Of the sons of Issachar, men who understood the times, with knowledge of what Israel should do, their chiefs were two hundred; and all their kinsmen were at their command — 1 Chronicles 12:32
Americans must decide if, in the name of homeland security, they are willing to allow TSA operatives to storm public places in their communities with no warning, pat them down, and search their bags. And they better decide quickly.
Bus travelers were shocked when jackbooted TSA officers in black SWAT-style uniforms descended unannounced upon the Tampa Greyhound bus station in April with local, state and federal law enforcement agencies and federal bureaucrats in tow.
A news report by ABC Action News in Tampa showed passengers being given the signature pat downs Americans are used to watching the Transportation Security Administration screeners perform at our airports. Canine teams sniffed their bags and the buses they rode. Immigration officials hunted for large sums of cash as part of an anti-smuggling initiative.
The TSA clearly intends for these out-of-nowhere swarms by its officers at community transit centers, bus stops and public events to become a routine and accepted part of American life.
The TSA has conducted 8,000 of these security sweeps across the country in the past year alone, TSA chief John Pistole told a Senate committee June 14. They are part of its VIPR (Visible Intermodal Prevention and Response) program, which targets public transit related places.
All of which is enough to make you wonder if we are watching the formation of the “civilian national security force” President Obama called for on the campaign trail “that is just as powerful, just as strong and just as well funded” as the military.
The VIPR swarm on Wednesday, the TSA’s largest so far, was such a shocking display of the agency’s power that it set the blogosphere abuzz.
In a massive flex of muscle most people didn’t know the TSA had, the agency led dozens of federal and state law enforcement agencies in a VIPR exercise that covered three states and 5,000 square miles. According to the Marietta Times, the sweep used reconnaissance aircraft and “multiple airborne assets, including Blackhawk helicopters and fixed wing aircraft as well as waterborne and surface teams.”
When did the TSA get this powerful? Last year, Pistole told USA Today he wanted to “take the TSA to the next level,” building it into a “national-security, counterterrorism organization, fully integrated into U.S. government efforts.”
What few people realize is how far Pistole has already come in his quest. This is apparently what that next level looks like. More than 300 law enforcement and military personnel swept through a 100-mile stretch of the Ohio Valley alone, examining the area’s industrial infrastructure, the Charleston Gazette reported.
Federal air marshals, the Army Corps of Engineers, the U.S. Coast Guard, the FBI, the Office of Homeland Security and two dozen other federal, state and local agencies teamed up to scour the state’s roads, bridges, water supply and transit centers under the TSA’s leadership.
What is remarkable about these security swarms is that they don’t just involve federal, state and local law enforcement officials. The TSA brings in squads of bureaucrats from state and federal agencies as well, everything from transportation departments to departments of natural resources.
The TSA had received no specific threats about the Tampa bus station before the April sweep, reporters were told.
They were there “to sort of invent the wheel in advance in case we have to if there ever is specific intelligence requiring us to be here,” said Gary Milano with the Department of Homeland Security in an ABC News Action television report. “This way us and our partners are ready to move in at a moment’s notice.”
Federal immigration officials from Customs and Border Patrol swept the station with the TSA, looking for “immigration violations, threats to national security” and “bulk cash smuggling.” (How the bulk cash smuggling investigation related to national security was never explained.)
“We’ll be back,” Milano told reporters. “We won’t say when we’ll be back. This way the bad guys are on notice we’ll be back.”
The TSA gave the same vague answers when asked about the three-state sweep this week. That sweep wasn’t in response to any specific security threat, either.
The purpose was to “have a visible presence and let people know we’re out here,” Michael Cleveland, federal security director for TSA operations in West Virginia told the Gazette. “It can be a deterrent.”
It might be — if Americans are willing to live this way.
Tara Servatius is a radio talk show host. Follow her @TaraServatius and on Facebook.
It has ALWAYS been under liberals and progressives that America has degenerated into the depths of a police state. Go back and see all the fascist garbage that Woodrow Wilson beqeathed us with, for example. Consider FDR putting the Japanese into camps and even LYING to the Supreme Court to justify doing so.
“The President does not have power under the Constitution to unilaterally authorize a military attack in a situation that does not involve stopping an actual or imminent threat to the nation,” Obama responded [on December 20, 2007].
– prior to ripping up the Constitution and then urinating on it to get America into Libya and Yemen.
Liberals are hypocrites. Hypocrisy is the liberals’ quintessential essence. If you took the hypocrisy out of the liberal, you could not have liberalism. You certainly couldn’t have Nancy Pelosi. Oh, or John Kerry. Or Charlie Rangel. Or Al Gore. Or Barack Obama. Or Joe Biden. Or Bill and Hillary Clinton. Notice how these are pretty much all their top-level people; the rank-and-file march in goose-step behind them. Democrats are the kind of people who demonize Republicans left and right for taking actions that are necessary in the face of direct threats. And then they do far worse than the Republicans EVER did, and “It’s not fascism when WE do it.”
Liberals are people who say one thing and do another. They are people who are capable of endless self-righteous selective outrage that dries up when THEY’RE running things.
Where are all the liberals demanding Obama be impeached for all his wars? Where are all the liberals demanding Obama be impeached for all of his secrecy and his lies? It was all over the place (and all over the front pages of the mainstream media) throughout the years of Bush derangement syndrome. Remember how they were out in force every single day in front of the televesion cameras? Where are all the Cindy Sheehands and the Code Pinks and the coverage of them NOW???
Try to sort through the Democrats’ basic premise: the party that is trying to grow the size of goverment more and more and put government in charge of more and more of our lives ISN’T fascist; while the party that is trying to reduce the size and scope and power of government ARE the fascists.
Do you remember how liberals went off on Bush as stupid for eight years (not including the primary season leading up to the 2000 election) because of the way he talked?
Bush and the word “nuclear” was a favorite, of course. And there were always a few awkward sentence constructions from a president who – unlike Obama – wasn’t slavishly attached to a teleprompter:
Obama has relied on a teleprompter through even the shortest announcements and when repeating the same lines on his economic stimulus plan that he’s been saying for months — whereas past presidents have mostly worked off of notes on the podium except during major speeches, such as the State of the Union.
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The same left that ridiculed George Bush over his every verbal slip are now rushing in with “intellectual” defenses as to why Obama sounds like a babbling fool every single time he can’t read his lines off a screen.
Apparently, a lot of people consider President Obama to be bumblingly inarticulate. “The guy can’t talk his way out of a paper bag!” a reader wrote to me recently. “Sarah Palin is a brilliant speaker. It’s the president whose sentences are undiagrammable,” said another in response to a column I wrote about Palin. It’s not just my readers, nor is it exclusively conservatives, who hold this view. A Google search of “does Obama have a speech impediment” turns up several pages of discussion among the president’s supporters and critics alike.Admittedly, the president is given to a lot of pauses, “uhs” and sputtering starts to his sentences. As polished as he often is before large crowds (where the adjective “soaring” is often applied to his speeches), his impromptu speaking frequently calls to mind a doctoral candidate delivering a wobbly dissertation defense.
But consider this: It’s not that Obama can’t speak clearly. It’s that he employs the intellectual stammer. Not to be confused with a stutter, which the president decidedly does not have, the intellectual stammer signals a brain that is moving so fast that the mouth can’t keep up. The stammer is commonly found among university professors, characters in Woody Allen movies and public thinkers of the sort that might appear on C-SPAN but not CNN. If you’re a member or a fan of that subset, chances are the president’s stammer doesn’t bother you; in fact, you might even love him for it (he sounds just like your grad school roommate, especially when he drank too much Scotch and attempted to expound on the Hegelian dialectic!).
If you’re not, chances are you find yourself yelling “get to the point already!” at the television screen every time Obama’s search for the right word seems to last longer than the search for Osama bin Laden. And thanks to its echoes of the college lecture hall, you may think it comes across as ever so slightly (or more than slightly) left wing.
That’s kind of ironic, given that the godfather of the intellectual stammer is arguably none other than the paterfamilias of the conservative movement, William F. Buckley Jr. With his slouch, his glazed-eyed stare and a speaking style that suggested the entire Oxford English Dictionary was flipping through his mind while he searched for a word like “dithyramb,” he makes Obama’s extemporaneous speech seem canned — not to mention pedestrian — by comparison. In fact, if the people critiquing Obama’s meandering speech patterns were to see an old “Firing Line” segment, I daresay they would think Buckley was drunk or otherwise impaired.
Granted, Buckley didn’t hold political office (he made an unsuccessful run for mayor of New York in 1965). He was more an observer than a decider, which is pretty much the opposite of what you need to be to lead a nation. Obama, as much as his critics might hate to admit it, is more than a phlegmatic egghead. He’s proved he can act decisively; whatever his faults, he’s leading the nation far more effectively — albeit less colorfully — than Buckley would have led New York. (When asked what he’d do if he won the mayoral election, he famously responded, “Demand a recount.”)
Obama’s problem is not that he’s an intellectual (for the sake of argument let’s define it as someone who is scholarly, broadly informed and distinguished as a thinker). It’s that he sounds like an intellectual. Unlike other presumed political brainiacs — Bill Clinton or Newt Gingrich, for example — he isn’t able to bury his ideas behind a folksy regional accent or good-old-boy affectations when he wants to. Nor is he effective at “keeping it real” when he falls into traditionally African American cadences that he clearly never used when he was growing up.
By speaking as though he hails from everywhere, he ends up being from nowhere. The result is that people look at him and see not a Hawaiian or a Chicagoan or even a black man, but a university man.
Of course, the president enables that stigma by stammering his way through town hall meetings and other public dialogues as though they were philosophy lectures. Irritating? Sure. But inarticulate? Sorry, folks, but you’ll have to find another adjective. And take your time. The right word is usually worth waiting for.
Okay. I understand. Obama sounds so stupid because he’s so damned BRILLIANT. And here, look. There’s a conservative out there who did the same thing.
Or not. I don’t recall William F. Buckley Jr. having moments like this one:
But that is a fact. And such things are hindrances to most of the mainstream media’s “narratives.”
I don’t recall Buckley telling us about the 57 states (with one left to go) he’s visited in those sophisticated tones of his:
Nor do I remember Buckley making a visit to Westminster Abbey and getting the date wrong by three years as Obama just got through doing:
I don’t remember Bush – who of course was a moron (just ask any liberal) doing anything this braindead either.
Nope. It’s brilliant, intellectual “university men” who ascend to such marvellous heights of intellect.
Democratic presidential candidates teamed up during a National Public Radio debate here Tuesday to blast the Bush administration over its policy toward Iran, arguing that a new intelligence assessment proves that the administration has needlessly ratcheted up military rhetoric.
While the candidates differed somewhat over the level of threat Iran poses in the Mideast, most of them sought to liken the administration’s approach to Iran with its buildup to the war in Iraq.
“I vehemently disagree with the president that nothing’s changed and therefore nothing in American policy has to change,” said New York Sen. Hillary Rodham Clinton. “We do know that pressure on Iran does have an effect. I think that is an important lesson.”
Delaware Sen. Joseph R. Biden Jr., chairman of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, said the new intelligence report indicated that Iran dropped its program before international pressure came into play.
“It was like watching a rerun of his statements on Iraq five years earlier,” Biden said. “Iran is not a nuclear threat to the United States of America. Iran should be dealt with directly, with the rest of the world at our side. But we’ve made it more difficult now, because who is going to trust us?”
The debate was aired without a studio audience over NPR, live from the Iowa State Historical Museum. It covered Iran, China and immigration, offering the contenders a chance to delve more deeply into subjects that often receive less detailed debate treatment.
Clinton and Biden were joined by Illinois Sen. Barack Obama, former North Carolina Sen. John Edwards, Connecticut Sen. Christopher J. Dodd, Ohio Rep. Dennis J. Kucinich, and former Alaska Sen. Mike Gravel.
But why should it matter that Bush was right, and we are now facing a disastrous crisis that it’s just a damn shame that liberals basically ENTIRELY created with their abject REFUSAL to deal with a crisis, and their DEMONIZATION of anyone who tried? Bush said “nuclear” funny, and that’s really all that matters if you’re properly sophisticated and, you know, professorial. Bush was stupid even though he was entirely correct and the liberals who attacked him (including the three top liberals of the Obama administration with VP Biden and Secretary of State Clinton) were entirely wrong.
It doesn’t matter how many times we’re right and how many times they’re wrong. Because they won’t acknowledge the truth and because the facts don’t really matter worth a damn to them.
There’s a concept in psychology called “accommodation and assimilation” that fits liberals in their steadfast refusal to follow the rules of normal learning. In normal psychology, one assimilates new information into one’s worldview and accommodates one’s worldview as new facts come in that run contrary to the picture one has of the world. Liberals don’t bother with that nonsense. Rather, they rigidly adhere to their doctrines and simply paste-over whatever reality happens to get in the way.
I think of Harold Camping and his followers. It didn’t matter than he falsely predicted the end of the world before in 1994. It didn’t matter that the Bible that he’s doing all his “calculations” from specifically says no man can know the day or the hour of such things. It doesn’t even matter that his prediction for the end of the world on May 21 turned out to be wrong. Such facts don’t work, so so much the worse for the facts. Now we’re assured that the world will end on October 21. Really. Better get ready.
Like Harold Camping and his followers, liberals are immune from any genuine learning. They simply lack the character to deal with reality in an honest way.
Obama is brilliant because he graduated from Harvard, but Bush is stupid even though he graduated from Yale. Previous Democratic presidential nominee John Kerry was brilliant because he graduated from Yale, even though Bush had also graduated from Yale and even though Bush actually had a better accumulated grade average (77 versus 76) than Kerry. Oh, and by the way, even though Bush also actually had a higher IQ than Kerry. But so what? Kerry had that arrogant Massachusett’s tone that just sounded so… so smart. And of course, Bush was stupid because he had a few gaffes; ergo sum Obama is brilliant whenever he’s off his teleprompter because his gaffes are supposedly somehow kind of similar to brilliant people’s.
Or Bush was evil because of Gitmo, and rendition, and the Patriot Act, and domestic eavesdropping, and indefinite detentions, and military tribunals, etc. etc.; ergo sum, when Obama goes back on his demagogic rhetoric and pursues all the same policies that he demonized when Bush did them, it is Obama magnificently adapting his foreign policy. Bush was evil for using enhanced interrogation and Obama was righteous to dismantle the CIA program that relied on such intelligence – even though Obama should get all the credit for killing Osama bin Laden and even though enhanced interrogation and the CIA program that Obama dismantled were absolutenly essential to getting Osama bin laden.
One has to wonder how their heads don’t just explode from containing all the contradictions. But it turns out that when you live in your own little world – and particularly when you get to control the media and shape the “narrative” for society to consume – irritating things like facts and contradictions just don’t really matter.
It had to happen eventually. And it finally has. Osama bin Laden is in hell where he belongs, where seventy-two very un-virginal demons will tear his flesh for all eternity.
And it came the best way: by the trigger fingers of individual heroes, rather than by the faceless push of a button to activate a missile by a Predator drone. It is fitting that bin Laden died at the hands of Americans who got to look him in the eye as they facilitated his journey to the eternally burning trash pit in the sky.
And just to add some icing to the cake, the reports are that they killed Osama bin Laden’s oldest son in the attack, too.
Osama bin Laden, hunted as the mastermind behind the worst-ever terrorist attack on U.S. soil, has been killed, sources told ABC News.
Bin Laden was killed in a ground attack by Joint Special Operations Command forces working with the CIA, not a drone strike, a national security source told ABC News.
According to a national security source, a compound in Pakistan where the terrorist mastermind was believed to be had been monitored for months. When the decision was made to move on it, special operations forces were sent across the border from Afghanistan to launch a ground attack and take the body.
DNA testing confirmed that it was bin Laden, sources told ABC News.
Vice President Biden has reached out to congressional leadership to update them on the news tonight.
“This is a terrific day for America and quite frankly the whole world that cares about winning the war on terror,” former Bush chief of staff Andy Card told ABC News. Card said the news is “particularly significant” for the intelligence community.
“They’re the ones who kept their nose to the grindstone and worked very hard to allow this day to be realized … finally,” he said.
[The rest of the ABC story is mostly biographical on who bin Laden was and what he did. You may read it here].
My congratulations and heartfelt appreciation go out to all the intelligence and military professionals who brought about this fitting end.
As President George Bush put it on October 11, 2001:
Anyone who has read one paragraph of my blog knows that I am a fierce critic of President Barack Obama. But he and his administration deserve credit for approving the actions that led to this day of reckoning. Obama also displayed some class in how he first called former President Bush and then cited him in his announcement of bin Laden’s killing.
That said, the city where bin Laden was killed – Abbottabad – was a military district headquarters. And the early releases are claiming that the Pakistani government was not informed prior to the raid that got Osama bin Laden. And the fact that bin Laden was staying in a large walled security compound only 100 yards from a Pakistani military facility tells you that bin Laden was almost certainly being protected by at least a faction of the Pakistani military.
Given how badly we need Pakistan and other key Muslim countries to cooperate with us if we are to be able to use anything other than a “Kill them all; let God sort them out” policy, Pakistan’s apparent duplicity and its cooperation with al Qaeda is not good news.
The war on terror isn’t over. It might even intensify, as the terrorist network al Qaeda looks for vengeance. It’ s who they are; it’s what they do. Here, for instance, is a story that al Qaeda threatened a “nuclear hellstorm” if America killed or captured bin Laden. Rest assured, al Qaeda will be determined to do something that will seek to restore their honor and credibility in the Islamic world as a result of this raid.
What will happen as a result of this raid and the killing of bin Laden? Will Pakistan be embarrassed into more cooperation with the U.S., or will they be embarrassed into LESS cooperation with the U.S.? Did conducting a massively consequential military operation in a foreign country without notifying its leaders make that country a better friend, or a less trustworthy foe? Under the presidency of Barack Obama, U.S.-Pakistani relationships have soured to an all-time low. Did this attack on their country improve those relations? What will happen as a direct result of this attack?
I don’t even want to think about what would have happened had a Pakistani military or police unit fired on the U.S. special operations forces.
If liberals are consistent, they will immediately denounce President Obama and demonize him for further antagonizing the Islamic world and for risking an escalation of terrorism.
The problem with that is that it is total crap. And whether liberals like it or not, we are in a war for the survival of our culture against a culture of hate.
George Bush put it best describing countries and their attitude toward the United States: “You’re either with us or against us in the fight against terror.” That statement was met with incredible criticism and condemnation from the left. And yet, in what way did Obama’s actions today do anything other than reinforce that that was the only attitude we could realistically take?
The left has been proven fundamentally and profoundly wrong in its attitude toward the war on terror. And it should be obvious by now that the only way to be successful is to not just follow George Bush’s example, but to actually try to “out-Bush” Bush’s example.
And Obama has largely “out-Bushed” Bush in Pakistan. President Bush did not want to cause a deterioration in U.S.-Pakistani relations, because he viewed Pakistani cooperation as key in the war on terror. Obama, in using drone attacks and now direct military action, has been far more aggressive in “taking the war” to Pakistan.
Another example of “out-Bushing Bush” would be the Libya attack. George Bush – decried as the “imperial president” for his attack on Iraq – at least had constitutional authorization for that action (i.e,. the Iraq War Resolution). Obama took the “cowboy” route in Libya without bothering to obtain permission from any constitutional authority whatsoever. Except the “world.” Obama’s actions should serve to amply demonstrate just how hypocritical and utterly vacuous George W. Bush’s liberal critics truly were.
Liberals said that Bush’s attack on Iraq was a provocation that would make the war on terror worse. They said that the war on terror was a provocation. They said the surge was a provocation. And we shouldn’t be provoking the Muslim world like that.
Let me assure you, what those spec op warriors just did in their raid on that compound in Pakistan was an in-your-face provocation.
What’s the long-term effect of this degraded relationship with Pakistan going to be? I have no idea. But any liberal who wants to tell me that “cooperative” liberal policies are working where “confrontational” conservative ones have failed is simply an imbecile. Because what just happened clearly proves the exact opposite. And when you consider the fact that Obama has already pursued Bush’s policies on Guantanamo Bay, rendition, domestic eavesdropping, the Patriot Act, military tribunals, indefinite detentions and a host of other polices, George Bush and Dick Cheney stand as men proven correct.
We cannot relent. Because our enemies will not relent. They are determined to murder. It is a virtue for them. It is a religious duty. And the 9/11 attack was a religious act.
Our warriors should smile and give one another hearty high-fives for this victory. And then they need to get right back to work. Because what they do is vital for their country, whether their country has the moral intelligence to understand that or not.
What I most like about this is that it sends a message. Even ten years later, the United States of America will continue to hunt you down and kill you if you kill her citizens. And that is a message that Republican and Democrat alike ought to be able to unite around.
Update: we are now learning that it was a squadron of forty U.S. Navy SEALs from Team 6 who conducted the raid that got bin Laden. God bless you guys.
And now we are even beginning to learn that “enhanced interrogation” may very well have given us the information breakthrough that got us bin Laden.
I rather routinely call Obama the F-word. No, not that F-word (although the ability to resist doing so is dwindling); the other F-word: Fascist. Barack Obama is a fascist.
I have had quite a few liberals fixate on this word, and – while ignoring the rest of my arguments – proceed to give me a lecture about how my extremism undermines my positions and arguments (which they don’t bother to consider).
I’d like to respond to that. At length.
There are many who would argue that if a politician is not as rabid as Adolf Hitler, that one cannot use this label of “fascist” – at least not unless the target is a Republican (see below). Barack Obama is not a “dictator,” these would argue. He hasn’t launched the world into global war and he hasn’t murdered 6 million Jews (at least, he hasn’t yet). So he can’t be a “fascist.” This argument fails on two parts. First of all, by such a metric, Benito Mussolini wouldn’t be a “fascist” either (except for the “dictator” part). One of the reasons it is hard to have an easy definition of “fascist” is because fascism has taken a different character in every country and culture in which it has been embraced. Hitler is not the norm or standard of fascism; he is merely the most extreme example of its virulence and danger. Secondly, even if we were to take a Hitler as our example, let us realize that Adolf Hitler was a very cunning politician who managed to gain power in a Germany that was THE most sophisticated, educated and scientific nation and culture of its day. What I am asserting is that if an Adolf Hitler were to run for the presidency of the United States in 2012, he would run a platform that we could very easily label as “hope and change,” he would demagogue his adversaries as being the cause for the nation’s plight, he would lie both cynically and outrageously to win votes and he would then proceed to push the country as far as he possibly could toward his agenda. And so here, from the outset, I am claiming that the suggestion that either Barack Obama or anyone else does not qualify as a “fascist” simply because he or she can’t be directly compared to Adolf Hitler is nothing but a straw man.
The question thus becomes, what is fascism, and then it is what is Obama steering us toward?
THE WORD “fascism” is used broadly on the left as a term of abuse. Sometimes it is used to refer to any repressive government, whatever its political form. Most commonly on the left in the U.S., it is used to describe any Republican government–in particular, any Republican government or candidate on the eve of a presidential election.
As an experiment, I typed the words “Bush fascist” and then “Obama fascist” sans quotes. I got 3,280,000 Google hits for Bush fascist (and keep in mind an awful lot of hits would have vanished in the last 11 years as domains purged articles or simply ceased to exist) versus only 2,490,000 for Obama. That means liberals were over 45% more likely to call Bush a fascist than conservatives have been to call Obama one.
And when these liberals express their outrage that I would dare call Obama a fascist and thus lower the discourse, I invariably ask them just where the hell they were when their side was teeing off on Bush for eight unrelenting years of Bush derangement syndrome??? It was rare indeed to see a liberal excoriate his fellow liberals for demonizing the president of the United States.
With all due respect, the left started this form of “discourse.” They turned it into an art form. And how dare these hypocrites dare to tell me not to do unto Obama as they did unto Bush???
That might only be a rhetorical argument, as two wrongs clearly don’t make a right. But it remains a powerful one. Liberals have forfeited any moral right to criticize conservatives for using their own tactics against them.
But I don’t simply call Obama a fascist because liberals called Bush one. I call him one because he has exhibited all kinds of fascistic tendencies, which I shall in time describe.
But fascism has a far more precise definition. Historically, fascism is a far-right movementof the middle classes (shopkeepers, professionals, civil servants) who are economically ruined by severe economic crisis and driven to “frenzy.”
In the brilliant words of Leon Trotsky, fascism brings “to their feet those classes that are immediately above the working class and that are ever in dread of being forced down into its ranks; it organizes and militarizes them…and it directs them to the extirpation of proletarian organizations, from the most revolutionary to the most conservative.”
I have no doubt that the irony of these words were entirely lost to the “Socialist Worker” who wrote the article. But allow me to illuminate it for you: think of the most infamous fascists of all time, the Nazis. What did the word “Nazi” stand for? It was the “acronym for the ‘National Socialist German Workers Party’.” Let me try that again, just in case you missed these precious little details: “National SOCIALIST German WORKERS Party.”
But ask the “Socialist Workers” and they’ll assure you that the “Socialist Workers Party” had absolutely nothing whatsoever to do with Socialist Workers. Because that would certainly be awkward, wouldn’t it???
It is rather fascinating that “Socialist Worker” would cite as his authority on fascism and who should be labeled as a “fascist” the Marxist thinker . Allow me to provide one counter statement which is based not on the “brilliant words” of a Marxist, but on the plain simple facts:
“Part of the problem in recognizing fascism is the assumption that it is conservative. [Zeev] Sternhell has observed how study of the ideology has been obscured by “the official Marxist interpretation of fascism.” Marxism defines fascism as its polar opposite. If Marxism is progressive, fascism is conservative. If Marxism is left wing, fascism is right wing. If Marxism champions the proletariat, fascism champions the bourgeoisie. If Marxism is socialist, fascism is capitalist.
The influence of Marxist scholarship has severely distorted our understanding of fascism. Communism and fascism were rival brands of socialism. Whereas Marxist socialism is predicated on an international class struggle, fascist national socialism promoted a socialism centered in national unity. Both communists and fascists opposed the bourgeoisie. Both attacked the conservatives. Both were mass movements, which had special appeal for the intelligentsia, students, and artists, as well as workers. Both favored strong centralized governments and rejected the free economy and the ideals of individual liberty. Fascists saw themselves as being neither of the right nor the left. They believed that they constituted a third force synthesizing the best of both extremes” [Gene Edward Veith, Jr., Modern Fascism: Liquidating the Judeo-Christian Worldview, p. 26].
So depending on Leon Trotsky or any other Marxist-inspired academic who merely parrots “the official Marxist interpretation of fascism” has rather serious intellectual drawbacks. And yet that is largely what we get. Far too many American academics wouldn’t be so obvious as to use the phrase, “In the brilliant words of Leon Trotsky,” but they give his ideas, theories and talking points total credence, nonetheless. The term “useful idiots” was literally coined to describe these Western “intellectuals.” And their being “useful idiots” is every bit as true today as it ever was in the past.
Consider the REAL “polar opposite”: American conservatives are capitalists, not socialists. They demand a limited national/federal government, not a massive centrally planned state as does socialism, communism and fascism. They prefer the federalist idea of powerful states’ rights against a weakened federal government, not some all-powerful Führer. And to try to force conservatives into some Nazi mold invariably means either creating straw men arguments or citing irrelevant facts (such as that conservatives favor a large military just like the Nazis did, as though virtually every single communist state does not similarly favor a large military “just like the Nazis did”). If you want an all-powerful national government that gets to decide who wins and who loses, if you want to see a system where you have to come to your government for assistance and resources with all manner of strings attached rather than being allowed to depend on yourself, your family and your community, you should embrace the political left, not the right.
By the way, another favorite idiotic red herring for liberals asserting that “Nazism was right wing” was that the Nazis hated the admittedly left wing communists. But consider the fact that Coke hates Pepsi and Barbie Doll makers hate Bratz Doll makers. Are we supposed to believe that Coke is the opposite of Pepsi as opposed to water, milk or orange juice? The fact of the matter is that Nazis and Soviet Communists hated each other because both movements had a global agenda of totalitarian dominion, and both movements were competing for the same rabidly left wing converts.
Pardon me for the following insult, but the only people who believe garbage arguments like these are ignorant fools who live in a world of straw men. Even if they have the title “PhD.” after their names.
It is for that reason that I can state categorically that Marxism and fascism are not “polar opposites” at all. They are merely two potentially complementary species of socialism. That is why China has been able to easily weave blatantly fascistic (national socialist/corporatist) elements into its Maoist communism. It is also why Joseph Stalin was able to go from being an international socialist (i.e. a communist) and then appeal to nationalism (i.e., national socialism or “fascism”) when he needed to fight Hitler, only to switch back to “international socialism” after the war, as a few lines from Wikipedia on “Russian nationalism” point out:
The newborn communist republic under Vladimir Lenin proclaimed internationalism as its official ideology[4]. Russian nationalism was discouraged, as were any remnants of Imperial patriotism, such as wearing military awards received before Civil War….
The 1930s saw the evolution of the new concept of Soviet nationalism under Joseph Stalin, based on both Russian nationalism and communist internationalism. Official communist ideology always stated that Russia was the most progressive state, because it adopted socialism as its basis (which, according to the writings of Karl Marx, is the inevitable future of world socio-economic systems). Under Lenin, the USSR believed its duty to help other nations to arrange socialist revolutions (the concept of World Revolution), and made close ties with labor movements around the world[4].
[…]
The Soviet Union’s war against Nazi Germany became known as the Great Patriotic War, hearkening back to the previous use of the term in the Napoleonic Wars. The Soviet state called for Soviet citizens to defend the ‘Motherland’, a matrilineal term used to describe Russia in the past.
[…]
In 1944, the Soviet Union abandoned its communist anthem, The International, and adopted a new national anthem which citizens of the Soviet Union could identify with.
And then, with the victory secured over fascism, the Stalinist “national socialism” (a.k.a. “fascism”) suddenly became international socialism again. The Nazis’ very name was Nationalsozialistische.
One can be a “Marxist-fascist” and combine and blend elements of both totalitarian socialist systems quite easily, as both the Russian and then the Chinese communists proved. Communism and fascism have far more in common with one another than they have in opposition; especially when you examine the fact that both political systems invariably end up becoming the same big-government totalitarian police state.
So for my first two points – namely that 1) the left has routinely demagogically labeled the right “fascist” even when 2) it is clearly the left that owes far and away the most to fascistic elements – I am going to continue to shout from the rooftops who are the real fascists in America.
That said, it is still not enough to merely point out the FACT that American liberalism has much in common with fascism. And there is a lot more yet to say.
Before I begin spouting particular examples, I therefore need to further approach just what it is that would constitute a “fascist.” And then see who and how the label fits. From The Concise Encyclopedia of Economics:
The best example of a fascist economy is the regime of Italian dictator Benito Mussolini. Holding that liberalism (by which he meant freedom and free markets) had “reached the end of its historical function,” Mussolini wrote: “To Fascism the world is not this material world, as it appears on the surface, where Man is an individual separated from all others and left to himself…. Fascism affirms the State as the true reality of the individual.”
This collectivism is captured in the word fascism, which comes from the Latin fasces, meaning a bundle of rods with an axe in it. In economics, fascism was seen as a third way between laissez-faire capitalism and communism. Fascist thought acknowledged the roles of private property and the profit motive as legitimate incentives for productivity—provided that they did not conflict with the interests of the state.
[…]
Mussolini’s fascism took another step at this time with the advent of the Corporative State, a supposedly pragmatic arrangement under which economic decisions were made by councils composed of workers and employers who represented trades and industries. By this device the presumed economic rivalry between employers and employees was to be resolved, preventing the class struggle from undermining the national struggle. In the Corporative State, for example, strikes would be illegal and labor disputes would be mediated by a state agency.
Theoretically, the fascist economy was to be guided by a complex network of employer, worker, and jointly run organizations representing crafts and industries at the local, provincial, and national levels. At the summit of this network was the National Council of Corporations. But although syndicalism and corporativism had a place in fascist ideology and were critical to building a consensus in support of the regime, the council did little to steer the economy. The real decisions were made by state agencies such as the Institute for Industrial Reconstruction (Istituto per la Ricosstruzione Industriale, or IRI), mediating among interest groups.
[…]
Mussolini also eliminated the ability of business to make independent decisions: the government controlled all prices and wages, and firms in any industry could be forced into a cartel when the majority voted for it. The well-connected heads of big business had a hand in making policy, but most smaller businessmen were effectively turned into state employees contending with corrupt bureaucracies. They acquiesced, hoping that the restrictions would be temporary. Land being fundamental to the nation, the fascist state regimented agriculture even more fully, dictating crops, breaking up farms, and threatening expropriation to enforce its commands.
Banking also came under extraordinary control. As Italy’s industrial and banking system sank under the weight of depression and regulation, and as unemployment rose, the government set up public works programs and took control over decisions about building and expanding factories. The government created the Istituto Mobiliare in 1931 to control credit, and the IRI later acquired all shares held by banks in industrial, agricultural, and real estate enterprises.
The image of a strong leader taking direct charge of an economy during hard times fascinated observers abroad. Italy was one of the places that Franklin Roosevelt looked to for ideas in 1933…
Fascism is all about the “community,” not the individual. Its message is about the good of the nation, or the people (or the Volk), or the community, rather than the good of a nation’s individual citizens. It is about distributing and then redistributing the wealth and returning it to “its rightful owners” under the guise of an all-powerful state rather than recognizing and rewarding individual achievement. In short, when Hillary Clinton explained that, “It takes a village,” an educated Nazi would have snapped his fingers and excitedly shouted, “Ja! JA! Das ist ES!”
For Obama, the collectivism, community or “village” thing is such a profound part of him that he has literally made it an integral part of his very heretical form of “Christianity,” which very much stresses individual salvation and individual responsibility. Obama has on several occasions put it this way:
For example, in 1995, Obama said, “my individual salvation is not going to come about without a collective salvation for the country…” and again in May of 2008, “our individual salvation depends of collective salvation.”
In the Christian faith, there is no such thing as collective salvation. Salvation is an individual choice. It is personal acceptance of Jesus as savior, Son of the living God.
Obama’s is a wildly perverted view of orthodox Christianity. It so distorts true Christianity at such a fundamental level, in fact, that one literally has to go to Hitler to find a suitable similar parallel from a “Christian” national leader. The great Protestant Reformer Martin Luther – the most famous German prior to Hitler – had written the most monumental text of German culture prior to Hitler’s Mein Kampf. It was called “The Bondage of the Will,” which was considered THE manifesto of the Reformation. According to Luther, the human will was in bondage to sin. The fallen will, if left to itself, will choose what is evil. The human will has been perversely set against the righteous will of God. For sinful human beings, the will is not in a state of liberty but is in bondage to its worst impulses. Luther wrote in this work, “When our liberty is lost we are compelled to serve sin: that is, we will sin and evil, we speak sin and evil, we do sin and evil.” Adolf Hitler infamously turned that key doctrine of Christianity on its head in his “The Triumph of the Will,” in which he exalted depraved human will to an altogether different level of human depravity. Which is to say that Hitler was so profoundly wrong that he proved Luther right.
But getting back to Obama’s profoundly anti-Christian concept of “collective salvation,” the Nazis would have been all over that, enthusiastically shouting their agreement, “Ja! JA! Das ist ES!” Recall the encyclopedia entry on fascism stating that, “Fascism affirms the State as the true reality of the individual,” which was then further defined as “collectivism.” And the Nazis repeatedly called upon loyal Germans to make horrendous sacrifices in the name of that collective.
What the Nazis pursued was a form of anti-capitalist anti-conservative communitarianism encapsulated in the concept of Volksgemeinschaft, or “people’s community.”
From the Nazi Party Platform:
– The first obligation of every citizen must be to work both spiritually and physically. The activity of individuals is not to counteract the interests of the universality, but must have its result within the framework of the whole for the benefit of all Consequently we demand:
– Abolition of unearned (work and labour) incomes. Breaking of rent-slavery.
– In consideration of the monstrous sacrifice in property and blood that each war demands of the people personal enrichment through a war must be designated as a crime against the people. Therefore we demand the total confiscation of all war profits.
– We demand the nationalization of all (previous) associated industries (trusts).
– We demand a division of profits of all heavy industries.
– We demand an expansion on a large scale of old age welfare.
– We demand the creation of a healthy middle class and its conservation, immediate communalization of the great warehouses and their being leased at low cost to small firms, the utmost consideration of all small firms in contracts with the State, county or municipality.
– We demand a land reform suitable to our needs, provision of a law for the free expropriation of land for the purposes of public utility, abolition of taxes on land and prevention of all speculation in land.
– We demand struggle without consideration against those whose activity is injurious to the general interest. Common national criminals, usurers, Schieber and so forth are to be punished with death, without consideration of confession or race.
– We demand substitution of a German common law in place of the Roman Law serving a materialistic world-order.
– The state is to be responsible for a fundamental reconstruction of our whole national education program, to enable every capable and industrious German to obtain higher education and subsequently introduction into leading positions. The plans of instruction of all educational institutions are to conform with the experiences of practical life. The comprehension of the concept of the State must be striven for by the school [Staatsbuergerkunde] as early as the beginning of understanding. We demand the education at the expense of the State of outstanding intellectually gifted children of poor parents without consideration of position or profession.
– The State is to care for the elevating national health by protecting the mother and child, by outlawing child-labor, by the encouragement of physical fitness, by means of the legal establishment of a gymnastic and sport obligation, by the utmost support of all organizations concerned with the physical instruction of the young.
– We demand abolition of the mercenary troops and formation of a national army.
– We demand legal opposition to known lies and their promulgation through the press. In order to enable the provision of a German press, we demand, that: a. All writers and employees of the newspapers appearing in the German language be members of the race: b. Non-German newspapers be required to have the express permission of the State to be published. They may not be printed in the German language: c. Non-Germans are forbidden by law any financial interest in German publications, or any influence on them, and as punishment for violations the closing of such a publication as well as the immediate expulsion from the Reich of the non-German concerned. Publications which are counter to the general good are to be forbidden. We demand legal prosecution of artistic and literary forms which exert a destructive influence on our national life, and the closure of organizations opposing the above made demands.
Ah, yes, the Nazis had their “Fairness Doctrine” long before this current generation of liberals had theirs.
You read that Nazi Party Platform carefully, and you tell me if you see small government conservative Republicans or big government liberal Democrats written all over it.
Now, you read the Nazi Party Platform, and given what American liberals want and what American conservatism opposes, it is so obvious which party is “fascist” that it isn’t even silly. Then you ADD to that the fact that fascism and American progressivism (which is liberalism) were so similar that the great fascists of the age couldn’t tell the damn difference.
Since you point out Nazism was fascist, let’s look at some history as to WHO was recognized as fascist in America.
Fascism sought to eliminate class differences and to destroy/replace capitalism and laissez-faire economics.
H.G. Wells, a great admirer of FDR and an extremely close personal friend of his, was also a great progressive of his day. He summed it up this way in a major speech at Oxford to the YOUNG LIBERALS organization under the banner of “Liberal Fascism”: “I am asking for a Liberal Fascisti, for enlightened Nazis.” He said, “And do not let me leave you in the slightest doubt as to the scope and ambition of what I am putting before you” and then said:
These new organizations are not merely organizations for the spread of defined opinions…the days of that sort of amateurism are over – they are organizations to replace the dilatory indecisiveness of democracy. The world is sick of parliamentary politics…The Fascist Party, to the best of its ability, is Italy now. The Communist Party, to the best of its ability, is Russia. Obviously the Fascists of Liberalism must carry out a parallel ambition on still a vaster scale…They must begin as a disciplined sect, but must end as the sustaining organization of a reconstituted mankind.”
H.G. Wells pronounced FDR “the most effective transmitting instrument possible for the coming of the new world order.” And of course, we easily see that the new world order Wells wanted was a fascist one. In 1941, George Orwell concluded, “Much of what Wells has imagined and worked for is physically there in Nazi Germany.”
It was from the lips of liberal progressive H.G. Wells that Jonah Goldberg got the title of his book, Liberal Fascism. Goldberg didn’t just invent this connection: H.G. Wells flagrantly admitted it and George Orwell called him on it. All Goldberg did was rediscover history that liberals buried and have used every trick imaginable to keep buried.
And as a tie-in to our modern day, who more than Barack Obama has been more associated with said FDR?
But let me move on to some real red meat. In just what specific, concrete ways can I call Obama a fascist?
Well, to begin with, there is the signature achievement of his entire presidency, his national health care system (ObamaCare). For liberals, it is nothing but the most bizarre coincidence that Nazi culture had a national health care system that was quite rightly considered the wonder of its day by socialists in America. It is the most despicable of insults that Sarah Palin excoriated ObamaCare as “death panels” – even though it is more precisely a bureaucratic maze consisting of more like 160 separate death panels:
And the “czar” thing hits a very fascist nerve, too. Obama has appointed 39 czars who are completely outside our Constitutional process. Obama signed a budget bill into law that required him to remove these czars, but why would a fascist trouble himself with outmoded things like “laws”? One of the enraged Republicans responded, “The president knew that the czar amendment was part of the overall budget deal he agreed to, and if he cannot be trusted to keep his word on this, then how can he be trusted as we negotiate on larger issues like federal spending and the economy.” And of course, he’s right.
But why do I say it’s financial fascism in 20/20 hindsight? Because of what we just learned: in spite of all the bogus lying promises and the massive takeover “for our own good,” Obama didn’t fix anything. Instead he made it WORSE:
The financial system poses an even greater risk to taxpayers than before the crisis, according to analysts at Standard & Poor’s. The next rescue could be about a trillion dollars costlier, the credit rating agency warned.
S&P put policymakers on notice, saying there’s “at least a one-in-three” chance that the U.S. government may lose its coveted AAA credit rating. Various risks could lead the agency to downgrade the Treasury’s credit worthiness, including policymakers’ penchant for rescuing bankers and traders from their failures.
“The potential for further extraordinary official assistance to large players in the U.S. financial sector poses a negative risk to the government’s credit rating,” S&P said in its Monday report.
But, the agency’s analysts warned, “we believe the risks from the U.S. financial sector are higher than we considered them to be before 2008.”
Because of the increased risk, S&P forecasts the potential initial cost to taxpayers of the next crisis cleanup to approach 34 percent of the nation’s annual economic output, or gross domestic product. In 2007, the agency’s analysts estimated it could cost 26 percent of GDP.
Last year, U.S. output neared $14.7 trillion, according to the Commerce Department. By S&P’s estimate, that means taxpayers could be hit with $5 trillion in costs in the event of another financial collapse.
Experts said that while the cost estimate seems unusually high, there’s little dispute that when the next crisis hits, it will not be anticipated — and it will likely hurt the economy more than the last financial crisis.
So much for the massive and unprecedented fascist government takeover.
Think last year’s $700 billion Wall Street rescue package was beaucoup bucks to spend bailing out the nation’s floundering financial system? That’s chump change compared to what the overall price tag could be, a government watchdog says.
The inspector general in charge of overseeing the Treasury Department’s bank-bailout program says the massive endeavor could end up costing taxpayers almost $24 trillion in a worst-case scenario. That’s more than six times President Obama’s proposed $3.55 trillion budget for 2010.
Nobody here but us fascists. And we sure aint talking.
Then there are other issues that the left usually uses to attack conservatives, such as racism. Wasn’t Hitler a racist, just like conservatives? The problem is, the liberals are as usual upside-down here. After running as the man to create racial harmony, Barack Obama has instead done more to racially polarize America than any president since other famous progressives such as Woodrow Wilson and FDR. Frankly, if one were to conduct a major study of racial politics, and the setting up in opposition of one racial group against another, just which party has emphasized race and race-baiting more?
Hitler’s Jew-baiting was all about the idea that one race had taken over the culture, had the money and the power, and was using its influence to oppress the people in the banking system and anywhere else that mattered. And Hitler’s constant screed was that Germany needed to confiscate the Jews’ wealth and then redistribute it. With all respect, all the left has done is replace “Jew” with “Caucasian” and making the exact same claims.
And with all this hard-core racist demagoguing, I’m supposed to say that, “Oh, yes, it’s the conservatives who are guilty of demagoguing race”??? Seriously???
Obama has Samantha Powers (the wife of Cass Sunstein, the man who “nudges us”) close to him and advising him on matters of war. According to the very liberal publication The Nation, “She began to see war as an instrument to achieving her liberal, even radical, values.” What if you had an ultra conservative – oh, say a Sarah Palin – openly acknowledged to pursue war and risk American lives to advance her radical values??? What would the left call this if not “fascist”?
But it’s only fascist if Republicans do it, of course.
Also in yesterday’s news is the fact that Obama is the perpetual demagogue– which is a quintessentially fascist tactic. Obama demonized Bush for trying to raise the debt ceiling until he needed to raise it. Now it would be un-American for Republicans to act the same exact way Obama acted. In the same demagogic spirit, Obama personally invited Paul Ryan to a speech just so he could personally demonize him. The same Obama who lectured Republicans that it would be counter-productive to rely on name-calling and accusations in the health care debate launched into a vicious demagogic attack. Ryan correctly said that “What we got yesterday was the opposite of what he said is necessary to fix this problem.” But that is par for the golf course for a fascist. If that wasn’t enough, Obama held a White House conference for “stake holders” in the immigration debate and refused to invite a single governor from a border state.
A Republican equivalent would have had to come out of a deep involvement with some vile racist militia organization to approximate Obama’s background. And liberals would rightly label such a politician a fascist for his past alone.
Here’s a recent Youtube video of Obama’s key union allies on camera saying, “We’re not going to rely on the law,” and, “Forget about the law” as they seek to impose their unions basically whether workers want them or not:
Today we find out officially that Obama is backpedeling on two lies: one to close Guantanamo Bay, and the other to try the worst terrorists in civilian court. As the LA Times reports via the AP:
Professed 9/11 mastermind Khalid Sheikh Mohammed and four alleged co-conspirators are being referred to the system of military commissions for trial, a federal law enforcement official said Monday.
The decision by the Obama administration is an about-face from earlier plans to have the five go on trial in civilian federal court in New York.
You stupid, arrogant poodle, Obama. You’d be completely ashamed of yourself if you weren’t such an arrogant narcissist.
Again and again, on issue after issue, Obama demagogued and demonized Bush policies on the campaign trail. But when it came time to put up or shut up, and actually DO something, Obama’s “poodle policies” ended up on their back with Bush policy fangs around their throat.
But just when you think Obama has finally accepted reality, the idiot climbs back on his winged unicorn and flies off in another cloud of magic fairy dust.
By finally relenting – after 17 months of wasted time and God only knows how many millions of dollars spent fighting reality – to try the terrorists at Gitmo, Obama is acknowledging that Guantanamo Bay will not be closed as long as his loathsome character pollutes the White House.
Here’s the worst of it. Obama cowardly and despicably went overseas and demonized his predecessor for his atrocities such as Gitmo and trying terrorists in military tribunals. The contemptible rat bastard-in-chief even said he would consider holding Bush criminally responsible. And now Obama will be embracing the very “atrocities” that he himself personally demonized.
The left has been saying that Gitmo and military tribunals would give al Qaeda ammunition for recruiting terrorists. Riddle me this: how much more will they gain ammunition by replaying the very words of Obama and his attorney general Eric Holder as saying Gitmo and military tribunals were immoral?!?!??
Do you remember how the left demonized George W. Bush for eight years? Remember how he was trampling all over the Constitution with his military tribunals? Remember how Guantanamo was a scourge upon the face of humanity, a veritable second Auschwitz? Remember how Obama was going to close Guantanamo within his first year in office? Remember the “fierce moral urgency of change?”
There is also no question that Guantanamo set back the moral authority that is America’s strongest currency in the world. Instead of building a durable framework for the struggle against al Qaeda that drew upon our deeply held values and traditions, our government was defending positions that undermined the rule of law. In fact, part of the rationale for establishing Guantanamo in the first place was the misplaced notion that a prison there would be beyond the law — a proposition that the Supreme Court soundly rejected. Meanwhile, instead of serving as a tool to counter terrorism, Guantanamo became a symbol that helped al Qaeda recruit terrorists to its cause. Indeed, the existence of Guantanamo likely created more terrorists around the world than it ever detained.
So the record is clear: Rather than keeping us safer, the prison at Guantanamo has weakened American national security. It is a rallying cry for our enemies. It sets back the willingness of our allies to work with us in fighting an enemy that operates in scores of countries. By any measure, the costs of keeping it open far exceed the complications involved in closing it. That’s why I argued that it should be closed throughout my campaign, and that is why I ordered it closed within one year.
Now, you vile liberals, you explain to me how al Qaeda will not be playing Barack Obama’s and Eric Holder’s speeches and saying, “You see? America is evil even by its very own president’s and attorney general’s standards.”
Dick Cheney has repeatedly said that Obama couldn’t be more naive or more wrong and that he would ultimately be forced to abandon his immoral positions on both Gitmo and the military tribunals.
You owe George Bush and Dick Cheney a personal apology. When Dick Cheney stood up to your lies and denounced your terrible policies, he rightly confronted you on the very issues that you just backed down from today in an implicit acknowledgment that he was right and you were totally wrong. And if you had so much as a single shred of personal honor or decency, you would offer that apology.
The fact that you DON’T have any honor or decency is why we can know that you won’t bother.
Frankly, there aren’t enough words or superlatives in the English dictionary to describe the great Thomas Sowell. With an unparalleled gift to explain even the most complicated subjects in simple and easily understandable terms, few can match the pedigree and contributions of the Hoover Institute senior fellow. Author of the new book, “Dismantling America,” Sowell recently sat down for an interview with Investors Business Daily’s David Hogberg. And along with a few priceless jabs at Michelle Obama, sociology, Newsweek, and the public education system, Dr. Sowell discussed why he (like Niall Ferguson) believes America may be entering a prolonged period of decline.
“The only analogy I can think of from history is when the Norman conquerors of England published their laws in French for an English-speaking nation,” Sowell says about the Obama administration’s governing style, a style he characterizes as unconstitutional.
As someone who, if forced to, would label himself as more libertarian than conservative — though he has irked many with his support of American combat missions in Iraq — most noteworthy (and a bit shocking) about the interview is what Sowell believes the greatest threat is — terrorism, Iran’s nuclear ambitions and the international scene. Questioned as to what some of the current markers of national decline are, it isn’t “huge bills that fundamentally change the way the economy operates,” reckless government spending, social engineering programs and the national debt which worry the economist the most, it is national security and President Obama’s foreign policy.
And Sowell makes a few not-so-subtle Neville Chamberlain analogies that are almost impossible to ignore:
Of course, the one that trumps them all is on the international scene. That’s where Iran is moving toward nuclear weapons. I’m just staggered at how little attention is being paid to that compared to frivolous things. If a nation with a record of sponsoring international terrorism gets nuclear weapons, that changes everything and it changes it forever.
Someday historians may wonder what were we thinking about when you look at the imbalance of power between the U.S. and Iran, and we sat there with folded hands and watched this happen, going through just enough motions at the United Nations to lull the public to sleep. That, I think, is the biggest threat.
Sowell also condemns the president for affronting our allies (in particular, the British and Israelis) in “clever” yet unmistakable ways the general public may not notice, further hastening America’s decline:
His first foreign policy gambit was to fly to Russia and offer to renege on the American commitment to put a missile shield in Eastern Europe…All he really got out of that was a demonstration of his amateurishness and of his willingness to sell out allies in hopes of winning over enemies. That ploy was tried in the 1930s and didn’t work all that well.
These are no ordinary times, with no ordinary president. Leading up to the historic “Hope and Change” election, commentators on the Right could not possibly have attacked Obama and his intentions to fundamentally change the identity and economy of America more than they already had. Even so, not only has President Obama fulfilled every single “fear-mongering” indictment down to a tee, he’s exceeded them — making even some his most extreme opponents look clairvoyant. So with keeping that in mind, and considering all the new challenges we face domestically, that one of the greatest economic minds of our time would still elevate national security and terrorism to such a level truly speaks volumes about the reality and situation of Iran.
Also citing the lack of expertise and national discussion in international issues, former U.S. Ambassador John Bolton confirmed to Greg Gutfeld that he was seriously considering a presidential run on Red Eye last week. Bolton-Sowell 2012? One can only dream. But hey, if a community organizer can get elected, why not someone with ten times the accomplishments and wisdom?
I’ve said many of the same things, myself. Just not as well, and not as succinctly. For example, I said:
If Iran gets its nukes, it will be able to do a number of things: 1) attack Israel, assuring Israel that if it uses its nukes against Iran, Iran will use its nukes against Israel; 2) shut down the Strait of Hormuz, which would immediately drive up the price of oil. The cost of gasoline in the U.S. would soar above $15 a gallon; 3) dramatically increase Iranian-sponsored terrorism worldwide.
If you don’t believe that a nuclear-armed Iran would pick a minimum of one of these options, you’re just nuts.
It shouldn’t take a rocket scientist to see that Iran is employing a lot of rocket scientists to create a ballistic nuclear missile capable of striking the United States and Israel. But when Democrats are in charge, even the most trivial aspects of common sense are akin to the most sophisticated form of theoretical mathematics.
It is a fact – a FACT – that George Bush tried to deal with the threat of Iran when it was possible to avert their nuclear ambitions; but that Democrats did everything they could to prevent him from succeeding against the insane jihadist regime. I quoted an LA Times article from just three years ago in which every single Democrat presidential candidate stated that Iran was not a meaningful threat, and in which they denounced Bush’s efforts to draw attention to the danger posed by Iran:
“DES MOINES — Democratic presidential candidates teamed up during a National Public Radio debate here Tuesday to blast the Bush administration over its policy toward Iran, arguing that a new intelligence assessment proves that the administration has needlessly ratcheted up military rhetoric.
While the candidates differed somewhat over the level of threat Iran poses in the Mideast, most of themsought to liken the administration’s approach to Iran with its buildup to the war in Iraq.”
But the fact that the failure to deal with Iran rests ENTIRELY in Democrats’ hands won’t stop them from blaming Bush when Iran rears its vicious head against the world. Any more than it stopped them from blaming Bush for the 2008 economic collapse in spite of the fact that they had had total control of Congress for the previous two years, and even though they had repeatedly prevented Bush from regulating and reforming GSEs Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac – which were at the epicenter of the disaster.
It’s just what cowards do. And the Democrat Party is the party of moral cowardice going back to at least the Carter years, if not dating back to the waning days of the LBJ administration.
You can go back and review the record. Nearly 60% of the Democrats in the U.S. Senate (29 out of 50) voted to authorize the Iraq War Resolution. Furthermore, virtually every single top Democrat was on the factual record agreeing with George Bush and supporting his reasoning to attack Saddam Hussein –
– and yet Democrats en masse cowardly, despicably, and I would argue treasonously, turned on Bush and turned on our troops in time of war. For no other reason than to treacherously obtain a cheap political advantage aided and abetted by a mainstream media propaganda apparatus that could have come right out of the vile brain of Joseph Goebbels.
In addition to their opposition to the Iraq War (which again 60% of Senate Democrats voted for, only to repudiate and claim Bush deceived them), Democrats opposed the Patriot Act; opposed Domestic Surveillance which allowed the US to track calls from international terrorists into the United States; opposed Gitmo, even though it is the clearly the ONLY reasonable place to hold incredibly dangerous terrorists that no country wants; opposed allowing terrorists to be tried in military tribunals to safeguard intelligence techniques and personnel, and to prevent the court system from being hijacked by enemies of freedom; opposed even the most reasonable use of profiling to weed out terrorists intent upon murdering Americans; and even declared surrender in the vile “I believe that … this war is lost” statement of Harry Reid, the Democrat Senate Majority Leader. I could go on. It boils down to the fact that the left despise anything that help us win the war on terror or protect us from terrorism.
"RUN AWAY!!!"
To the extent that Barack Obama has done anything – ANYTHING – right at all in the war on terror, it has only been because he repudiated himself and demonstrated that he was either an incompetent fool or a lying hypocrite. Obama – after publicly denouncing, undermining and alienating the CIA – has continued the policy of “torture” by continuing the policy of “rendition” in which terror suspects are sent to other countries that use torture. Obama – after continually denouncing Bush over Gitmo – has STILL not closed the facility down two full years after usurping the office of the presidency with lies. Obama is using a surge strategy in Afghanistan after denouncing Bush’s successful surge strategy in Iraq and blatantly predicting it would fail. And Obama is now continuing the Bush policy of using predator drones to attack terrorist positions inside Pakistan that US Special Operations forces cannot reach.
Iran WILL get the nuclear bomb. Democrats guaranteed that Iran would be able to do so.
Iran will become a plague upon global peace and security unlike anything the world has ever seen at least since the rise of the Nazis and the abject failure of FDR and Neville Chamberlain to deal with the clear and present danger.
And when that day comes, America will be unable to meaningfully deal with it because Barack Obama and the Democrat Party made us economically incapable of rising to any significant occasion.
Since present day Humanism vilifies Judeo-Christianity as backward, its goal to assure progress through education necessitates an effort to keep all mention of theism out of the classroom. Here we have the irony of twentieth century Humanism, a belief system recognized by the Supreme Court as a non-theistic religion, foisting upon society the unconstitutional prospect of establishment of a state-sanctioned non-theistic religion which legislates against the expression of a theistic one by arguing separation of church & state. To dwell here in more detail is beyond the scope of this article, but to close, here are some other considerations:
In the earlier spirit of cooperation with the Christian church the ethics or values of the faith were “borrowed” by the humanists. In their secular framework, however, denying the transcendent, they negated the theocentric foundation of those values, (the character of God), while attempting to retain the ethics. So it can be said that the Humanist, then, lives on “borrowed capital”. In describing this stuation, Francis Schaeffer observed that: “…the Humanist has both feet firmly planted in mid-air.” His meaning here is that while the Humanist may have noble ideals, there is no rational foundation for them. An anthropocentric view says that mankind is a “cosmic accident”; he comes from nothing, he goes to nothing, but in between he’s a being of supreme dignity. What the Humanist fails to face is that with no ultimate basis, his ideals, virtues and values are mere preferences, not principles. Judging by this standard of “no ultimate standard”, who is to say whose preferences are to be “dignified”, ultimately?
What happens when “preferences, not principles” encounters a difficulty? The preferences will go out the window every single time. Call it a “preference” for “the ends justify the means.” Who needs moral principles when Obama has political pragmatism? And bye-bye, any professed principles.
“Feet firmly planted in mid-air,” and the abandonment of principles in favor of a constant stream of moral relativism and ends-justifies-the-means thinking has plagued the amoral Obama administration again and again. Obama damned Bush over Gitmo; but he’s doing the same thing. Obama damned Bush over military tribunals. What is he doing now? He damned Bush over the surge strategy in Iraq; what in the world would you call the strategy he’s employing now in Afghanistan? Obama damned Bush over the practice of rendition, but he’s doing it as much as Bush did. Obama denounced Bush for holding terrorist detainees without trial, but he’s doing the same exact thing. The list goes on and on. Obama attacked Bush over his lack of transparency, only to be far less transparent than Bush ever was. Obama criticized Bush for protecting the wealthy at the expense of the poor, but has since engaged in bailout after bailout of the rich and powerful. Obama blasted Bush for being partisan, but he has become the most partisan president in American history. Obama denounced the right for using reconciliation to pass key legislation, and then used it to pass the most significant legislation this country has seen in 60 years. For all Obama’s lefty rhetoric, he has abandoned virtually every principle he professed.
Quite possibly above everything else, Obama pronounced himself the man who would end the war on terror – if nothing else than by the sheer magnificence of his person – and restore all the principles of liberalism’s views toward constitutional protections to the enemies we would confront on the battlefield.
But when the rubber met the road, the amoral president demonstrated that his moral values amounted to dust in the wind, which would blow away in the face of the next challenge.
WASHINGTON — The Obama administration’s decision to authorize the killing by the Central Intelligence Agency of a terrorism suspect who is an American citizen has set off a debate over the legal and political limits of drone missile strikes, a mainstay of the campaign against terrorism.
The notion that the government can, in effect, execute one of its own citizens far from a combat zone,with no judicial process and based on secret intelligence, makes some legal authorities deeply uneasy.
To eavesdrop on the terrorism suspect who was added to the target list, the American-born radical cleric Anwar al-Awlaki, who is hiding in Yemen, intelligence agencies would have to get a court warrant. But designating him for death, as C.I.A. officials did early this year with the National Security Council’s approval, required no judicial review.
“Congress has protected Awlaki’s cellphone calls,” said Vicki Divoll, a former C.I.A. lawyer who now teaches at the United States Naval Academy. “But it has not provided any protections for his life. That makes no sense.”
Obama and his supporters have routinely depicted Obama (somewhat falsely) as “a constitutional law professor.” But stop and think about it: this “constitutional law professor” now has the view that it’s okay to blow away an American citizen without any form of legitimate trial. He’s dogmatic about protecting the sanctity of the guy’s cellphone calls, but he has no compunction about ordering the guy to be blown to bits without a trial based on secret intelligence.
A pretty remarkable degree of chutzpah from a guy who once demagogued a president over his treatment of foreign terrorists.
Now, one might think that the political left and the liberal mainstream media would be frothing in outrage over all of these abandonments of principle, but the left is as incapable of genuine moral outrage as they are of genuine moral principles. Which is to say that the media damned Bush over every breach of constitutional ethics from a leftist perspective, but they largely never mention all of Obama’s myriad breaches of the very same ethics.
Whenever the left offered its next political Utopia, the mainstream media of the day sanctified the government takeover as wonderful. And then failed to speak out as the next regime, and then the next, and then the next, became a living hell on earth (as an example, here’s an article about the “hidden” history of evil in the Soviet Union. Why is it “hidden”? Because the left has steadfastly refused to look at the ugly face of socialism/communism).
Standing for nothing, with their feet firmly planted in mid-air, Barack Obama and the leftist radicals he champions have no principles to plant their feet upon. The result has been one abandonment of principle after another beyond anything I’ve ever seen in my lifetime.
When I was a kid, we had a tough little dachshund. Then we got a poodle who was as arrogant as you’d expect a poodle to be. The poodle constantly attacked the dachshund, even though time after time the dachshund would have the poodle on her back with her teeth around the poodle’s throat in about 2 seconds every time they got into it.
That’s sort of like Obama and Bush. With Obama being the poodle, and Bush (despite the fact that he doesn’t bother to defend his policies in the media) being the dachshund.
You stupid, arrogant poodle, Obama. You’d be completely ashamed of yourself if you weren’t such an arrogant narcissist.
Again and again, on issue after issue, Obama demagogued and demonized Bush policies on the campaign trail. But when it came time to put up or shut up, and actually DO something, Obama’s “poodle policies” ended up on their back with Bush policy fangs around their throat.
And now we see it yet again. Military Tribunals? Another Obama butt kicking:
By Anne E. Kornblut and Peter Finn
Washington Post Staff Writer
Friday, March 5, 2010
President Obama‘s advisers are nearing a recommendation that Khalid Sheik Mohammed, the self-proclaimed mastermind of the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks, be prosecuted in a military tribunal, administration officials said, a step that would reverse Attorney General Eric H. Holder Jr.’s plan to try him in civilian court in New York City.
The president’s advisers feel increasingly hemmed in by bipartisan opposition to a federal trial in New York and demands, mainly from Republicans, that Mohammed and his accused co-conspirators remain under military jurisdiction, officials said. While Obama has favored trying some terrorism suspects in civilian courts as a symbol of U.S. commitment to the rule of law, critics have said military tribunals are the appropriate venue for those accused of attacking the United States.
You just thought you were so above it all, weren’t you, Poodle-in-Chief? Bush’s policies were terrible in every way except in virtue of the fact that they actually worked, while all yours are now revealed to be so totally full of crap you dropped them.
In other developments, the guy we are forced to rely upon to impose his will on an Iran determined to create a nuclear ICBM stockpile doesn’t even have the nerves to impose his will on a pack of cigarettes.
Start Thinking Right 