EASILY Refuting The Asinine Liberal Argument That Bush Is More Fascist Than Obama Because Bush Issued More Executive Orders

Okay, this shouldn’t take long.

Republicans are outraged at the number of times Obama has simply either completely abrogated law or simply illegally wrote a law by himself when that power is invested solely in Congress.

Democrats use this “moral” logic:

The New York Magazine listed all presidents serving during the past 115 years, ranking them by use of executive orders. The president issuing the most executive orders in that period of 115 years was FDR who issued more than 3,000. The ranking proceeds down from there to Hoover [R], Wilson [D], Harding [R], Coolidge [R], Taft [R], Teddy Roosevelt [R], Truman [D], Carter [D], Kennedy [D], Ford [R], Johnson [D], Nixon [R], Eisenhower [R], Reagan [R], Clinton [D], George Herbert Walker Bush [41] [R], McKinley [R], George W. Bush [43] [R] and, drum roll please, the president with the fewest executive orders in the past 115 years was President Obama [D] with 167.

If the Republicans’ argument were that “executive orders” are inherently evil and every executive order is as wicked as any other, then that argument would be valid rather than laughably stupid.  But that ISN’T their argument.  A president has the right to issue executive orders; he just doesn’t have a right to change the law.

Watch me now proceed to blow up the Democrat reasoning in about two seconds:

Fascist right-wing Nazi President Mikey will issue only TWO executive orders during his presidency for life:

1. All power is hereby rendered to the executive.

2. The Democrat Party is hereby a terrorist and criminal organization and all of its members and all of the people who have supported it shall hereby be hunted down with dogs and burned alive.

And here’s the beauty of this: President Mikey responds to the Democrats’ charge of fascism by pointing out that Barack Obama was actually 98.8 percent more fascist because he issued 167 orders to President Mikey’s two.

It’s amazing, isn’t it.  I have just seized total dictatorial power and literally executed all of my political opposition, but according to Democrats’ current “reasoning,” I can’t be a fascist because Obama issued more executive orders than I did.

I hope I don’t have to explain more about how that is an utterly dumbass argument and that anybody and everybody who would or who has used it is a mindless ideologue zombie.

Just how morally idiotic ARE Democrats?  It is a mystery that only God knows.  I know only that no human being created in the image of God could be such a fool, and that the Democrats’ moral insanity is the result of their pissing on the image of God and declaring themselves the mindless “progress” of random evolution as they put their faith in the notion that they somehow kept mutating into smarter and smarter creatures.

But HERE is the problem with MANY of the executive orders that Obama has written: he has not only materially changed (read “fundamentally transformed”) laws that were passed by Congress, that he signed, and that as according to his role as president becomes his job to “faithfully execute” rather than abrogate or change, he has actually flat-out created new crimes that had never existed before.

Obama: It’s nonsensical for me to enforce the law as it is written
By: DrJohn

image courtesy of Maggie’s Notebook

Michael Cannon of the Cato Institute testified before Congress yesterday about the dangerous territory into which the country is headed. Obama took an oath to “take Care that the Laws be faithfully executed” and Cannon spells out in clear detail how badly Obama is flouting his oath and the Constitution.

The law is a reciprocal pact between the government and the governed. Public order requires government to remain faithful to the law as much as it requires the citizenry to do so. If the actions of government officials lead citizens to conclude that those officials are no longer meaningfully bound by the law, then citizens will rightly conclude that neither are they.

Since he signed the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act (PPACA) into law on March 23, 2010, President Barack Obama has failed to execute that law faithfully.

The president has unilaterally taken taxpayer dollars made available by the PPACA and diverted them from their congressionally authorized purposes toward purposes for which no Congress has ever appropriated funds.

He has unilaterally and repeatedly rewritten the statute to dispense taxpayer dollars that no federal law authorizes him to spend and that the PPACA expressly forbids him to spend.

He has unilaterally issued blanket waivers to requirements that the PPACA does not authorize him to waive.

At the same time he has declined to collect taxes the PPACA orders him to collect, he has unilaterally rewritten the statute to impose billions of dollars in taxes that the PPACA expressly forbids him to impose, and to incur billions of dollars in debt that the statute expressly forbids him to incur.

He has unilaterally rewritten the PPACA to allow health insurance products that the statute expressly forbids. He has encouraged consumers, insurers, and state officials to violate a federal law he enacted.

And he has taken these steps for the purpose of forestalling democratic action by the people’s elected representatives in Congress.

President Obama’s unfaithfulness to the PPACA is so wanton, it is no longer accurate to say the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act is “the law of the land.” Today, with respect to health care, the law of the land is whatever one man says it is – or whatever this divided Congress will let that one man get away with saying. What this one man says may flatly contradict federal statute. It may suddenly confer benefits on favored groups, or tax disfavored groups without representation. It may undermine the careful and costly planning done by millions of individuals and businesses. It may change from day to day. This method of lawmaking has more in common with monarchy than democracy or a constitutional republic.

Obama has run roughshod over the PPACA law. Cannon points out the worst abuse:

The president’s most egregious violation of his duty to execute faithfully the PPACA is his attempt – under the rubric of that law – to tax, borrow, and spend billions of dollars that statute expressly prohibits him to spend.

The relevant provisions of the Act are complex, but the law is abundantly clear. The PPACA authorizes the creation of state-specific health insurance “exchanges” that regulate health insurance within each state. It asserts that “Each State shall . . . establish” an Exchange. It directs the Secretary of Health and Human Services to establish an Exchange in states that do not. It offers health insurance subsidies to certain taxpayers who enroll in a qualified health plan “through an Exchange established by the State under Section 1311.” Finally, the PPACA exempts employers from its “free-rider penalty,” and exempts millions of individual taxpayers from its individual-mandate penalties, if their states opt not to establish an Exchange. The language of the statute is clear, consistent, and unambiguous.

Nevertheless, shortly after legal scholars brought this feature of the law to the public’s attention in 2011, the Internal Revenue Service proposed a rule that would issue those subsidies – and impose the resulting taxes – through federal Exchanges as well as state-established Exchanges. Congressional Budget Office estimates indicate that issuing subsidies in the 34 states that have refused to establish Exchanges would cost taxpayers roughly $700 billion in the first 10 years. The president is literally threatening to tax, borrow, and spend hundreds of billions of dollars, without congressional authorization, and indeed in violation of the express language of his own health care law.

The IRS proposed this rule with no apparent regard for the clear language of the statute. Despite public criticism and objections during the notice-and-comment period, the agency finalized its proposed rule in May 2012 yet cited neither any provision of the PPACA nor any element of the legislative history in support of its “interpretation” of the law.

You will want to read the entire testimony. Cannon concludes with a strong warning:

The concerns I share with you today are not borne of partisanship. Though I have worked for Republicans, I am not a Republican, for reasons that Democrats on this committee can readily appreciate. I am acutely aware of the last Republican president’s failures to execute the laws faithfully. In 2008, though I did not support him, I preferred the Democratic presidential candidate to the Republican candidate in part because he promised to curb such abuses by the executive. I have praised President Obama for doing more than even many libertarians to celebrate the gains in equality and freedom our nation has secured for women, for African-Americans, for gays, and for lesbians.

This president’s failure – or any president’s failure – to honor his constitutional duty to execute the laws faithfully is not a partisan issue. The fact that presidents from both parties violate this duty is cause not for solace. It is cause for even greater alarm, because it guarantees that presidents from both parties will replicate and even surpass the abuses of their predecessors as payback for past injustices. The result is that democracy and freedom will suffer no matter who occupies the Oval Office.

The Obama regime is arguing that it is nonsensical to read literally the law as it is written.

That’s utterly absurd.

What do laws mean if they can be rewritten at will by the President? Why must we obey laws if the President does not? Since when are we to obey what democrats say they intended rather than what is codified in a law they wrote?

Why could Obama not suspend the 2nd Amendment if he wakes up one day and decides on it? What if Obama wakes up one day and claims the First Amendment means he can shut down the press because that’s how he interprets it?

Who’s going to stop him?

Obama does think he is king and this country is edging closer and closer to that becoming a reality.

Here is an example of a “nonsensical” understanding of the law according to Obama:

The Obama administration last week delayed for a second time the part of the Affordable Care Act that requires large employers to provide health coverage or pay fines.

The “employer mandate” was supposed to take effect in January. But now, mid-size firms of 50 to 99 employees do not have to comply until 2016, and the requirements will be phased in for employers of 100 or more full-time workers.

Mr. Lee, Utah Republican, told Fox News Sunday that if Mr. Obama can change the law through rules from the Treasury, “then there’s almost no limit to his authority.”

Fox host Chris Wallace said the text of the law is quite clear, stating the mandate “shall apply to months beginning after Dec. 31, 2013.”

Of course, yes, the damn law was written to take effect on January 1, 2014.  But Obama CHANGED the law that he swore as part of his oath of office to “faithfully execute.”

Obama decided that “execute” means “kill.”  And of course it’s “nonsensical” for him to interpret “execute” as “to faithfully carry out.”  Because he is MURDERING the law.  He has now changed his OWN ObamaCare law 29 times – and these being MAJOR changes that Congress DID NOT PASS.

We know that Barack Obama is the very worst possible kind of dishonest hypocrite without shame, integrity, honor, decency or virtue of any kind.  And we know that even the top liberal legal scholars are now calling him an outright fascist who has fundamentally transformed our democracy into something that will necessarily degenerate into totalitarianism in the days just before the beast comes.

What is going on in Ukraine – as the people rise up against a dictatorial president who is trying to force them to become less like a democracy and more like a Russian fascist dictatorship – ought to be happening here.

Because what Barack Obama is doing is truly evil.  And the crisis is that the Democrat Party that has become truly evil and the Democrat voters who are truly evil hypocritically protect him when they would be screaming in the streets if Bush had done anything even remotely close to what Obama has done.

Reagan Won By A Landslide And Governed Like A Leader; Obama Won By A FRACTION Of Reagan’s Mandate And Governed Like An Arrogant Tyrant.

In 1980 Ronald Reagan stunned Jimmy Carter and the mainstream media propagandists – and yeah, all the pseudo-pollsters – by destroying Carter by winning 489 electoral votes to Jimmy Carter’s 89:

In 1984, Ronald Reagan AGAIN stunned the mainstream media propagandists and all the psuedo-pollsters by destroying Walter Mondale by 529 electoral college votes to 13.  Reagan carried 49 states that year; and only Mondale’s home state of Minnesota drank his Kool Aid and pulled the lever for him:

There’s a damn good reason why Gallup still ranks Ronald Reagan as THE GREATEST AMERICAN PRESIDENT IN HISTORY. 

But here’s the thing: Ronald Reagan won America and won a “mandate” by the largest margins EVER.  And Reagan wasn’t even a FRACTION as arrogant or dismissive of the other side as Obama has been every single day of the last four years.

We have simply got to get the stench of this turd also known as Barack Hussein Obama out of the White House if we EVER want to have anything even CLOSE to resembling a presidency that is capable of reaching out to the other side.  Because just as Obama has destroyed the public election system by being the first candidate to refuse public matching funds – and thus opening the doors to special interests like NO OTHER MAN IN AMERICAN HISTORY – he will destroy anything resembling bipartisanship if he gets to continue to abandon the law and the Constitution and govern by tyranny.

One of the primary things that will ultimately make Obama’s presidency the worst in history was his total inability to compromise, to reach out to the other side, and to champion bipartisan accomplishments.  In those regards, Ronald Wilson Reagan has spent every single day of Obama’s failed presidency bitch-slapping him.

And one of the key ways Obama has shown that at his core he is a demagogue rather than an actual leader is that he has repeatedly said that the conservative Republican agenda somehow equals Bush and equals everything that is bad rather than understanding that the greatest president in history became the greatest president in history by means of the very conservative agenda that Obama is clearly too arrogant, too ideological and too ignorant to even begin to understand.

Barack Obama IS the anti-Reagan president.  He is also the anti-Kennedy and anti-American exceptionalism president.

The saddest thing about Obama’s failed presidency is that it “fundamentally transformed” the thirty year trajectory of success that Reagan’s policies bequeathed upon America.  We now have a labor participation rate that is THE WORST since Jimmy Carter screwed up the universe and it took a Ronald Reagan to fix the mess.  And that rate has gotten worse every single year of Obama’s failed presidency.  We now have consumer confidence rates that similarly are as dismal as they were in the day that Jimmy Carter was screwing up the universe.

When confronted by a true economic crisis, Ronald Reagan got to work and gave America its greatest recovery EVER.  When Barack Obama was confronted by a true economic crisis, he and his fellow Marxist ideologues said “Never let a crisis go to waste!” and demagogued all kinds of socialist takeovers through a militant Democrat-controlled Congress.  And as we look at the next four years, all Obama has to offer are failed policies that didn’t work the first four years and won’t work in the future.

Obama has no relationships at all with either the House or the Senate.  He has done so little bipartisan reaching out during his failed administration that when the Republicans swept the House in 2010, Barack Obama’s White House did not have the phone number or any way to reach incoming Speaker John Boehner:

The failure of Obama to connect with Boehner was vaguely reminiscent of another phone call late in the evening of Election Day 2010, after it became clear that the Republicans would take control of the House, making Boehner Speaker of the House.
 
Nobody in the Obama orbit could even find the soon-to-be-speaker’s phone number, Woodward reports. A Democratic Party aide finally secured it through a friend so the president could offer congratulations.
 
While questions persist about whether any grand bargain reached by the principals could have actually passed in the Tea Party-dominated Congress, Woodward issues a harsh judgment on White House and congressional leaders for failing to act boldly at a moment of crisis. Particular blame falls on the president.
 
“It was increasingly clear that no one was running Washington. That was trouble for everyone, but especially for Obama,” Woodward writes.

Because he had never bothered to reach out in any way, shape or form when John Boehner was the Minority Leader and Republicans were shut out.

The man had ZERO outreach to the Republicans.  And more than anything else that was the greatest failure of his presidency.

Obama’s tone with Republicans was thinly veiled contempt straight out the door when he took office:

In Obama’s first meeting with Democratic and Republican House and Senate leaders, just two weeks after his inauguration, he told the group that he wanted to hear everyone’s ideas and come to a bipartisan solution—words he had run his presidential platform on. He told those assembled, “If it works, we don’t care whose idea it is.” But the next day his tune changed when Rep. Eric Cantor, then House minority whip, passed out a draft of a potential economic recovery plan that essentially met only the Republican demands. After reading the one-page spread, the president responded: “I can go it alone but I want to come together. Look at the polls. The polls are pretty good for me right now.” He then told Cantor, “Elections have consequences and Eric, I won.” The president’s arrogance is described many times in the book as having a negative effect. Woodward writes of impromptu speeches that Obama would sometimes make over conference calls and which Congress members often muted, specifically naming House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi. Additionally, one of Obama’s most used “catch phrases” at the beginning stages of his presidency was “I’d be willing to be a one-term president over this.” It was a phrase he used to back up topics he was passionate about. It was also used against him later when Republicans began to hope his quips would come true. […]

Cantor is noted as being a straight-talking politician. So much so that Senator Majority Leader Harry Reid, a Democrat, once thanked Cantor for his brutal honesty during a meeting with the president—despite the two being on opposite sides of the ideological spectrum. But Obama wasn’t always as appreciative of Cantor’s tendency to speak his mind, Woodward writes. During yet another budget meeting in which House and Senate leaders were talking with the president about the amount of money they were willing to raise through both taxes and cuts, Cantor told the president that the two sides were moving in opposite directions. Obama did not take Cantor’s mild taunt lightly and responded, according to Woodward, “I promise you, Eric, don’t call my bluff on this. It may bring my presidency down, but I will not yield on this.” Obama then stood up and strode from the room.

More on that:

I’ve written about Obama’s divisiveness – in wild contrast to his hypocritical and cynical promises to “transcend the starkly red-and-blue politics of the last 15 years, end the partisan and ideological wars and build a new governing majority” – and on this day when we celebrate the unity of the immediate aftermath of the 9/11 attack, it seems fitting to examine why any hope of unity went out the door with Obama’s presidency.

Two weeks – just TWO WEEKS – after Obama took office, Republicans (according to Bob Woodward’s new book) came ready to work with him. The problem was that Obama wasn’t ready to work with THEM. When Eric Cantor provided some excellent suggestions to the massive stimulus that Obama demanded, Obama shut him down by saying, “Elections have consequences and Eric, I won.” Obama flat-out told Republicans he didn’t want to hear any of their ideas and that they weren’t going to be allowed to contribute.

Obama gave a speech just three weeks after taking office in which he said:

“Don’t come to the table with the same tired arguments and worn ideas that helped to create this crisis,” he admonished in a speech.

Eric Cantor was simply amazed. Obama had falsely won election on a promise of true hope and change for rising above partisan intransigence. And he was being more partisan and more bullheaded than anybody. Cantor reflected that Obama had EVERYTHING when he took office. He had the love of the American people. He had total Democrat control over the House for two full years. He had filibuster-proof supermajority in the Senate for those two years. He had an opposition party that was shocked and awed and disoriented and dismayed at the loss they had just taken. Obama had all of that going for him. And, in Cantor’s words, in Obama’s very first act as president, “he had unified and energized the losers.”

The New York Times wrote about how Obama constantly overestimates his abilities and underestimates the abilities of those around him:

But even those loyal to Mr. Obama say that his quest for excellence can bleed into cockiness and that he tends to overestimate his capabilities. […]

He may not always be as good at everything as he thinks, including politics. While Mr. Obama has given himself high grades for his tenure in the White House — including a “solid B-plus” for his first year — many voters don’t agree, citing everything from his handling of the economy to his unfulfilled pledge that he would be able to unite Washington to his claim that he would achieve Israeli-Palestinian peace.

Those were not the only times Mr. Obama may have overestimated himself: he has also had a habit of warning new hires that he would be able to do their jobs better than they could.

“I think that I’m a better speechwriter than my speechwriters,” Mr. Obama told Patrick Gaspard, his political director, at the start of the 2008 campaign, according to The New Yorker. “I know more about policies on any particular issue than my policy directors. And I’ll tell you right now that I’m going to think I’m a better political director than my political director.”

Though he never ran a large organization before becoming president, he initially dismissed internal concerns about management and ended up with a factionalized White House and a fuzzier decision-making process than many top aides wanted.

They wrote about how Obama is so petty in his competitiveness that he spends extraordinary time trying to compete and win in utter triviliaties:

For someone dealing with the world’s weightiest matters, Mr. Obama spends surprising energy perfecting even less consequential pursuits. He has played golf 104 times since becoming president, according to Mark Knoller of CBS News, who monitors his outings, and he asks superior players for tips that have helped lower his scores. He decompresses with card games on Air Force One, but players who do not concentrate risk a reprimand (“You’re not playing, you’re just gambling,” he once told Arun Chaudhary, his former videographer).

His idea of birthday relaxation is competing in an Olympic-style athletic tournament with friends, keeping close score. The 2009 version ended with a bowling event. Guess who won, despite his history of embarrassingly low scores? The president, it turned out, had been practicing in the White House alley.

For the record, that pissy, superior, arrogant attitude is NOT what characterized ANY successful American president.  Obama will not be successful in a second term simply because he is not emotionally or psychologically capable of doing what a successful president needs to be able to do.

Reagan had Tip O’Neil, the Democrat Speaker of the House.  And the two had a real relationship such that they could work with each other.  Clinton had Newt Gingrich, the Republican Speaker of the House, sweep into power two years into his first term.  And the two men had a real relationship such that they could work with each other.

Whatever tree of relationship had existed between the presidency and Congress, Barack Obama pissed on it till it died.  And no, he hasn’t reached out much more to Congressional Democrats than he has to Republicans.  You find out from multiple sources that Barack Obama had an emperor’s disdain for Congress and frankly didn’t like ANY of them, even Democrats.  He is a distant, aloof and detached man when it comes time to stop campaigning and pretending he’s something he’s not and start actually leading and being the president.

The last thing this country can afford is a failed leader like Barack Obama getting a second chance at a job he will NEVER be emotionally or psychologically capable of handling.

Obama is The Empty Chair as a leader and as a president.  It is time to get a man like Ronald Reagan who came into the White House knowing how to lead and led America to greatness.  Granted we can’t do that at this point, Mitt Romney is the only chance this nation has.  Unlike Obama, Romney’s experience as a Governor (i.e., as an actual leader rather than merely one politician in a body of 99 other politicians like Senator Obama was) proved to be a successful one in terms of proving himself able to work in a liberal and overwhelmingly Democrat state like Massachusetts.

If you want more vicious gridlock and four more years of Obama being unable to lead Congress and getting nothing done beyond a series of increasingly tyrannical and self-serving executive orders, well, Lord help you, but you’re just not that bright.  The rest of you can study up on what a mean-spirited, petty man Obama is when it comes to demonizing his opposition and draw your conclusion accordingly.

Obama, The Anti-Kennedy, Anti-Reagan, Anti-Exceptionalism President

“On the hope of our free nation rests the hope of all free nations.” — John F. Kennedy

“Can we doubt that only a divine providence placed this land, this island of freedom, here as a refuge for all those people on the world who yearn to breathe free?” — Ronald Wilson Reagan

“I believe in American exceptionalism, just as I suspect that the Brits believe in British exceptionalism and the Greeks believe in Greek exceptionalism.”  — Barack Hussein Obama

“We’ve been a little bit lazy, I think, over the last couple of decades.” — Barack Hussein Obama

Kind of helps you understand why if you attend an Independence Parade on July Fourth or take a moment to contemplate your American flag, you are a Republican these days.

Mind you, the United States of America is an exceptional nation without peer; but it’s closes second is it’s magnificent historic ally, Great Britain.  Unless you talk to somebody associated with the Obama administration:

The real views of many in Obama administration were laid bare by a State Department official involved in planning the Brown visit, who reacted with fury when questioned by The Sunday Telegraph about why the event was so low-key.

The official dismissed any notion of the special relationship, saying: “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.”

Britain – the faithful ally and friend that alongside America prevailed over evil in two world wars – gets tossed into the same boat that Obama tosses America into.

But what else should you expect from these people?

SEPTEMBER 1, 2011
Obama and the Burden of Exceptionalism
Post-’60s liberals, with the president as their standard bearer, seek to make a virtue of decline.
By SHELBY STEELE

If I’ve heard it once, I’ve heard it a hundred times: President Obama is destroying the country. Some say this destructiveness is intended; most say it is inadvertent, an outgrowth of inexperience, ideological wrong-headedness and an oddly undefined character. Indeed, on the matter of Mr. Obama’s character, today’s left now sounds like the right of three years ago. They have begun to see through the man and are surprised at how little is there.

Yet there is something more than inexperience or lack of character that defines this presidency: Mr. Obama came of age in a bubble of post-’60s liberalism that conditioned him to be an adversary of American exceptionalism. In this liberalism America’s exceptional status in the world follows from a bargain with the devil—an indulgence in militarism, racism, sexism, corporate greed, and environmental disregard as the means to a broad economic, military, and even cultural supremacy in the world. And therefore America’s greatness is as much the fruit of evil as of a devotion to freedom.

Mr. Obama did not explicitly run on an anti-exceptionalism platform. Yet once he was elected it became clear that his idea of how and where to apply presidential power was shaped precisely by this brand of liberalism. There was his devotion to big government, his passion for redistribution, and his scolding and scapegoating of Wall Street—as if his mandate was somehow to overcome, or at least subdue, American capitalism itself.

Anti-exceptionalism has clearly shaped his “leading from behind” profile abroad—an offer of self-effacement to offset the presumed American evil of swaggering cowboyism. Once in office his “hope and change” campaign slogan came to look like the “hope” of overcoming American exceptionalism and “change” away from it.

So, in Mr. Obama, America gained a president with ambivalence, if not some antipathy, toward the singular greatness of the nation he had been elected to lead.

 

Chad Crowe

But then again, the American people did elect him. Clearly Americans were looking for a new kind of exceptionalism in him (a black president would show America to have achieved near perfect social mobility). But were they also looking for—in Mr. Obama—an assault on America’s bedrock exceptionalism of military, economic and cultural pre-eminence?

American exceptionalism is, among other things, the result of a difficult rigor: the use of individual initiative as the engine of development within a society that strives to ensure individual freedom through the rule of law. Over time a society like this will become great. This is how—despite all our flagrant shortcomings and self-betrayals—America evolved into an exceptional nation.

Yet today America is fighting in a number of Muslim countries, and that number is as likely to rise as to fall. Our exceptionalism saddles us with overwhelming burdens. The entire world comes to our door when there is real trouble, and every day we spill blood and treasure in foreign lands—even as anti-Americanism plays around the world like a hit record.

At home the values that made us exceptional have been smeared with derision. Individual initiative and individual responsibility—the very engines of our exceptionalism—now carry a stigma of hypocrisy. For centuries America made sure that no amount of initiative would lift minorities and women. So in liberal quarters today—where historical shames are made to define the present—these values are seen as little more than the cynical remnants of a bygone era. Talk of “merit” or “a competition of excellence” in the admissions office of any Ivy League university today, and then stand by for the howls of incredulous laughter.

Our national exceptionalism both burdens and defames us, yet it remains our fate. We make others anxious, envious, resentful, admiring and sometimes hate-driven. There’s a reason al Qaeda operatives targeted the U.S. on 9/11 and not, say, Buenos Aires. They wanted to enrich their act of evil with the gravitas of American exceptionalism. They wanted to steal our thunder.

So we Americans cannot help but feel some ambivalence toward our singularity in the world—with its draining entanglements abroad, the selfless demands it makes on both our military and our taxpayers, and all the false charges of imperial hubris it incurs. Therefore it is not surprising that America developed a liberalism—a political left—that took issue with our exceptionalism. It is a left that has no more fervent mission than to recast our greatness as the product of racism, imperialism and unbridled capitalism.

But this leaves the left mired in an absurdity: It seeks to trade the burdens of greatness for the relief of mediocrity. When greatness fades, when a nation contracts to a middling place in the world, then the world in fact no longer knocks on its door. (Think of England or France after empire.) To civilize America, to redeem the nation from its supposed avarice and hubris, the American left effectively makes a virtue of decline—as if we can redeem America only by making her indistinguishable from lesser nations.

Since the ’60s we have enfeebled our public education system even as our wealth has expanded. Moral and cultural relativism now obscure individual responsibility. We are uninspired in the wars we fight, calculating our withdrawal even before we begin—and then we fight with a self-conscious, almost bureaucratic minimalism that makes the wars interminable.

America seems to be facing a pivotal moment: Do we move ahead by advancing or by receding—by reaffirming the values that made us exceptional or by letting go of those values, so that a creeping mediocrity begins to spare us the burdens of greatness?

As a president, Barack Obama has been a force for mediocrity. He has banked more on the hopeless interventions of government than on the exceptionalism of the people. His greatest weakness as a president is a limp confidence in his countrymen. He is afraid to ask difficult things of them.

Like me, he is black, and it was the government that in part saved us from the ignorances of the people. So the concept of the exceptionalism—the genius for freedom—of the American people may still be a stretch for him. But in fact he was elected to make that stretch. It should be held against him that he has failed to do so.

Mr. Steele is a senior fellow at Stanford University’s Hoover Institution. Among his books is “White Guilt” (Harper/Collins, 2007).

Regarding the quote about Obama, that he seeks “the ‘hope’ of overcoming American exceptionalism and ‘change’ away from it,” I’m reminded of a comment by Jules Crittendon: “The Obama administration doesn’t study history. It reimagines it.”

Obama Says ‘We Don’t Need A Balanced Budget Amendment.’ What We Don’t Need Is This Fool-In-Chief

Barack Obama is on the record saying, “We don’t need a balanced budget amendment,” he said. “We simply need to make these tough choices and be willing to take on our bases.”  Obama says, “I think it’s important for everybody to understand all of us believe we need to get to the point where we can balance the budget,” Mr. Obama said at a White House press conference. “We don’t need a constitutional amendment to do that.”

We desperately need a balanced budget amendment.  What we DON’T need is Barack Hussein Obama and his endless rhetorical posturing.

The national debt that is acknowledged is currently more than $14.5 trillion.

Let’s take a brief trip down national debt memory lane.  Now, let’s see.  When Ronald Reagan left office, the national debt was $2.6 trillion.  By the time Bush I left office, the national debt was $ trillion.  By the time Bill Clinton left office, the national debt was $5.6 trillion (which is quite strange, given the constant claim that Clinton balanced the budget).  By the time Bush II left office, the national debt was $10.6 trillion.  It is currently at over $14.5 trillion, and Obama is not even through his first term yet.  He wants it increased to more than $16 trillion now.  Again, before the end of his first term.

And, of course that’s actually NOTHING.  $14.5 trillion, or even $16 trillion, is actually really chump change to how much the United States REALLY owes.  Read this figure published in a peer reviewed International Monetary Fund publication article that provides the grim reality:

News from globeandmail.com
The scary real U.S. government debt
Wednesday, October 27, 2010
NEIL REYNOLDS
Ottawa — reynolds.globe@gmail.com

Boston University economist Laurence Kotlikoff says U.S. government debt is not $13.5-trillion (U.S.), which is 60 per cent of current gross domestic product, as global investors and American taxpayers think, but rather 14-fold higher: $200-trillion – 840 per cent of current GDP. “Let’s get real,” Prof. Kotlikoff says. “The U.S. is bankrupt.”

Writing in the September issue of Finance and Development, a journal of the International Monetary Fund, Prof. Kotlikoff says the IMF itself has quietly confirmed that the U.S. is in terrible fiscal trouble – far worse than the Washington-based lender of last resort has previously acknowledged. “The U.S. fiscal gap is huge,” the IMF asserted in a June report. “Closing the fiscal gap requires a permanent annual fiscal adjustment equal to about 14 per cent of U.S. GDP.”

This sum is equal to all current U.S. federal taxes combined. The consequences of the IMF’s fiscal fix, a doubling of federal taxes in perpetuity, would be appalling – and possibly worse than appalling.

Prof. Kotlikoff says: “The IMF is saying that, to close this fiscal gap [by taxation], would require an immediate and permanent doubling of our personal income taxes, our corporate taxes and all other federal taxes.

“America’s fiscal gap is enormous – so massive that closing it appears impossible without immediate and radical reforms to its health care, tax and Social Security systems – as well as military and other discretionary spending cuts.”

He cites earlier calculations by the Congressional Budget Office (CBO) that concluded that the United States would need to increase tax revenue by 12 percentage points of GDP to bring revenue into line with spending commitments. But the CBO calculations assumed that the growth of government programs (including Medicare) would be cut by one-third in the short term and by two-thirds in the long term. This assumption, Prof. Kotlikoff notes, is politically implausible – if not politically impossible.

One way or another, the fiscal gap must be closed. If not, the country’s spending will forever exceed its revenue growth, and no one’s real debt can increase faster than his real income forever.

Prof. Kotlikoff uses “fiscal gap,” not the accumulation of deficits, to define public debt. The fiscal gap is the difference between a government’s projected revenue (expressed in today’s dollar value) and its projected spending (also expressed in today’s dollar value). By this measure, the United States is in worse shape than Greece.

Prof. Kotlikoff is a noted economist. He is a research associate at the U.S. National Bureau of Economic Research. He is a former senior economist with then-president Ronald Reagan’s Council of Economic Advisers. He has served as a consultant with governments around the world. He is the author (or co-author) of 14 books: Jimmy Stewart Is Dead (2010), his most recent book, explains his recommendations for reform.

He says the U.S. cannot end its fiscal crisis by increasing taxes. He opposes further stimulus spending because it will simply increase the debt. But he does suggest reforms that would help – most of which would require a significant withering away of the state. He proposes that the government give every person an annual voucher for health care, provided that the total cost not exceed 10 per cent of GDP. (U.S. health care now consumes 16 per cent of GDP.) He suggests the replacement of all current federal taxes with a single consumption tax of 18 per cent. He calls for government-sponsored personal retirement accounts, with the government making contributions only for the poor, the unemployed and people with disabilities.

Without drastic reform, Prof. Kotlikoff says, the only alternative would be a massive printing of money by the U.S. Treasury – and hyperinflation.

As former president Bill Clinton once prematurely said, the era of big government is over. In the coming years, the U.S. will almost certainly be compelled to deconstruct its welfare state.

Prof. Kotlikoff doesn’t trust government accounting, or government regulation. The official vocabulary (deficit, debt, transfer payment, tax, borrowing), he says, is vulnerable to official manipulation and off-the-books deceit. He calls it “Enron accounting.” He also calls it a lie. Here is an economist who speaks plainly, as the legendary straight-shooting film star Jimmy Stewart did for an earlier generation.

But Prof. Kotlikoff’s economic genre isn’t the Western. It’s the horror story – “and scarier,” one reviewer of his book suggests, than Stephen King.

And what’s Obama’s response to all of this?

 

We are so screwed it is absolutely unreal.

And that’s just what the UNITED STATES government owes.  Let’s consider the leftist People’s Republic of Californication and see what IT’S actual debt is:

California’s $500-billion pension time bomb
April 06, 2010|By David Crane

The staggering amount of unfunded debt stands to crowd out funding for many popular programs. Reform will take something sadly lacking in the Legislature: political courage.

The state of California’s real unfunded pension debt clocks in at more than $500 billion, nearly eight times greater than officially reported.

That’s the finding from a study released Monday by Stanford University’s public policy program, confirming a recent report with similar, stunning findings from Northwestern University and the University of Chicago.

Most other states are facing catastrophic implosion due to government union workers massive unfunded pension liabilities.  Take Obama’s own state of Illinois, for instance.

Yeah, you’re right, Mr. Fool-in-Chief.  We don’t need a balanced budget amendment.  Let’s go with your plan instead.  Let’s dig our own graves, slit our own throats, and then fall into a hole never again to crawl out.  Let’s sacrifice our children’s children’s children’s children and put the weight of a debt they will never be able to possibly repay as we continue to selfishly and wickedly vote ourselves benefits at their expense.  Let’s guarantee that the United States becomes a banana republic in the next fifteen years.

We’re going to collapse soon.  When it happens, it will seem to come out of the blue, but we will have been working steadily toward our own doom for generations.

Obama’s Keynesian approach has utterly and completely failed.  And only fools refuse to see that by now.

The beast is coming.  And Barack Obama, the Democrat Party and every single fool who votes for these fools, will be his useful idiots.

Misery Index HIGHEST EVER, Hiring Only 70% Of 2006 Levels, And Boy Do We Ever Need A New President

Economics statistics are well on their way to becoming a Department in the 1984-style “Ministry of Truth.”

We start with misery, and the real apples-to-apples misery index that we can compare to the misrule of Jimmy Carter.  From Economic Policy Journal:

John Williams, over at Shadow Stats, compiles economic data for inflation and unemployment the way it used to be calculated pre-1990. Based on that data, the CPI inflation rate is over 10%, and the unemployment rate is over 15% (see charts). The Misery Index is the sum of the current inflation rate and the unemployment rate.  If it were to be calculated using the older methods, the Index would now be over 25, a record high. It surpasses the old index high of 21.98, which occurred in June 1980, when Jimmy Carter was president. Most believe the height of the Index along with the Iranian hostage crisis is what caused Carter to lose his re-election bid.

 

 

Using current calculation methods, April unemployment came in at 9.0% and the annualized April CPI number came in at 4.8%, for a Misery Index reading of 13.8.

The last time the Index came in with a higher reading with this index reading was in March 1983, with a reading of 13.90.

Ronald Reagan, of course, was president in 1983.  Reagan had a monster that Jimmy Carter largely created called out-of-control inflation.

As I previously explained:

The numbers told the sad story of the Jimmy Carter presidency: interest rates of 21%; inflation at 13.5%, and an unemployment rate of 7%.  And a relatively new economic device called “the misery index” – the combination of the unemployment and inflation rates which Carter had himself used to great effect in his 1976 campaign to win election – was at a shocking 20.5%.

And those who went through those dark and difficult times may soon be looking back to that period as “the good old days.”

Welcome back, Carter.

When Ronald Reagan took office from Jimmy Carter, inflation was at a meteoric 13.3% and the country was in the throes of a fierce recession. There was a real question as to whether workers’ wages would keep up with the costs of living, which made people afraid to either spend or save. And nobody knew how to control inflation – which had risen from 1.4% in 1960 to the aforementioned 13.3% in 1980 – causing a real erosion of confidence in the future. Jimmy Carter answered a reporter’s question as to what he would do about the problem of inflation by answering, “It would be misleading for me to tell any of you that there is a solution to it.”

But Ronald Reagan had a solution.  And by the time he left office, he had solved the problem of creeping inflation increases and had actually reversed the trend: he left behind a healthy inflation rate of 4.1%.

Reagan’s policies set the trajectory for growth that would last for 20 years.

Jimmy Carter didn’t have an answer for the economy, so he just made it worse and worse and WORSE.  Reagan had an answer.  He not only made it better; he established a trajectory of economic success.

And of course, we’re heading right back to that time of shocking inflation.  The cost of EVERYTHING is going up.  And there is absolutely no indication whatsoever that Barack Obama has an answer that is working.  Which is only going to make the pain last longer and the solution more difficult.  Presuming there is another Reagan waiting in the wings for that time when the American people overwhelmingly abandon Democrats and revile them for the failures that they are and basically always have been.

So what does the mainstream media do with that?

They create the propaganda that somehow Obama is a new Reagan, despite the fact that Obama reviles everything Reagan stood for, just as Reagan would have reviled everything Obama stands for.

Then there’s the enemployment beast.  How’s THAT hope and change working out for you?

Here’s some new news about hopey changey from the Wall Street Journal:

 MAY 16, 2011
Why the Job Market Feels So Dismal
The number of hires is the same today as it was when we were shedding jobs at record rates.
By EDWARD P. LAZEAR

Why don’t American workers feel that the labor market is on the mend? After all, the May 6 jobs report could suggest that the labor market is improving. Nonfarm employment rose by 244,000 and employment growth over the last three months is averaging over 200,000 per month. With unemployment at 9%, employment is still down many millions from where it should be, but up from its recession lows.

The fact is the jobs numbers that create so much anticipation from the business press and so many pundit pronouncements do not give a clear picture of the labor market’s health.  A better understanding requires an examination of hires and separations, or what the Bureau of Labor Statistics calls Job Openings and Labor Turnover Survey (JOLTS) data. Here are some surprising facts:

First, the increase in job growth that occurred over the past two years results from a decline in the number of layoffs, not from increased hiring. In February 2009, a month during which the labor market lost more than 700,000 jobs, employers hired four million workers. In March 2011, employers hired four million workers. The number of hires is the same today as it was when we were shedding jobs at record rates.

We added jobs because hires exceeded separations, not because hiring increased. There were 4.7 million separations in February 2009. In March 2011 that number had fallen to 3.8 million. The fall in separations reflects a decline in layoffs, which went from 2.5 million per month in February 2009 to 1.6 million per month in March 2011. One small piece of good news is that the just-released April data showed hires up about 2% over last year’s average and 12% above the low reached in January 2010.

The decline in layoffs is not unexpected and does not necessarily reflect labor-market health. Layoffs tend to occur early in a recession. When an economy has reached bottom and has already shed much of its labor, layoffs slow. But that doesn’t mean that the labor force is recovering. We could have high unemployment and a stagnant labor force even when layoffs are low. Isn’t the fact that hires exceed separations indicative of a healthy labor market? Unfortunately, no.

At any point in the business cycle, even during a recession, American firms still hire a huge number of workers. That’s because most of the action in the labor market reflects “churn,” the continual process of replacing workers, not net expansion or contraction of employment. The lowest number hired in any month of the current recession was 3.6 million workers. Even during the dismal year of 2009 there were more than 45 million hires.

Bear in mind that the U.S. labor force has more than 150 million workers or job seekers. In a typical year, about one-third or more of the work force turns over, leaving their old jobs to take new ones. When the labor market creates 200,000 jobs, it is because five million are hired and 4.8 million are separated, not because there were 200,000 hires and no job losses. When we’re talking about numbers as large as five million, the net of 200,000 is small and may reflect minor, month-to-month variations in the number of hires or separations.

The third fact puts this in perspective. In a healthy labor market like the one that prevailed in 2006 and early 2007, American firms hire about 5.5 million workers per month. Recall that the current number of hires is four million and it has not moved much from where it was two years ago. The labor market does not feel like it is expanding if hiring is not occurring at a recovery-level pace—and that means at least a half million more hires per month than we are seeing now.

The combination of low hiring and a large stock of unemployed workers, now 13.7 million, means that the competition for jobs is fierce. Because there are now many more unemployed workers, and because hiring is only about 70% of 2006 levels, a worker is about one-third as likely to find a job today as he or she was in 2006. It is no wonder that workers do not feel that the labor market has recovered.

One final fact is worth noting. Healthy labor markets are characterized not only by high levels of hiring, but also by high levels of separations. Although it is true that the importance of quits relative to layoffs rises during good times, even the number of layoffs was greater in the strong labor market of 2006-07 than it is now. No one would suggest that layoffs are good for workers, but what is good is a fluid labor market, where workers and firms constantly seek to produce better products and to find more efficient ways to produce them. High labor market churn is a characteristic of a strong economy. It generally means that workers are moving to better jobs in growing sectors that pay higher wages and away from declining sectors that pay lower wages.

Allowing maximum flexibility encourages fluidity and means that employers are willing to hire workers who lose their jobs elsewhere. Many European countries have restricted mobility by imposing severance pay penalties on employers that lay workers off. More than reducing layoffs, these rigidities make employers reluctant to hire because of the penalties that they will later incur if a layoff is necessary. Such restrictions are in large part responsible for the chronically high rates of unemployment that have been prevalent in many European countries.

The prescription for the American labor market is simple: low taxes on capital investment, avoidance of excessively burdensome regulation, and open markets here and abroad. We must create a climate in which investment is profitable, productivity is rising, and employers find it profitable to increase their hiring rate. These are the mantras that economists have chanted in the past. But they are our best bet for ensuring a dynamic and growing labor market.

Mr. Lazear, chairman of the President’s Council of Economic Advisers from 2006-2009, is a professor at Stanford University’s Graduate School of Business and a Hoover Institution fellow

Wait a minute.  What was that one sentence again?

Because there are now many more unemployed workers, and because hiring is only about 70% of 2006 levels, a worker is about one-third as likely to find a job today as he or she was in 2006.

Yeah, but George Bush was bad by mainstream media propagandist definition, and Obama is good by the same standard.

If you want welfare, vote for Obama.  You’ll get it until United States of America implodes into a failed banana republic.  And then you’ll get the Marxist-fascist hybrid the left has been dreaming of for the last fifty years.  You want a job?  Vote for a conservative Republican.

The Pathological Stupidity Of Obama’s ‘Fairness’ Meme Of Taxing The Rich

We need to balance our insane budget deficit, Democrats say.  And it’s time the rich paid their fair share.

All the top 10% of earners paid is 73 percent of the income taxes collected by the federal government.  That’s nothing.  It’s those poor poor who suffer the most.  The bottom 50% have to pay a whole bunch of nothing.  It’s just brutal for them every April.  They want to write a check to the government, but only the rich get to do stuff like that.  And the bottom 40% are so screwed by our federal income tax system that they actually are forced to accept free money in addition to paying a whole bunch of nothing.  Unless the Associated Press is lying about it.

Nothing makes me more annoyed than the phrase “give the rich tax cuts.”  Because it presumes that the government owns us and graciously allows us to keep some of what we earn.  The way liberals understand things, they own all the means of production.  They own my labor and whatever I earn from my labor.  And I am lucky if the commissars allow me to keep enough to feed myself.  It derives from a tenant of Marxism: “From each according to his ability, to each according to his need.”  At the core is central planning; government stands above us, it stands above God (which is why consistent Marxists deny God exists and religion is merely an opiate of the masses), and government should redistribute everything according to its divine power.

That is the intrinsic logic of their view that allowing the rich or anyone else to keep more of their own money is considered a cost to the government.  But it ISN’T a cost to the government to allow me to keep more of my own money; anymore than it is a cost to me to allow my next door neighbor to keep more of his own tools.

Obama gave an address in which he paid lip service to reducing spending – even though his budget that he released only TWO MONTHS AGO didn’t reduce any spending at all – and in fact stated that it would be dangerous to do so.  Obama has no plans to cut spending; in fact, the deficit in just the first six months of this year shot up another 15.7%.  Obama is going to do what he’s been doing since he started running for president; he’s going to offer meaningless rhetorical platitudes about cutting spending and reducing costs, while demonizing the rich and demanding that the ONLY people who pay REALLY START TO PAY.

Obama is going to talk about “fairness.”

The ‘fairness’ meme
April 12, 2011 – 4:47 am – by Roger Kimball

We don’t know exactly what Barack Obama is going to say when he fires up his teleprompters at George Washington University tomorrow. The color, we do know, however: it’s red, as in “red ink,” what Mitch Daniels at his speech at CPAC earlier this year called “the new red menace.” (I like to think that the invocation of the old “red menace,” the Communist, socialist one, was deliberate: it is, I would argue, apt.)

The substance of the speech, as ABC notes, is “closely held.” Everybody thinks that there will be at least pro forma acknowledgement that spending on such programs as Medicare and Social Security needs to be reined in. But the big O will also return to one of his favorite themes, a by-word from his 2008 campaign: “increased taxes on the wealthy” (that’s according to “White House officials”).

Here’s my bet: the operative word in Obama’s speech tomorrow night, the mantra that will be repeated endlessly not only by O but also by the left-wing commentariat, is “fairness.” You remember his campaign shtick: the Saddleback Church event, for example, when Rick Warren asked candidates John McCain and B.O. about taxes. “Define rich,” he asked. McCain tossed out an income of $5 million, which elicited derision. But the gravamen of his response came in the elaboration: “I don’t want to take any money from the rich. I want everybody to get rich.”

How different was B.O.’s response: What he was looking for, he said, was “a sense of balance, and fairness in our tax code. It is time for folks like me who make more than $250,000 to pay our fair share.”

“Our fair share.” That, as I noted at the time, is B.O.’s refrain. “[W]e will save Social Security for future generations by asking the wealthiest Americans to pay their fair share.” It’s a small step from the invocation of “our fair share” to Obama’s call for a tax on “the windfall profits of oil companies,” a tax increase on capitals gains, elimination of the tax on Social Security tax, etc., etc.

The crucial point here is that what Obama is interested in is not increasing revenue but in promulgating redistributionist policies that make it harder for people to prosper economically. William McGurn, writing in The Wall Street Journal back then, recalled Obama’s response to ABC’s Charlie Gibson when Gibson observed that raising taxes led to decreased revenues: “Well, Charlie,” Obama replied, “what I’ve said is that I would look at raising the capital gains tax for purposes of fairness.”

“For purposes of fairness”: that means, “for purposes of economic egalitarianism.”

McGurn observed:

[I]t doesn’t really matter whether a tax increase actually brings in more revenue. It’s not about robbing from the rich to give to the poor. Robbing from the rich will do, especially if it’s done in the name of fairness.

Now there are good reasons Mr. Obama is not likely to pursue the revenue side of the fairness question. As this newspaper noted in a recent editorial, the latest data from the Internal Revenue Service does not show to Mr. Obama’s advantage. As we come to the end of the Bush administration, the top 1% of American taxpayers already pay 40% of all income taxes — the highest level in 40 years. The top 10% of income earners pay 71% of the taxes.

The bottom line is that when Obama invokes “fairness,” he wants us to feel guilty about economic success. This is the secret of his appeal to the socialistically inclined.

It worked in 2008. Let’s see how it goes down tomorrow. Over the last two years, Barack Obama has presided over an economic Armageddon. Everyone knows about that $14 trillion that is the federal debt. Few people, I suspect, really appreciate what that unimaginable figure represents. And the kicker is, $14 trillion is only a tithe of the trouble. As Kevin Williamson and others have pointed out, the country’s real debt, when you facotr in state indebtedness and unfunded so-called “entitlement” liabilities, is closer to $130 trillion. That horror-movie figure is just too awful to contemplate, so I will draw a veil.

[…]

For the record, I wrote an article entitled, “Tax Cuts Increase Revenues; They Have ALWAYS Increased Revenues,” in which I documented that every single time the United States has reduced the income tax rate, federal revenues have gone up.  I go back to Warren Harding to document that.  I include John F. Kennedy, Ronald Reagan, and George Bush – who increased federal revenues by lowering tax rates.

But this recurring documented fact of U.S. history is tantamount to rocket science to liberals.  Because they adhere to the entirely unrealistic premise that if I were to double your taxes, I would collect double the revenue, because people wouldn’t react to the tax increase by altering their behavior.

Recent developments give me a crystal clear example of why liberals couldn’t be more wrong:

Gas Price Rise, Americans Drive Less
By Rachel Smith
Posted: Apr 12, 2011 10:30 a.m.

Americans are taking rising gas prices seriously. They’re already driving less, “reversing what had been a steady increase in demand for fuel,” the Associated Press writes. “For five weeks in a row, they have bought less gas than they did a year ago.”

The average price of gas is an obvious indicator of why national fuel consumption is dropping. At the end of March, AAA reported that gas reached an average of $3.60 nationally. Today, AAA says the national average is $3.79 for regular grade, a 29 cent jump in about two weeks. Business Week reports that many analysts forecast that these numbers will worsen, and expect that consumers could pay as much as $5 a gallon this year due to political unrest in North Africa and the Middle East, which supply much of the United States’ oil. The $5 per gallon speculation has been floating around the industry for some time, but last year, CNN stated that former president of Shell Oil, John Hofmeister predicted that Americans could pay $5 a gallon by 2012. Analysts have bumped that date up.

“Drivers are already reacting to the change,” writes Kicking Tires. “In the first week of April, consumption was down 3.6%, or 2.4 million gallons of gasoline,” based on data from MasterCard Spending Pulse.

One of the best ways to combat rising gas prices is to drive less, but there are other simple things you can do. […]

Even uneducated, ignorant and frankly stupid people understand this incredibly basic concept: cost goes up, activity goes down.  And yet you have liberals with PhDs staffing agencies such as the Congressional Budget Office utterly fail to understand that if they make taxes go up, they will end up with reactions that will invariably produce less revenue for the government.

If even high-school dropouts understand that if the price of gasoline goes up, they need to drive less, how is it that brilliant businessmen won’t realize that if their tax rates go up, they need to protect their money?

Here’s another analogy that might be spot on the money.  Suppose your going to work and a mugger jumps you and takes all your money.  As he’s walking off, counting your (well, his now) cash, he says, “I hope you’ve got as much dough tomorrow, because I’m going to mug you again.”  Now, if you’re smart, you won’t be happening by that way at all the next day.  But if you’ve absolutely got to go that way to get to work, will you have as much money that next day?  Not if you’ve got a single functioning brain cell.  On my analogy, if you figure out some other way to get to work, that’s tax avoidance.  If you stash your cash somewhere so you don’t have it for the robber to take, that’s tax sheltering.  And if you’re too stupid to understand that this is what people do when their taxes go up, that’s liberalism.

The more taxes increase, the more activities that were previously not worth doing – such as sheltering assets, moving assets overseas, investing in collectibles, purchasing tax-exempt investment vehicles, or just dodging taxes – become worth doing.

And so,what happens every single time happens yet again.  Raise taxes expecting more revenue, get less revenue, and hurt the economy in the process by penalizing productivity and investment risk and thereby restricting growth.  And when you encourage growth by reducing the tax burden and allowing people to keep what they earn, lo and behold, cetaris parabis, there is a surge in activity, an increase in economic growth and a corresponding increase in federal tax revenue.

I say “cetaris parabis” because if you throw in a socialist Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac that undermine something as vital as our housing mortgage market by imposing morally and fiscally insane policies until the system comes crashing down, such as what occurred leading up the crash in 2008, the best tax rates in the world can’t save the system.

Here are just a few articles I wrote on that subject, in order of date written with the earliest listed first:

Biden: ‘We Misread The Economy, And It’s All Republicans’ Fault

AEI Article: How Fannie And Freddie Blew Up The Economy

Barney Frank And Democrat Party Most Responsible For 2008 Economic Collapse

More Proof Democrats Destroyed The Economy In 2008: The Ongoing Fannie Mae/Freddie Mac Disaster

We need to have intelligent economic policies.  If we don’t have such policies, we’re going to struggle regardless of our tax rates.

Quickly, another liberal policy that will not even possibly work is the Federal Reserve QE2 (that’s the second shot at quantitative easing) that artificially reduces interest rates by artificially increasing the money supply in order to increase lending.

Here’s the problem with that.  Short term, it might seem to work.  The stock market looks at the apparent backstopping of our economy and follows the leader (Uncle Sam) up until the ship starts to sink.  After which they will sell, sell, sell.  But the ship ALWAYS sinks.  Why?  Because you have a lot more dollars chasing after the same supply of finite goods and services (if anything, in the last few years, we have a LOWER supply of finite goods and services).  So what happens?  More dollars chasing less stuff.  That’s inflation.  It will INVARIABLY require more devalued dollars to buy the same things.  The more you inflate the money supply, the worse that inflation gets.  And we have massively increased our money supply.

Let me go back to what I wrote going on a year ago now:

An increase in the money supply is rather like an overdose of drugs.  And in this case the effect of the overdose will be hyperinflation.  Basically, the moment we have any kind of genuine recovery, our staggering deficit is going to begin to create an ultimately gigantic inflation rate.  Why?  Because we have massively artificially increased our money supply beyond our ability to actually produce real wealth, and that means that money will ultimately be devalued.  There’s simply no way it can’t be.  If simply printing money solved financial problems, the government could just mail everyone several million dollars, and we could all retire.  The problem is that more money chasing a limited supply of goods simply pushes up prices higher and higher without doing anything to solve the underlying economic problems.  If we have a recovery, with increased economic activity, there will be increased demand on the money supply, forcing an upward climb in interest rates as a means of controlling the currency.  And then we’ll begin to seriously pay for Obama’s and the Democrat Party’s sins.  Paradoxically, the only thing preventing hyperinflation now is the recession, because people aren’t buying anything and therefore aren’t competing for those limited goods.

And let me point out that we’re looking at huge inflation now – even as Obama declares victory over the recession – in insanely rising gas prices, food prices, clothes prices, all prices:

Hope ‘n Change Coming To Fruition: Cost Of EVERYTHING About To Go Up

Instability, Food Riots And A Heaping Dose Of ‘I Told You So’

Just like I said would happen.  And just like the long list of economists said would happen when they begged Obama not to do the $3.27 trillion stimulus.

This phenomenon is going on all over the world because most of the world is tied to the U.S. dollar – the currency that Obama has been poisoning hoping for short-term political gains.

And, again, a temporary extension of the Bush tax cuts (which doesn’t help businesses and individuals who are desperately searching for consistency so they can predict their costs) is not going to help us out of this kind of moral and fiscal insanity.

But what we are going to see is Obama now demagoguing all the massive economic failure that his own policies are responsible for creating in the first place to demand that the rich “pay their fair share.”

How Big Government Works, In Just Seven Paragraphs

Ronald Reagan put it this way: “Government isn’t the solution to the problem; government IS the problem.”

Here’s the perfect story to better understand how government works:

Once upon a time the government had a vast scrap yard in the middle of a desert.  Congress said, “Someone may steal from it at night.”  So they created a night watchman position and hired a person for the job.

Then Congress said, “How does the watchman do his job without instruction?”  So they created a planning department and hired two people, one person to write the instructions and one person to do time studies.

Then Congress said, “How will we know the night watchman is doing the tasks correctly?”  So they created a Quality Control department and hired two people, one to do the studies and one to write the reports.

Then Congress said, “How are these people going to get paid?”  So they created two positions, a time keeper and a payroll officer, then hired two people.

Then Congress said, “Who will be accountable for all of these people?”  So they created an administrative section and hired three people, an Administrative Officer, an Assistant Administrative Officer, and a Legal Secretary.

Then Congress said, “We have had this command in operation for one year, and we are $918,000 over budget.  We must cut back.”

So they laid off the night watchman.

And all the myriad levels of government, and all the bureaucrats who scurry around like the little rodents they basically are, do so by parasitically leaching off the once-productive but now dying private sector.

Now, as you ponder that, read this Wall Street Journal article: “We’ve become a nation of takers, not makers,” and understand that the above story came true in the liberal big government takeover of America.

Remember to continue voting Democrat: you’re too mindless and helpless to do anything else.

Why FDR Would Have Denounced The Modern Democrat Party As Un-American

Democrats and the Democrat Party they form have become truly despicable.

I can cite former Democrats such as Dennis Prager who has frequently called himself “a Kennedy liberal.”  He has pointed out, “I didn’t leave the Democrat Party; the Democrat Party left me.”

I can cite Ronald Reagan himself as such a man:

Reagan began his political career as a liberal Democrat, admirer of Franklin D. Roosevelt, and active supporter of New Deal policies, but in the early 1950s he shifted to the right and, while remaining a Democrat, endorsed the presidential candidacies of Dwight D. Eisenhower in 1952 and 1956 as well as Richard Nixon in 1960.[54] His many GE speeches—which he wrote himself—were non-partisan but carried a conservative, pro-business message; he was influenced by Lemuel Boulware, a senior GE executive. Boulware, known for his tough stance against unions and his innovative strategies to win over workers, championed the core tenets of modern American conservatism: free markets, anticommunism, lower taxes, and limited government.[55] Eventually, the ratings for Reagan’s show fell off and GE dropped Reagan in 1962.[56]  That year Reagan formally switched to the Republican Party, stating, “I didn’t leave the Democratic Party. The party left me.”[57]

One of the things that undoubtedly resulted in these two brilliant political thinkers’ sense of abandonment was the fact that they clearly HAD BEEN abandoned by the Democrat Party as it continued to “evolve” (liberals love that word, worshiping it in place of a God who stays the same) into a degenerate spiral.  And it was that profound abandonment of key Democrat liberal views – the abandonment of classical liberalism into something that can only be described today as a hybrid of Marxism and fascism – that then led these men to question their entire political presuppositions that had resulted in their being Democrats in the first place.

Yes, I know, liberals always confidently assure us that Nazism and fascism are right wing.  But how, exactly?  If they say militarism, then how was it that the Soviet Union had the largest and most powerful military machine in the world?  If they say racism, then – apart from their own bigotry – how do they escape their own racism?  If you want to talk about anti-Semitism of the Nazis, it turns out that Democrats are actually far more anti-Semitic than Republicans.  And, again, the genocide of the leftwing Soviet Union dwarfs even that of the Nazis.

So, what exactly is it that makes Nazism “right wing”?  Well, maybe the left would say that the Nazis were “Christian” and left wing ideologies are secular.  But that is hardly true, either.  I document in a previous article (“Hitler Wasn’t ‘Right Wing’, Wasn’t ‘Christian’; And Nazism Was Applied Darwinism“) that Nazism and Christianity had virtually nothing to do with one another, and that in fact Hitler was an acknowledged atheist.

I did not know at the writing of that article that in fact Hitler actually wanted to kidnap Pope Pius XII, and that the SS officer placed in charge of the operation understood that Hitler would have murdered him following his capture.  I don’t see how that doesn’t do anything more than strengthen my case that Hitler was hardly a “Catholic.”

When it comes to Nazi ideology and Nazi policies (not the least of which was the sort of abortion and Darwinian eugenics that liberal progressive and modern-day Democrat Icon Margaret Sanger engaged in), Nazism was far more in line with liberal progressivism than anything remotely conservative.  A couple quick statements by Margaret Sanger, the patron saint of Hillary Clinton:

In Pivot of Civilization, Sanger referred to immigrants and poor folks as “human weeds,” “reckless breeders,” “spawning  … human beings who never should have been born.”

“We do not want word to go out that we want to exterminate the Negro population,” she said, “if it ever occurs to any of their more rebellious members.” (Woman’s Body, Woman’s Right: A Social History of Birth Control in America, by Linda Gordon)

In her “Plan for Peace,” Sanger outlined her strategy for eradication of those she deemed “feebleminded.” Among the steps included in her evil scheme were immigration restrictions; compulsory sterilization; segregation to a lifetime of farm work; etc. (Birth Control Review, April 1932, p. 107)

And I also show in a comment to that article that Nazism was far, FAR more in line with Democrat Party liberalism than it ever could be Republican Party conservatism when it came to big government and big government policies.

Jonah Goldberg points out that Nazism was in fact “far right.”  But only in the sense that the Nazi Party, i.e. the National Socialist German Workers Party, was the far right of the extreme left.

A good article I recently found on the subject of socialism and fascism is available here.  Basically, the latter is simply a particular species of the former.

American conservatism calls for a strong military defense, yes.  But as we shall see, so also did FDR.  And in every other aspect, consistent conservatism calls for limited and small national government.  Which was the diametric opposite of Adolf Hitler’s Nazi project, which controlled every sphere of life the same way the Democrat Party tried to do during the last two years when they had power.

If you think for so much as an instant that Adolf Hitler wanted less centralized power for himself and more control in the hands of the states/districts and the individual people – as Sarah Palin, Newt Gingrich, Rush Limbaugh and conservatives constantly talk about – you simply couldn’t be any more ignorant.

That said, just what are the two fundamental issues I claim in my title that FDR would have denounced in the Democrat Party of today?

They are military power and the willingness to use it (i.e., the heart of any foreign policy) and government or public employee unions (i.e., the heart of Democrat’s domestic agenda).

These are no small matters: the former is central to any rational foreign policy and the latter has become central to Democrat domestic policy.

I describe FDR’s fundamental opposition to government unions and the reasons he was opposed to them here.  And I provide FDR’s very own words and his very own reasoning.  Suffice it to say that as pro-union as FDR was, he was profoundly opposed to government/public sector employees having the very sort of collective bargaining rights that Democrats today routinely demand for the public sector unions which constitute the bulk of union power today, and which massively contributes almost exclusively to the Democrat Party machine.  FDR realized that these employees were employees not of some unfair private company, but of the American people.  He also recognized that the government becomes a monopoly unto itself, and that government unions striking 1) exploited that monopoly power in an unfair and un-American way, and 2) was a defacto attack against the American people.

Please read the article above for more.

That leaves the other issue, the foreign policy issue of military power and the willingness to use it to deal with threats to the nation.

A speech by British Prime Minister Winston Churchill could have been given today to expose the American liberal views of Democrats basically since Lyndon Baines Johnson refused to seek re-election after liberals turned on him.  It certainly powerfully applies to the Democrat positions in the war on terror – that Obama once refused to even acknowledge – of today.  Churchill began:

I have but a short time to deal with this enormous subject and I beg you therefore to weigh my words with the attention and thought which I have given to them.

As we go to and fro in this peaceful country with its decent, orderly people going about their business under free institutions and with so much tolerance and fair play in their laws and customs, it is startling and fearful to realize that we are no longer safe in our island home.

For nearly a thousand years England has not seen the campfires of an invader. The stormy sea and our royal navy have been our sure defense. Not only have we preserved our life and freedom through the centuries, but gradually we have come to be the heart and center of an empire which surrounds the globe.

It is indeed with a pang of stabbing pain that we see all this in mortal danger. A thousand years has served to form a state; an hour may lay it in dust.

What shall we do? Many people think that the best way to escape war is to dwell upon its horrors and to imprint them vividly upon the minds of the younger generation. They flaunt the grisly photograph before their eyes. They fill their ears with tales of carnage. They dilate upon the ineptitude of generals and admirals. They denounce the crime as insensate folly of human strife. Now, all this teaching ought to be very useful in preventing us from attacking or invading any other country, if anyone outside a madhouse wished to do so, but how would it help us if we were attacked or invaded ourselves that is the question we have to ask.

Would the invaders consent to hear Lord Beaverbrook’s exposition, or listen to the impassioned appeals of Mr. Lloyd George? Would they agree to meet that famous South African, General Smuts, and have their inferiority complex removed in friendly, reasonable debate? I doubt it. I have borne responsibility for the safety of this country in grievous times. I gravely doubt it.

But even if they did, I am not so sure we should convince them, and persuade them to go back quietly home. They might say, it seems to me, “you are rich; we are poor. You seem well fed; we are hungry. You have been victorious; we have been defeated. You have valuable colonies; we have none. You have your navy; where is ours? You have had the past; let us have the future.” Above all, I fear they would say, “you are weak and we are strong.”

Churchill gave that speech back in 1934.  Just imagine how much unparalleled human suffering would never have happened if only the weak and appeasing policies of the leftist bleeding hearts had not triumphed!  The left wrongly claim to stand for peace and compassion and every good thing.  But the exact opposite is true, as they have in fact murdered millions and millions of innocent human beings with their naive and morally stupid policies.  And to whatever extent liberals have good intentions, the road to hell is paved with liberal intentions.

Think back to Obama’s positions as a candidate in which he demonized Bush’s war in Iraq and his surge strategy.  Think of Obama’s incredibly naive and incredibly failed policy of talking to Iran without preconditions.

I could go on all day about Democrats taking on the views that Churchill condemned; that our enemies really aren’t that evil and how we can talk to them and reach some kind of accord short of fighting them.  It is as naive and morally idiotic today as it was in the era of Churchill and – yes – Franklin Delano Roosevelt.

I did not realize this until I watched a program I viewed on the Military History Channel called “Decisions That Shook the World.”  But FDR rapidly became what we would today call a neo-conservative.

In the late 1930s, FDR began to watch with growing horror as the Nazis began to take over Europe.  In secret letters to Winston Churchill, he offered his moral support to the Allies.  FDR knew that if the people – who did NOT want to become entangled in what they saw as a European war – were to find out about these letters, they would turn against him in outrage.  The American people in the 1930s and early 1940s were crystal clear that they did not want to become involved in another world war in Europe.  As it was, at the very time that the American people were the most worried about FDR secretly getting involved in the war behind their backs, FDR was in fact secretly corresponding with Churchill to do that very thing.  FDR also – again secretly – ordered his military commanders to devise a secret military plan with Great Britain for when FDR was able to involve America in the war against Hitler in Europe.

Now, today, it would be very easy to condemn FDR as duplicitous.  And he WAS incredibly duplicitous.  FDR was a man – we find out in the words of the historians who narrated the “Decisions” program – who had no problem saying and doing things in private that he very much did not want to be known in public.  As an example, FDR, in direct defiance of the United States Supreme Court – directed his Attorney General to wiretap suspected spies.  That was literally an impeachable offense.  FDR was breaking the law to deal with what he saw as a growing threat against America.

Rep. Wendell Wilkie, the Republican candidate for president in the 1940 election – warned the American people, “If you elect FDR, he will get you into a war you don’t want.”  And FDR, deceitfully, in a speech, said, “That charge is contrary to every fact, every purpose of the past eight years.”  It was, as history documents, a complete lie.

Another lie FDR told the people came on the eve of the 1940 election.  FDR told mothers, “I have said this before, but I shall say it again and again and again: Your boys are not going to be sent into any foreign wars.”  And it is hard to imagine a more dishonest promise, given that he was at the moment he said those words doing everything he knew how to get America into the war in Europe.

One of the points the historians made clear is that, “If all of Roosevelt’s acts were publicly known, he likely would have been impeached.”  He most certainly would NOT have been re-elected in 1940.

FDR was reelected on the promise that he would not do what in fact he was determined to do.

In 1940, the “anti-war” candidate was the Republican, Wendell Wilkie.  He had the virtue of being honest, but likely on the wrong side of history (we can’t know for sure what would have happened had the United States not become involved in World War II, but it doesn’t look pretty).  Democrat FDR may have had the virtue of being right, but he was certainly profoundly dishonest.

Now, I could write how FDR was quite constant with other modern liberal presidents who say one thing and do the exact opposite (I’m speaking directly about Barack Obama, the examples of which are now already legion).  But that isn’t my project here.  My project is to point out that, when it came to being prepared for war and then fighting that war, FDR was fundamentally in opposition to the modern Democrat Party agenda.

That briefly stated, it was the Republican Party which ultimately came to realize that FDR was correct in his views of the military and the need to vigorously defend American national security.  And it was the Democrats who came to turn on FDR’s realization and abandon his views.

They didn’t do so all at once, or right away.  As much as modern liberals tried to attack Ronald Reagan as putting the world on the brink of nuclear war in his Cold War stand against the powerful Soviet Union, one President John F. Kennedy was every bit the cold warrior that Reagan ever was.  And, again, any liberal who doubts this is simply a fundamentally ignorant human being.  That said, it was during the Kennedy presidency that JFK cynically – and by executive fiat rather than any vote by Congress – allowed the government unions that came to own the Democrat Party lock, stock and barrel to collectively bargain as a means to help the Democrat Party.  And the moral collapse of the Democrat Party was incredibly precipitous after that.

At this point in time, anyone who doubts that radical Islam is easily capable of not only destabilizing the world, but plunging it into economic depression and global war is delusional.  The mere prospect of a collapse of the Libyan government alone could spell enormous problems in the likely event of a civil war in that country.  Oil prices could literally more than double, which would simply obliterate any potential global economic recovery.  If Iran is able to obtain the bomb – which is most assuredly will if it hasn’t already – we will see a rise in Islamic fundamentalism, jihadism and terrorism such that the world has never seen as the Iranian regime rightly sees itself as impervious to any meaningful international action against it.  If that isn’t bad enough, we would also see a nuclear arms race quickly escalate in the craziest region in the history of the planet as Sunni Muslim regimes tried to protect themselves against the Shiite Iranian threat.

For what it’s worth, even as mainstream liberals celebrate and rejoice in the overthrow of one Arab leader after another, it is IRAN which is most benefitting from the chaos.  From the New York Times:

MANAMA, Bahrain — The popular revolts shaking the Arab world have begun to shift the balance of power in the region, bolstering Iran’s position while weakening and unnerving its rival, Saudi Arabia, regional experts said.

I have been warning and warning about this.  But the world listens to Obama, not me.

But in light of Obama’s policy of appeasement, of asking for meetings of minds with no preconditions, allow me to rephrase Churchill’s words to suit our modern-day situation:

Would the invaders consent to hear Barack Obama’s exposition, or listen to the impassioned appeals of Hillary Clinton? Would they agree to meet that famous African, Kofi Annan, and have their inferiority complex removed in friendly, reasonable debate? I doubt it.

Allow me to share with you the consensus view of liberalism today at one of its elite headquarters of Columbia University:

Columbia University is holding a series of public hearings on whether or not to allow ROTC back on campus now that DADT has been repealed. A wounded Iraq veteran who recently enrolled at Columbia took to the microphone and asked fellow students to support ROTC. He was booed, jeered, and called a racist.

Columbia University students heckled a war hero during a town-hall meeting on whether ROTC should be allowed back on campus.

“Racist!” some students yelled at Anthony Maschek, a Columbia freshman and former Army staff sergeant awarded the Purple Heart after being shot 11 times in a firefight in northern Iraq in February 2008. Others hissed and booed the veteran.

The former soldier responded to the jeers with this awesome statement:

“It doesn’t matter how you feel about the war. It doesn’t matter how you feel about fighting,” said Maschek. “There are bad men out there plotting to kill you.”

The despicable so-called “Americans” in the audience only laughed and jeered more.

Anthony Maschek was a staff sergeant with the Army’s 10th Mountain Division. He was shot 11 times and spent two years recovering at Walter Reed. He’s an American hero and those thugs at Columbia are a disgrace. This is no different than those pieces of crap who spit on veterans coming back from Vietnam. It’s disgusting that in 2011 our veterans should have to be heckled by cowards.

Read more: http://www.thehotjoints.com/2011/02/21/wounded-veteran-booed-and-jeered-at-columbia-university/#ixzz1Evn0A8qL

FDR would have turned his back on this Democrat Party as a bunch of contemptible and despicable traitors to the United States of America.  He would have looked at the government unions that today are the sine qua non – the “that without which” – of the Democrat Party machine.  And he would have been disgusted that the entire Democrat Party rests today upon an inherently un-American foundation.  Then this president who risked so much to keep America and the world safe from tyranny would have looked upon the modern Democrat Party and its repeated denunciation of those who would fight America’s most terrifying enemies even as those enemies grew stronger and stronger while we have grown weaker and weaker, and he would have vomited in contempt for the party that he had such a profound role in shaping.

By the very standards of the figures that you cite as your greatest heroes, I denounce you as the pathetic, vile, un-American fools that you truly are, Democrats.

I would say that you should be ashamed of yourselves, but I doubt that you are capable of that virtue in this house-of-card world that you are building now.  And the problem with houses of cards is not merely that they fall; it is also that they tend to burn furiously when a match is struck.

And when the Antichrist warned of by the Scriptures for more than 2,600 years comes (as described in the Books of Daniel and Revelation), it will be Democrats, the quintessential fools, who welcome him with cheers and adoration.

New York University Liberal Celebrates Gang-Raping Of “War Monger” CBS Journalist By Egyptians

Liberals are people who need to be exposed so that everyone can see how truly hypocritical and in fact truly evil they are.

Invariably, liberals end up disguising who they are; they will run as moderates, fool the foolish masses, and then the gloves come off and the fangs come out.  And then they are widely rejected by Americans who don’t want the vile garbage liberals euhamistically label “social justice,” and they go back to trying to deceive the masses until they can demagogue their way to their next opportunity to sink their fangs into Uncle Sam and Lady Liberty.

Take Barack Obama.  Here’s a guy who spent two full years governing as an off-the-wall over-the-top liberal.  What were the magazine covers?

And even better:

What does the story somehow morph into once the people rise up in rage and vote out all these liberal scum?

Now, some fool might argue that that’s just elite media liberals, and Obama doesn’t have any control over what other liberals put on their magazine covers.  But that isn’t true.  Obama started this whole “I’m just like Ronnie!” thing off by carrying a book about Reagan around.  And then a few of his advisers went around and made comparisons.  And that started an Obama-friendly blitzkrieg of comparisons of Obama to Reagan, and how Obama actually has all the greatest of Reagan’s qualities while harboring none of his nasty policies.  And then Obama appears with his outgoing press secretary Robert Gibbs and refers to himself as “the Gipper,” which was clearly Ronald Reagan’s most famous line as an actor and a line he repeated often as president.  These people are not stupid; it was all quite intentional. 

The American people did not like the liberal face that Obama showed them.  So Obama said, “Don’t look at my face with the fangs!  Look over here at my Reagan sock puppet!”

Let me just take a moment to assure you that Ronald Reagan never tried to deceive people into thinking he was really a reincarnation of Jimmy Carter.

But rather than looking at the false face of liberalism that liberals want you to look at, the face they show you when they realize that the people have seen their ugly and hateful soul and rejected it, let’s look at the real face of liberalism.

Here’s the latest story exposing why you don’t want liberals in charge of anything but the insane asylum and convict inmate popuations:

This afternoon, atrocious news surfaced that CBS correspondent Lara Logan had been subjected to “brutal and sustained sexual assault” while covering the celebrations in Egypt.

According to a full statement released by CBS:

On Friday February 11, the day Egyptian President Hosni Mubarak stepped down, CBS Correspondent Lara Logan was covering the jubilation in Tahrir Square for a 60 MINUTES story when she and her team and their security were surrounded by a dangerous element amidst the celebration. It was a mob of more than 200 people whipped into a frenzy.

In the crush of the mob, she was separated from her crew. She was surrounded and suffered a brutal and sustained sexual assault and beating before being saved by a group of women and an estimated 20 Egyptian soldiers. She reconnected with the CBS team, returned to her hotel and returned to the United States on the first flight the next morning. She is currently in the hospital recovering.

There will be no further comment from CBS News and Correspondent Logan and her family respectfully request privacy at this time.

When the news initially broke, I was on Twitter as people began talking about it. Almost everyone was shocked, appalled, and deeply sympathetic for Logan, except for one man.

That man was Nir Rosen. Rosen is a fellow at the NYU Center for Law and Security. When he realized what he said was outrageous and others began informing him of that, he deleted his worst comments. However, some were captured using a “screen grab.”

The ones grabbed show Rosen letting everyone know that he “ran out of sympathy” for her and that everyone should “remember her role as a major war monger”. Also stating, we have to “find the humor in small things”. Rosen also deleted his bio as people began to tweet him. (click pictures to enlarge.)

These are not the kinds of things anyone should say, let alone a fellow at the NYU Center for Law and Security. If you would like to contact NYU about the matter, click this link for the contact information.

The left love to depict themselves as being “pro-woman.”  But they’re not; they hate real women unless those women are hard-core liberal feminists.  If you’re a successful and independent and accomplished woman such as a Sarah Palin, those fangs come out.  And nothing would make them happier than were Sarah Palin to be viciously gang-raped like that poor CBS correspondent in Egypt.  Nothing.

Of course, it’s the same way with the left being “pro-black.”  Unless your a black person who has any ideas of thinking for yourself.  Then you become an Aunt Jemima (e.g. Condoleeza Rice) or an Uncle Tom (e.g. Clarence Thomas) or a house negro (e.g. Colin Powell).  It doesn’t matter how successful or how accomplished you are; if you’re a conservative or even a Republican, those tolerant liberals will viciously call you a “nigger” and want to send you back to the cotton fields.

This crap never ends with the true racists among us, by which I mean liberals.  It just happened yesterday, as a liberal described successful black conservative businessman Herman Cain as a “monkey in a window” and used terms like “coon” and “sambo” to refer to him.  Every day in every way, it is LIBERALS who want to put a racial box over everyone and everything and if there’s a black person who wants to think for himself or herself, they have no compunction whatsoever of “putting that monkey in its place.”  And you remember that it was the Democrat Party that fought for slavery against Republicans who died to stop it.  And you remember that the Ku Klux Klan was the terrorist wing of the Democrat Party whose victims consisted of black people and Republicans.

And it’s not even just conservatives or Republicans.  Even liberal Hillary Clinton got “the treatment” when the more uber-liberal Obama ran against her.  She was mocked as a woman; Obama’s team played the race card on her.  These are the kind of people who will devour even their own if doing so will get them a step closer to the power to shape and control other people’s lives that they crave.

According to liberal writer and liberal university fellow Nir Rosen, CBS correspondent Lara Logan is a war monger.  And therefore it is a joyous thing that she was repeatedly violated as a woman repeatedly by the very Egyptian people that liberals hailed as being so wonderful even as the gang rape was happening.

Some liberals are more disciplined.  The fangs and the claws only come out when they believe they’ve gained the upper hand in the political debate.  Many others are just so ugly that they wear their fangs and claws and think their ugliness is lovely.  But one way or another the fangs come out and their ugliness is revealed.

The American people foolishly gave people very much like Nir Rosen a chance to govern in 2008 (I’m thinking of the open Marxists Obama appointed like Van Jones and Mark Lloyd and the many union thugs who serve as footsoldiers for Obama).  Then there are the craftier liberals like senior Obama adviser Valerie Jarrett, who is in fact a slum lord.  These people are as thick as cockroaches in Obama’s White House.  In 2010, these same fang-bearing liberals got the most massive political asskicking since the 1920s when the people rightly saw them for what they are.

Don’t give these liberals another chance.  Because whether they’re showing it at the moment or not, there is a vile monster just beneath the surface of these people, just waiting to emerge.

Update, February 17: Nir Rosen resigned, citing a “right wing attack machine.”  Informing us that his university did not think he’d done anything to merit a reprimand (I mean, all he did was rejoice in the vicious gang-rape of a journalist), he said as his reason for leaving:

“US academic establishments are already under attack from the right, and my Center at NYU stood to be harmed by the pack of dogs sent to take me down, and I did not want to harm a very important center or the work of people I greatly admire.”

Let me first say that if you want to see a pack of dogs, take just a few moments to look through Lara  Logan’s eyes at the 200 men who jeered and celebrated while others were taking turns raping her.

I have written over a thousand articles on this blog.  You can search through them one by one; what you will find is that – as “hateful” as liberals want to claim I am – I have NEVER rejoiced in the killing, death, physical suffering or rape of a single person who had a different political ideology than my own.  And I can honestly say that if I were to come across a liberal progressive woman being raped, that I would rather be dead than not do everything I could to stop such an evil attack.

But that isn’t the way liberals like Nir Rosen think.  In fact, as I think of what the left has gleefully done to Sarah Palin or how they exhalted in the lingering death by cancer of Tony Snow, I have come to learn that many, many liberals are exactly like Rosen.

You see, liberalism and Nir Rosen are the victims.  They always see themselves as the victims, and they will use any distortion of logic and any rhetorical ju jitsu to make themselves the victims no matter what they said or did to bring righteous anger down on their own heads.  It is who they are and it is what they do.  You see, celebrating the vicious rape of a woman is a good thing as long as that woman has done something to offend liberal ideological sensibilities, and liberals are good people for pointing that out.  It’s the conservatives who don’t like rape that are the malicious attack machine.

Conservatives constantly find themselves in the difficult position of trying to reason with complete moral idiots who are about as capable of moral reasoning as cockroaches.

Rush Limbaugh Discusses Ronald Reagan And Demonstrates Why Liberals Must Be Defeated Rather Than Reasoned With

I thought this was a very interesting discussion.  Here’s the transcript of it, with the response that I found most significant in bold font:

CALLER:  Hi, Rush.  I, um… I’m calling because… Well, first of all, I’m a liberal, and I seriously don’t understand this, uh, Reagan idolatry on behalf of conservatives.  I’ll get… I’ll give you my reasons.  Instead of privatizing Social Security, he raised taxes. We’re all paying higher taxes today out of our paychecks every single week because he decided to save Social Security.  He —

RUSH:  Wait, wait.  Hold it.  I need to go…

CALLER: (speaking rapidly)
 
 
RUSH: Wait. Jeez.

CALLER:  The Greenspan Commission.  He signed it into law, and it raised taxes on Social Security.

RUSH:  What…? Wait, you’re talking about Reagan or Clinton?

CALLER:  I’m talking about Reagan.  Reagan did that.  He raised taxes on Social Security.  He negotiated with terrorists, sending — over and over again — arms to Iran in exchange for hostages; by contrast Jimmy Carter didn’t give an inch to the Iranians.

RUSH:  What in the world…?

CALLER:  Not an inch.  Instead Reagan (crosstalk)

RUSH:  Testing the true depth of my politeness here on this call, folks.

CALLER:  Say that again?

RUSH:  Let me ask you a question.  What do you think, given all this that you believe, when you hear Obama and the Democrats cite Reagan as they have been doing since about a week before the State of the Union?

CALLER:  It’s funny you ask that.  Because as a liberal I think Obama owes his presidency to Reagan.  They’re both kinda stuffed suits that say one thing and then do another.  Obama hasn’t been anywhere near liberal enough for me.  He said he’d close Guantamano (sic), he hasn’t done that.

RUSH: Yeah.

CALLER: He said he’d help people out with foreclosures, he hasn’t done that.

RUSH:  I feel for you on that.

CALLER:  But Reagan, I mean, amnesty to people who are breaking the law and living in the country illegally. He said, “Forget about it. Stay here forever.” He cut and ran from Lebanon. How many hundreds of Marines were killed —

RUSH: Yeah.

CALLER: — and he just decided, “Well, you know, instead of the fighting the bad guys I’m gonna run away”?

RUSH:  Yeah.

CALLER:  Why is Reagan a hero to conservatives?

RUSH:  “Why is Reagan a hero to conservatives?”  I don’t think you… Given what you’ve said, and I’m not trying to avoid the question, I don’t think you’d ever understand it.

CALLER:  Well, he’s a tax raiser, an amnesty giver, a cut-and-runner, and he negotiated with terrorists.  Why is he a hero to conservatives?  I don’t think you understand it.

RUSH:  No, I do. Most assuredly I do.  I just don’t think that you would understand it.  Where did you get this silly notion that Reagan raised taxes on Social Security?  What websites do you read?  Where did you pick that up?

CALLER:  Look up the Greenspan Commission.  It’s not too hard to find.  I mean, it’s a matter of history.

RUSH:  Where did you get it?  I mean, you’re asking me questions.  I’m just reversing one on you here.

CALLER:  I’m sorry.  It’s just general knowledge.  It’s something I’ve known for a long time. I can’t remember where I got it from.

RUSH: You can’t remember? You’ve never heard of a website called Media Matters which highlighted it yesterday?

CALLER: (static) Oh, no. I know Media Matters very well but that’s not where I got it.

RUSH: Oh, not where you got it. It’s an amazing coincidence.

CALLER: (static) I mean, I’m a liberal.  Of course I know Media Matters.

RUSH:  Amazing coincidence out there.

CALLER: (static blaring) They’re a fantastic website.  But why are you dodging the question?  I want to know why a tax-raising, amnesty-giving, cut-and-running, negotiating-with-terrorists guy is a hero to the conservative movement.

RUSH:  Well, because you understand Reagan in a way that is flawed. You —

CALLER: (static)

RUSH: Your call is actually kinda interesting because you represent the impossibility of “bridging the gap.”  Somebody like you just has to be defeated.  There’s no crossing the aisle and finding common ground with you.  You’re free to be who you are, don’t misunderstand.  I’m not trying to be insulting. I’m just saying, you are unreachable. You don’t want to be reached.  This picture of Reagan, you’ve just described somebody you should love, and you hate him! You just described somebody you should absolutely love, all these things. He’s an anti-conservative, as you say, but you don’t love him. You’re having trouble understanding why he’s viewed as heroic to a lot of people. 

I could talk to you about anti-communism. I could. You want to talk about amnesty? Yeah, that was Simpson-Mazzoli, and that was one-and-a-half, two million illegals; and he was told, “Okay, if we’re gonna do this, this is it, then. We’re gonna secure the borders and that’s it.”  It’s the same thing with every tax increase he signed. It was also accompanied by promises to cut spending, and it never happened.  Reagan’s not perfect.  Nobody is.  But I think the proof of Reagan is the fact that when your guys get in trouble, who do they seek to associate themselves with?  Remember, Obama and these people are all about getting votes. 

The fact that he’s trying to surround himself with Reagan, the fact that he’s trying to position himself with Reagan is the best indication anybody could have of what this country really thinks of Ronaldus Magnus.  I think if you want to focus in on hypocrisy, you’ve got far more of it on your side of the aisle to explain and dig through than we do.  Reagan was forced to raise payroll taxes by a crisis in Social Security in 1983. He endorsed that rescue plan that was written by Alan Greenspan. It was reluctant.  He was not a big supporter of that.  Remember, Reagan did not have a congressional majority with him.

Everything he got, the tax cuts, he had Democrats outnumbering him in the House and Senate everywhere.  There were certain realities that he faced.  But the biggest tax increase on Social Security was authored by none other than Bill Clinton.  But did you understand the notion? Ronald Reagan fought for America.  He loved America.  He feared where the left, based on history, wanted to take the country.  Ronald Reagan set the stage for the end of the Cold War.  Ronald Reagan defeated Soviet communism without firing a shot.  I don’t know… But none of that would matter.  So you, sir, a nice individual, I’m sure you’re a fine guy (probably not too much fun at a ball game, unlike Bill Clinton), but still, you illustrate that people like you just have to be defeated, not met halfway and gotten along with.  I mean politically.

Rush is entirely correct here.  You can’t have a rational or meaningful discussion with people like this liberal caller.  You can only defeat them and render them powerless politically.

You can’t have an honest conversation with a dishonest person. There is simply no point.  They won’t tell you what’s really on their heart and mind; they merely constantly employ rhetorical games that mean nothing and go nowhere.  In the case of Rush’s caller, you had a man who simply spoke lies about Ronald Reagan.  If he had actually believed any of his own crap, he would have LOVED Reagan, as Rush pointed out.

I remember a discussion I had with a liberal on an article I wrote about the tax cuts.  An individual who called himself “michael” wrote and said:

I am at work right now but i just read this article and it is the funniest thing i have ever read. no hate intended but it looks like it was written by someone who read someone elses work and is trying to claim their opinion as his or her own

Well, this individual dismisses my work as having been plagerized.  That certainly wasn’t true.  I wrote every word that I didn’t directly cite as a quote and legitimately sourced every citation as having been quoted.  But after a little dicussion this same liberal writes another comment that supposedly puts me in m place.  Among other huge problems with this comment was the fact that my former professor’s nose smelled a rat.  Basically, the tone of the two writers didn’t match one another.  I googled part of the diatribe, and sure enough, discovered that the selfsame liberal who falsely accused me of plagerizing had actually completely plagerized his rebuttal to me.

After exposing his dishonesty, I said:

You are not an honest person, Michael. And there is no point having a discussion with a liar. Because the truth and the facts don’t matter to a liar. And someone like you can and will say anything and claim lies as fact.

And I’m not going to waste my time with you.

And that’s where we’re at.  There’s no “bridging the gap” with liberals.  There’s no rational dialogue.  They have a warped and depraved worldview, which means they cannot even possibly understand the world as it really is (i.e., from the “God’s-eye view”), and then, to make it even worse, far too few of them are personally honest enough to have a meaningful discussion involving facts and truth because dishonest people will simply invent “facts” and surround themselves in lies.

Rush ultimately informs the audience that Reagan basically NEVER had Republican control of Congress throughout his entire presidency.  The House of Representatives, which controls spending, was under complete Democrat control for every single year of Ronald Reagan’s presidency (with first Tip O’Neil and then Jim Wright serving as Democrat Speakers of the House).  As for the Senate, it was also under Democrat control for part of Reagan’s presidency; and Reagan NEVER had a strong majority there.  So the caller was not depicting events honestly: it wasn’t like Reagan realized his policies were failing and raised taxes.  Rather, Reagan had to constantly negotiate and compromise with Democrats in control of the Congress – particularly the House – and was forced to make concessions to get other things he wanted.

Furthermore, this caller who plagued Rush was little different from the blogger who plagued me.  He passed off liberal talking points as his own thoughts.  It turns out that this caller was merely regurgitating crap that was flying out of the mouths of the vomitous left.  You can see a conservative response to these slime attacks on Reagan here.

So let me quote that article’s response to the liberal’s charge that Reagan gave illegal’s amnesty:

The Democrat leadership in Congress promised to enact strict enforcement measures as a trade for a one-time amnesty deal. In an effort to control the border, Reagan went along with the deal.  At the time (1986), the measures were marketed by Democrats as as being able to stop illegal immigration. Ted Kennedy himself sold the enforcement clauses of the law as strong enough to ensure that only a one-time amnesty would be needed. But, as is their standard practice, Democrats lied about sealing the border.

Which not only shows that Reagan most certainly did NOT say, “Forget about it. Stay here forever,” as the caller deceitfully claims, but in fact goes back to the now documented proof that liberals are liars who cannot be trusted and cannot be bargained with or reasoned with.

The caller describes Reagan as running from Lebanon with his tail between his legs.  Which is actually funny, given the fact that Democrats at the time demanded that Reagan immediately pull out of Lebanon after the Beirut bombing that killed 241 Marines.  Nobody on the left was demanding we attack Lebanon.

I have my own perspective on that.

Reagan’s pullout from Lebanon bothered me greatly at the time.  But I realize the Reagan’s wisdom now.  He was already in the process of fighting and defeating the Soviet Union – the largest military power on earth – and he saw the folly of getting America into another war against a different ideology and another limitless enemy at the same time.  If you were in the infantry in the 1980s, you knew that we were preparing for some potentially imminent conflagration; and we would be pouring in to Western Europe to fight a defensive war against a Soviet invasion.  Ronald Reagan wisely chose to stay the course in facing and defeating the Soviet Union, and allow the Islamic threat to remain for another day when the Russian threat was gone.  Just imagine how much the Russians would have loved it to be able to supply millions of death-happy Muslims and watch us bleed from the sidelines in an endless proxy war?  Which is to say that the caller not only misrepresents what in actual fact happened – making him a liar – but also argues that Reagan should have fought two civilizational wars simultaneously, making him a complete fool.

When Democrats routinely pursue such deceit, it becomes pointless to argue with them.  It boils down to the Mark Twain wisdom of, “Never argue with a fool.  People won’t be able to tell the difference.”  Try to reason with those independents who are capable of “bridging the gap,” as Rush Limbaugh put it.  Argue with people who might change their minds.  Argue with people who won’t play a neverending tune of rhetorical garbage.  Argue with people who won’t constantly rely on lies.

And just defeat liberals.  Because defeat is the only reality that they are capable of understanding.