026, spiraling interest payments would push the debt above its all-time peak (set just after World War II) of 113 percent of GDP. It would reach 200 percent of GDP in 2038.

This huge mass of debt, which would stifle economic growth and reduce the American standard of living, can be avoided only through spending cuts, tax increases or some combination of the two. And the longer government waits to get its financial house in order, the more it will cost to do so, the CBO says.

It’s actually worse than the Washington Post editorial board states.  The 113% debt-to-GDP ratio cited by the Post used a different measuring standard than what the Congressional Budget Office uses today.  When the debt-to-GDP raises to 82% in 2019, it will be the equivalent of 144% when converted to the same standard that was used to calculate the WWII figure.

Let me illustrate: in 1945 the debt-to-GDP was 115% as found at scribd.com (it actually went to 121% in 1946); the same chart – which runs to 2007 – shows the debt-to-GDP as 65% in 2007.  But the Congressional Budget Office figure for the year 2007 shows the debt-to-GDP as 36.9% in 2007 (and 40.8% in 2008).  Clearly very different numbers.

So we have to do some converting to make the numbers comparable.  And what we find when we take that into account is that our debt-to-GDP ratio in 2019 will be 144.4% rather than 82% [65/39.6 = 1.76;     82 X 1.76 = 144.44].

So, if the Washington Post is going to provide us with debt-to-GDP figures from 1945, they need to state the current and future debt-to-GDP figures in the same terms.

Not only will our debt-to-GDP be considerably higher than it was at the highest point in our nation’s history due to Barack Obama’s frankly insane spending, but other factors need to be considered which reveal the real truth to be even worse yet.

Namely, during the WWII and post-WWII era, American productivity was at its height.  U.S. industrial capacity literally stunned the world.  We could built more tanks than the Germans believed possible; we could build so many aircraft that by wars’ end the U.S. were able to fly more planes on one single mission than Japanese intelligence said existed in the entire world.  And as the war ended, and as American factories geared toward peacetime production to provide a world whose industry had been devastated by war, we were able to produce as had never been seen before.

This is clearly not true anymore.  Today, we are watching our industrial capacity go bankrupt, in a trend that started years ago and has accelerated dramatically in recent times.

You cannot spend your way out of debt; you can only produce your way out of debt.  When American productivity was at its apex, we could recover from a high debt-to-GDP ratio.  But what can we do now and in the future, when we have lost that productive capacity?  Exactly how will we produce our way out of anything?

As another problem that is about as serious, during the WWII era America rationed and saved.  Even as Americans were rationing every commodity for the war effort, they were also investing in war bonds and Treasury bills.  So when the United States government went into high debt in the 1940s, who did they owe that debt to?  American citizens.  And as the U.S. government repaid that debt, it was being fed right back in to the U.S. economy.

Is that true anymore?  Not even close.  The U.S. population no longer rations, and it certainly doesn’t save.  And thus today, our debt is largely owned by foreign countries (particularly China).  So as our debt goes up and ever upward, the U.S. government is most certainly NOT feeding the American economy when it makes its interest payments; it is feeding China’s economy.

So, in real terms, our debt-to-GDP will be higher than it’s ever been (144.4% in 2019, soaring way past the 200s in 2038), and at the same time our means to accommodate that debt will be at an all-time low.  Thus, while our debt went down steadily after 1946, it will be going up dramatically as we enter our very bleak future.

In other words, we’re screwed.  We are really, truly screwed.

And as shocking as these numbers already are, they do not take into account the trillions of dollars that will be racked up as the Democrats advance their government health care agenda and their cap-and-trade fiasco.  The former will add trillions of dollars in costs even as the latter muzzles our economic output to the tune of trillions of dollars.

As the government tries to calculate the cost of health care “reforms,” realize something: in 1965, nobody (but conservatives) ever even began to dream that the Medicare program would soar to an unfunded obligation that is now over Thirty-six TRILLION dollars.  The next time someone tells you that the government will be able to create “savings,” remind him of the $36 trillion black hole known as Medicare.  And then laugh hysterically in his face.

It won’t get better.  Rather, it’s going to get so much worse that it would frankly be less frightening to be having Jason Voorhees chasing you around in a horror movie.  The baby boomer generation began qualifying for Social Security in 2008.  In two years, they will begin to qualify for Medicare.  From that point on, wave after wave of 77 million retiring baby boomers will begin to swamp the system for the next 20 years.  Talk about a “tsunami.”

To make matters even worse, our population is aging, and health care costs are going to “necessarily skyrocket” (to borrow a phrase Obama used to describe the costs that would result from his energy plan) no matter what we do.  In 1945, we had a worker-to-retiree ratio of 42 workers paying into the system for every retiree consuming benefits.  Now we have a 3-1 ratio.  And by 2030 it will be only 2-1.  It kind of makes me miss those 50 million potential workers that we murdered in the abortion mills.

There is no possible way out system can escape disaster.  And on top of that, we have a president and a Congress that is compiling more debt faster than any president and Congress in history, bar none.  President Obama racked up more debt in his few months in office – $1.8 trillion – than President Bush did in seven years (dealing with 9/11, two wars, and Hurricane Katrina to boot).

A New York Post article points out:

And these deficits aren’t merely a temporary result of the recession; the president’s budget would run deficits averaging nearly $1 trillion a year for the next decade.

The national debt would double. In other words, Obama would run up as much government debt as every president in US history from George Washington to George W. Bush — combined. Put simply, he’d dump $84,352 per household of new debt into the laps of our children and grandchildren over the next decade.

Given what we face, does more spending and more debt at a faster rate than has ever been compiled in human history seem sane to you?

One day, not very far off now, Americans will realize that they voted for their nation’s national suicide in voting for Barack Obama and a Democrat-controlled Congress.  They will realize that they voted for their children or grandchildren to struggle, and quite possibly starve to death as their country collapses under the weight of its own massive debt.

But until that time, we will continue merrily along as we hurtle faster and faster toward food riots and a total societal collapse.

The beast is coming.  I pray you will be ready.

Radical Sotomayor Now Overruled 6 Out Of 7 Times By SCOTUS

One out of seven is even terrible in baseball; it is an absolutely horrifying statistic for a judge who is being seriously considered for the U.S. Supreme Court.

Sonia Sotomayor has had her cases overruled six out of seven of the times that they have come before the Supreme Court. That is how radical, and how incompetent as a judge, she truly is.

Cases Reviewed by the Supreme Court

• Ricci v. DeStefano 530 F.3d 87 (2008) —decision pending as of 5/26/2009 [update as of 6/29/09: reversed 5-4 (Dissenting: Stevens, Souter, Ginsburg, Breyer)].

• Riverkeeper, Inc. vs. EPA, 475 F.3d 83 (2007) — reversed 6-3 (Dissenting: Stevens, Souter, Ginsburg)

• Knight vs. Commissioner, 467 F.3d 149 (2006) — upheld, but reasoning was unanimously faulted

• Dabit vs. Merrill Lynch, 395 F.3d 25 (2005) — reversed 8-0

• Empire Healthchoice Assurance, Inc. vs. McVeigh, 396 F.3d 136 (2005) — reversed 5-4 (Dissenting: Breyer, Kennedy, Souter, Alito)

• Malesko v. Correctional Services Corp., 299 F.3d 374 (2000) — reversed 5-4 (Dissenting: Stevens, Souter, Ginsburg, Breyer)

• Tasini vs. New York Times, et al, 972 F. Supp. 804 (1997) — reversed 7-2 (Dissenting: Stevens, Breyer)

Sonia Sotomayor is a judge who has been humiliated with an 8-0 smackdown of her judicial reasoning.  She has been overruled – meaning her legal judgment was contradicted – six out of seven times.  And the ONLY time her decision was upheld (Knight vs. Commissioner), her reasoning for the decision was faulted by every single judge on the panel.

That’s bad.  That is really, really bad.

In the Ricci v. DeStefano (i.e. the “New Haven firefighter case) Sotomayor in a single paragraph tossed out the case of a dyslexic firefighter who had spent $1000 on teaching aids and simply outworked his competition.  Being dyslexic doesn’t count; only being black should count as a disabling “handicap” for these black robed liberal bigots.

This “judge” who makes racism a basis for her rulings has made repeated statements to indicate that she will make racial bias a fundamental element of her judicial philosophy.  Consider again her comment: “I would hope that a wise Latina woman with the richness of her experience would more often than not reach a better conclusion than a white male who hasn’t lived that life.”  She is unfit to be a judge on ANY court; let alone the Supreme Court of the United States.

The last thing this country needs is another radical in robes, who will ignore the US Constitution and impose her own biased and defective judgment upon people and institutions demanding justice.

The Life And Death Of Michael Jackson As A Lesson For Us All

Years ago, during the Bosnian War, I heard someone say something that I’ll never forget. U.S. troops were taking part in the U.N. effort to prevent more genocide, and desperate Bosnian people were scrounging through the huge garbage piles accumulated by the American forces looking for valuables they could see or food they could feed their families.

A reporter interviewed a man on the trash piles, who said, “We are living like animals. Is this all there is to our lives? Is there nothing more?”

It dawned on me that an incredibly poor, desperate Bosnian, or a hugely successful rock star, could be asking the same question. Because both could well be living equally meaningless, empty lives.

Michael Jackson’s life and untimely death – along with the deaths of so many other celebrities who seemed to have everything the world could offer, yet were so deeply unhappy – is an illustration of the truth of that reality.

By most accounts, Michael Jackson earned more than $500 million during his performing career, and some analysts believe that his music catalog holdings could be worth billions. Yet he spent so massively, on so many luxuries and trifles and distractions to satisfy his every whim, that he is apparently hundreds of millions of dollars in debt. And one gets the sense that he never did manage to find anything approaching happiness; just one quick addictive rush to some new toy or new frill after another.

And a once handsome man disfigured himself into some kind of freak due to an obviously profoundly ugly self-image.

Imagine having everything the world can offer: imagine being one of the beautiful people; having fame and adoration; and having a massive fortune that allows you to travel anywhere or do anything you desire.

And imagine being unhappy, and asking yourself, “Is this all there is to life? Is there nothing more?”

I would rather be that Bosnian man living off a giant trash heap than be a man who had pursued everything the world could offer, only to realize that the world was not enough even as I desperately clung to that world and its wealth.

I believe that many celebrities pursue bizarre religious experiences in a desperate search for some kind of meaning. But their world-distorted worldview has limited their search. So they pursue bizarre religions like Scientology or faddish ones like Kabbalah. Ultimately, they want to be able to eat their cake and have it too. They want to be the gods of their own worlds that they create for themselves, rather than bend the knee to a Creator God who demands that they be holy, as He is holy. But at the same time, they want to be part of something that is larger than they are. Essentially, they want the latter in a way that doesn’t cramp the former.

A psychiatrist, doing her own postmortem analysis of Michael Jackson’s life, said that he had never had a role model as a child, and there had never been anyone like himself to model himself after once he had grown up. By many accounts, his father and his older brothers shaped him like a marketing product and sold him like meat for mass culture. And during his childhood, he was sexually abused while whoever was supposed to love him and take care of him failed to do either.

When the psychiatrist said that Michael Jackson had no role models, no one to model his life after, I immediately thought of the one name that is above every name: the name of Jesus. Michael Jackson lived a life that was far outside the remotest experience of virtually anyone else. But Jesus remained as the quintessential role model: and how different Michael Jackson would have been had he sought to model his life after Christ’s, rather than after whatever caricature of himself he fabricated through bizarre behaviors and plastic surgeries.

Augustine, in the famous insight of his Confessions, wrote, “Our hearts were made for Thee, O Lord, and will not rest until they rest in Thee.”

Ambrose, and later Pascal, aptly referred to that restlessness, that God-shaped hole in the soul, as a vacuum. Apart from our Creator God who made us to find our peace and happiness in Himself, that hole in our soul has a force behind it and it will suck up anything to fill it. G.K. Chesterton explained that when we cease believing in God, we don’t believe in nothing; we will rather believe in anything. Human beings were created to be hungry for meaning. The problem arises when we reject true meaning; we will replace it with any substitute under the sun. And replace the truth of God for a lie.

As a Christian, I do not need great beauty, or great wealth, or great fame, or great celebrity, or great athleticism, or anything that any of those things can buy, to be happy. If I have Christ in my heart, and trust in Him to provide all my needs, I have the answer to the search for meaning. And I have more than the world can ever hope to provide.

As Economy Continues Toward Toilet Bowl, Don’t Forget True Cost Of Failed Stimulus

There is increasing evidence mounting that Barack Obama’s $787 billion stimulus bill (the euphemistically-titled “American Recovery and Reinvestment Act of 2009” as opposed to “The Porkulus Act of 2009” or “The Generational Theft Act of 2009) has utterly failed to deliver anything that Obama promised.

As I reported in my article, “Obama Wreckovery Act And Stimulus ‘Employment’: The Pathetic Reality,” it has utterly failed to produce jobs.  In rushing the bill through Congress when unemployment was at 7.2%, Obama promised the country something that is now laughable: his administration assured America “that the economic stimulus would prevent unemployment from rising above 8 percent.” It is now over 9.4%, and is expected to enter double-digit territory before the end of the year.

At the time that Obama was arguing that we needed a stimulus plan to avert total disaster, and assuring the country that his stimulus plan would keep unemployment under 8%, the Congressional Budget Office said that unemployment would only go to 9% by 2010 if we did absolutely nothing.  Which is another way of saying that not only has Obama’s stimulus not helped, but it has actually HURT the economy:

New jobless claims jump unexpectedly to 627,000; continuing claims rise to 6.74 million

By Christopher S. Rugaber, AP Economics Writer
On Thursday June 25,The Labor Department data released Thursday show jobs remain scarce even as the economy shows some signs of recovering from the longest recession since World War II.

The department said initial claims for jobless benefits rose last week by 15,000 to a seasonally adjusted 627,000. Economists expected a drop to 600,000, according to Thomson Reuters.

Several states reported more claims than expected from teachers, cafeteria workers and other school employees, a department analyst said.

The number of people continuing to receive unemployment insurance rose by 29,000 to 6.74 million, slightly above analysts’ estimates of 6.7 million.

To make it even more laughable, many of the very jobs that Barrack Obama had heralded as “saved” – including private sector jobs at Caterpillar and government sector jobs at the Columbus, Ohio police department – are the ones being wiped out.

But even though Obama’s stimulus has hurt the economy, it doesn’t change the fact that we’re still going to have to pay the bill for it.

And that bill WON’T be for $787 billion; it will be for $3.27TRILLION.

Stimulus Verdict: A $3.27 Trillion Porker

By: David A. Patten     February 14, 2009

The gargantuan stimulus bill Congress has rubber-stamped with virtually no Republican support contains tens of billions of the very spending projects that made the legislation a lightning rod for criticism.

And although the bill is generally described as costing $787 billion, the Congressional Budget Office reports the actual figure is now closer to $3.27 trillion.

That stems from the $744 billion it will take to pay for the additional debt the legislation will create, and $2.527 trillion in increased spending from the new and expanded programs the bill will spawn over the next decade.

The bill now spans more than 1,000 pages. While Democrats removed some provisions that fiscal conservatives objected to, most of the pork remains. Among them:

The plan has more than $3 billion in “neighborhood stabilization” and Community Development Block Grant funding, much of which may go to benefit ACORN, a low-income housing and voter registration “community” organization that is under federal investigation for its suspicious voter registration practices. $1.3 billion to bailout AMTRAK, the perennial money-loser railroad. $1 billion for educational programs, including courses on sexually transmitted diseases. $30 million for restoration of wetlands to be spent in the San Francisco Bay Area – House Speaker Nancy Pelosi’s district. The money will go in part to protect the endangered salt marsh harvest mouse. $200 million for a low-pollution, coal-fired power plant in President Barack Obama’s home state of Illinois. $45 million for ATV four-wheeler trails, and government office renovations, according to RNC Chairman Michael Steele. $200 million to provide computers to community colleges. $50 million for the National Endowment of the Arts. Over $650 million in coupons to help consumers buy digital TV converter-box coupons. A reported $300 million for hybrid vehicles and electric-powered cars. According to the Washington Times, this item will include buying golf carts for federal workers.GOP Sen. John McCain summed up his view of the bill: “This measure is not bipartisan. It contains much that is not stimulative.”Some of the criticisms of the bill, however, center on policy rather than cost.The Heritage Foundation, for example, reports the bill reverses the bipartisan welfare reforms achieved during the Clinton administration.Also, opponents have slammed the bill for being “anti-religious,” because it expressly prohibits the use of stimulus funds for faith-based schools, schools of divinity, facilities used for “sectarian worship,” or places of religious worship.

Heritage Foundation has an image of the CBO’s scoring:

So while the media continues to report “$787 billion stimulus” to mask the actual devastating cost of this mess, in point of fact we’re not talking about a colossal $787 billion boondoggle; we’re talking about a mega-colossal $3.27 trillion boondoggle.

There are a whole lot of questions about whether Obama is creating any jobs with his massive government spending (beyond his fairy tale “saved” jobs that the US Bureau of Labor Statistics has said can’t be verified – and can you even imagine the mainstream media allowing President George Bush to hype job numbers that he couldn’t verify???), but there is no question at all that the trillions of dollars being spent are all-too-real. And there is no question that a great big giant lead anvil will fall on the US economy due to the near doubling of the national debt as Obama adds a projected $9.3 trillion to the $11.7 trillion hole we’re already in (which doesn’t count the tens of trillions of dollars in unfunded mandates from Social Security, Medicare, etc).  Obama is borrowing 50 cents on the dollar as he explodes the federal deficit by spending four times more than Bush spent in 2008 and in the process “adding more to the debt than all presidents — from George Washington to George Bush — combined.” And most terrifying of all, Obama’s spending will cause debt to double from 41% of GDP in 2008 to a crushing 82% of GDP in 2019.

What will be the result of all this insane spending, and not very far off? A quote from a CNS News story should awaken anyone who thinks the future will be rosy:

By 2019, the CBO said, a whopping 82 percent of the nation’s gross domestic product (GDP) will go to pay down the national debt. This means that in future years, the government could owe its creditors more than the goods and services that the entire economy can produce.

Now you have to add to that the fact that the Democrats are pushing a $3.5 TRILLION health care bill that will socialize – on top of a big chunk of the economy that already HAS been socialized (e.g. banks, auto companies) a further 1/6th of the US economy.

And you have to add in the staggering future costs to our economy that will be imposed by the Waxman-Markey (or as I prefer to call it, the Wackjob-Marxist) cap-and-trade bill that will result in capping productivity and trading away our prosperity: $6,800 per family of four by 2035, even as our energy costs skyrocket (or to quote Obama himself: “Under my plan of a cap and trade system, electricity rates would necessarily skyrocket“).  And as energy costs (and therefore production) increase dramatically, do you think employers will hire more workers, or fewer and fewer?

All that staggering hyperinflation-creating debt-funded government spending, along with the simultaneous nationalization of our economy and the systemic undermining of our productivity, and about the only jobs that are being created are for washing cars and running errands for politically-connected Democrats.

By the time the American people understand what has happened to their economy and to their way of life, it’s going to be too late to undo the damage that will have been done.

Does Gov. Sanford’s Disgrace Prove Conservative Values Hypocritical?

The left are falling all over themselves to not only damn Republican South Carolina Governor Mark Sanford, but to damn everything he claimed to stand for.

Just as one among a gazillion examples:

After Sanford, Let’s End Hypocrisy and Promote Equality

So Governor Sanford is another family values hypocrite. How many times did he deny privacy rights and marriage equality to others?

According to OnTheIssues.org, as a Member of Congress, Mark Sanford voted repeatedly against abortion rights; against gay marriage, civil unions, and gay adoptions; and for posting the Ten Commandments. As Governor, he continued those positions.

Let us express this argument in the following way:

Premise 1) Mark Sanford preached traditional family values.

Premise 2) Mark Sanford was discovered to have violated some of the very traditional family values he preached.

Conclusion: We should end hypocrisy and abandon all traditional family values.

Well, how about if we apply that argument to another example:

Premise 1) Al Gore preached it was wrong to have a huge carbon footprint.

Premise 2) Al Gore was discovered to have a MASSIVE carbon footprint

Conclusion: We should put end to the hypocrisy and start pumping trillions of tons of pollutants into the atmosphere, oceans, and rivers.

I could do the same thing with torturing puppies.  Suppose I was a spokesman for PETA, and was subsequently discovered to have kicked a puppy dog.  Would anyone but the worst nutjob in the world conclude that we should “end hypocrisy” and abandon a standard against torturing puppies?

Let me say it clearly: the Democrats’ use of personal hypocrisy on the part of Mark Sanford (or any other member of the Republican Party) as a device to attack traditional family values is fundamentally irrational.  It is an amoral rhetorical ploy, and nothing else.

Mark Sanford is a hypocrite.  But that doesn’t in any way prove that the values he claimed to stand for are hypocritical.

Should we condemn Governor Sanford for his personal hypocrisy?  Sure. Just as we should condemn Al Gore for his personal hypocrisy.  Both Mark Sanford and Al Gore have been exposed as being terrible proponents for their publicly-held views.  But to then argue that, since Al Gore is a pathetic environmentalist in his personal life, we should therefore abandon all environmentalism and pollute as much as we might like is simply fallacious.

You can go through a directory of logical fallacies and check off about every one:  Genetic fallacy; Question begging;  Affirming the consequent.; Ad populum;  Ad hominem;  False cause;  Non sequitur;  Loaded language;  Post hoc, ergo propter hoc;  Straw man;  Suppressed evidence.  Every one of these fallacies and more are being used to advance the “Governor Sanford is a hypocrite, so lets throw out traditional values” thesis.

Believe it or not, there are actually people who hold to traditional family values who don’t violate their marriage vows.  Just as their are actually people who hold to liberal environmentalist values who don’t rack up 221,000 kilowatt hours in one year while flying around in an emissions-spewing private jet and cruising around in a massive luxury boat while profiting from royalties on a zinc mine that the EPA once shut down as one of the worst polluting mines in America.

Let’s not base our morality on what a few hypocrites do, but on what we all ought to do.

I add this almost as an afterthought, but it is an important point: one of the related issues to the “hypocrisy” argument by the left is that many liberals do not want to be “constrained” by the traditional moral values espoused by conservatives, and conservatives should therefore back off and stop imposing their values.  Does this hold water?  Well, if it does, then why do liberals want to impose draconian global warming laws on conservatives who don’t buy into global warming?  Why do liberals want to impose high taxes on certain classes of people to pay for social programs those people neither want nor need?  Etcetera.

Iran, Iraq, and the Future in Bible Prophecy

The huge demonstrations protesting the election issues in Iran put that country on the front pages of every newspaper.

For nearly two weeks, demonstrations have raged.  Early on, some said that they didn’t know what would happen as to whether the protests would succeed in overthrowing the regime, but most recognized that the endgame was a foregone conclusion: the regime has the tanks, the guns, and the military.  It was only a question as to whether how far things might get before they used them.

As it stands, they won’t have to, as an AP article entitled “Intensified crackdown mutes protests in Iran” indicates.  While the demonstrations might well briefly flare up again (presidential candidate Mousavi has said he would appear at a demonstration on the 24th), there has never been any serious question that the theocratic regime would stand.

The serious question that remains is, stand as what?  Will it become a more open society, more willing to seriously interact with the Western world, or will it become more hostile and more determined to pursue a violent agenda in the coming months?

Based on the prophecies in the Bible, and based on my own belief that we are entering the last days, my view is that Iran will become more hostile and violent as it is increasingly isolated in the Western world.  Furthermore, my view is that it will engage in an increasingly close alliance/partnership with Russia and with other Islamic Arab and African states.

It is important to realize that the Iranian Constitution (Article Five) is inherently apocalyptic in nature.  The still-revered Ayatollah Khomeini in 1979 proclaimed that the basis for Iran’s constitution and its government would be the authority of the Hidden (or Twelfth) Imam.  This apocalyptic figure has been called the ‘expected one,’ (al—Muntazar), the ‘promised one’ (al—Mahdi’), or the ‘hidden one,’ (al—Mustatir) in the Shi’a tradition.

The threats of impending destruction of Israel and even of war against the United States have been issued in the name of this Twelfth Imam who will (according to Iranian/Shi’a Islam) come in the last days.

According to the tradition, the Hidden Imam was taken into hiding by Allah and kept there until he reappears in the last days to purify the umma and take the world for Islam.

Mahmoud Ahmadinejad and many others in the Iranian leadership passionately hold to the coming of the Hidden Imam.  That in itself is not necessarily frightening: Shi’ite orthodoxy has it that humans are powerless to encourage the Twelfth Imam to return.  However, in Iran a group called the Hojjatieh believe that humans can stir up chaos and violence to encourage him – even force him – to return.  And Ahmadinejad is at least a former member, and quite likely a current member of this sect.  When Ahmadinejad became president, $17 million was spent on the Jamkaran mosque, which is central to the Hojjatieh movement.  And it is even more frightening when such a man sitting as President of Iran claims to have a direct link to God.

And Dr. Serge Trifkovic has said this regarding Ahmadinejad’s theology/eschatology:

Ahmadinejad, by contrast, shares with Trotsky an apocalyptic world outlook. He favors direct action in pursuit of a permanent Islamic revolution that will pave the way for the return of the Hidden Imam, pave it with blood, sweat and tears. Indeed he’d like to speed things up, as you point out, and implicitly he hopes to achieve this by twisting the arm of the Almighty – no less so than the cloners of red heifers and would-be re-builders of the Temple hope to do as a means of speeding up the Rupture. The fact that he is more sincere in his beliefs and more earnest in his endeavors than the kleptocrats of the House of Saud are in theirs, is alarming but unsurprising. He is a visionary; they are Machiavellian cynics.

A much-more detailed analysis that comes to much the same conclusion about Ahmadinejad’s apocalyptic vision is available via FrontPage Magazine.

Mind you, re-building the Temple or cloning a red heifer are scarcely the source of inherently cataclysmic activities that many too many Shiite Muslims are pursuing.

So when one considers Iran, under such leadership, to be dedicated to the acquisition of nuclear weapons after stating that Israel should be “wiped out from the map” – and with the current Ayatollah Khamenei stating that Israel is a “cancerous tumor” on the verge of collapse – well, one should be very worried.  Wiping out Israel in a fiery blaze of atomic glory would indeed be a way to create the holocaust that would prompt the return of the long-awaited Hidden Imam (if anything ever could).

Clearly Jews understand this, as 1 in 4 would seriously consider leaving the country if Iran succeeds in acquiring nuclear weapons.  Given that such an event would literally mean the end of the state of Israel even if Iran didn’t nuke them, Israel has little choice but to attack Iran’s nuclear capability (since – clearly – no one else will).

Would Israelis hold back from a planned attack of Iran if they believed the United States would prevent Iran from obtaining nuclear weapons?  Probably.  But the problem is, they clearly don’t believe that any more.  And they certainly no longer believe that America under Barack Hussein Obama is on their side.  When George Bush was president, fully 88% of Israeli Jews believed the president was “pro-Israel”; today under Obama, only 31% of Israeli Jews think so.

Such an event, of hated Israel swooping into an Islamic country to destroy their Russian-built nuclear facilities, would itself be a likely cataclysmic event.  Do you even dare to imagine how the Islamic world would react?  And realize that just such an event is very likely coming – and coming all-too soon.

Now Vice President Joe Biden predicted that Barack Obama would be “tested” by an “international crisis” that would test his mettle.  He went on to say:

I promise you, you all are gonna be sitting here a year from now going, ‘Oh my God, why are they there in the polls? Why is the polling so down? Why is this thing so tough?’ We’re gonna have to make some incredibly tough decisions in the first two years. So I’m asking you now, I’m asking you now, be prepared to stick with us. Remember the faith you had at this point because you’re going to have to reinforce us.”“There are gonna be a lot of you who want to go, ‘Whoa, wait a minute, yo, whoa, whoa, I don’t know about that decision’,” Biden continued. “Because if you think the decision is sound when they’re made, which I believe you will when they’re made, they’re not likely to be as popular as they are sound. Because if they’re popular, they’re probably not sound.”

Joe Biden quickly turned his discussion of this international crisis and Barack Obama’s seeming poor handling of said crisis to politics and the hopes of Democrats.  But Iran obtaining nuclear weapons won’t be about politics; it will be about Armageddon.

Frighteningly, Barack Obama’s very own VP has said that Barack Obama is most certainly not ready for what may very well prove to be the most terrifying crisis in human history:

“There has been no harsher critic of Barack Obama’s lack of experience than Joe Biden,” McCain spokesman Ben Porritt said in a written statement, according to CNN. “Biden has denounced Barack Obama’s poor foreign policy judgment and has strongly argued in his own words what Americans are quickly realizing — that Barack Obama is not ready to be president.”

Biden frequently raised questions about Obama’s lack of foreign policy experience during the primaries. “I think he can be ready, but right now, I don’t believe he is,” Biden said during one debate. “The presidency is not something that lends itself to on-the-job training.”

North Korea looms large, and may loom far larger in the days soon-to-come.  But a nuclear Iran is an even more terrifying prospect.  You’ll see.

As I turn to Iraq – and then to how Iraq relates to Iran in the context of Bible prophecy – allow me to first discuss Joel Rosenberg.

A Wikipedia article on Joel Rosenberg probably provides the most concise summary (accessed June 23, 2009):

Rosenberg’s novels have attracted those interested in Bible Prophecy, due to several of his fictional elements of his books that would occur after his writing of books. Nine months before the September 11th attacks, Rosenberg wrote a novel with a kamikaze plane attack on an American city. Five months before the 2003 invasion of Iraq, he wrote a novel about war with Saddam Hussein, the death of Yasser Arafat eight months before it occurred, a story with Russia, Iran, and Libya forming a military alliance against Israel occurring the date of publishing,^[7] the rebuilding of the city of Babylon,^[12] Iran vowing to have Israel “wiped off the face of the map forever” five months before Iranian President Ahmadinejad said the same,^[13] and the discovery of huge amounts of oil and natural gas in Israel (which happened in January 2009).^[14] The U.S. News & World Report have referred to him as a “Modern Nostradamus,”^[15] although Rosenberg tries to play down those proclamations, stating that “I am not a clairvoyant, a psychic, or a ‘Modern Nostradamus,’ as some have suggested.”^[16] He gives the credit for his accurate predictions to studying Biblical prophecy and applying to the modern world.^[16]

Why did Rosenberg predict that there would be a “kamikaze plane attack on an American city” by Islamic terrorists?  Because he accurately understood the evil at the heart of Islam.

Why did Rosenberg predict a war between Saddam Hussein and the United States resulting in the overthrow of Saddam and his brutal regime?  That’s where it gets interesting.

Joel Rosenberg had done a thorough study of the Book of Ezekiel and of the Bible (as a couple of overlapping articles summarize – Article 1; – Article 2).  He learned that one day, according to the Bible, a massive army under the leadership of Russia and many of its former republics (Magog) and Iran (Persia) and consisting of many countries that are today Islamic [e.g. “Cush” (modern-day Sudan and Ethiopia); “Put” (modern-day Libya); “Gomer” (modern-day Turkey); “Beth-togarmah” (modern-day Armenia); and many peoples “along the mountains of Israel” (modern-day Lebanon and possibly Syria)] would form an “exceedingly great army” that would one day attack Israel.

What Rosenberg noted was the absence of two countries: Egypt and Babylon (i.e. Iraq).  Egypt had been a perennial enemy of Israel until 1973, when Egypt alone in all the Arab/Muslim world forged a historic peace treaty with the state of Israel.  That left Iraq.  Rosenberg asked himself, “How could a nation like Iraq, under the leadership of someone like Saddam Hussein, NOT participate in this mega-colossal-last-days attack on Israel?

Rosenberg concluded that Saddam Hussein WOULDN’T refrain from such an attack.  And that meant that Saddam Hussein would have to go.

And so, NINE MONTHS before the 9/11 attack, Rosenberg in his “fiction” created a scenario in which terrorists flew a plane in a kamikaze attack, and the United States took out the Iraqi regime and replaced it with a stable Western-friendly government.

And because the Bible is the true Word of an all-knowing God who knows the end from the beginning as revealed through His prophets, the scenario laid out by Joel Rosenberg turned out to be eerily true.  It wasn’t a “lucky guess”; it was based upon the God who had revealed the last days to an inspired prophet named Ezekiel some 2,600 years ago.

Thus we have Iraq, its tyrant who had filled mass graves with the bodies of at least 400,000 of his own people, overthrown and a stable democracy growing in his place.  And we have Iran, a country strongly allied with Russia; a country bent on acquiring nuclear weapons; a country that has announced its intent on the destruction of Israel; a country under the leadership of men who in all likelihood believe in establishing a future by an act of violent apocalypse.  Two countries on two very different paths.  And both paths known to God 2,600 years ago.

International Scholar Ajami Explains How Obama Is Failing Re: Iran

There is no question that Barack Obama has been widely criticized for offering weak statements on a developing Iranian situation with demonstrators literally risking death to protest what they view as a

While women are being gunned down in the streets, Obama has said he doesn’t want to “meddle” in Iran.  While such women and hundreds of thousands of others are demonstrating and even dying for their vote of Mousavi to be counted against the man whom the Iranian mullahs put in power (Ahmadinejad), Obama has publicly claimed that there is no difference between the two.  And while the Ayatollah Khamenei has issued a progressively harsher and more lethal crackdown on his people, Barack Obama has taken the Ayatollah’s side, claiming:

President Barack Obama says he believes supreme leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei has deep concerns about the civil unrest that has followed the hotly contested presidential election there.

Obama repeated Tuesday at a news conference his “deep ir own, concerns” about the disputed balloting. He said he believes the ayatollah’s decision to order an investigation “indicates he understands the Iranian people have deep concerns.”

The Iranian Ayatollah really isn’t that bad of a guy.  You heard it from Barack Hussein first.

It’s not a question as to whether Obama has been tepid in his response to the mass demonstrations in Iran; it is OBVIOUS he has been tepid.  To date, he has delivered three statements on Iran — having been forced to make the third, somewhat more strongly-worded statement, as a result of Congress’ display of unity in its resolve to stand with the Iranian people.  His first statement delivered on June 15 was simply pathetically weak.  Pure and simple.   And even the French and the Germans have shown more moral backbone and more moral indignation than Barack Obama.

When a French president displays moral outrage, while an American president displays political appeasement, it is more than a shame: it is an absolute abdication of leadership.  And, even worse, when an American president is behind Nancy Pelosi and Harry Reid in exhibiting moral courage, it is truly a sign of the last pathetic gasps of a fading republic.

No, the question isn’t whether Obama is being tepid; it’s merely a matter of asking why he is being so incredibly tepid.

The reason, from all accounts, is that Obama (cynically if realistically) expects the Iranian leadership to prevail in this current struggle, and he doesn’t want to antagonize the Iranian regime in a way that might undermine his subsequent efforts at the direct negotiations he campaigned on.  That, and he doesn’t want to be accused by the Iranians of “meddling” when that has already been proven absurd: the Iranians have ALREADY accused us of meddling whether we have been or not.

I would argue that Ronald Reagan’s “meddling” when he called the Soviet Union “an evil empire” and when he  said, “Mr. Gorbachev: tear down this wall!” are what is in order.  It isn’t “meddling” to call a spade a spade.  It is hardly “meddling” to decry in the strongest of terms the absence of liberty and freedom in support of a demonstrating people who clearly yearn for them.

We can never know what would have happened had we only done something that we were too timid to do.  It is right to stand with the Iranian people against an evil and unjust system; it is wrong to cynically play realpolitic in the faint hope of having that same evil and unjust system offer a diplomatic bone down the road.

But, getting back to the main point, are Obama’s concerns that he might undermine future negotiations with Iran valid?

I would argue that Obama’s whole project of attaining success through diplomacy with Iran was a fool’s project to begin with.  We are talking about a regime that has based itself for over 30 years on conflict with and opposition to “the Great Satan”, America.

At no time during the Obama presidency have they demonstrated any willingness to cease their efforts toward nuclear weapons.  They simply have no reason to do so.  And there is virtually no reason to believe that Barack Obama will be able to give them one.

By any realistic expectation, Obama’s policy of diplomacy and negotiation with Iran has ALREADY FAILED, as even the New York Times recognizes.  There is nothing left in terms of hopes of future negotiation breakthroughs to hope for.  If nothing else, how is Obama going to personally meet with President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, or the Ayatollah Khamenei, when the fundamental legitimacy of their government is in such open question?

An insightful article by one of the premier experts on Iran offers insights on precisely how and even why Barack Obama has failed on Iran:

JUNE 22, 2009

Obama’s Persian Tutorial: The president has to choose between the regime and the people in the streets.

By FOUAD AJAMI

President Barack Obama did not “lose” Iran. This is not a Jimmy Carter moment. But the foreign-policy education of America’s 44th president has just begun. Hitherto, he had been cavalier about other lands, he had trusted in his own biography as a bridge to distant peoples, he had believed he could talk rogues and ideologues out of deeply held beliefs. His predecessor had drawn lines in the sand. He would look past them.

Thus a man who had been uneasy with his middle name (Hussein) during the presidential campaign would descend on Ankara and Cairo, inserting himself in a raging civil war over Islam itself. An Iranian theocratic regime had launched a bid for dominion in its region; Mr. Obama offered it an olive branch and waited for it to “unclench” its fist.

It was an odd, deeply conflicted message from Mr. Obama. He was at once a herald of change yet a practitioner of realpolitik. He would entice the crowds, yet assure the autocrats that the “diplomacy of freedom” that unsettled them during the presidency of George W. Bush is dead and buried. Grant the rulers in Tehran and Damascus their due: They were quick to take the measure of the new steward of American power. He had come to “engage” them. Gone was the hope of transforming these regimes or making them pay for their transgressions. The theocracy was said to be waiting on an American opening, and this new president would put an end to three decades of estrangement between the United States and Iran.

But in truth Iran had never wanted an opening to the U.S. For the length of three decades, the custodians of the theocracy have had precisely the level of enmity toward the U.S. they have wanted — just enough to be an ideological glue for the regime but not enough to be a threat to their power. Iran’s rulers have made their way in the world with relative ease. No White Army gathered to restore the dominion of the Pahlavis. The Cold War and oil bailed them out. So did the false hope that the revolution would mellow and make its peace with the world.

Mr. Obama may believe that his offer to Iran is a break with a hard-line American policy. But nothing could be further from the truth. In 1989, in his inaugural, George H.W. Bush extended an offer to Iran: “Good will begets good will,” he said. A decade later, in a typically Clintonian spirit of penance and contrition, Secretary of State Madeleine Albright came forth with a full apology for America’s role in the 1953 coup that ousted nationalist Prime Minister Mohammed Mossadegh.

Iran’s rulers scoffed. They had inherited a world, and they were in no need of opening it to outsiders. They were able to fly under the radar. Selective, targeted deeds of terror, and oil income, enabled them to hold their regime intact. There is a Persian pride and a Persian solitude, and the impact of three decades of zeal and indoctrination. The drama of Barack Obama’s election was not an affair of Iran. They had an election of their own to stage. Mahmoud Ahmadinejad — a son of the Ayatollah Khomeini’s revolutionary order, a man from the brigades of the regime, austere and indifferent to outsiders, an Iranian Everyman with badly fitting clothes and white socks — was up for re-election.

The upper orders of his country loathed him and bristled under the system of controls that the mullahs and the military and the revolutionary brigades had put in place, but he had the power and the money and the organs of the state arrayed on his side. There was a discernible fault line in Iran. There were Iranians yearning for liberty, but we should not underestimate the power and the determination of those moved by the yearning for piety. Ahmadinejad’s message of populism at home and defiance abroad, his assertion that the country’s nuclear quest is a “closed file,” settled and beyond discussion, have a resonance on Iranian soil. His challenger, Mir Hossein Mousavi, a generation older, could not compete with him on that terrain.

On the ruins of the ancien régime, the Iranian revolutionaries, it has to be conceded, have built a formidable state. The men who emerged out of a cruel and bloody struggle over their country’s identity and spoils are a tenacious, merciless breed. Their capacity for repression is fearsome. We must rein in the modernist conceit that the bloggers, and the force of Twitter and Facebook, could win in the streets against the squads of the regime. That fight would be an Iranian drama, all outsiders mere spectators.

That ambivalence at the heart of the Obama diplomacy about freedom has not served American policy well in this crisis. We had tried to “cheat” — an opening to the regime with an obligatory wink to those who took to the streets appalled by their rulers’ cynicism and utter disregard for their people’s intelligence and common sense — and we were caught at it. Mr. Obama’s statement that “the difference between Ahmadinejad and Mousavi in terms of their actual policies may not be as great as had been advertised” put on cruel display the administration’s incoherence. For once, there was an acknowledgment by this young president of history’s burden: “Either way, we were going to be dealing with an Iranian regime that has historically been hostile to the United States, that has caused some problems in the neighborhood and is pursuing nuclear weapons.” No Wilsonianism on offer here.

Mr. Obama will have to acknowledge the “foreignness” of foreign lands. His breezy self-assurance has been put on notice. The Obama administration believed its own rhetoric that the pro-Western March 14 coalition in Lebanon had ridden Mr. Obama’s coattails to an electoral victory. (It had given every indication that it expected similar vindication in Iran.)

But the claim about Lebanon was hollow and reflected little understanding of the forces at play in Lebanon’s politics. That contest was settled by Lebanese rules, and by the push and pull of Saudi and Syrian and Iranian interests in Lebanon.

Mr. Obama’s June 4 speech in Cairo did not reshape the Islamic landscape. I was in Saudi Arabia when Mr. Obama traveled to Riyadh and Cairo. The earth did not move, life went on as usual. There were countless people puzzled by the presumption of the entire exercise, an outsider walking into sacred matters of their faith. In Saudi Arabia, and in the Arabic commentaries of other lands, there was unease that so complicated an ideological and cultural terrain could be approached with such ease and haste.

Days into his presidency, it should be recalled, Mr. Obama had spoken of his desire to restore to America’s relation with the Muslim world the respect and mutual interest that had existed 30 or 20 years earlier. It so happened that he was speaking, almost to the day, on the 30th anniversary of the Iranian Revolution — and that the time span he was referring to, his golden age, covered the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan, the American standoff with Libya, the fall of Beirut to the forces of terror, and the downing of Pan Am Flight 103 over Lockerbie, Scotland. Liberal opinion would have howled had this history been offered by George W. Bush, but Barack Obama was granted a waiver.

Little more than three decades ago, Jimmy Carter, another American president convinced that what had come before him could be annulled and wished away, called on the nation to shed its “inordinate fear of communism,” and to put aside its concern with “traditional issues of war and peace” in favor of “new global issues of justice, equity and human rights.” We had betrayed our principles in the course of the Cold War, he said, “fought fire with fire, never thinking that fire is quenched with water.” The Soviet answer to that brave, new world was the invasion of Afghanistan in December of 1979.

Mr. Carter would try an atonement in the last year of his presidency. He would pose as a born-again hawk. It was too late in the hour for such redemption. It would take another standard-bearer, Ronald Reagan, to see that great struggle to victory.

Iran’s ordeal and its ways shattered the Carter presidency. President Obama’s Persian tutorial has just begun.

Mr. Ajami, a professor at the School of Advanced International Studies at Johns Hopkins University and a fellow at Stanford University’s Hoover Institution, is the author of “The Foreigner’s Gift: The Americans, the Arabs, and the Iraqis in Iraq (Free Press, 2007).

It is more than fitting that, in an article that is ostensibly about Barack Obama’s poor handling of the Iranian election opportunity, Dr. Ajami should begin and end with Jimmy Carter.  Because we truly have seen much of Barack Obama’s native and failed policies before in the person of Jimmy Carter.

The biggest problem facing Barack Obama is that he is viewed – and I believe very rightly – as weak.

Ronald Reagan called the Soviet Union an “evil empire” – and he defeated it without even having to fire a shot simply by forceful and continuous confrontation.  George W. Bush called Iraq, Iran, and North Korea “the axis of evil” – and he defeated one of its members and replaced it with a stable democracy (over Barack Obama’s opposition, by the way).

Barack Obama is viewed by rogue regimes as being unwilling to go to war to stand up for American policy or American values.  He will pursue negotiation and diplomacy come what may – and in so doing allow tyrants to take advantage of the United States.

That is why “North Korea’s Kim Jong Il has challenged President Obama more in four months than he did President George W. Bush in eight years.”

Bottom line: with a Reagan, or with either Bush, dictators knew that there was a point beyond which they dared not go, lest the U.S. unleash its might upon them.  They have no such fear about Barack Obama, and for good reason.

Do American Christians Care About the Iranian Election Demonstrations?

We see you, Iran.

We don’t fully know what to make of what is going on, but we definitely see you.

For one thing, we don’t know for sure if the election that is being protested was fraudulent in the first place.  We know that a pre-election poll from May 11 (three weeks before the election) predicted much the same results that were officially released by Iran: a more than 2-1 victory for Ahmadinejad, with Ahmadinejad even winning in leading contender Moussavi’s home town.

And we don’t know what to make of Mir Hussein Moussavi: a man who took part in the Iranian Revolution that ushered in the rule of the ayatollahs; a man who governed with the full backing of the ayatollahs as Prime Minister; and a man who supported Iran’s nuclear program.  We don’t know that the man who may or may not have been usurped by fraud wouldn’t be better than, as bad as, or worse than Mahmoud Ahmadinejad has been.

What we DO know is that millions of Iranian demonstrators are out on the streets.

We also know that the Iranian regime is attempting to block the world from seeing these public demonstrations by restricting journalists and blocking demonstrator’s access to media, internet, and cellular sources.

And we know that demonstrators are being beaten and even killed.

The world IS watching, Iran.  And it DOES SEE what is happening.

You do not need to fear that no one knows or cares what is happening.  You do not need to fear that the regime can simply crack down by cracking skulls, and that no one in the rest of the world will care.

If you are living in Iran, you should know: we in America do not support the Iranian theocratic regime.  We do not support the Ayatollahs, and we want to see the “1979 revolution” defeated.

Nor do we support Mahmoud Ahmadinejad.  Or Mir Hussein Moussavi, for that matter.

We do not even necessarily support the Iranian people.

What we DO support is liberty and democracy, not only for the Iranian people, but for ALL people of every race, and of every creed.

Nearly fifty years ago now, President John F. Kennedy said:

Let every nation know, whether it wishes us well or ill, that we shall pay any price, bear any burden, meet any hardship, support any friend, oppose any foe, in order to assure the survival and the success of liberty.

And while America has never perfectly defended liberty, we have always had the best of intentions in trying to defend and spread liberty to the world.

The United States fought against the evils of communism nearly alone.  The war in Vietnam was one battle in the Cold War which we ultimately won.  But in the aftermath of our defeat and withdraw from Indochina, millions were murdered or allowed to starve to death by the communists.  And in the decades that followed, the United States took the side of the oppressed Muslims against the Serbs in Bosnia.  That same United States would later overthrow Saddam Hussein, who had buried at least 400,000 of his own people in mass graves, and help bring about a stable democracy in Iraq.

In the 1980s, Russian dissidents – some of whom were literally being tortured in the gulags – expressed being “overjoyed” when an American president announced that the Soviet Union was an “evil empire” which the United States would oppose.  Great dissidents such as Alexandr Solzhenitsyn, Andrei Sakharov, and Natan Sharansky realized that they were no longer alone against a monstrous system.  That they had powerful allies on the outside who were aware of the crimes going on, and who sided with them against the brutal regime.

When freedom finally came to Poland, after decades of totalitarian control by the U.S.S.R., it turned out to be Pope John Paul II and Ronald Reagan who had been at the heart of the revolution.

It was Natan Sharansky who called George W. Bush “the dissident president” because of his goal of bringing democracy to countries such as Iraq and Afghanistan, and who predicted Bush would largely fight for democracy in the world alone.

Mr. Sharansky says of his adversaries among the Western intellectual elite: “Those people who are always wrong–they were wrong about the Soviet Union, they were wrong about Oslo [the 1993 Israeli-Palestinian peace deal], they were wrong about appeasing Yasser Arafat–they are the intellectual leaders of these battles. So what can I tell you?”

In the same way, the great writer and Soviet dissident Alexandr Solzhenitsyn, who likewise experienced the gulags, likewise found himself attacked by Western “intellectual” elites after he delivered his great address entitled “A World Split Apart.”  Following that address, the same “Western intellectual elite” that Sharansky would come to deride as “wrong about everything” attacked Solzhenitsyn.

And upon what value system did these great changes occur?

As you seek to throw off the yoke of theocratic oppression by Ayatollahs, allow me to humbly advise you not to sever yourselves from religion or religious principles, however.

It was George Washington who said:

“…And let us with caution indulge the supposition that morality can be maintained without religion…  Reason and experience both forbid us to expect that national morality can prevail in exclusion of religious principle.”
– George Washington, Farewell Address, Sept 17, 1796

It might amaze you, Iranian Muslims, that your greatest allies in the West could be Christians.

Christians disagree with Muslims regarding the name and even the nature and purpose of God, but we can agree with any Muslim dissident that there is in fact a transcendent God who created human beings and intended them to have personal freedom, liberty and dignity.

Read Solzhenitsyn address, Iranian people.  Understand what he meant.  His speech excoriated the West for its immorality, materialism, and godlessness.  He affirmed traditional cultures against the all-encompassing mass culture of Western secularism.  He dissected Western materialism and its fixation on comfort and pleasure, which had drained away its capacity for courage and sacrifice.  He deplored the way our laws had been divorced from morality.  And he said, “Society has turned out to have scarce defense against the abyss of human decadence, for example against the misuse of liberty for moral violence against young people, such as motion pictures full of pornography, crime, and horror.”

Solzhenitsyn argued that both the communist East and the secularist West suffered from the same spiritual sickness.  And he concluded that, “No one on earth has any way left but – upward.”  Toward God and His transcendent values.  An outraged New York Times editorial summarized the very postmodernism Solzhenitsyn was damning: “He believes himself to be in possession of The Truth” (from “The Obsession of Solzhenitsyn,” New York Times, 13 June 1978).

But Alexandr Solzhenitsyn did have The Truth.  He had found it in the transcendent values of religion.  By contrast, he had NOT found it in Western secularism.

If the people of Iran truly want to throw off the shackles of brutal government control and oppression, we Christians in the West will stand with you.  Because we believe – as the American founding fathers believed – that every human being is created in the image of God, and possesses God-given rights to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.

We don’t care who you want for your president.  And we believe you have a right to be Muslims because God gives you the ultimate freedom – along with the ultimate responsibility – to be who you want to be, and to believe what you want to believe.

We care only about a peaceful and democratic Iran, where every citizen has God-ordained liberty and the right to pursue freedom, along with the happiness and prosperity that come with genuine freedom.

And it is as a Christian that I pray for the safety and success of Iranian demonstrators.

Bush, Obama, the Mainstream Media and the Iranian Election Demonstrations

Watching the mainstream media coverage of the demonstrations in Iran following their elections, you would think that the protests have been all about Obama and his Cairo speech delivered on June 4.

Barack Obama appeared to take great credit for whatever would happen when he delivered a rambling answer to a press question about what was happening in Iran prior to the election results being released (and Ahmadinejad being declared the winner):

“Uh, we are excited, uh, to see, uh, what appears to be a robust debate taking place in Iran. And obviously after the speech, uh, that I made in Cairo, uh, we tried to send a clear message that, uh, we think there is the possibility of change, uhhh, aaaand — ehhh, yuh– oh – Ultimately the election is for the Iranians to decide, but just a-as has been true in Lebanon, uh, what’s, uh — can be true in Iran as well is that you’re seeing, uh, people looking at new, uh, possibilities. And, uh, whoever ends up winning, uh, the election in Iran, the fact that there’s been a robust debate hopefully will help, uh, advance, uh, our ability to engage them in new ways.”

But there are some major problems with the “Obama’s speech changed the world” thesis:

For one thing, Obama’s speech failed to offer any new changes in American policy. As an example, even PBS’ positive article on the speech confessed:

While President Obama’s speech contained no new policy proposals on the Middle East, he called upon Israelis and Palestinians alike to live up to their international obligations and to work towards a two-state solution.

And with all due respects, it’s not like Obama’s devoid of actual policy change “call” ignited the Islamic world.

Any many Muslims rightly said, “Nice speech, but let’s wait and see what Obama actually does.”

One late night comedic take on the speech a group of terrorists wearing masks and bandoleers of weapons and ammunition listening to Obama’s speech in front of a television. When Obama seemed to say something about offering peace, they got up, “high-fived” one another, and began to take off their weapons. But then, even as they were in the process of taking off their weapons, Obama seemed to say something that went against the grain of his immediately previous statement, so the terrorists shrugged and started putting on their weapons again.

Bottom line: the comedic take ended up with the terrorists still armed with all of their weapons, just as they had been prior to the speech.

Fausta’s blog dealt with some of what was missing from the speech:

1. The word TERRORIST. “Violent extremism” doesn’t happen on its own. It’s done by terrorists.

2. Details on closing Gitmo “by early next year.” Surely Pres. Obama realizes that it’s not enough to say “I have ordered the prison at Guantanamo Bay closed by early next year.” Where will those terrorists be sent? What will be the international reaction?

3. A firm position on women’s rights. As Peter Ladou said regarding the tepid language on this issue:

Is that a joke?With women being stoned, raped, abused, battered, mutilated, and slaughtered on a daily basis across the globe, violence that is so often perpetrated in the name of religion, the most our president can speak about is protecting their right to wear the hijab? I would have been much more heartened if the preponderance of the speech had been about how in the 21st century, we CANNOT tolerate the pervasive abuse of our mothers and sisters and daughters.

Most troubling of all, the speech lacked
4. An unequivocal, firm stance on democracy: A “commitment to governments that reflect the will of the people” is not enough. Tyrants since the dawn of history have been summoning the masses to demonstrate their regimes “reflect the will of the people.”

Additionally, the statement, “America does not presume to know what is best for everyone” is equivocating on a moral point. America, from its birth, has been a champion of democracy, and should remain stalwart in its position.

Did Obama truly think there was little or no difference between the so-called “glass ceiling” women might find in America with the stonings and mutilations of women all-too common in the Islamic world?

As to this last point, Charles Krauthammer – after citing specific examples of just such moral equivalency from Obama’s speech – says this:

Obama undoubtedly thinks he is demonstrating historical magnanimity with all these moral equivalencies and self-flagellating apologetics. On the contrary. He’s showing cheap condescension, an unseemly hunger for applause and a willingness to distort history for political effect.

Distorting history is not truth-telling, but the telling of soft lies. Creating false equivalencies is not moral leadership, but moral abdication. And hovering above it all, above country and history, is a sign not of transcendence but of a disturbing ambivalence toward one’s own country.

Let me offer a rival explanation as to why Iranians are revolting against the results of the elections, even after the Ayatollah “sanctified” the results by claiming the re-election of Mahmoud Ahmadinejad reflected a “divine assessment.”

How about the hard-fought-for result of an actual democracy in Iraq right next to Iran?

How about the fact that Iranians had the chance to see not one, but now several, freely-held elections with Iraqi people being able to victoriously hold up purple-ink-smudged fingers as proof that they had been able to freely vote for the candidates of their choice?

Just how is it that Obama’s speech is somehow more important than that?

Let’s not forget the fact that neither Barack Obama nor the mainstream media wanted the Iraqi people to be able to freely vote for the candidates of their choice. They opposed the toppling of dictator and tyrant butcher Saddam Hussein – who had murdered at a minimum 400,000 of his own people and buried them in mass graves – having the opportunity to vote that George Bush and the magnificent American military courageously won for them.

And these same people who opposed the establishment of an Iraqi democracy in the heart of the Arab world are now telling you that a damn SPEECH filled with meaningless moral equivalencies and devoid of substance or policy accomplished a change in the heart of the Iranian people?

Seriously?

The mainstream media gleefully covered every death and every failure in Iraq and continued to cover it – until President Bush and the American military began to turn things around. And then the coverage dried up. These dishonest peddlers of propaganda were unwilling to represent the effort in Iraq as successful.

You can go back and find the left predicting in 2003 that “Bush’s declared attempt to introduce democracy in Iraq by force seems set to fail.” In 2005 the naysayers who called hope for democracy in Iraq “the province of fools” abounded. Then you can find media elites in 2006 suggesting that the elections in Iraq are good news, but still not as good as it should have been. Now we have a full-fledged stable democracy in the heart of the Arab world, and it is seemingly irrelevant to whatever positive pro-democracy changes that might be taking place immediately around Iraq.

The mainstream media allowed the Democrat Party to literally cut-and-run from its earlier positions on Iraq without coverage or analysis. Democrats were allowed to be for the deposing of Saddam Hussein before they were against it. Democrats like Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid were allowed to claim “I believe that this war is lost“ while our troops were still fighting on foreign soil to secure victory.

Articles still condemning Bush for Iraq by the mainstream media continue to go for about a dime a dozen, but the Wall Street Journal on January 31st, 2009 offered this far more accurate and honest conclusion:

Say what you want to say about the administrative debacle the situation became after Saddam was ousted, but Saturday’s endeavor is a sign of a better Iraq in a region infested with despots and tightly-gripped political systems, where elections, if allowed, are not that different from those held under Saddam – sham, corrupt and pointless. Arab regimes across the Middle East and Arab people around the world who bristled when they saw Saddam toppled, and later executed — and who may still easily shrug off Iraq’s elections as unconstitutional for being held under U.S. military occupation — have a right to know what it means to have a sense of hope. True, Iraq was safe under the Baath regime and walking in Baghdad at any time of the day felt to me even safer than walking in some parts of New York now, but give me any police state in that region or elsewhere that doesn’t enjoy a relative sense of protection.

The left got to take credit for the good times, and blame Bush for the bad ones. On December 15, 2003, Hillary Clinton crowed upon the capture of Saddam Hussein:

“I was one who supported giving President Bush the authority, if necessary, to use force against Saddam Hussein. I believe that that was the right vote.”

Hillary Clinton was for that war before she was against it. And the mainstream media – dishonest, deceitful, and disingenuous itself – allowed Hillary Clinton to be dishonest, deceitful, and disingenuous.

Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid, prior to his declaration of defeat in Iraq, had justified the war in 2002 when “being tough” was politically in vogue. On October 9, 2002 he was on the record saying:

“We stopped the fighting [in 1991] on an agreement that Iraq would take steps to assure the world that it would not engage in further aggression and that it would destroy its weapons of mass destruction. It has refused to take those steps. That refusal constitutes a breach of the armistice which renders it void and justifies resumption of the armed conflict.”

He was not only allowed to be for that war before he was against it by the media, he was allowed to utter outright treason by declaring a war our troops were still fighting “lost.”

Nancy Pelosi, the Speaker of the House, said on October 10, 2002:

“I come to this debate, Mr. Speaker, as one at the end of 10 years in office on the Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence, where stopping the proliferation of weapons of mass destruction was one of my top priorities. I applaud the President on focusing on this issue and on taking the lead to disarm Saddam Hussein. … Others have talked about this threat that is posed by Saddam Hussein. Yes, he has chemical weapons, he has biological weapons, he is trying to get nuclear weapons.”

But the mainstream media allowed Nancy Pelosi to get away with the outright moral depravity of attacking President George Bush as a liar when she had publicly held the very same positions herself.

And now we have these same deceitful, dishonest demagogues ignoring the hard-fought accomplishments won under George Bush, and crediting an empty speech as the driving force behind any changes in the Islamic world.

Following the beginnings of the Iranian public demonstrations, even in the aftermath of public statements of condemnation by European leaders, Barack Obama had failed to take a public stand. EVEN FRANCE HAD DISPLAYED MORE COURAGE IN STANDING BEHIND THE IRANIAN PEOPLE THAN OBAMA.

Obama finally provided a weak statement of support for the Iranian people. But it was criticized as being not nearly enough. Finally, he offered a somewhat stronger statement, but only after both the House and the Senate passed strongly-worded resolutions:

Congress voted resoundingly Friday to condemn the Iranian government’s crackdown on protesters, sending a strong bipartisan signal to the White House that it wants less caution and more outrage.

Obama hasn’t been at the forefront of democracy for Iran; he has in fact been the Western and American leader most behind on the issue of supporting true democracy in Iran.

But we’re supposed to believe that it was an empty-worded speech from an empty suit on foreign policy that is rocking the Iranian world?

Don’t believe it for a nanosecond.

Even Former KGB Russian PM Less Marxist than Barry Hussein

When did you think you’d see the day that the leadership of the United States would embrace Marxist policies, while the leadership of Russia warned us against it?

But that’s exactly what we’ve got going on in today’s mad, mad world:

The Moscow Times » Issue 4167 » Business

Putin Slams Obama Tax Proposal
16 June 2009

The Moscow TimesPrime Minister Vladimir Putin on Monday criticized U.S. President Barack Obama’s plan to raise taxes on U.S. companies’ foreign operations, saying it would amount to double taxation that will hurt the global economy.

“This is a serious decision for the world economy,” Putin said at a meeting of the Presidium, the government said on its web site. “If taxes are imposed on all companies working abroad, then it will mean the total destruction of the system for avoiding double taxation.”

Putin instructed Finance Minister Alexei Kudrin to hold discussions on the plan with Obama’s administration.

Kudrin met with finance ministers from the Group of Eight over the weekend and signed an agreement with Italy outlining a system for avoiding double taxation.

Obama has proposed canceling a provision of the tax code that allows foreign subsidiaries of U.S. corporations to defer tax payments on money that is reinvested in local operations.

“It’s a tax code that says you should pay lower taxes if you create a job in Bangalore, India, than if you create one in Buffalo, New York,” he said in May, referring to the current state of the U.S. tax code, media reported.

Obama is scheduled to make his first official visit to Moscow on July 6-8.

I truly never believed the day would come when I would actually find myself envious of Russia’s leadership over ours.

Clearly, if anyone would recognize the essence of socialism and Marxism, it would be men like Vlaidimir Putin, and Russian newspapers such as the Moscow Times and Pravda.  And to paraphrase the often mocked Bush take on Putin, Russia has now looked into the eyes of Barack Obama and found him to be a socialist and a Marxist.

American capitalism gone with a whimper

By: Stanislav Mishin     Source: Pravda.Ru

It must be said, that like the breaking of a great dam, the American decent into Marxism is happening with breath taking speed, against the back drop of a passive, hapless sheeple, excuse me dear reader, I meant people.

True, the situation has been well prepared on and off for the past century, especially the past twenty years. The initial testing grounds was conducted upon our Holy Russia and a bloody test it was. But we Russians would not just roll over and give up our freedoms and our souls, no matter how much money Wall Street poured into the fists of the Marxists.

Those lessons were taken and used to properly prepare the American populace for the surrender of their freedoms and souls, to the whims of their elites and betters.

First, the population was dumbed down through a politicized and substandard education system based on pop culture, rather then the classics. Americans know more about their favorite TV dramas then the drama in DC that directly affects their lives. They care more for their “right” to choke down a McDonalds burger or a BurgerKing burger than for their constitutional rights. Then they turn around and lecture us about our rights and about our “democracy”. Pride blind the foolish.

Then their faith in God was destroyed, until their churches, all tens of thousands of different “branches and denominations” were for the most part little more then Sunday circuses and their televangelists and top protestant mega preachers were more then happy to sell out their souls and flocks to be on the “winning” side of one pseudo Marxist politician or another. Their flocks may complain, but when explained that they would be on the “winning” side, their flocks were ever so quick to reject Christ in hopes for earthly power. Even our Holy Orthodox churches are scandalously liberalized in America.

The final collapse has come with the election of Barack Obama. His speed in the past three months has been truly impressive. His spending and money printing has been a record setting, not just in America’s short history but in the world. If this keeps up for more then another year, and there is no sign that it will not, America at best will resemble the Wiemar Republic and at worst Zimbabwe.

These past two weeks have been the most breath taking of all. First came the announcement of a planned redesign of the American Byzantine tax system, by the very thieves who used it to bankroll their thefts, loses and swindles of hundreds of billions of dollars. These make our Russian oligarchs look little more then ordinary street thugs, in comparison. Yes, the Americans have beat our own thieves in the shear volumes. Should we congratulate them?

These men, of course, are not an elected panel but made up of appointees picked from the very financial oligarchs and their henchmen who are now gorging themselves on trillions of American dollars, in one bailout after another. They are also usurping the rights, duties and powers of the American congress (parliament). Again, congress has put up little more then a whimper to their masters.

Then came Barack Obama’s command that GM’s (General Motors) president step down from leadership of his company. That is correct, dear reader, in the land of “pure” free markets, the American president now has the power, the self given power, to fire CEOs and we can assume other employees of private companies, at will. Come hither, go dither, the centurion commands his minions.

So it should be no surprise, that the American president has followed this up with a “bold” move of declaring that he and another group of unelected, chosen stooges will now redesign the entire automotive industry and will even be the guarantee of automobile policies. I am sure that if given the chance, they would happily try and redesign it for the whole of the world, too. Prime Minister Putin, less then two months ago, warned Obama and UK’s Blair, not to follow the path to Marxism, it only leads to disaster. Apparently, even though we suffered 70 years of this Western sponsored horror show, we know nothing, as foolish, drunken Russians, so let our “wise” Anglo-Saxon fools find out the folly of their own pride.

Again, the American public has taken this with barely a whimper…but a “freeman” whimper.

So, should it be any surprise to discover that the Democratically controlled Congress of America is working on passing a new regulation that would give the American Treasury department the power to set “fair” maximum salaries, evaluate performance and control how private companies give out pay raises and bonuses? Senator Barney Franks, a social pervert basking in his homosexuality (of course, amongst the modern, enlightened American societal norm, as well as that of the general West, homosexuality is not only not a looked down upon life choice, but is often praised as a virtue) and his Marxist enlightenment, has led this effort. He stresses that this only affects companies that receive government monies, but it is retroactive and taken to a logical extreme, this would include any company or industry that has ever received a tax break or incentive.

The Russian owners of American companies and industries should look thoughtfully at this and the option of closing their facilities down and fleeing the land of the Red as fast as possible. In other words, divest while there is still value left.

The proud American will go down into his slavery without a fight, beating his chest and proclaiming to the world, how free he really is. The world will only snicker.

Socialism doesn’t work next time around.  It is based on economic, theological, and philosophical presuppositions that are simply false.  It has always failed, and it always will fail.  If you doubt this, just as the Russians.

Previously, Validimir Putin has already warned the U.S. about its headlong rush to embrace socialism.

Putin has said:

In the 20th century, the Soviet Union made the state’s role absolute. In the long run, this made the Soviet economy totally uncompetitive. This lesson cost us dearly. I am sure nobody wants to see it repeated.

Nor should we turn a blind eye to the fact that the spirit of free enterprise, including the principle of personal responsibility of businesspeople, investors and shareholders for their decisions, is being eroded in the last few months. There is no reason to believe that we can achieve better results by shifting responsibility onto the state.

The Chinese government previously contacted our tax-cheating Treasury Secretary, ‘Turbo Tax’ Timothy Geithner, and told him:

“We want some kind of a guarantee that your money is going to be worth something if you keep spending so much over there and devalue not only your currency but the currencies throughout the world… We hate you guys.  Once you start issuing $1 trillion, $2 trillion, or more dollars, we know the dollar is going to depreciate.”

So, let’s see.  Our communist and former communist governments are warning us what will happen “if you keep spending so much over there”; we’re being told NOT to make “the state’s role absolute. In the long run, this made the Soviet economy totally uncompetitive”; we’re being told Obama’s stupid “plan to raise taxes on U.S. companies’ foreign operations would amount to double taxation.”  And the Russian newspapers are saying “the American decent into Marxism is happening with breathtaking speed.”  The same paper says of the Marxism that we are descending into, “The initial testing grounds was conducted upon our Holy Russia and a bloody test it was.”  And it warns the American populace to prepare “for the surrender of their freedoms and souls, to the whims of their elites and betters.”  And they tell us:

“The final collapse has come with the election of Barack Obama. His speed in the past three months has been truly impressive. His spending and money printing has been a record setting, not just in America’s short history but in the world. If this keeps up for more then another year, and there is no sign that it will not, America at best will resemble the Wiemar Republic and at worst Zimbabwe.”

I said as much in my previous article, “Socialilsm doesn’t work any better next time around.”

Update June 18: there are now two Inspectors General who have been fired under suspicious circumstances by this administration.