Obama Demagoguery Outraging The Citizen Class

A good article on Townhall underscores the building anger that is going to overtake Obama and the Democrat regime in November.

Sunday, May 23, 2010
by Austin Hill: Townhall.com Columnist
Obama Has Enraged the “Citizen Class”

The “citizen class” is horrified.

We’re speaking here of those Americans who, while they may disagree on a variety of social and public policy issues, nonetheless agree on a few, crucial matters.

Those of us among the citizen class generally agree that the United States is a good country. While far from perfect, we see our nation as being a place of tremendous opportunity, and a force for goodness around the world.

We also agree that being a U.S. citizen is a significant and distinct thing. While we respect the notion that all human beings are worthy of their “basic human rights,” we see the rights imparted to citizens of the United States as being something different, something “over and above” the category of “basic human rights.”

This is not to say that we are superior people, because we are U.S. citizens. This is, however, the greatest blessing of being a U.S. citizen. It is why so many of us in the citizen class think of our status as a “naturally born citizen” as being a God-given gift, and we celebrate those who legally earn American citizenship as well.

But along with the distinctiveness of being an American citizen, those of us among the citizen class also regard our nation’s sovereignty as something that must be safeguarded as well. Political philosophies, governmental structures, and economic systems are not morally neutral – some work far better than others. And the structures and institutions and governing philosophies of the United States have produced a far higher level of human flourishing and freedom than any others. For this reason, if for no other, our nation must always be regarded as separate and distinct.

Our nation is good, U.S. citizenship is distinct, and national sovereignty is non-negotiable. In a nutshell, this is the mindset, the worldview, of the citizen class. It has nothing to do with one’s ethnicity, or socioeconomic background, or sexual orientation, or gender. It has everything to do with one’s most deeply held beliefs.

Not every U.S. citizen possesses the “citizen class” view (clearly some Americans don’t understand the blessing of their status), yet a majority of us still do. And no matter how much we may disagree on other matters, those of us in the citizen class won’t budge on these three items.

And this why President Obama has enraged the citizen class. He has planted the seeds of doubt regarding our nation’s goodness, and has implied that U.S. citizenship, and national sovereignty, are irrelevant.

While an overwhelming majority of the citizen class supports Arizona’s effort to uphold the significance of citizenship and sovereignty, President Barack Hussein Obama has sided with the United Nations, Venezuelan Dictator Hugo Chavez, China, and the President of Mexico in opposing the state of Arizona. One would hope that the President of the United States – any President of the United States – would seek to protect all fifty of the states that he governs from international criticism, even if he didn’t happen to like the behavior of one of his states. But our current President stands united with some of the most thuggish regimes in the world, in opposing his fellow Americans of Arizona.

Worse yet, our President not only allowed, but enabled Mexican President Felipe Calderon to publicly humiliate our fellow Americans of Arizona, while standing on the sacred grounds of the White House. And President Obama’s party – the ruling party in Congress – couldn’t rise to their feet quickly enough and offer thunderous applause, when Mr. Calderon publicly humiliated Arizona during an address to both the Senate and House last week.

It’s nothing short of disgraceful to see the President of the United States undermine us, while the entire world is watching. His behavior has, in no small part, called in to question just how “united” the United States of America is right now.

Yet in the midst of the disgrace, there are hopeful signs. The citizen class has whole-heartedly rejected the agenda (such that it is) of Barack Obama. It began last November with statewide elections in New Jersey and Virginia, where gubernatorial candidates endorsed by Barack Obama both lost. It moved on to Massachusetts where Obama’s choice for U.S. Senate lost to Republican Scott Brown.

And now, evidence of the rejection of Obama’s agenda has radiated from Utah, Pennsylvania, and Kentucky. And we haven’t even seen yet how the President’s trashing of Arizona will impact elections yet to occur.

The louder President Obama and his party cheer, the greater the rage of the citizen class. And the citizen class won’t be ignored much longer.

Democrats are claiming that the victory of Democrat Mark Critz over his Republican challenger in a heavily Democrat district, proves that the Democrats are as popular as ever.  Let’s forget the fact that Pennsylvania’s 12 district has been gerrymandered to give Democrats a 2-1 registration advantage over Republicans.  Let’s forget the fact that the special election occurred on the same day as the Democrat primary – whereas Republicans had already voted, and essentially had to vote twice.

Republicans could point out that they just won the election in Barack Obama’s hometown in Hawaii – another state that is heavily Democrat as proof of the fact they they are going to destroy Democrats in November.  But the Republicans only won that because two Democrats were in the race, splitting the Democrat vote.  Sometimes those little details matter.

The fact is that the Democrat victory in Pennsylvania and the Republican victory in Hawaii are for the most part anomalous. Both races will be fought all over again in six months – and the results of both may very likely change.

But the fact is also that the American people have largely turned against Barack Obama.  As of today, he has an approval rating of minus seventeen (- 17), with only 45% of Americans approving of his performance versus 54% who disapprove.  And the fact that a pissed off and frightened people are going to vote in huge majorities against Barack Obama in states and districts across the country in November.

What is particularly interesting is that Mark Critz – and many Democrats – are actively running against Barack Obama and the Obama agenda.  Crizt ran against ObamaCare, and against Obama’s cap-and-trade plan, among other things.  Democrats are literally saying that the American people should elect Democrats in order to oppose the Democrat agenda.  Does that really sound like a narrative that’s going to work in November?

Add to that the fact that unemployment and a host of other measurements of the U.S. economy are bad, with not a whole lot of evidence that they are going to improve.

The Democrats demagogued and demonized Republicans about the Republican record as they assured the American people that they would make everything better.  And now the same anger and outrage that Democrats rode last year will fittingly come back to wash them away over their failures.

I see a reckoning coming.

Update May 24: Oops.  Did I say 45% of Americans approved of Obama, versus 54% who disapproved?  That was yesterday.  Today only 44% of Americans approve of Obama, against 55% who disapprove.  And the President Approval Rating is at a negative eighteen.

Update May 25: Oops again.  Did I say 44% of Americans approve of Obama?  That’s no longer correct.  I’m sorry, but Obama is tanking so fast that it’s just hard to keep up with it.  Today, only 42% of Americans approve of this turd which is stinking up the White House.

From Rasmussen, May 25:

Overall, 42% of voters say they at least somewhat approve of the president’s performance. That is the lowest level of approval yet measured for this president. Fifty-six percent (56%) now disapprove of his performance.

And oh my, a whopping 20% more voters utterly despise Obama now than like him.

And that overwhelming majority of voters is going to want to come out and hurt somebody in November.

Obama Not A Happy Marxist Camper

It’s kind of pathetic, really.  The Slobbering Love Affair that the media has had with Obama still isn’t over; it’s just that Obama has been such an abject failure in every aspect of his failed presidency that even über minister of propaganda Joseph Goebbels couldn’t bail him out.  But Obama can’t seem to emotionally handle that ANY media outlet or ANY reporter is permitted to say anything negative about him (and I don’t seem to remember Obama decrying this phenomenon of negative news coverage when George Bush was president).  Obama has received the most fawning media coverage of any president in the modern era – and it STILL isn’t enough for him.

Obama is the guy who has routinely and shrilly demonized Fox News for reporting what has turned out to be the truth.  Obama is the guy who hasn’t had a press conferance for longer than any of his predecessors.  It’s now been nine months since Obama was accountable to the media.  And even liberal media such as the Los Angeles Times has pointed out that his self-righteous claims of “transparency” has been a bogus load of crap.

Obama is not happy about not being able to control the media. This is typical of a socialist….if he can’t control the message, then the message must be a lie. This thought process, this way of thinking, is very dangerous. To quote the President:

“Meanwhile, you’re coming of age in a 24/7 media environment that bombards us with all kinds of content and exposes us to all kinds of arguments, some of which don’t rank all that high on the truth meter. With iPods and iPads; Xboxes and PlayStations; information becomes a distraction, a diversion, a form of entertainment, rather than a tool of empowerment. All of this is not only putting new pressures on you; it is putting new pressures on our country and on our democracy.”

Flopping Aces put it this way:

Imagine if Bush had said this…

What [Obama’s] crying about is the fact that he and his cohorts haven’t been as successful as hoped in controlling the flow of information, and how we…his minions…should interpret that information. Very hard to lie when there are so many forms of media today. How else can he sell us crap like how well the economy is going, or a State actually enforcing laws is a bad thing, or Socializing medicine isn’t going to cost us more in the long run, both economically and in the quality of that service.

It was sooooo much better when all we had were the alphabet channels, the NYT’s, and Cronkite to control what the flow of information….right?

Now we know why Barack Obama selected Marxist Mark Lloyd to be his “Diversity Czar”; Obama believes the identical same communist garbage about controlling the media to control the people’s perception that Lloyd does.

From Obama’s handpicked Marxist:

Lloyd wrote in his 2006 book, Prologue to a Farce: Communication and Democracy in America, “It should be clear by now that my focus here is not freedom of speech or the press.  This freedom is all too often an exaggeration. At the very least, blind references to freedom of speech or the press serve as a distraction from the critical examination of other communications policies. … “[T]he purpose of free speech is warped to protect global corporations and block rules that would promote democratic governance.”

Freedom, screedom.  It’s overrated.  There’s no God.  We’re biologically determined meat puppets.  The “people” (i.e. the Marxist-fascist totalitarian big government) really ought to have complete control over the herd animals otherwise known as the human race.  Then we could have the kind of “democracy” that big government liberals want.

Lloyd also said of Marxist dictator Hugo Chavez:

“In Venezuela, with Chavez, is really an incredible revolution – a democratic revolution.  To begin to put in place things that are going to have an impact on the people of Venezuela.  The property owners and the folks who then controlled the media in Venezuela rebelled – worked, frankly, with folks here in the U.S. government – worked to oust him.  But he came back with another revolution, and then Chavez began to take very seriously the media in his country.”

If by “began to take very seriously the media” you mean “used the power of government to destroy free speech,” you’re right.

Sean Penn explained what the standard of media coverage should be from his liberal, progressive perspective:

“Every day, this elected leader is called a dictator here, and we just accept it, and accept it” said Penn, winner of two Best Actor Academy Awards. “And this is mainstream media, who should — truly, there should be a bar by which one goes to prison for these kinds of lies.”

Ah, just the kind of media standard that Hitler and Goebbels would have loved.

And, of course, many prominent Democrats have been trying to implement dictator Hugo Chavez’s policies via their “Fairness Doctrine” for years.  And when one version of this socialist takeover of the media fails to cut the mustard, there’s always the “new, improved” version.

Obama’s handpicked czars like Ron Bloom also hold radical Marxist positions such as:

“Generally speaking, we get the joke. We know that the free market is nonsense.”

And:

“We know this is largely about power, that it’s an adults only no limit game. We kind of agree with Mao that political power comes largely from the barrel of a gun.”

We know that Obama’s number one visitor – Andy Stern of SEIU – is a rabid Marxist:

– “Because workers of the world unite, it’s not just a slogan anymore.”

– “We like to say: We use the power of persuasion first. If it doesn’t work, we try the persuasion of power.”

We know that Obama demonstrated his radical Marxism via his appointment of self-described communist Van Jones:

• “I met all these young radical people of color — I mean really radical, communists and anarchists. And it was, like, ‘This is what I need to be a part of.’”

• How’s that capitalism working for ya?

• And the white polluters and the white environmentalists are essentially steering poison into the people-of-color communities.

• “This movement is deeper than a solar panel! Deeper than a solar panel! Don’t stop there! Don’t stop there! We’re gonna change the whole system! We’re gonna change the whole thing!

And we know that Obama’s White House CONTINUES to employ Marxist hostility and jack-booted-thug rhetoric about private companies, as demonstrated by Obama’s Interior Secretary Ken Salazar’s comment:

Salazar’s boots kept walking on CNN, where he said, “Our job is keep our boot on the neck of British Petroleum and make sure they live up to their responsibilities.”

The media has largely been like Pavlov’s dog, trained to drool every time Obama has called to them.  But even their fawning coverage hasn’t been enough for him.  He is a Marxist to his core.  And such people have always done everything they could to undermine freedom and liberty.

Read Liberal Fascism.  Realize that the first word is just a nice-sounding synonym that means the second word.  Look at who REALLY wants to control the press, control free speech, use the politics of demonization and demagoguery to divide the country, and impose the big government socialism of Marxist-fascism.

Obama ‘believes that words are a substitute for reality’

Newt Gingrich gave the following sober assessment of Barack Obama:

“It’s a nice fantasy. It sounds good. It would be wonderful. It just doesn’t fit this particular planet. And, over here you have North Korea, Pakistan, Iran, Al-Qaeda and a whole host of potential enemies…

I think if you were to say, “He’s potentially the most dangerous because he completely misunderstands reality.” …You get an embrace if you are Hugo Chavez. You get acceptance if you’re Ahmadinejad in Iran. But, if you’re an American ally, somehow you’re not acceptable. He can bully you.

And, I think this is a typical pattern on the left. Jimmy Carter did it to some extent. The other thing that Obama does on a scale that Carter never dreamed of, is he believes, maybe because he believes in his own rhetoric… He believes that words are a substitute for reality.

Youtube:

I wrote a 3-part series on postmodernism and the danger it poses to Western civilization:

How Postmodernism Leads To Fascism (part 1)
How Postmodernism Leads To Fascism (part 2)
How Postmodernism Leads To Fascism (part 3)

That final assessment by Gingrich – “He believes that words are a substitute for reality” – couldn’t be more spot-on.  And it literally is the quintessence of postmodernism.

Postmodernists base their relativism and the view that all meaning is socially constructed on a particular view of language taken from a literary technique known as “deconstruction.”  As such, they begin with the assumption that language cannot render truths about the world in any kind of objective way.  On their view, language, by its very nature, shapes what we think.  And since language is a cultural creation, meaning must be nothing more than a social construction.  Thus, for postmodern linguists, the very meaning of words constitutes a self-contained system.  Words merely refer to other words.  And as human beings, we are unable to step outside of the boundaries, limits, or demands of language.  And since language is bound up within culture, it is therefore largely beyond our control, and we can’t even think for ourselves.

Postmodernists believe there is no objective meaning, no realm of absolute truth, that exist beyond the bounds of human language.  As a postmodern slogan puts it, “We are incarcerated in a prison house of language.”  And our language thinks for us.

Thus you understand how a Barack Obama believes that words are a substitute for reality.  On his view, what else is there but words?

Postmodernists along with deconstructionists view meaning as a social construct, which is to say that societies construct meaning through language.  But they also view societies as inherently oppressive.  They draw upon Frederich Nietzsche, who contended that human life and culture are only expressions of an innate will to power.  They draw upon Karl Marx, who reduced culture to economic class conflict and exploitation.  And they draw upon Sigmund Freud, who interpreted culture in terms of sexual and gender repression.  Postmodernists assume that the true significance of culture lies beneath the surface, and that institutions are really simply “masks” for a sinister conspiracy.

Modern liberalism is every bit an offshoot of postmodernism.  Take one of the most powerful tools of liberalism, “political correctness.”  Being politically correct is not simply an attempt to make people feel better.  It’s a large, coordinated effort to change Western culture as we know it by  redefining it. Early Marxists and fascists designed their postmodern takeover long ago and continue to execute that plan to this day: to control the argument by controlling the “acceptable” language. Those with radical agendas have been taking advantage of an oversensitive and frankly overly gullible public for decades.

This is where the fundamental elitism of postmodernism rears its ugly head.  They believe that all of the above is true for everyone else.  But they alone have the intellect, the courage, the foresight, and the academic tools to decipher the codes and understand language and culture.  They are the priests who can get beyond the limits they ascribe to all other human beings.

And so they alone have the right to rule the world.

It should be obvious why this point of view has been so dangerous every single time it has been imposed in history.

My response to all this is agreement with George Orwell, who once said that some ideas are so foolish that only an intellectual could believe them, for no ordinary man could be such a fool.

Obama believes that he can “fundamentally transform” reality with his words.  And yes, in agreement with Newt Gingrich, that makes him a profoundly naive and ultimately incredibly dangerous fool.

Progressivism Revealed In Words Of Hollywood Liberals Like Tom Hanks And Sean Penn

If you want to know what an idea looks like, it is a good idea to look for some examples of that thing in action.

Take “progressivism” or “liberalism,” for instance (please! as the old comic’s joke goes).

What do these people think?  What are they about?  What is their vision for the future, and for this country?  What do they want to do?

Well, why not ask Tom Hanks and Sean Penn, both famed Oscar-winning Hollywood liberals in good standing.

Let’s start with Sean Penn.  That way we can get rid of him faster.

Sean Penn, speaking about Hugo Chavez of Venezuela, said:

“Every day, this elected leader is called a dictator here, and we just accept it, and accept it. And this is mainstream media. There should be a bar by which one goes to prison for these kinds of lies.”

Well, what SHOULD we think about Hugo Chavez?  Let’s find out.

From May 2007:

CARACAS (Reuters) – Venezuelan troops have seized an anti-government television channel’s broadcast equipment, the station said on Sunday, ahead of a controversial midnight EDT/0400 GMT takeover by President Hugo Chavez that will take the broadcaster off the air.

Chavez sparked international criticism with his decision to not renew RCTV’s license and to replace Venezuela’s most-watched channel with a state-backed network that will promote the values of his self-styled socialist revolution.

From November 2008 in the New York Review of Books:

Hugo Chávez Versus Human Rights

On September 18, we released a report in Caracas that shows how President Hugo Chávez has undermined human rights guarantees in Venezuela. That night, we returned to our hotel and found around twenty Venezuelan security agents, some armed and in military uniform, awaiting us outside our rooms. They were accompanied by a man who announced—with no apparent sense of irony—that he was a government “human rights” official and that we were being expelled from the country.

From July 2009 from the Human Rights Watch (which also includes numerous Venezuelan human rights violations):

Venezuela: Repeal Measures Aimed at Critics

Jul 31, 2009

The Venezuelan government has adopted and proposed measures that reduce the ability of government critics to voice their opinions and will seriously limit freedom of expression in Venezuela.

From August 2009 via the UK Telegraph:

Thirteen channels ordered to be closed by the Venezuelan government went off the air on Saturday and more than 200 are expected to close in coming weeks.

The government broadcasting watchdog, Conatel, said that 34 radio outlets would be closed because they failed to comply with regulations.

However, critics claimed the crackdown infringed on freedom of speech and hundreds of protesters demonstrated in Caracas against the closures.

And, of course, that is simply scratching the surface of Hugo Chavez’s abuses of freedom:

According to the U.S. State Department and other official government sources, the Venezuelan government has been guilty of numerous human rights violations under Chavez’s rule.

“Politicization of the judiciary and official harassment of the political opposition and the media characterized the human rights situation during the year,” said the State Department’s Country Report on Human Rights in Venezuela for 2008 that was released last month.

The report credits the Chavez regime with unlawful killings, arbitrary arrests and detention, discrimination based on political grounds, widespread corruption at all levels of government, official intimidation and attacks on the independent media.

“According to HRW [Human Rights Watch], ‘Government officials have removed scores of detractors from the career civil service, purged dissidents employees from the national oil company, denied citizens access to social programs based on their political opinions, and denounced critics as subversives deserving of discriminatory treatment,” says the State Department report.

A recent report by the Congressional Research Service also outlined human rights concerns in Chavez’s Venezuela.

“Under the populist rule of President Hugo Chavez … Venezuela has undergone enormous political changes, with a new constitution and unicameral legislature, and a new name for the country, the Bolivarian Republic of Venezuela,” states a Feb. 5, 2009 CRS report.

“U.S. officials and human rights organizations have expressed concerns about the deterioration of democratic institutions,” the report adds, “and threats to freedom of expression under President Chavez, who has survived several attempts to remove him from power.”

How about Hugo Chavez in his very own words:

CHAVEZ: “Yes, we are indoctrinating the children from the first grade through college, every grade, private schools. The ideology of the revolution! The ideology of socialism! Our ideology.”

So Hugo Chavez is a dictator and a thug who is without any doubt suppressing freedom of speech and other human rights in his country.  And if I may now refresh your memory about Sean Penn’s view of the man:

Sean Penn has defended Hugo Chávez as a model democrat and said those who call him a dictator should be jailed.

The Oscar-winning actor and political activist accused the US media of smearing Venezuela’s socialist president and called for journalists to be punished.

“Every day, this elected leader is called a dictator here, and we just accept it, and accept it. And this is mainstream media. There should be a bar by which one goes to prison for these kinds of lies.”

This one’s pretty easy.  Sean Penn demonizes the press for smearing a dictator by calling him a “dictator.”  And proceeds to argue that journalists who report the truth about Chavez be jailed.

Which is, of course, precisely what a dictator would do, isn’t it???

You see, Hugo Chavez is a dictator and thug; but he is a LEFTWING dictator and thug (just as most dictatorial thugs almost always are).

So, to put a thousand words into a picture:

Mind you, Sean Penn is not the only Hollywood liberal who has embraced this dictatorial thug. There’s Danny Glover, Oliver Stone, Benicio del Toro, and others.

And earlier progressives eagerly flocked around the communist revolution under Vladimir Lenin and the fascist revolutions under first Benito Mussolini and then Adolf Hitler, too.  Which is to say that this behavior from progressives – as bizarre and as morally insane as it is – is part of a century-old tradition.

Let’s go back to Woodrow Wilson, the father of the progressive movement.  In his unintentionally chilling essay, “Leaders of Men,” Wilson wrote:

The competent leader of men cares little for the interior niceties of other people’s characters: he cares much – everything – for the external uses to which they may be put. His will seeks the lines of least resistance; but the whole question with him is a question as to the application of force. There are men to be moved: how shall he move them? He supplies the power; others supply only the materials upon which that power operates… It is the power which dictates, dominates; the materials yield. Men are as clay in the hands of the consummate leader.

On Wilson’s elitist view, American citizens truly ARE as clay.  They are incapable of understanding anything remotely complex.  And therefore the half-truths (which very often amount to whole lies) of the skillful demagogue become justified:

only a very gross substance of concrete conception can make any impression on the minds of the masses; they must get their ideas very absolutely put, and are much readier to receive a half-truth which they can understand than a whole truth which has too many sides to be seen all at once.

And how did the father of the progressive movement – who viewed men as uncomprehending clay waiting to be shaped by the half-truths of the skillful demagogue – view the Constitution?  Wilson wrote:

Justly revered as our great Constitution is, it could be stripped off and thrown aside like a garment, and the nation would still stand forth in the living vestment of flesh and sinew, warm with the heart-blood of one people, ready to recreate constitutions and laws

And uncomprehending clay men do not particularly deserve the inalienable rights bestowed upon them by a Constitution which itself is of little actual value.  Thus the father of the progressive movement wrote:

No doubt a lot of nonsense has been talked about the inalienable rights of the individual, and a great deal that was mere sentiment and pleasing speculation has been put forward as fundamental principle.

And what should be the limitations of power on the government Leviathan – which could easily be stripped of its limiting Constitution – over uncomprehending and infinitely malleable men of clay?  In The State, Wilson said that:

“Government does now whatever experience permits or the times demand.”

In his “Congressional Government,” Wilson wrote that:

“I cannot imagine power as a thing negative and not positive.”

In other words, Progressivism sees no limitations against the power of raw government power.

But I can certainly imagine such power being a negative thing.  As a student of history, I am vividly aware of the fact that in just one such form of government – communism – more than 100 million people were systematically and brutally murdered by their own government during peacetime.

Conservatives favor limited government with limited and well-defined powers.  Which is the exact OPPOSITE of fascistic totalitarian governments.  When you start demanding bigger and bigger and more activistic and socialist government, you begin meandering over to fascist land.

Thus you should understand why it  shouldn’t be surprising that Sean Penn and Danny Glover should think this way about Hugo Chavez.  Chavez is the Great Leader who shapes stupid clay men with his skillful demagoguery; and thus woe be unto any who seek to get in his way.

And, good news for progressives, the magnificent Hugo Chavez’s socialist revolution is coming to America in the form of Barack Hussein Obama:

(CNSNews.com) – Inspired by his meeting with U.S. President Barack Obama at the Americas Summit, Venezuelan President Hugo Chavez declared on Sunday that Venezuelan socialism has begun to reach the United States under the Obama administration.

And it’s completely reasonable that Chavez would think this way about Obama.  After all, the American president who did nothing while the Venezuelan dictator nationalized U.S. businesses has done plenty of nationalizing himself.  Which prompted Hugo Chavez to point out:

CARACAS (Reuters) – Venezuela’s President Hugo Chavez said on Tuesday that he and Cuban ally Fidel Castro risk being more conservative than U.S. President Barack Obama as Washington prepares to take control of General Motors Corp.

Does the Obama administration share the totalitarian views of Hugo Chavez, and even admire them?  It certainly does, according to the words of Obama’s Diversity czar, Mark Lloyd:

“It should be clear by now that my focus here is not freedom of speech or the press.  This freedom is all too often an exaggeration. At the very least, blind references to freedom of speech or the press serve as a distraction from the critical examination of other communications policies.

[T]he purpose of free speech is warped to protect global corporations and block rules that would promote democratic governance.”

[…]

“In Venezuela, with Chavez, is really an incredible revolution – a democratic revolution.  To begin to put in place things that are going to have an impact on the people of Venezuela.

“The property owners and the folks who then controlled the media in Venezuela rebelled – worked, frankly, with folks here in the U.S. government – worked to oust him.  But he came back with another revolution, and then Chavez began to take very seriously the media in his country.

And we’ve had complaints about this ever since.”

“Complaints,” of course, which bother genuine progressives such as Sean Penn and Obama’s diversity czar Mark Lloyd.  Which is why they think that “complainers” should be thrown in jail.

The left loves – and even worships as a surrogate for God – big government, and seemingly the bigger the better.  And of course, the very biggest governments, the ones that can control the populations and guide their nations to the next socialist Utopia, invariably are or descend into totalitarian regimes.

It’s not that Sean Penn is stupid for his views.  Sean Penn is accurately explaining his progressive philosophy.  He is not a politician who needs your vote, so he can be honest.  And as a multi-millionaire celebrity, he epitomizes the mindset of progressivism: that the peon clay masses are ignorant and need to be ruled over, and that they should surrender their wills and allow the government of their superiors to do whatever they think is best.  And who better than an elitist Hollywood celebrity to explain why the more than 300 million Americans constituting the lower classes are like maggots crawling across the landscape, and that they should be compelled to shut up and do as their betters tell them?

So let us be rid of Sean Penn and introduce ourselves to the “wisdom” of Tom Hanks.  Recently – in acquainting America with the 10 part HBO series on World War II he took part in – had this to say:

“Back in World War II,” he told Brinkley, “we viewed the Japanese as ‘yellow, slant-eyed dogs’ that believed in different gods. They were out to kill us because our way of living was different. We, in turn, wanted to annihilate them because they were different. Does that sound familiar, by any chance, to what’s going on today?” In a separate interview, Hanks referred to the war in the Pacific as one of “racism and terror.”

Damn racist American bastards.  They were called “the greatest generation”; the generation that rose up from the ashes of the Great Depression to defeat the greatest evil the world has ever seen.  But you and Tom Hanks know the truth, don’t you: they were just a bunch of racists.  The vicious cheap-shot sneak attack at Pearl Harbor didn’t have anything to do with our going to war against Japan.  Heck, in the spirit of the modern “truthers” who claim that Bush bombed the World Trade Center, FDR probably sent in American planes painted to look like Japanese Zeroes.

Stupid unAmerican fool.  We didn’t want to annihilate the Japanese “because they were different.”  We were forced to annihilate them because they were utterly fanatic and refused to surrender.  We were forced to annihilate them because they started a war of annihilation and wouldn’t stop.  Tom Hanks is too ignorant and too much an ideologue to consider the Rape of Nanking, or the Bataan Death March, or the Banzai charges, or the first suicide bombers known as the Kamikaze.  I’d like to see Tom Hanks take part in a movie about the monstrous and utterly despicable Unit 731.

If Tom Hanks wasn’t a complete moral idiot, he would simply realize that Japan attacked us without provocation with a vengeance, and the United States of America responded with a vengeance.  Just as they would have done had their attackers had white skin and round eyes.

And when Tom Hanks asks, “Does that sound familiar, by any chance, to what’s going on today?”  he is not content to label the greatest generation as a bunch of racist warmongers; no, he seeks to do the same thing to our great warriors who are protecting us today.

Why are we fighting against Islamic jihadism?  Because they’re “different,” as Tom Hanks maintains?  How about because they attacked us in vicious act of war that left 3,000 innocent civilians murdered?  Maybe THAT had something to do with it?

Contrary to being “racists,” our soldiers today are operating with a level of restraint against an utterly despicable terrorist enemy – who hide among and prey upon their own civilian people – that is simply amazing to behold.  Our soldiers as a matter of routine are the most enthusiastic back-patting cheerleaders of the courage and toughness they are beginning to see in their Afghani and Iraqi counterparts.

Tom Hanks, like Sean Penn, see only ugliness in America and Americans, and only beauty in the totalitarian regimes of brutal dictators.

And that is, and always has been, the progressive way.

Copenhagen Falls Apart Under Obama’s Hollow Rhetoric

Hot Air swings for the bleachers, and sends a lot of liberal pitches soaring over the center field wall.  Here’s another home run:

Breaking: India, China walk out of Copenhagen
posted at 10:49 am on December 18, 2009 by Ed Morrissey

Barack Obama came, he spoke, and no one concurred:

India and China have taken a united stand and walked out of the climate summit as Copenhagen talks fail.

Tensions prevailed at the climate talks at Copenhagen today, as Indian prime minister Manmohan Singh and China premier Wen Jiabao walked out of the summit along with their respective delegations, as talks failed.

Obama feted Singh just this month, saying that they should be impressed that India got first crack at Obama’s state dinner agenda.  Apparently, Singh was less impressed than Obama presumed.

Meanwhile, Obama is getting some pretty bad reviews for his intervention in Copenhagen … from his once-adoring admirers.  Since this comes from the Left’s major newspaper in the UK, where political biases are openly acknowledged in the media, this may seem like good news for those worried that Barack Obama would give away the store in Copenhagen.  We needn’t have worried; Obama turned out to be just as effective on the world stage as he has been in finding compromises here at home.  The Right has no illusions about Obama, but the disillusionment from the Left is rather amusing:

Barack Obama stepped into the chaotic final hours of the Copenhagen summit today saying he was convinced the world could act “boldly and decisively” on climate change.

But his speech offered no indication America was ready to embrace bold measures, after world leaders had been working desperately against the clock to try to paper over an agreement to prevent two years of wasted effort — and a 10-day meeting — from ending in total collapse. …

Many reactions were strongly critical of Obama. Hugo Chávez, the president of Venezuela, described Obama’s speech as “ridiculous” and the US’s initial offer of a $10bn fund for poor countries in the draft text as “a joke”.

Tim Jones, a spokesman for the World Development Movement, said: “The president said he came to act, but showed little evidence of doing so. He showed no awareness of the inequality and injustice of climate change. If America has really made its choice, it is a choice that condemns hundreds of millions of people to climate change disaster.”

Friends of the Earth said in a statement, “Obama has deeply disappointed not only those listening to his speech at the UN talks, he has disappointed the whole world.”

The World Wildlife Fund said Obama had let down the international community by failing to commit to pushing for action in Congress: “The only way the world can be sure the US is standing behind its commitments is for the president to clearly state that climate change will be his next top legislative priority.”

Honestly, have these people paid no attention to Obama’s performance all year?  He doesn’t do the hard work.  Obama has spent all year outsourcing his work on domestic policy to Nancy Pelosi and Harry Reid, refusing to get involved in negotiations.  Even now, progressives on Capitol Hill wonder if Obama ever wanted a public option in his signature domestic policy priority at all — a rather strange gap, considering the high-profile cheerleading coming from Obama all year long.  That’s all he does: campaign.

The one issue that he could not outsource was Afghanistan.  As Commander in Chief, the decision on resourcing and strategy was his alone … and it took him almost four months to make it.

The truth is that Barack Obama would make a much better Secretary-General of the UN than an American President, and even the Left is beginning to see it.

As for Copenhagen, Obama was already redeploying over the event horizon before news of the walkout hit, according to ABC News, which had reported optimistically on Obama’s efforts for most of the morning:

“We’ve done what we can here,” a senior White House official in Copenhagen, Denmark, tells ABC News. “The Chinese are dug in on transparency and are refusing to let people know they’re living up to their end of the agreement.”

After landing in Denmark early this morning, President Obama met with Chinese Premier Wen Jiabao during a bilateral at the United Nations Climate Change Conference in Copenhagen to press the case that China needs to allow for transparency.

“The President’s priority is to make our economy far more focused on a clean energy economy that creates jobs,” the official said. “He is here to work constructively and participate in hoping to get an international accord. But not getting one here won’t change wanting to transform our economy to create the new foundation he’s talked about.”

Well, he’s been there one whole day.  Who can argue with his commitment after giving one speech and holding one meeting?

As to Afghanistan, Obama boldly claimed he had the right strategy in place back in May, picked his own general to implement it, and then spent four months angsting over that general’s urgent recommendation.  When Obama finally made a decision after four months of what the Pentagon described as dithering, it was accompanied with a withdrawal date that left even his own supporters unable to explain his policy, in addition to grave uncertainty and fear in the minds of our allies.

Not to mention the ridiculous joke of Obama finally making the announcement to send more troops to fight in Afghanistan, then jetting off to pick up his Nobel Peace Prize.  “Ridiculous” because the only way he could reconcile the massive hypocrisy from the leftist prism was to invoke what was tantamount to the very Bush doctrine he had previously personally demonized (see also here).

We arrive at something that should have occurred to the left when they were decrying Sarah Palin’s lack of experience.  Namely, that she actually had far more leadership experience than Obama did.  Sarah Palin had been a chief executive of a state; Barry Hussein had led exactly squat.  And so when the left was pointing out Sarah Palin’s lack of substantial executive experience, they were literally pointing out the splinter in Palin’s eye, while refusing to see the giant redwood log in Obama’s.

Well, they’re seeing that great big giant log now, aren’t they?  On virtually every front (e.g., the economy, health care, global warming, Afghanistan, unemployment, soaring deficits, Iran’s nuclear program, Gitmo, cap-and-trade, the Olympics), Obama is an utterly failed leader even according to the left.

Conservatives were loudly declaring that Obama would be a failure all along.  Rush Limbaugh was demonized for his prediction, but now far leftists such as Howard Dean have joined him.

The left-leaning world swooned over Obama’s speeches.  Now they know that, rather than being an eloquent man expressing a great vision, Obama is merely an incoherent gibberer who needs to read the word-for-word sentences of others off of two teleprompter screens.

This was the man who actually had the unmitigated and arrogant gall to say:

The journey will be difficult. The road will be long. I face this challenge with profound humility, and knowledge of my own limitations. But I also face it with limitless faith in the capacity of the American people. Because if we are willing to work for it, and fight for it, and believe in it, then I am absolutely certain that generations from now, we will be able to look back and tell our children that this was the moment when we began to provide care for the sick and good jobs to the jobless; this was the moment when the rise of the oceans began to slow and our planet began to heal; this was the moment when we ended a war and secured our nation and restored our image as the last, best hope on Earth. This was the moment – this was the time – when we came together to remake this great nation so that it may always reflect our very best selves, and our highest ideals.

Obama says here, “It’s not all about me; it’s about you under my inspired divine messiahship, too.”  I mean, why was “this” “the moment”?  Why wasn’t it the moment when either Bush was president, or when Clinton was president, etcetera?

Michelle Obama cut through the vain hypocrisy of Obama’s vain rhetoric at a UCLA speech delivered on February 18, 2008:

“Barack Obama will require you to work. He is going to demand that you shed your cynicism. That you put down your divisions. That you come out of your isolation, that you move out of your comfort zones. That you push yourselves to be better. And that you engage. Barack will never allow you to go back to your lives as usual, uninvolved, uninformed.”

I think Spike Lee summed up Obama’s delusional mindset best:

“It means that this is a whole new world. I think…I’ve been saying this before. You can divide history. BB Before Barack. AB After Barack.”

It was always all about Obama.  And we, tiny little near-mindless proletariat ants that we were, would be stimulated into action by the exalted greatness of Obama’s wonderfulness.

And of course, it’s STILL all about Obama.  Only now it’s about what a colossal failure he is, rather than how he is somehow going to heal the planet.

Now because of America’s delusional foolishness, we’re going to have to suffer through the dismal malaise of three more years with a failed, dithering, appeasing, demagogic, pandering weakling in the White House.

But enough about the failure and fraud of Obama and his “hype and chains” movement.

Getting back to the abysmal failure and fraud of “Hopenhagen,” do read the absolutely blistering UK Telegraph piece by  Gerald Warner.

Anti-Free Press Obama Demagogue Anita Dunn A Self-Admitted Marxist

Anita Dunn is Barack Obama’s White House Communications Director, anti-Fox News demagogue — and a self-acknowledged Maoist Communist.

Glenn Beck provided the stunning video of Anita Dunn speaking on June 5 of this year:

Speaking to an audience of high school students, Barack Obama’s Communications Director said the following:

“A lot of you have a great deal of ability.  A lot of you work hard.  Put them together, and that answers the ‘why not?’ question.  There’s usually not a good reason.

And then the third lesson and tip actually come from two of my favorite political philosophers, Mao Tse-Tung and Mother Teresa — not often coupled with each together, but the two people that I turn to most to basically deliver a simple point, which is, you’re going to make choices. You’re going to challenge. You’re going to say, “Why not?” You’re going to figure out how to do things that have never been done before. But here’s the deal: These are your choices. They are no one else’s.

In 1947, when Mao Tse-Tung was being challenged within his own party on his plan to basically take China over, Chiang Kai-shek and the Nationalist Chinese held the cities, they had the army, they had the air force, they had everything on their side.  And people said, “How can you win? How can you do this? How can you do this against all of the odds against you?” And Mao Tse-Tung said, you know, “You fight your war, and I’ll fight mine.” And think about that for a second.

You know, you don’t have to accept the definition of how to do things, and you don’t have to follow other people’s choices and paths, OK? It is about your choices and your path. You fight your own war. You lay out your own path. You figure out what’s right for you. You don’t let external definition define how good you are internally. You fight your war. You let them fight theirs. Everybody has their own path.”

Well, that’s just great.

For what it’s worth, Adolf Hitler also laid out his own path.  He too figured out what was “right for him.”  He certainly didn’t let any “external definitions define how good he was internally.”  Oh, did he ever fight his war.  And Adolf Hitler most definitely had his own path.

And Hitler actually murdered fewer than Anita Dunn’s political hero.

Anita Dunn joins fellow Marxist and Obama-handpicked FCC Diversity Czar Mark Lloyd, who said:

“In Venezuela, with Chavez, is really an incredible revolution – a democratic revolution.  To begin to put in place things that are going to have an impact on the people of Venezuela….The property owners and the folks who then controlled the media in Venezuela rebelled – worked, frankly, with folks here in the U.S. government – worked to oust him. But he came back with another revolution, and then Chavez began to take very seriously the media in his country.”

Nothing wrong with a little Marxism and a little crusade to attack and destroy media critics.  Unless you have a functioning moral compass, anyway.

And we have to mentioned Van Jones, who departed (literally) in the night after his extreme radicalism was revealed.  Van Jones said:

[Van] Jones had planned to move to Washington, DC, and had already landed a job and an apartment there. But in jail, he said, “I met all these young radical people of color — I mean really radical, communists and anarchists. And it was, like, ‘This is what I need to be a part of.’” Although he already had a plane ticket, he decided to stay in San Francisco. “I spent the next ten years of my life working with a lot of those people I met in jail, trying to be a revolutionary.” In the months that followed, he let go of any lingering thoughts that he might fit in with the status quo. “I was a rowdy nationalist on April 28th, and then the verdicts came down on April 29th,” he said. “By August, I was a communist.”

If Barack Obama isn’t a communist, then why on earth does he keep intentionally surrounding himself with them?

It’s readily apparent that Obama has always sought out communist mentors.  In Dreams of My Father, Obama described his circle whom he intentionally surrounded himself with:

To avoid being mistaken for a sellout, I chose my friends carefully.  The more politically active black students.  The foreign students.  The Chicanos. The Marxist Professors and the structural feminists and punk-rock performance poets.

And before those Marxist professors, Obama was mentored in Hawaii by communist Frank Marshall Davis.  And after those Marxist professors, Obama chose to go to Jeremiah Wright’s black liberation theology (i.e. Marxist) church.

I bring that out lest anyone try to disassociate Anita Dunn, Mark Lloyd, Van Jones, and others from Barack Obama.  These people aren’t a bunch of individual anomalies; they are part of a very clear pattern of Marxism having invaded the VERY highest level of the White House.

You know, my own favorite political philosophers are George Washington, Thomas Jefferson, and great political thinkers such as Cicero and Alexis de Tocqueville.  My list most certainly does not include Mao Tse-Tung, who was without question one of the worst monsters in human history.

Mao Tse-Tung, Anita Dunn’s favorite political philosopher, murdered 70 million of his own people during peacetime to secure and consolidate his power.

Annie Dillard underscored both the evil heart of Mao Tse-Tung and the inherent moral insanity of affirming both Chairman Mao and Mother Teresa in her article “The Wreck of Time” in Harper’s from January 1998:

Was it wisdom Mao Tse-Tong attained when – like Ted Bundy – the awakened to the long view?  “The atom bomb is nothing to be afraid of,” Mao told Nehru, “China has many people. . . . The deaths of ten or twenty million people is nothing to be afraid of.” A witness said Nehru showed shock. Later, speaking in Moscow, Mao displayed yet more generosity: he boasted that he was willing to lose 300 million people, half of China’s population. Does Mao’s reckoning shock me really? If sanctioning the death of strangers could save my daughter’s life, would I do it? Probably. How many others’ lives would I be willing to sacrifice? Three? Three hundred million?

An English journalist, observing the Sisters of Charity in Calcutta, reasoned: “Either life is always and in all circumstances sacred, or intrinsically of no account; it is inconceivable that it should be in some cases the one, and in some the other.”

Mao Tse-Tung was a fundamentally evil man.  And Anita Dunn – Barack Obama’s handpicked demagogue who is working on his behalf to undermine the free press that her “favorite political philosopher” Mao likewise destroyed in China – is a moral idiot.  She connects and embraces the world’s greatest taker of human life with the world’s greatest saver of human life.  And cannot comprehend the insanity of doing so.

One of the things that her “other” favorite political philosopher, Mother Teresa, said should make Anita Dunn a fierce opponent of abortion:

“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

But I think we can all see which “favorite” political philosopher is more “favorite” for Anita Dunn.  But then, this political demagogue, this liberal witch-hunter, is morally incapable of seeing the fundamental irrationality of the Mother who fought for the lives of children, versus the Chairman who created a system that imposed forced abortion.

John F. Kennedy and Ronald Reagan both saw the truly graphic evil represented by communism.  How they must be turning over in their graves knowing that the White House has come to embrace everything they fought to protect this country from.

White House Ignores War In Afghanistan To Pursue New War On Fox News

Up until the exaltation of The One – may socialist Scandinavians place golden medallions around his neck forever – the Democrats’ spiel on Afghanistan was that it was the right war, the top priority war, the just war, the necessary war, but that the devil Bush ignored Afghanistan while he focused on Iraq.

Iraq, of course, was the unwinnable war (even after Bush won it), and the surge strategy was bound to be a costly failure (even after it worked).

Well, now that Obama – in the words of a leftist “journalist” – “stands above the country” and “above the world” as “sort of God,” well, the “change” the left kept blathering about resulted in a change of focus:

Afghanistan is no longer the “war of necessity,” or the “top priority,” or the “cause that could not be more just.”  Nope.  That war morphed into the war that the White House has declared on Fox News.

White House communications director, Anita Dunn:

“We’re going to treat them the way we would treat an opponent,” said Anita Dunn, the White House communications director.

And:

“The reality of it is that Fox often operates almost as either the research arm or the communications arm of the Republican Party,” White House Communications Director Anita Dunn said in an interview that aired Sunday on CNN’s “Reliable Sources.”

And:

“As they are undertaking a war against Barack Obama and the White House, we don’t need to pretend that this is the way that legitimate news organizations behave.”

Mind you, every major totalitarian dictator in the world is more “legitimate” than Fox News, as far as the White House is concerned:

White House communications director Anita Dunn also said this:

“What I think is fair to say about Fox — and certainly it’s the way we view it — is that it really is more a wing of the Republican Party,” said Anita Dunn, White House communications director, on CNN. “They take their talking points, put them on the air; take their opposition research, put them on the air. And that’s fine. But let’s not pretend they’re a news network the way CNN is.”

Yes, that’s right.  Dunn is referring to CNN — the same CNN that demonstrated that it is so completely in the tank for the Obama agenda that it actually “FACT-CHECKED” a Saturday Night Live skit.

That’s the criteria for “a news network”: complete ideological loyalty.

Obama pretty much pointed that out himself when he addressed White House correspondents:

“Most of you covered me; all of you voted for me.  Apologies to the Fox table.”

Unlike all the other media, Fox correspondents didn’t vote for Obama.  And that’s enough to declare war.  For all must love The One.  No dissension can be tolerated.

Mind you, while the White House asserts that Fox News is evil because it – alone by itself – is not in the tank with Obama, it’s interesting to see that Obama himself is in the tank for SEIU and the hard-core union agenda as he vows to “paint the nation purple.”

We’ve seen this reaction to media criticism by a president before – from the darkest and most evil days of Richard Nixon.  It wasn’t pretty, and it didn’t end well.

Is Fox the media arm of the Republican Party?  Viewers who are flocking to Fox News in droves don’t seem to think so:

Fox News Channel was the 2nd highest rated cable channel on all of television during the first quarter of 2009 in prime time Total Viewers. CNN was 17th and MSNBC 24th for the first three months of the year. FNC beat CNN and MSNBC combined and gained the most compared to the first quarter of 2008, up 24%. 2009’s first quarter was FNC’s 3rd highest rated quarter in prime time in the network’s history — just behind Q4 ’08 and Q3 ’05. In prime time, ages 25-54 demo, and in total day in both categories, FNC grew more year-to-year than CNN and MSNBC combined. FNC had nine of the top 10 programs on cable news in Total Viewers.

The hardly right-wing UCLA seems to find plenty of bias from all of those journalists that Obama boasted voted for him, rather than Fox:

Of the 20 major media outlets studied, 18 scored left of center, with CBS’ “Evening News,” The New York Times and the Los Angeles Times ranking second, third and fourth most liberal behind the news pages of The Wall Street Journal.

Only Fox News’ “Special Report With Brit Hume” and The Washington Times scored right of the average U.S. voter.

To the extent that Fox News is biased to the right, every single other news outlet is biased toward the left.

The Center for Media and Public Affairs’ study concluded that Fox News was in fact the most fair and balanced network, concluding:

Fox News Channel’s coverage was more balanced toward both parties than the broadcast networks were. On FOX, evaluations of all Democratic candidates combined were split almost evenly — 51% positive vs. 49% negative, as were all evaluations of GOP candidates — 49% positive vs. 51% negative, producing a perfectly balanced 50-50 split for all candidates of both parties.

Sacred Heart University’s media study discovered that Fox News was the most trusted in the nation:

Researchers were asked which national television news organization they trusted most for accurate reporting. Fox News was named by 30.0% of all respondents – up from 19.5% in 2003 and 27.0% in 2007.

Those named most frequently as the television news organization most trusted for accurate reporting in 2009 included: Fox News (30.0%), CNN (19.5%), NBC News (7.5%) and ABC News (7.5%). Fox News was also the television news organization trusted least. Just over one-quarter, 26.2%, named Fox News, followed by NBC News (9.9%), MSNBC (9.4%), CNN (8.5%), CBS News (5.3%) and ABC News (3.7%).

In fact, it didn’t come all that far from being TWICE as trusted as the runner-up, CNN (the network that fact-checks SNL sketches that are negative to Obama).

So this war – that again seems to be replacing the “just war of necessity” that Afghanistan was SUPPOSED to be is just ridiculous.

It merely shows just how dramatically ideological this administration truly is.

It also explains why former longtime ABC correspondent Chris Wallace said of the Obama administration:

“They are the biggest bunch of crybabies I have dealt with in my 30 years in Washington.”

Let’s just take a second to consider what Obama seems to think about the media, as evidenced by his selection of Mark Lloyd to be his FCC Diversity Czar.  Remember that cartoon of dictators that Obama has met with?  Obama’s FCC Diversity Czar Mark Lloyd admiringly said this of Venezuelan dictator Hugo Chavez:

“In Venezuela, with Chavez, is really an incredible revolution – a democratic revolution.  To begin to put in place things that are going to have an impact on the people of Venezuela….The property owners and the folks who then controlled the media in Venezuela rebelled – worked, frankly, with folks here in the U.S. government – worked to oust him. But he came back with another revolution, and then Chavez began to take very seriously the media in his country.”

Just as Obama is now taking Fox News seriously in this country.

But how did Hugo Chavez “take very seriously the media”?

Newsbusters answers that by simply pointing to the facts in Venezuela:

NGOs Warn of Restrictions in Pending Venezuela Law

Associated Press – May 7, 2009

Prominent Venezuelan nongovernmental organizations warned Thursday that a bill being drafted by lawmakers loyal to President Hugo Chavez could be used to financially strangle groups that criticize the government.

Chavez clamps down on broadcast media

Irish Examiner – Friday, July 10, 2009

President Hugo Chavez’s government is imposing tough new regulations on Venezuela’s cable television while revoking the licenses of more than 200 radio stations.

Report: Venezuela’s Hugo Chávez aggressively seizing control of media

Miami Herald – August 14, 2009

An unclassified report lists examples of Venezuelan government efforts to crack down on or seize control of media outlets to stifle criticism.

How’s that for a chronology of authoritarian censorship?

And Obama’s choice for FCC Diversity Czar also had this to say:

[From a 2005 Conference on Media Reform: Racial Justice]: “Because we have really, truly good white people in important positions. And the fact of the matter is that there are a limited number of those positions.  And unless we are conscious of the need to have more people of color, gays, other people in those positions we will not change the problem.

We’re in a position where you have to say who is going to step down so someone else can have power.”

It’s nice of Mark Lloyd to acknowledge that there are “good white people” around – just before he announces the need to have a purge of white people from the media.  But Mark Lloyd is a racist who has also said:

“There are few things I think more frightening in the American mind than dark skinned black men. Here I am.”

And Barack Obama also showed what he thought about free speech rights when his selection for FCC Diversity Czar said:

“It should be clear by now that my focus here is not freedom of speech or the press. This freedom is all too often an exaggeration. At the very least, blind references to freedom of speech or the press serve as a distraction from the critical examination of other communications policies.

“[T]he purpose of free speech is warped to protect global corporations and block rules that would promote democratic governance.”

So we pretty much know where the Obama White House is coming from: the media should be the exclusive tool of leftist propaganda to advance the Obama agenda.  Only Obama voters need apply to be considered as “journalists.”  Free speech is a terribly overrated thing, which needs to be “reinterpreted” to exclude ANYONE who has ANYTHING but a far-leftist revolutionary agenda.  And Venezuelan dictator Hugo Chavez has provided the American left with the model as to how to proceed in that direction.

Obama is dithering around in Afghanistan while our soldiers languish and die for lack of support.  But he seems all to willing to pursue his war on Fox News with a gusto.

In both the war in Afghanistan and the war on Fox News, the threat is to freedom itself.

Even Liberals Complaining About Obama’s ‘Lindsey Lohan’ TV Narcisism

Note from uber-liberal Bill Maher: “Hey, Obama: please do a little less talking, and a lot more shutting the hell up.  Your nutjob-narcissism is getting too disgusting even for your own side.”

As a conservative, I never get tired of being able to say, “I told you so.”  Here’s just a few of my pre-election articles, from earliest to latest:

Brandenburg Gate: Pseudo-Candidates Need Pseudo-Credibility

Obama Suffers From Kennedy-Confusion Syndrome

Nancy Pelosi and Barack Obama: Saving The Planet, Megalomaniac-style

Invesco Field ‘Temple Of Barack’ Reveals Pathological Pretension

And now – to my I-laughed-so-hard-I-hurt-myself chortling glee, I discover that even BILL MAHER has come to realize what a pathological narcissist Barry Hussein really is:

June 14, 2009
Bill Maher: Obama obsessed with being on TV

Self-described libertarian pundit Bill Maher ripped Barak Obama during a lengthy monologue on his HBO program Friday night, accusing the president of being obsessed with appearing on TV and failing to come through on pre-election promises.

“This is not what I voted for,” Maher said. “I don’t want my president to be a TV star.”

Maher criticized Obama’s constant television coverage (“I get it: you love being on TV”) and said the president should focus on fixing the nation’s problems instead.

“You don’t have to be on television every minute of every day — you’re the president, not a rerun of ‘Law & Order,'” Maher said. “TV stars are too worried bout being popular and too concerned about being renewed.”

Maher continued: “You’re skinny and in a hurry and in love with a nice lady — but so is Lindsay Lohan. And just like Lindsay, we see your name in the paper a lot but we’re kind of wondering when you’re actually going to do something.”

Maher added that Obama’s presidential rival John McCain was right to say Obama acted like a celebrity and, amazingly for Maher, the comedian suggested Obama needs to act more like his predecessor.

“I never thought I’d say this, what [Obama] needs in his personality is a little George Bush.”

Video

What can you say for a president who is so pathetic he makes even Bill Maher pine for George W. Bush?

Barry Hussein is a disaster.  The only question is whether he will take the American people down the drain with him before enough of them wake up and realize that their president is “Lindsey Lohan.”

Venezuelan dictator Hugo Chavez – another man known for spending long hours dominating his country’s television in order to puff himself up – recently said that “Comrade” Obama is proving himself to be more leftwing than he or Castro is.  And surprise, surprise, Obama is turning out to be every bit as conceited and narcissistic and disastrous for his country as Chavez – and the networks who helped bring their Dear Leader to power are now afraid not to run him for fear of his reprisals.

In a way, that last bit is rather like one of those horror flicks, where the weasel mad scientist who manufactured the monster gets eaten by his own creation.

But a better TV analogy to horror movies or even “Lindsey Lohan” might be the unceasing advertisements.  Seeing Barack Obama on television is really a lot like seeing a really stupid and annoying commercial: it happens all the damn time, and you know that it’s just somebody’s way of trying to sell you more ridiculous crap.

Obama Approval Index Now At ZERO% As Obama Ruins Country

The good thing is that more and more people are now beginning to realize that Barack Obama is leading their country off a cliff into an economic fiasco that we will likely never recover from; the bad news is that it may already bee too late.

Right now, we’ve got “czars” appointed by Obama that are running roughshod over entire industries with absolutely no congressional or people’s oversight whatsoever.  There are now FIFTEEN “czars” accountable to no one but Obama: a drug czar; an energy and environment czar; a health czar; an urban affairs czar; an economic czar; a regulatory czar; a technology czar; a government performance czar; a border czar, a WMD policy czar; an intelligence czar; a car czar; a Great Lakes czar; a Stimulus czar; and now a Cyber czar.  Again, Czars dominating industrustries and whole sections of the massive government infastructure who are accountable to no one but the president.

To quote J.R. Dieckmann who describes the new “cyber security czar” and in so doing denounces the entire mindset that creates them in the first place:

We have seen the tactic used by this administration over and over again — find or create a crisis, then violate the people’s liberties to deal with it. We saw it with the banking industry. We saw it with the mortgage industry. We’re seeing it with the auto industry and the energy industry, the global warming hoax, and many others. This is a president who wants the federal government to control everything of any significance. Controlling the Internet would be most helpful to him in forcing his Marxist agenda down the throats of the American citizens.

[By the way, even as Obama plunges the economy of the nation into ruin by pursuing the radical global warming agenda, a new NASA study confirms that – surprise – the sun, NOT man, has been responsible for warming.  Not that the obvious facts have ever mattered to liberals].

If you don’t think what Obama is doing is Marxism, as Dieckmann (and recently the Russian Pravda) describes it, try fascism.  Or insert your own blatantly un-American “-ism” (examples: totalitarianism, socialism).  Call it whatever you want: it’s an insult to everything America stands for.

CARACAS, June 2 (Reuters) – Venezuela’s President Hugo Chavez said on Tuesday that he and Cuban ally Fidel Castro risk being more conservative than U.S. President Barack Obama as Washington prepares to take control of General Motors Corp. […]

“Hey, Obama has just nationalized nothing more and nothing less than General Motors. Comrade Obama! Fidel, careful or we are going to end up to his right,” Chavez joked on a live television broadcast.

Maybe Hugo Chavez and Fidel Castro think it’s a joke; I don’t think there’s anything funny about it.  I don’t think there’s anything funny about Obama’s using czars answerable only to him to shred the Constitution to set aside firmly established bankruptcy and contract law in order to make a political payoff to his union constituency.

Who did Obama appoint to run his nationalized Government Motors?  A 31-year old punk named Brian Deese who has never run anything but liberal political campaign propaganda:

Here’s the 411 of Mr. Deese’s “experience.”

• Left Yale Law School to work on Hillary Clinton’s campaign
• Has a Bachelor’s in political science from Middlebury College
• “He has appeared in videos posted on change.gov by the transition team”
• Policy analyst at liberal think tanks like Center for American Progress
• Never run a business
• Doesn’t have a law degree
• Has gone on public record as being scared of his work capabilities already in his appointment in the auto task force.

THIS is the guy who “finds himself dismantling General Motors and rewriting the rules of American capitalism” (in the exact words of the New York Times)?  How do we not deserve to go the way of the Dodo bird when we do crap like this?

Liberals who used to decry Bush for his imperial tactics are an insult unto themselves; Bush’s “abuses of power” are to Obama’s what a pea-shooter is to a hydrogen bomb.  Obama is continuing the things that liberals have screamed the most about (including domestic eavesdropping which he once opposed; including the right to use enhanced interrogation methods should he deem it appropriate; including the use of rendition to send terrorist suspects to countries that will employ harsh interrogations; including the use of military commissions he himself condemned; including the right to hold people indefinitely without trial that he previously had demonized.  The ONLY difference between Bush and Obama on these issues is that Bush wasn’t a pompous, self-righteous, arrogant liar and demagogue, as Obama has now proven himself to be.  Meanwhile, on top of all the “abuses of power” liberals attacked Bush over, Obama has further taken it upon himself to abuse federal power like no one before him had ever even dreamed.

Bush opened the door to this crap; Barrack Hussein has essentially driven a suicide-bomber’s truck right through that door – and is in the process of driving his bomb into the very heart of our economy, our infrastructure, and our entire way of life.

And more and more people are FINALLY starting to become angrier and angrier about it.  Not enough to stop it.  But enough to give one hope that we’re not as insane as it has previously appeared.

Daily Presidential Tracking Poll

June 5, 2009

The Rasmussen Reports daily Presidential Tracking Poll for Friday shows that 34% of the nation’s voters now Strongly Approve of the way that Barack Obama is performing his role as President. Thirty-four percent (34%) Strongly Disapprove giving Obama a Presidential Approval Index rating of 0. That’s the highest level of strong disapproval and the lowest overall rating yet recorded (see trends).

The President’s ratings have slipped since General Motors filed for bankruptcy to initiate a new government bailout and takeover. Just 26% of Americans believe the GM bailout was a good idea and nearly as many support a boycott of GM products. It remains to be seen whether the dip in the President’s numbers is a temporary reaction to recent news or something more substantive.

The Presidential Approval Index is calculated by subtracting the number who Strongly Disapprove from the number who Strongly Approve. It is updated daily at 9:30 a.m. Eastern (sign up for free daily e-mail update). Updates also available on Twitter.

Obama’s approval can only go down so far no matter what he does or how badly he fails.  If he were to so destroy the United States to such an extent that it became like North Korea – a people’s socialist utopia that has so little economic production that it’s people are in a constant state of famine, having so little energy it might as well be in the dark ages – I truly believe that 45% of Americans would still vote to re-elect him in 2012.  And with most of the mainstream media still continuing to sing his praises just as the North Korean media continues to fawn over their “Dear Leader” Kim Jong-Il.

It may literally be too late to save this country from impending economic collapse.  Already $1 out of every $6 in the US economy is coming from the government.  And if Obama is able to nationalize our health care – and a further one-sixth of the economy – we will find ourselves in a position from which we will never be able to recover.  History has proven that it is impossible to terminate federal bureaucracies once they have been created.

Steven Moore, the senior economics writer for the Wall Street Journal editorial page, summarizes what he calls “onslaught of the left” and concludes:

Yikes!  That’s a big dosage of economic cyanide the left wants America to swallow.   If this whole agenda goes through, in 2009 the federal budget will run the budget deficit to $2.2 trillion —  in a single year.  That’s more borrowing in twelve months than the federal government did in 200 years!

How do we possibly survive this crushing level of debt?  “Economic cyanide,” indeed.

Obama campaigned as this country’s “messiah” or savior.  But who will be able to save us from Obama, once his ruinous policies explode?

Obama’s Disgrace America Tour Off To Great Start

Let’s reflect on the past few weeks.

First Obama treats the Prime Minister of Britain – America’s closest historic ally – like dirt and then has his State Department announce that “There’s nothing special about Britain. You’re just the same as the other 190 countries in the world. You shouldn’t expect special treatment.”

But that’s okay; he’s balancing that despicable treatment by doling out more of the same shoddy treatment to the 2nd greatest ally of the United States, Israel.

Apparently, Obama seeks to appease the countries who despise us by turning his back on the countries who have loved us.

Then he goes on his “Apologize for being an American” tour during the G-20 summit. He didn’t get any meaningful commitments from anybody to give us any kind of meaningful help in our “good war” in Afghanistan, and he got absolutely nobody to follow his “let’s all keep on recklessly spending” stimulus plan. But he gave up American economic sovereignty by ceding control over to an international body anyway. At least Judas got 20 pieces of silver for his betrayal; Obama got nothing for his.

During that tour, Obama had the gall to apologize to France – to FRANCE! – for American arrogance. That pretty much proves that Obama believes America is the most arrogant country in the history of the world.

And he bowed down before the king of Saudi Arabia before lying about the fact that he had bowed. The first American president to break with the tradition that American presidents do not bow down to kings. The tradition of “sic semper tyrannis” is officially over.

Then – after bowing down before a Muslim king – Obama went to Turkey to renounce American Christianity, and all the founding history that went with it.

With his genuflection to serve as a capstone foreign policy moment for American submission, Obama then journeyed to Mexico to tell them to blame America for all their problems, and repeats the already utterly disproven demagoguery that “More than 90 percent of the guns recovered in Mexico come from the United States” to support his thesis. Pretty smart, this: he gets to demonize America for selling guns to Mexican drug cartels and at the same time he gets to undermine the 2nd Amendment.

And then we went to the Americas Conference to appear as the “poor ignoramus” that Hugo Chavez said he was a few weeks earlier:

CARACAS (Reuters) – Venezuela’s President Hugo Chavez said on Sunday his U.S. counterpart Barack Obama was at best an “ignoramus” for saying the socialist leader exported terrorism and obstructed progress in Latin America.

“He goes and accuses me of exporting terrorism: the least I can say is that he’s a poor ignoramus; he should read and study a little to understand reality,” said Chavez, who heads a group of left-wing Latin American leaders opposed to the U.S. influence in the region.

Geez. I never would have believed Hugo Chavez would ever be right about anything. Hugo Chavez should look in a mirror, of course, but he’s absolutely spot-on in his assessment of Obama.

The governments of the United States and Venezuela finally agree upon something; and Obama and Chavez subsequently shook on it to confirm the fact: Barack Obama IS a poor ignoramus.

Well, at least he didn’t bow down before him, although some have suggested that perhaps if Obama bows down before the Ayatollah of Iran and Kim Jong Il of North Korea perhaps they’d abandon their nuclear weapons and ballistic missile programs. Why nuke us if we’re already subservient?

And then Chavez took another photo op moment to present Obama with a book that presents the Marxist-socialist thesis that America is the source of evil that is responsible for all of Latin America’s problems. Chavez DID say the poor ignoramus needed to read up on his Marxist fabrication of history, after all.

Sad thing is I bet Obama reads every page of the book Chavez gave him. And believes it.

After listening to a deranged speech in which Daniel Ortega demonized and blamed the United States for every problem in Latin America (having clearly read Obama’s new book), Obama’s response was as telling as it was depressing:

“I’m grateful that President Ortega did not blame me for things that happened when I was three months old.”

It’s NOT about YOU, dammit! This guy just pissed all over your country – the country that you took an oath to DEFEND, by the way – and all you care about is whether he blamed YOU the way you’ve blamed George Bush 5,000 times?  STAND UP FOR AMERICA! Tell the world we’re NOT the hateful country that sleazeballs such as Ahmadinejad, Chavez, and Ortega claim.  But, no; you’ve done even more blaming of America than Ortega during the last several weeks.

Very recently, Obama continued the disgrace America tour by releasing CIA memos so he could refer to “the dark and painful chapter in our history.” Yet another attempt to rub our nose in our morbid and completely illegitimate desire to protect ourselves from the lethal hatred of terrorists. CIA officials are supposed to be thankful that Obama did not reward them for their efforts to protect the country by having them criminally prosecuted. It was apparently vitally important that our terrorist enemies be made to realize that they no longer have absolutely anything whatsoever to fear from being captured by American forces. All they have to do is lawyer up while enjoying three hots and a cot while they destroy our country just like the ACLU does – from within – by using our own institutions against us.

The disgrace America tour goes on and on under Barrack Hussein. Let’s not forget the sermons from Obama’s spiritual leader for 23 years: this IS “God damn America,” after all.

I end by reflecting on the words of Mark Levin from Liberty And Tyranny, page 18:

For the Statist, the international community and international organizations serve as useful sources for importing disaffection with the civil society. The Statist urges Americans to view themselves with through the lenses of those who resent and even hate them. He needs Americans to become less confident, to doubt their institutions, and to accept the status assigned to them by outsiders – as isolationists, invaders, occupiers, oppressors, and exploiters. The Statist wants Americans to see themselves as backward, foolishly holding to their quaint notions of individual liberty, private property, family, and faith, long diminished or jettisoned in other countries. They need to listen to the voices of condemnation from world capitals and self-appointed global watchdogs hostile to America’s superior standard of living. America is said to be out of step and regressive, justifying the surrendering of its sovereignty through treaties and other arrangements that benefit the greater “humanity.” And it would not hurt if America admitted its past transgressions, made reparations, and accepted its fate as just another aging nation – one among many.