The End of Obama Liberalism as an Intellectual Movement (For The Record, Liberalism Has ALWAYS Been Vacuous Pseudo-Intellectualism)

Well, another way to sum it up would be “Yes, we can!” and “Change you can believe in!” and (my own favorite): “I won’t have to worry about putting gas in my car. I won’t have to worry about paying my mortgage… If I help [Obama], he’s gonna help me!”

May 5, 2012
The End of Obama Liberalism as an Intellectual Movement
By Carl Paulus

Over the past six months the public has watched the current liberal intellectual movement crumble as its leaders have failed to provide a tenable solution to the serious problems facing our nation. President Obama is desperately searching for a way to convince the public he should be reelected. But his liberal ideology is no longer capable of providing effective answers to the questions of the 21st century. Today’s liberalism has been reduced to an opposition movement, rather than a coherent ideological alternative to conservatism. The Democratic Party all but confirmed this notion with their latest slogan for the 2012 campaign: “Not A Republican.”

When President Obama and the Democrats used the largest majority in over three decades to pass Obamacare — despite the objections of the country — they did so because they believed that it offered a significant solution to a problem. Though it remains unpopular with a majority of citizens, at least Obamacare was introduced as a bill, debated publicly, and signed into law. However, after being rejected by the people in 2010, modern liberalism has ceased to be a serious intellectual movement, trading gimmicks and demagoguery for substantial policy initiatives. Starting with the introduction of the Ryan budget in 2011, Democrats — led by the president — have disengaged from discussing ideas and negotiating legislation. Instead, emotional rhetoric has been used to mask the evidence that liberal programs offer very little substance to move the nation forward in the modern world.

Treasury Secretary Tim Geithner exhibited the lack of ideas coming from the Democrats when he told House Budget Chairman Paul Ryan that the administration “doesn’t have a definitive solution” to the impending debt crisis, but that they do know that they “just don’t like” the House Republican plan. In other words, liberals have admitted that they only have the intellectual disposition to oppose Ryan rather than providing a different way forward. Democrats have become the armchair quarterbacks of public policy. They offer criticism without a workable alternative.

Liberals have abandoned policy issues as a way to intellectually combat those who disagree with them. It was not a coincidence that the Obama administration announced a plan to force Catholic institutions to go against their consciences and pay for contraception and abortifacients just three days after the White House outlined its budget for 2013. Instead of debating budgetary reforms the country desperately needs, liberals sparked a faux debate over contraception, claiming that arguments based in both the history of the Enlightenment and the founding of the nation regarding religious freedom were actually about access to contraception in general. Liberals maintain that women who work for and attend Catholic institutions are not exercising a choice to do so. In effect, they undercut the feminist movement that for decades argued that women have the capability to make their own decisions and provide for their own lifestyles, undermining an intellectual foundation they helped to create. The entire topic of contraception was brought up without any Republican, especially the presumptive nominee, talking about birth control during the campaign.

The White House sparked a month-long, superficial debate over the Republican “War on Women” in order to distract Americans from the stunning realization that President Obama is the first president in American history to have two budgets rejected unanimously by his own party in Congress. Furthermore, Democrats have controlled the Senate for nearly six years. Yet, under Harry Reid’s leadership, they have proposed a budget only once since the inauguration of President Obama and no longer even attempt to seriously negotiate a budget with Republicans. The entire discussion about the “War on Women” substantiates that modern liberalism offers no intellectual foundation for governing the United States.

The rhetoric and actions stemming from the fight over contraception might be construed as an isolated instance — a desperate president hoping to change the narrative in a cynical attempt to be reelected. Unfortunately, it was not. When Mitt Romney appeared to secure the Republican nomination, the president, with the full support of his party, reignited the discussion of the Occupy-Wall-Street inspired tax on millionaires he named the Buffett Rule. Democrats hoped to sell it to the people as significant piece of legislation. President Obama first suggested it was needed to help reduce the deficit. When that was disproven, he then said it should be enacted in the interest of “fairness.” When that fell flat the president finally maintained that the Buffett Rule was based on “an argument about how do we grow the economy in a 21st century environment.”

President Obama’s reasoning for the Buffett Rule changed for clear reasons. His attempt to add a special tax on the wealthy had little substance and was nothing more than an emotional ploy meant to appeal to the “Not Republican” liberal base. Rather than providing an intellectual foundation to tackle the numerous challenges the country faces, liberalism has deteriorated into a purely reactionary doctrine that hopes to win an election by demagoguing the wealthy. Liberals want to say that Mitt Romney’s success makes him unelectable just eight year after nominating the billionaire John Kerry for the presidency because that’s all they really have left to argue.

Over the next six months the president and his supporters are going to talk a lot about “fairness.” However, do not expect them to offer a definition of the term. Vague rhetoric about their plans, just as in 2008, will be used to conceal the lack of appreciable ideas coming from the Democratic Party. When a liberal such as Obama, or Nancy Pelosi, gets precise, the electorate is rather unkind. The reason for this is clear: emotional rhetoric about the rich not paying enough in taxes only works on the envious or guilt-ridden. Ordinary Americans are neither of those things. This is why when pollsters ask the public what the wealthy should pay in taxes they choose a lower rate than the current tax code.

Liberalism used to be a movement capable of producing ideas that could be debated both publicly and in the intellectual marketplace. Though conservatives disagreed with them, liberal ideas had to be contended with through thoughtful rebuttals produced by those, in the words of the historian Gary Nash, who “engaged in study, reflection, and speculation; purveyors of ideas.” Conservatives had to explain why our path was a better way forward than the left’s. However, today’s liberal movement offers no direction, just resistance. Modern liberals have become defined by this picture: empty chairs in a budget committee meeting that they control. Admittedly, their focus is solely on policy aimed at stirring controversy and allowing them to act as demagogues. President Obama and the current Democratic leadership have ushered in the end of liberalism as an intellectual movement because the ideas they offer are based more empty rhetoric than smart policy.

Conservatives must be wary and refuse to be pulled down into their realm of liberal inanity, even if it can be fairly funny to mock them. After all, the true unemployment rate is still in double digits and in the five minutes that it took to read this article the United States of America added 15 million dollars to the debt as we race towards a crisis. Our current problems require thoughtful solutions.

Carl Paulus, Ph.D., is a historian of American Politics and a staff assistant for the Robert Gonzalez congressional campaign in TX-14.

Liberalism is vaccuous nonsense.  Liberalism is gutless: it stands for mutually exclusive things.  Liberalism is fiscally reckless BECAUSE of its gutlessness: it demands spending that is shockingly unsustainable while it demonizes those who are doing nothing more than trying to prevent those who are trying to keep failed programs such as Medicare solvent.

Liberals are stupid people.  And they are the worst form of stupid people.

There are people who just aren’t that smart due to limitations in their genes and/or limitations in their educations.  But we’re not talking about that kind of “stupid”; rather, we are talking about a deliberate, intentional refusal by people who ought to know better to refuse to acknowledge reality.

What is “reality”?  Ultimately, it is the world as God sees it.  It is the world as it really is; the world as God ordained it to be.  Liberals ACTIVELY DESPISE that reality; and instead of looking to the Word of God for truth they look to “-isms” such as Marxism and socialism and Keynesianism for their “truth.”

History refutes them over and over and over again.  But they WILL NOT acknowledge that because they have completely immunized themselves to reality.

How Obama Managed To Screw Up Even The Killing Of Osama Bin Laden

It’s really quite amazing: Barack Obama is a near-total failure even when he finally manages to get something right.

Obama’s disasterous bungling of the aftermath of the killing of bin Laden makes me think about that proverbial idiot who managed to kill the goose that laid the golden eggs.

From the UK Telegraph:

10 ways Barack Obama botched the aftermath of the masterful operation to kill Osama bin Laden
By Toby Harnden World Last updated: May 5th, 2011

The past few days have seemed like an extended amateur hour in the White House as unforced error after unforced error has been made in the handling of the US Government’s message about the killing of bin Laden.

We should not forget the bottom line in this: bin Laden was justifiably and legally killed by brave and skilled US Navy SEALs. The operation was audacious and meticulous in its planning and execution. President Barack Obama made the call to carry out the raid and his decision was vindicated in spades.

Having said that, the messiness since then has taken much of the sheen off this success, temporarily at least. Here’s a summary of what went wrong once the most difficult bit had been achieved:

1. It took nearly three days to decide not to release the photographs. I think there was a case for not releasing the pictures, though on balance I think disclosure would have been best. But whichever way Obama went on this, the decision should have been made quickly, on Monday. By letting the world and his dog debate the issue for so long and then say no made the administration look indecisive and appear that it had something to hide. It will fuel the conspiracy theories. And the pictures will surely be leaked anyway.

2. To say that bin Laden was armed and hiding behind a wife being used as a human shield was an unforgiveable embellishment. The way it was expressed by John Brennan was to mock bin Laden as being unmanly and cowardly. It turned out to be incorrect and gave fuel, again, to conspiracy theories as well as accusations of cover-ups and illegality. Of all the mistakes of the week, this was by far the biggest.

3. It was a kill mission and no one should have been afraid to admit that. Bin Laden was a dead man as soon as the SEAL Team landed. There’s nothing wrong with that but the Obama administration should have been honest about it rather than spinning tales about bin Laden having a gun, reaching for a gun (the latest) and resisting (without saying how he resisted).

4. Too much information was released, too quickly and a lot of it was wrong. When it made the administration look good, the information flowed freely. When the tide turned, Jay Carney, Obama’s spokesman, clammed up completely. I’m a journalist; I like it when people talk about things. But from the administration’s perspective, it would have been much better to have given a very sparse, accurate description of what happened without going into too much detail, especially about the intelligence that led to the compound (an account which is necessarily suspect).

5. Obama tried to claim too much credit. Don’t get me wrong, he was entitled to a lot of credit. but sometimes less is more and it’s better to let facts speak for themselves. We didn’t need official after official to say how “gutsy” Obama was. Far better to have heaped praise on the CIA and SEALs (which, to be fair, was done most of the time) and talked less about Obama’s decision-making. And a nod to President George W. Bush would have been classy – and good politics for Obama.

6. Proof of death was needed. The whole point of the SEAL operation, rather than a B2 bombing that levelled the compound, was to achieve certainty. The administration has DNA evidence, facial recognition evidence and photographic evidence. Some combination of that evidence should have been collated and released swiftly. It’s not enough to say, effectively, “Trust me, I’m Obama” – especially given all the misinformation that was put out.

7. The mission should have been a ‘capture’ one. Notwithstanding 3. above and the legitimacy of killing bin Laden, I think a capture of bin Laden was probably possible and, in the long term, would have been better – not least because of the intelligence that could have been gleaned from interrogating him and the couriers. My hunch is that Obama didn’t want him alive because there would have been uncomfortable issues to address like whether he should be tried, where he should be held (it would have been Guantanamo – obviously) and the techniques for questioning him.

8. Obama’s rhetoric lurched from jingoistic to moralistic. During the initial announcement, Obama said that by killing bin Laden “we are once again reminded that America can do whatever we set our mind to”. If Bush had said that, he would have been mocked and laughed at, with some justification. But by today Obama was all preachy and holier than thou saying: “It is important for us to make sure that very graphic photos of somebody who was shot in the head are not floating around as an incitement to additional violence or as a propaganda tool.  That’s not who we are.  We don’t trot out this stuff as trophies.”

9. Triggering a torture debate was an avoidable own goal. Following on from 3. by discussing the intelligence, the administration walked into the issue of whether enhanced interrogation techniques yielded important information. That was certainly something they could have done without. Politically, it gave something for Republicans to use against Obama.

10. The muddle over Pakistan. Everyone I talk to with knowledge of these things tells me that Pakistan had to have given the green light for the raid in some form. But the Pakistanis, for good reasons, would not want this made public. Rather than say it would not comment on whether Pakistan had harboured bin Laden or was playing a double game, the White House poured petrol on the flames by encouraging criticism of Pakistan. That might have been deserved, but in terms of managing the region it was impolitic. The Pakistanis are clearly riled and the contradictions between the US and Pakistani accounts, again, fuel the conspiracy theories.

All this has meant that this week’s media story has become one about Obama and the White House more than one about the SEALs, the CIA and what killing bin Laden means. That’s exactly the wrong way round.

It’s not enough to say that Obama arrogantly and falsely took too much credit, or even that Obama didn’t give Bush and the programs Bush developed enough credit: Obama personally demonized programs that were essential to finally getting Osama bin Laden, and even launched a vendetta to destroy the professionals who gave us the vital information via his attorney general.

Waterboarding and “enhanced interrogation” were absolutely vital to nailing bin Laden.  Even the career Democrat who was Barack Obama’s handpicked man to run the CIA openly acknowledged that:

Asked by NBC-TV’s Brian Williams about the information obtained from detainees that led to the bin Laden takedown, Panetta replied:  ‘We had multiple series of sources that provided information with regards to this situation.  … Clearly some of it came from detainees [and] they used these enhanced interrogation techniques against some of those detainees.”

When Williams asked whether “waterboarding” was one of those techniques, Panetta replied:  “That’s correct.”

General Michael Hayden, the career intelligence professional who had directed the CIA prior to Leon Panetta, speaking about the CIA program Obama terminated on his second day as president, had this to say:

Michael Hayden said there is no question the CIA program including waterboarding laid the foundation for bin Laden’s capture.

MICHAEL HAYDEN, FMR CIA DIRECTOR ON FOX NEWS RADIO (via telephone): That database was kind of like the home depot of intelligence analysis. You know, it was incredibly detailed stuff.

HERRIDGE: As for its role in identifying this compound in Pakistan —

HAYDEN: It would be very difficult for me to conceive of an operation like the one that took place on Sunday that did not include in its preparation information that came out of the CIA detention program.

It is a well-documented fact, confirmed by both the Republican- and Democrat-appointed Directors of Central Intelligence, that waterboarding led to the breakthrough that finally resulted in nailing Osama bin Laden.

Barack Obama wants to demonize the people and procedures that led to Osama bin Laden’s killing even as he takes credit for what could not possibly have happened without the people and procedures that he demonized.  It is a disgrace.

And Obama is STILL continuing to persecute the CIA professionals who got us the intelligence that got bin Laden via his attorney general attack dog.  He won’t even so much as talk to Holder about his rabid attack dog’s rabid determination to criminalize the professionals whose work led to the result Obama is taking credit for.  And that makes Obama a disgrace.

Then there’s the fact that so many of the events surrounding Barack Obama were staged propaganda.

Of the famous photo supposedly showing Obama and his national security team monitoring and directing the SEAL Team that got Osama bin Laden, we now know that:

Leon Panetta, director of the CIA, revealed there was a 25 minute blackout during which the live feed from cameras mounted on the helmets of the US special forces was cut off.

A photograph released by the White House appeared to show the President and his aides in the situation room watching the action as it unfolded. In fact they had little knowledge of what was happening in the compound.

In an interview with PBS, Mr Panetta said: “Once those teams went into the compound I can tell you that there was a time period of almost 20 or 25 minutes where we really didn’t know just exactly what was going on. And there were some very tense moments as we were waiting for information.

“We had some observation of the approach there, but we did not have direct flow of information as to the actual conduct of the operation itself as they were going through the compound.”

Which is to say that much of the hubub of Obama as commanding figure was simply staged.  It wasn’t real.

Nor were the photos of Obama’s speech announcing that Osama bin Laden had been killed.

And while a liberal might argue that what Obama did has been done before, my response is that there are times when you’ve got to be real and not propaganda, and this was clearly one of those times.

In light of what George Bush did to create programs, build special operations capabilities capable of performing the Pakistan mission that got bin Laden, and even what Barack Obama said during his campaign for president, the decision to capture or kill Osama bin Laden was a no-brainer.

I mean, just imagine the fecal matter that would have struck the rotary oscillator had it emerged that Barack Obama had known for at least six months where Osama bin Laden was – and refused to get him????

That said, the man acted brainless before the decision to get Osama bin Laden, and he’s clearly returned to his brainless form since.

If Sheriff Dupnik Knew There Was A ‘Climate Of Hate,’ WHY Didn’t He Guard Gabrielle Giffords???

This was a question that Bill O’Reilly asked on his Friday night program.  And it seems rather impossible for a liberal to answer.

Sheriff Clarence Dupnik (and if that doesn’t sound like the name of an abject idiot, I don’t know what does) has been so busy being a liberal ideologue Democrat he really hasn’t had time to be an actual law enforcement officer.

If he were acting like a sheriff, he would be trying to calm and reassure the people, and limit himself to describing the facts.

Instead, he’s doing the precise opposite of what any legitimate sheriff would do: he’s doing everything he can to stir up paranoia and invent fact-free theories.

In a way, Clarence Dupnik and Jared Loughner deserve each other.  Both believe that someone else controls other people’s minds; Loughner believes it’s the government doing it (the same government that pulled off the 9/11 attack on its own citizens), and Dupnik believes its Rush Limbaugh:

“The kind of rhetoric that flows from people like Rush Limbaugh, in my judgment he is irresponsible, uses partial information, sometimes wrong information,” Pima County Sheriff Clarence Dupnik said today. “[Limbaugh] attacks people, angers them against government, angers them against elected officials and that kind of behavior in my opinion is not without consequences.”

Frankly, I think as absolutely nuts as Loughner is, his theory is actually far more sane than Dupnik’s.  After all, not only is Obama constantly lecturing the nation, but he has access to our water supply.  Rush can talk to people for three hours a day, but he can’t insinuate mind-controlling chemicals into our porridge like Obama can.

But let’s put the fact that Dupnik’s ideas are absolutely warped to go along with being absolutely irresponsible.  Let’s take Dupnik’s garbage at face value for just a moment.  Let’s suppose that Dupnik genuinely believed that right wing hate had truly created a hostile climate.

Dupnik has told any reporter who would put him on television that, in spite of not having a single solitary shred of evidence (something which non-Democrat sheriff’s actually care about), he knows that right wing rhetoric has heated up the environment and created a hateful climate.

So here’s the question: knowing this, knowing that there was a conservative-caused poisonous environment creating a clear and present danger, why didn’t this incompetent disgrace put a protective detail on Gabrielle Giffords? By his own acknowledgment, this incompetent moron (and did I mention he’s a Democrat?) knew that she was in danger, and refused to lift a finger to protect her.

If Dupnik had a deputy at Giffords’ event – as he should have, given what he “knew” – most or even ALL of the carnage would have been stopped.  And yet this buffoon who had it in his power to prevent this terrible tragedy has been doing nothing but blaming conservatives who had absolutely nothing to do with what happened.

He should be sharing Jared Loughner’s cell, comparing notes with his companion as to how Rush, or the government, or space aliens, or whatever is controlling people’s minds.

Don’t be a Dupnik.

Truth Among Murder Victims As Left Tries To Make Jared Loughner A Republican

Pilate therefore said to Him, “So You are a king?” Jesus answered, “You say correctly that I am a king. For this I have been born, and for this I have come into the world, to bear witness to the truth. Everyone who is of the truth hears My voice.”  Pilate said to Him, “What is truth?” – John 18:37-38

Well, one thing’s for sure: the truth sure isn’t what the Democrat rhetoric is spouting in the aftermath of the Tucson, AZ shooting that resulted in the wounding of Rep. Gabrielle Giffords among 19 shooting victims, with six killed.

I was amazed to see the thousands of hits an old article I wrote had recently generated.  The reason?  Democrats who had demonized Sarah Palin for her “targeting strategy” – which Democrats themselves routinely do – are now demonizing her again because one of the vulnerable districts Palin identified well over a year ago was Rep. Gabrielle Giffords’ District 8.

As Democrats galore shrilly and viciously attack Sarah Palin for her “targeting,” what is conveniently ignored is that liberals not only targeted Gabrielle Giffords for defeat, but literally said “she’s dead.”

But “what is truth?” for these people?  An inconvenient obstacle to be overcome, at most.

I was also amazed that the White House literally used Fox News to pass off clear and demonstrable lies associating a conservative organization with Jared Loughner.

Incredibly, the Pima Country sheriff – elected as a Democrat – without a single shred of supporting evidence, has repeatedly denounced conservatives as being somehow to blame for the shootings in blatantly partisan and irresponsible manner.

“What is truth?”  Don’t ask Democrat Sheriff Clarence Dupnik.

And then there are the “Jared Loughner Facebook accounts” which “have all right wing books, websites, and people that he points to.”  Just more false flag operations by Democrats to falsely associate conservatives with the psycho assassin.

This crap just never ends. It doesn’t matter to these lying propagandists one iota that if anything, Jared Loughner was a liberal, rather than any kind of conservative.

Here’s yet another depraved Democrat attempt to deceive:

Loughner “Republican” Voter Registration faked. Three points that demonstrate that.
Posted on 01/10/2011 6:14:13 AM PST by Lazamataz

This document is circulating, purportedly showing Jared Loughner is a registered Republican.

There are two reasons why the document is faked, and one official proclamation that undermines it:

• TUCSON is spelled TUSCON. People who live in a city do not mispell it’s name.

• If you go to the Arizona Independent Redistricting Commission website and put in the address listed on this “registration” it comes up in Senator District 26. This fraud voter reg says District 27. (Hat tip, Brytani)

• Chris Roads, Pima County Registrar of Voters, declares that Jared Loughner is registered as an independent. First registered in 2006. http://azstarnet.com/news/local/crime/article_78272a23-fe75-5bee-ba38-f8171cda3fb7.html

A blatantly partisan ideologue Newsweek “journalist” isn’t one bit disappointed in the sea of lies that characterize the Democrat response to this tragedy.  Far from it:

“You never want a serious crisis to go to waste,” Rahm Emanuel famously said in 2008. The same goes for a shooting spree that gravely wounds a beloved congresswoman. Congress won’t enact gun control, as it did in the wake of the assassinations of Martin Luther King and Robert F. Kennedy in 1968, but perhaps something positive can come from this.

This little Joseph Goebbels minion basically wants Barack Obama to deliver a “State of the Reich” Address and demagogue this tragic shooting into a demand to round up all the conservatives and put them in camps.

The strategy that the little Newsweek rodent recommends has been successfully tried in the past – by one Adolf Hitler.  Let us hope that the “new bipartisan Obama” (although there is this caveat) is now getting his advice from more humans and fewer rodents.

Democrats and their media lackeys are decrying the “angry” or “hateful” rhetoric which caused this shooting en masse.  And, of course, they mean “conservative” and “Republican” “angry” or “hateful” rhetoric.

But why would anyone think that?  Apart from the fact that they are ideologues and propagandists, I mean?  There’s no evidence whatsoever that Jared Loughner EVER listened to “right wing talk radio,” or supported Sarah Palin, or was a member of the tea party, or even cared about charged political issues such as health care.  The evidence is, rather, that he was severely mentally sick and living in his own twisted world.

They make the prima facia claim (with little or no supporting argument) that the angry partisan political climate can set off the mentally unbalanced.  Which is itself a mentally unbalanced claim to make.

A few things, there.  First, if this is so, and they really believe that, then how do they justify the eight incredibly angry years of “Bush derangement syndrome”?  Why was it not true when Republicans were in power, but not true now that Democrats are in power?  The mainstream media is far too pathologically biased and dishonest to show you that the WORST “climate of hate” comes from the left.

Second, why do Democrats, if they really believe their own crap, continue to make such bitter and polarizing comments if such comments can push the already unhinged over the edge?  Take our liberal propagandist “sheriff, for instance:

“When you look at unbalanced people, how they respond to the vitriol that comes out of certain mouths about tearing down the government — the anger, the hatred, the bigotry that goes on in this country, is getting to be outrageous,” Dupnik said Sunday.

It’s clear who the sheriff has in mind. As he told Fox News’ Megyn Kelly: “We see one party trying to block the attempts of another party to make this a better country. … We as a country need to look into our souls and into our hearts and say is what we’re doing really in the best interest of this country, or is there something better we can do.”

Got that? The shooting was motivated by the rhetoric of “one party” — the Republicans — trying to stop the Democrats from making this “a better country.” Talk about “hate speech.”

Let me ask you, just for the sake of argument.  Suppose that there is some crazed liberal out there in the wings.  And said crazed liberal hears his law enforcement say, “We see [the Republican] Party trying to block the attempts of [the Democrat] Party to make this a better country.”  And, of course, he’s aghast.  What can be done to stop this evil Republican Party from keeping the Democrats from finally making this “a better country”???

Something must be done.  Someone must act.  By any means necessary.  Including – maybe even embracing – violence.

How does this not follow on their own rhetoric???

Didn’t Obama command, “If they bring a knife to the fight, we bring a gun”?

The president beamed his command into my brain to bring a gun to the Republican congressman’s meet-and-greet.

Didn’t Obama command, “I want you to argue with them and get in their face.”?

“Yes!  YES!  Get in their face.  With a gun!  And then pull the trigger!”

Didn’t Obama tell his followers to “punish our enemies”?  With said “enemies” being Republicans?

“My client says he had to punish those Republican congressmen.  He says the president commanded him to kill those congressmen.”

Now, to set the record straight, having pointed out just a few of Obama’s comments, I don’t think Obama was calling for violence.  Because, apparently unlike Democrats, I possess the moral intelligence to understand that he was using the same sort of common metaphors as Sarah Palin has when she has said, “Don’t retreat, reload.”  And, on the flip side, I realize that if Sarah Palin is a disgrace, then the president of the United States is far more so, given the very office from which he has said these things.

A reasonable person can’t help but be confused at the constant double-standard that comes from Democrats.  If this kind of rhetoric is wrong, if it leads to violence, then why do they keep doing it themselves???  And why do they denounce Republicans even while they themselves are doing the very thing they say is evil to do???  And how do their skulls not explode from containing all the contradictions???

Let me offer something that happened to me a couple of years ago to show how political rhetoric – whether “angry” or “hateful” or not – has little if anything to do with setting off an unhinged mind.

A very sweet lady in my church asked several of her friends to help her with a big garage sale she wanted to have.  Being a sweet lady, she asked the police if it was okay to put out signs around town notifying drivers of her yard sale.  Which most people just do.  And, being a sweet lady, when the police told her people weren’t supposed to put out such signage, she didn’t do it.  Which meant that her yard sale – with all the effort that went into it – was twisting in the wind.

So I made a nice, big sign that said “Yard Sale” along with the address, drove to the main drag in town, and waved that darned thing around to first the northbound traffic, then the southbound traffic, and so on and so forth.  And when I came back a couple hours later, I was assured that my incredibly soul-numbing boredom had not been in vain: a lot of people suddenly started showing up.

I love sweet little old ladies.  And don’t you dare mess with one while I’m anywhere nearby, if you like your teeth.

Well, all that was to bring up something that happened while I was holding that sign that merely said “YARD SALE” with a house address.  A woman walking on the sidewalk came up to me, took a look at the sign, and screamed, “Yard Sale!  YARD SALE!”  And just went off on me in an uncontrollable rant for two or three minutes.

I never said a single word to her.  There was no point.  She was clearly not in her right mind, and there’s no point trying to argue with or reason with deranged people.

And the point is, anything can set these people off.  Absolutely anything.  Even the words “Yard Sale” on a cardboard sign, accompanied by the probably wide-eyes of a helpless man staring into the bulging eyeballs of the insane.

It’s not a matter of “avoid the anger.”  Avoid everything.  Shut down the economy.  Close the stores.  Stay in your homes.  Shut off all the television and radio stations.  Make tinfoil hats.  Because even your very thoughtwaves can set these people off.

So this notion that Republicans and conservatives must “tone down the hate” – while of course Democrats may continue to feel free to unleash hell – is so paranoid and so unhinged that I can’t help but watch these Democrats and these reporters and see the face of that whacked-out woman going off on me about my yard sale sign.

Sheriff Dupnik saying that what people hear on the radio and on television makes them do the things they do could well come right out of the brain of Jared Loughner, who merely replaces “radio and television” with “government.”  It’s equally insane.

I can easily picture the “sheriff,” and liberals like Chris Matthews, Keith Olbermann and Rachel Maddow cringing in lead-lined bunkers hoping that their tinfoil hats are thick enough to prevent Sarah Palin – who already lives rent-free in their heads – from taking over that final molecule and forcing them to do her evil bidding.

That’s basically the message of the left right now: “Put on your tinfoil hats, people!  Because your all in danger of having your minds commandeered by rightwing hate!”

And, at risk of boring you, that was precisely what Jared Loughner’s disturbed and paranoid brain feared: mind control.

This Jared Loughner guy wasn’t livid over ObamaCare or the stimulus or anything based in reality; he was frothing at the mouth over the government being behind the 9/11 attack on the World Trade Center, he was furious over the government taking over our brains by controlling grammar, he was enthralled with his bizarre dreams, that sort of thing.  He was as disconnected from politics as he was from the rest of reality.  Loughner once confronted Rep. Giffords with a question that made no sense.  And when she basically ignored it, his warped mind apparently fixated on her.

To make the Democrats’ despicable argument all the more so, based on their view, you could reasonably blame Gabrielle Giffords for the shooting.  Jared Loughner was listening to her, and she clearly didn’t say the right thing – which incited him to violence.

Every single journalist and every single politician who demands that people – and particularly conservative people – tone down their political views should be immediately discredited as nothing more than despicable ideological hacks.

What we are seeing is the murder of seven victims.  Not just six.  The seventh is truth, which is now being contorted and ripped beyond the breaking point for the sake of partisan political ideology.

And I’ll end by saying this: the record of history could not be more clear: the worse monsters in political history have without fail been those who have demanded that their opponents be silent.  The last thing we should ever want to follow is the political rationale that says, “You never want a serious crisis to go to waste.”

On The So-Called Link Between ‘Rightwing’ Political Rhetoric And Violence

See my previous article, “On the Malicious Connection Between Conservatives And Hate.”

Having documented that the left’s demonization of conservative “rhetoric” was nothing more than a hypocritical and immoral attempt to politically exploit a tragedy, I would like to go a little further and examine whether the 1st Amendment right to freedom of speech should be denounced – as the Democrats have clearly tried to do in the aftermath of the Tucson shooting.

Should angry political rhetoric be suppressed?  Our founding fathers clearly didn’t think so.  And, truth be told, they freely let a fair amount of “rhetoric” fly themselves, during their day.  Furthermore, they codified that belief in the Bill of Rights.

But that isn’t the question I intend to examine.  Rather, I want to go further and ask, “Does angry political speech – call it ‘rhetoric’ if you want – lead to violence in a democracy?”

Let me repeat what I wrote when I first learned of this tragedy on Saturday, January 8:

Whoever did this terrible thing, and for whatever reason he did it, we have to be able to disagree in America without resorting to violence.  Or our entire system of government will collapse.  There can be no democratic republic in a police state.

Pray for Gabrielle Giffords.  Pray for her staff, some of whom were terribly wounded or even killed.  Pray for the safety of every single politician in America.  And especially pray for the safety of those politicians with whom you most disagree.

And later in that same article:

This event is something that should transcend the political arguments and the debate over which party should run America that constantly goes on.  Because ANY act of violence which accompanies a political statement of any kind undermines our freedom and liberty.

Because, like I said above, you cannot have a democratic republic in a police state.  And the more politically violent any group or individuals become, the more police powers become necessary to impose order.

All that to point out that I, as someone who can easily be identified by the pejorative “right winger,” would in fact NEVER call for acts of violence.  And I do not oppose political violence in spite of the fact that I am a conservative, but rather BECAUSE I am a conservative.

The fundamental tenant of political conservatism is the belief in limited government.  Conservatives are not “anti-government” any more than are leftists.  The far-leftist communists overthrew the current government in Russia in 1917; American liberals were opposed to the government of the Bush administration just a short time ago.  Conservatives don’t want NO government, but rather they want a federal government which is limited in size, sphere and power.  The debate isn’t between “pro-government” versus “anti-government,” but rather small government versus expansive government.  And my point is that as a conservative I don’t want a Big Brother state.  I don’t want the police on every corner.  I don’t want myriad laws restricting my freedoms.  I don’t want government imposing its will on me in order to “restore order” or impose “social justice.”  And frankly, if any political ideology in this country wants those things, it is the left.

I would further point out that the reason we do not need to resort to violence in our American democratic system is because we have the ability to use persuasion in place of and instead of violence.  But if you take away the ability to use persuasion to change society, all that is left is violence.

For the record, it is not conservatives, but liberals such as former SEIU president Andy Stern (among many others) – who have repeatedly said things like, “If we can’t use the power of persuasion, we will use the persuasion of power” – who have an unfortunate record of conflating persuasion with the raw exercise of “power.”

But let me go even further than that.  Let me take the most visceral political issue of all – abortion – and examine that issue in light of the possibility of rightwing violence.

Let me state my position on abortion clearly: it is nothing short of murder.  It is the unjustified killing of an innocent human being.

When President Obama gave his speech at the memorial service in Tucson, which shooting victim did he single out for the greatest attention?  It wasn’t Rep. Gabrielle Giffords; it was the youngest victim, nine year-old Christina Taylor.  What did Obama say?  “I want America to be as good as she imagined it.”

For someone who is pro-life, it is no surprise that the president would have focused on the youngest victim.  Because 9 year-old Christina had so much unrealized potential, so many dreams that would never be fulfilled, so much life that was taken away from her.  And it is precisely that deprivation of potential that makes her death so much more tragic and heart-wrenching than the 79 year-old victim – whose murder was obviously also a tragedy.

Allow me to consider the fifty-three MILLION innocent human beings who likewise should have had their entire lives ahead of them but instead had their lives violently and ruthlessly snuffed out.  Entire lifetimes of limitless human potential were ripped and dissolved away with surgical scissors and saline solutions.

Let me say even more: Adolf Hitler treated six million Jews as being “less than human” and ruthlessly exterminated them.  One of the greatest monsters in human history, and he is only one-NINTH as murderous as the Democrat Party in the United States of America.  There’s a term the Nazis used – Lebensunwertes Leben (“a life unworthy to be lived”) – that with all due respect is every bit as much an ideology of the Democrat Party as it was of the Nazi Party.

I think of Democrats who call themselves “Christians” celebrating Mary the Mother of Jesus’ “right to choose” to kill “the Lamb of God, who takes away the sin of the world” (John 1:29) in her womb, and I want to puke.  Your theology would murder Jesus in His mother’s womb; your “god” is abortion.

And I believe that one day Democrats will stand before a just and holy God, Who will send them to burn in hell for voting in election after election for untold millions of the most innocent of all human beings to be slaughtered for the sake of convenience.

I agree.  These are pretty strong words.  And yeah, they’re harsh.  Truth isn’t always warm and fuzzy.

And yet I’ve never killed anyone, or ever even once advocated the killing of anyone, who was pro-abortion.

Do you want to know why?

I earlier mentioned Adolf Hitler.  Let me return to him now for a thought experiment that will help me make my point.

Suppose that I could go back in time and assassinate Adolf Hitler.  Would I do it?

Well, first let me ask, would you do it?  Take a moment and think about it before reading any further.

My answer is yes, I believe I would do so.  I believe that I would kill Adolf Hitler.  Not for sake of revenge; but for the sake of all living things.  I would kill Adolf Hitler to save millions of human lives and prevent human misery and suffering beyond imagination.

Ah, you say.  So why not apply that reasoning to abortion doctors, and prevent the murders of untold babies?  Wouldn’t that be consistent?

And I would answer no, it isn’t.  Because in the case of Adolf Hitler, we have the benefit of 100%, 20/2o hindsight.  We have the record of Hitler’s entire life.  We know what he did, and we know what he intended to continue to do.

Now consider abortion doctor George Tiller, aka “Tiller the baby killer.”  He was murdered – in a church, no less – by someone who said that “preborn children’s lives were in imminent danger.”  And yet it is important to recognize that the pro-life movement immediately denounced the murder.

Let me tell you what I don’t know about George Tiller’s life that I did know about Adolf Hitler’s life.

Just like every single one of those fifty-three million innocent human beings who were murdered in abortion mills, I don’t know what George Tiller’s future would have been.

Would George Tiller have changed his beliefs on abortion if he hadn’t been murdered?  It certainly isn’t impossible that he would have.  Take the case of former head abortion nurse and former active member of N.O.W. Joan Appleton.

What would have happened if had I killed Joan Appleton while she was still performing abortions?

Think of the potential for good that she has since done with her life that would have been snuffed out.

And, neither I or the murderer of George Tiller or anyone else knows what would have happened in George Tiller’s life had he not been murdered.  Imagine the testimony that the world could have heard had the most notorious abortion doctor in the country come out condemning abortion.

In point of fact, the man who murdered George Tiller in his moral ignorance committed the very same crime that abortionists commit which makes abortion so evil; he failed to consider the very essence of what he professed to stand for.

In effect, George Tiller’s murderer committed a retroactive abortion.  He put aside Tiller’s humanity, personhood and Imago Dei; he dismissed Tiller’s “right to life”; he ignored Tiller’s “potential.”  And he killed him.

Paradoxially, all the murderer of George Tiller did – condemned as he was by the pro-abortion movement – was use the exact same mindset that the abortion movement employs every single day.

I point out in a previous article:

And there really is no doubt, once we truly consider the issues. Ever hear the argument that fetuses aren’t human beings, so it’s okay to kill them? Think again. Both science and logic assure us that – from the moment of conception – that thing in the womb of a human mother is fully a human being. Take a moment and consider the taxonomic system by which every living thing is rigorously categorized and classified. By that system a human embryo is of the kingdom Anamalia, of the phylum Chordata, of the class Mammalia, of the order Primate, of the family Pongidae, of the genus Homo, and of the species Sapiens – same as any other human being. Put even more simply, that embryo is a human by virtue of its parents, and a being by the fact that it is a living thing: it is a human being.

I’ve heard the Nazi argument that Jews weren’t human beings.  I’ve heard the argument that unborn babies aren’t human beings.  Wrong, and wrong.

I’ve heard the declaration that conservatives such as Dick Cheney and Michelle Bauchmann don’t deserve to live.  I’ve heard the declaration that babies growing up in their mothers’ wombs don’t deserve to live.  Wrong, and wrong.

So, yes, I will be a voice crying out in the wilderness about the vicious evil of abortion.  I will cry out in despair about the tragedy of millions upon millions of little Christina Taylors who were eradicated as if they were diseases before they got any chance to live out the potential that they should have had.  But I won’t kill.  Because I believe in human life.

Governments have what St. Paul described as the power of the sword to carry out justice (see Romans 13:1-4).  But I, acting on my own authority, don’t have the right of either vengeance or vigilantism.  Because vengeance is not mine; and because justice for criminals is not mine to carry out.  It is for God and for the governments which He has ordained on this earth to carry out those tasks.

Let me now also say that there is no connection in a healthy mind, in a healthy society, between rhetoric and violence.  None whatsoever.

And what of an unhealthy mind?

I made the point in a previous article that I once had a mentally ill woman literally come unglued on me as I held a sign that merely said, “YARD SALE.”  And I concluded then what I point out here: that if we’re going to ban or condemn “angry political rhetoric” for its possible effects upon sick minds, we’re going to have to condemn far more than just political speech.  Because literally anything can set off a sick mind.  Even a yard sale becomes dangerous.

If we banish everything that could set off a diseased mind, we necessarily must become the Big Brother totalitarian state which I earlier described fearing.  Because what couldn’t set off such a mind, which would then mean what sphere of life would the government not need to control?

I believe that I have explained why a consistent conservative would never employ violence to advance a political cause.  I also believe I have done so by employing a worldview and an argument that Democrats not only don’t acknowledge, but frankly don’t even understand.

Which is why it is the political left – and not the political right – which has been responsible for the overwhelming majority of global political violence.  Whether it be Marxist or Maoist communist socialist violence or Nazi fascist socialist violence, whether it be union violence, or whether it be radical group violence (in the 1960s the FBI nearly exclusively identified leftwing groups as being violent even throughout Democrat administrations).  The political hatred and violence that we have seen has almost invariably been leftwing.

[For those who would like to see more regarding the relationship between Nazism and the political left, see my article on the connection between leftist thought and fascism; please see my comment on the connection between “fascism” and American liberalism, and see my articles on the connection between postmodernism and fascism here and see also here, especially before you post a comment trying to argue with me].

So it is long past time for liberals to stop denouncing conservatives and finally turn their examination upon themselves.

Articulate Incompetent Obama Leads Nation To Great Depression Unemployment Levels

Robert Blagojevich – the brother of Democrat Governor Blagojevich – labeled Jesse Jackson Jr. as an “articulate incompetent” (actually a “f-ing articulate incompetent”).  That label couldn’t suit Barry Hussein better.

Barack Obama is a complete failure.  He’s an utter disgrace.  But he’s an articulate failure and utter disgrace.  Which means he’s always smooth-talking, always using disingenuous and dishonest rhetoric to conceal or camouflage his failure.

As an example, Obama is out on the stump saying:

“And I do want to point out, when you get in your car, when you go forward, what do you do? You put it in ‘D.’ When you want to go back, what do you do? (Laughter.) You put it in ‘R.’  We won’t  want to go into reverse back in the ditch. We want to go forwards. We got to put it in ‘D.’ (Applause.) Can’t have the keys back.” (Laughter.)

That’s quite rhetorically clever.  It’s so articulate.  It’s also substantially utterly meaningless.

Putting facts to the rhetoric doesn’t look so good for Obama.  George Bush “handed Obama the keys” with unemployment two full points lower and with the deficit trillions of dollars lower.  Would I rather have Obama’s 9.5% unemployment – which as bad as it is is artificially low because of all the people who’ve dropped out of the job market, and which is now forecasted to up to 10% and remain there next year – or would I rather put the car in ‘R’ and go back to Bush’s worst unemployment rate of 7.6%?

We’re going to have a double dip recession – and which president is responsible for that second giant scoop of pain which will occur ENTIRELY on Obama’s watch?  Goldman analyst Jan Hatzius and his team just lowered their GDP forecast for 2011 from 2.5% to a dismally pathetic 1.9%, increased their unemployment forecast from 9.8% to 10.0%, boosted their inflation expectation from 0.4% to 1.0%, and said that the rather frightening Fed scenario known as “QE lite” is now on the table.

Specifically, the Goldman analysis says:

“As a result of this downgrade, we now expect the jobless rate to rise to 10% by early 2011 and remain there for the rest of the year.”

Does that make you want to put the car in ‘D,’ dumbass (which is another thing that ‘D’ stands for, for what it’s worth)?  We can see the cliff, but it’s full speed ahead with the turbochargers blazing.

In this case, “forward” leads to screaming-in-pain hell.

Obama says that Republicans don’t have “a single, solitary new idea” to help the American people recover from the economic recession.  Which takes a lot of chutzpah, given that Obama’s “new ideas” date back to 1848 and Karl Friggin Marx.  And the very newest “new ideas” of all date back to the colossal failure otherwise known as Jimmy Carter.  It’s not enough to say that Obama is throwing stones in a glass house; he’s using a machine gun to blast out every pane in the building.

Obama is quite “articulate” at fearmongering, race-baiting, slandering, demagoguing and demonizing his opponents.

But that kind of crap is all Obama’s got.  He’s incompetent at everything else.  As a matter of simple routine, we receive massively conflicting and contradictory messages from this White House.  On Wall Street.  On Afghanistan.  On health care.  On Iran.  On Everything.  Other than that, the first president of “God damn America!” is an utter disgrace.

So let’s look past the Obama rhetoric and look at the hard facts.

Losing is the New Winning

By: Larry Walker, Jr.

According to today’s Employment Status Report, the Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS) reveals that as of July 31, 2010 there were 857,000 fewer persons employed than there were in July of 2009. Yet from Barack’s glass bubble, it sounded like all is well. Sure, his chief economist, Christina Romer just resigned, but that’s no cause for concern. The latest from Obama is that ‘private employment has increased every month’ during 2010. Really? Does that mean there are more jobs today than there were yesterday?

Following is my latest presidential scorecard, based purely on official BLS data:

Obama was quick to take credit for the false increase in overall employment, earlier this year, when the U.S. Census Bureau hired 500,000 temporary workers, but now that they’re all gone he’s been slow to acknowledge the true situation. According to the BLS there were 139.8 million Americans employed in July of 2009, and 138.9 million employed in July of 2010. That’s a decline of 857,000 jobs over the past 12 month’s. There has actually been a steady, and progressive, decline in civilian employment for the past year, but you know, Obama doesn’t have time to look at facts and figures.

When G.W. Bush entered office in January of 2001, there were 136.8 million jobs. When he left office in December of 2008, there were 145.3 million jobs. When Obama entered office in January of 2009, there were 145.3 million jobs. As of July 31st of this year, there were 138.9 million jobs. So when we do the math, there are now 6.4 million fewer jobs than there were when Obama entered office in January of 2009. That’s reality. That’s what it feels like on the ground. Obama is losing, and losing big. And in his losing, he’s dragging America and the Democrat party along for the ride.

Is this what success looks like in the minds of progressive Democrats? Is losing the new winning? If so, Obama is certainly leading the pack. It’s time to throw the bum(s) out!

Just so you know that I’m not making this stuff up, here’s a snapshot of the latest BLS report:

Sources:

Bureau of Labor Statistics: Employment Situation 8/6/2010

Bureau of Labor Statistics: Historical Data

Related:

Obama on Jobs: Fool Me Thrice

Obama on Jobs: Worst Track Record in History

Recovery (dot) Fail Not Jobs

The labor force has never decreased since World War II – and it has now decreased for two years in a row under the worst failure in American history.

We have one chance, and only one chance, to avoid a Great Depression.  And that is to elect a Republican House of Representatives and a Republican Senate.

Bill Clinton gets all the credit for being the economic genius who gave us incredible economic growth by the mainstream media.  But if that’s so, why was he smacked down with the biggest political landslide in American history, when Republicans came from out of nowhere to retake both the House and the Senate in 1994?  And why was it that it was only AFTER the Republicans took control of Congress that we began to see the positive economic developments?

Read my article on the subject for why the credit for the “Clinton Economy” belongs with the Republicans in Congress.  It is Congress which enacts budgets, and it is Congress alone which has the authority to spend.

It is also Congress alone which can check a foolish, incompetent, and out-of-control president.

Obama Guilty Of Crimes Against Humanity

The left called George Bush a war criminal, a man who was guilty of crimes against humanity.

Pretty much every day of his presidency.

Of course, Barry Hussein is at war in absolutely every country that George Bush fought in.  But that’s different.  Because liberals are hypocrites and don’t really give much of a damn about facts.

So they were beyond frothing-at-the-mouth outrage at every opportunity when the President was a Republican.

Analysis: Press Largely Ignored Incendiary Rhetoric at Bush Protest
By Bill Sammon
Published August 12, 2009
FOXNews.com

News outlets that are focusing on the incendiary rhetoric of conservatives outside President Obama’s town hall meeting Tuesday ignored the incendiary rhetoric — and even violence — of liberals outside an appearance by former President George W. Bush in 2002.

When Bush visited Portland, Ore., for a fundraiser, protesters stalked his motorcade, assailed his limousine and stoned a car containing his advisers. Chanting “Bush is a terrorist!”, the demonstrators bullied passers-by, including gay softball players and a wheelchair-bound grandfather with multiple sclerosis.

One protester even brandished a sign that seemed to advocate Bush’s assassination. The man held a large photo of Bush that had been doctored to show a gun barrel pressed against his temple.

“BUSH: WANTED, DEAD OR ALIVE,” read the placard, which had an X over the word “ALIVE.”

Another poster showed Bush’s face with the words: “F— YOU, MOTHERF—ER!”

And exactly HOW MANY screaming-in-your-face protests have the left thrown at Zero?  Obama, that’s how many.  Or maybe it’s the other way around.

The mainstream media treated Cindy Sheehan like the incontrovertible voice of truth when Bush was president; now they just treat her like a demented shrew with Obama putting his feet up on the Oval Office desk.

Let us remember, and never ever forget:

So Bush was evil for fighting in Afghanistan and Iraq.  And Obama is only a little bit guilty for completely lying about getting us out, and not a bloodthirsty warmonger at all.  Even though Bush got us into a war that we could win, whereas Obama said Bush’s war that we could win was evil, and we needed to put all our eggs in Vietnam I mean Afghanistan instead.

Barack Obama is a month away from equaling the total number of American casualties that George Bush lost in his entire eight years of war in Afghanistan.  Obama is every bit as much of a warmonger as George Bush ever was.

But that’s only part of Obama’s crimes against humanity.

Barack Obama is also guilty of crimes against human beings being able to have a job.

Want an example?  Here you go:

SHOCK! Offshore Drilling Moratorium Would Cost United States 175,000 Jobs Per Year Through 2035
by Bob McCarty

During a 45-minute conference call with journalists from 40 major media outlets this morning, Jack Gerard shared some startling predictions about the future health of the nation’s oil and natural gas industry if the Obama Administration gets its way in adding more regulation and increasing taxes on offshore drilling in the Gulf of Mexico. The biggest one of all is enough to cause anyone to take pause:

“The administration’s moratorium, if continued indefinitely — or similar legislative proposals which would make the deep water unavailable or uneconomic — would cost this country 175,000 jobs every year between now and 2035, according to our latest analysis,” said Gerard, president of the American Petroleum Institute, a group representing some 400 oil and natural gas companies.

And that’s not all!

“The Gulf of Mexico accounts for 30 percent of our domestic oil production and 13 percent of natural gas,” Gerard explained. “The deepwater areas account for 80 percent of the Gulf’s oil production and 45 percent of its natural gas production. Twenty of the highest-producing leases are in the deep water.”

When one considers that the oil and natural gas industry, according to Gerard, supports 9.2 million workers and 7.5 percent of all U.S. gross domestic product, even a small percent of decline can have a tremendous impact on the economy.

According to an API-produced report released today, the economic impact of a complete shutdown of deepwater drilling would yield some awful results. For instance:

• Reduce direct and indirect employment in the oil & gas and its service industries by 93,000 jobs – every year through 2035;

• Reduce an additional 82,000 jobs every year through 2035 in non oil & gas related industries due to less income in the economy;

• Reduce annual GDP by over $20 billion per year or a cumulative impact of approximately $500 billion in the next 25 years;

• Reduce long-term U.S. oil production by 27 percent; and

• Increase long-term U.S. foreign oil imports by 19 percent.

And so we can add “crimes against employment” to “crimes against humanity.”

We need to grasp reality: Obama’s job killing policies kill jobs.  And the only thing Obama is stimulating is unemployment.

Let’s face facts: business leaders – you know, the people who actually know something about business – are out in force saying that Obama policies are ‘job-destroying.’

The Wall Street Journal views Obama’s policies as a manifesto for job destruction.

Barack Obama is destroying jobs.

By the Democrats’ own standards from their 2004 campaign rhetoric against George Bush, Barack Obama is the worst president in American history.

And the right to work is a basic human right, according to Franklin Delano Roosevelt:

“The inherent right to work is one of the elemental privileges of a free people. Continued failure to achieve that right and privilege by anyone who wants to work and needs work is a challenge to our civilization and to our security.”

I submit, therefore, that Barack Obama is guilty of crimes against humanity – and by the very standards that Democrats created.

New Jersey Teachers’ Unions Show They Like Communism More Than Common Sense

New Jersey Governor Chris Christie is showing he is even more fearless and determined to fulfill his promises than he is rotund.

Liberals – the demagogues and haters in this country – are relying on a vicious ad hominem campaign of hate over Christie’s weight because mean-spirited hate and ad hominem demagogic rhetoric is all they’ve got.

Big blunder cost New Jersey teachers years of goodwill
By Kevin Manahan
May 27, 2010, 5:05AM

My father spent nearly his entire career in public relations at AT&T, so he was always dispensing advice on how to handle personal crises, big and small. And when I would come home from my high school job of stocking shelves at King’s Supermarket, complaining about some ungracious customer, he would remind me:

“AT&T spends millions of dollars trying to shape the public’s opinion of us, but it takes only one rude telephone operator to flush all that money and ruin all of my hard work. The same thing could happen at King’s.”

His lesson was clear: One bad decision, one stupid miscalculation, can wreck years of good will.

Which brings us to the New Jersey Education Association.

In an astonishing fall from grace that has taken only months, teachers have gone from respected and beloved members of the community to some of the most reviled. In a blink, they have trashed years of good will.

Once the patient darlings who nurtured our kids, teachers now look like insensitive, out-of-touch, can’t-think-for-themselves union robots who, when forced to face economic realities, clung to an insulting sense of entitlement, heartlessly sacrificed the jobs of colleagues, called the governor naughty names and used students as political pawns.

All while blaming everyone else.

At Saturday’s rally in Trenton, teachers wondered when the Earth started spinning in the other direction.

“It’s like we woke up one morning and the world had changed,” said Linda Mirabelli, a music teacher in Livingston. “We were liked and respected, and now, overnight, people have turned against us.”

How did it happen? That’s easy: One bad decision, one stupid miscalculation: An overwhelming majority of teachers refused to accept a pay freeze. They could have won taxpayers’ eternal gratitude, but instead demanded their negotiated raises and fought against contributing a dime toward budget-breaking health insurance benefits. Teachers could have pitched in, but they dug in.

They thumbed their noses at taxpayers, who have lost their jobs, had their pay cut, gone bankrupt and fallen into foreclosure. As taxpayers made less, teachers demanded more. You do that, you become a villain. Fast. It doesn’t matter how many stars Junior gets on his book report.

Teachers listened to their overpaid brain trust, the architects of this disastrous public relations strategy. Together, NJEA president Barbara Keshishian, executive director Vincent Giordano and spokesman Steve Wollmer earn more than a million dollars. Keshishian, who has been outmaneuvered by the governor at every turn, earns $256,450 annually. Giordano, with salary and deferred compensation, earned $550,203 in 2009, and Wollmer makes $300,000.

Who says you get what you pay for? Union members are shelling out a lot of money for lousy representation. They should stage a coup. Instead they joined hands at Saturday’s You-And-Me-Against-The-World rally and tried to convince each other they’re doing the right thing.

To compound the troubles, the NJEA does something stupid almost every day. They insult the governor; teachers (and administrators) let kids walk out of class to protest cuts in aid; union members refuse to give up their seats to private-school students at a hearing in Trenton.

And now the NJEA is now running TV commercials, attacking Christie (again), this time using cops and firemen for cover, hoping the public still likes those guys. The firefighters union, realizing the teachers union is now toxic, says it never would have approved the commercial, but the NJEA never asked.

NJEA leadership should have seen the backlash coming. Tenure, raises, pensions, health care benefits and an aversion toward merit pay have irked taxpayers for years. The recession ignited that anger, and no last-gasp advertising blitz will change the perception of insensitive teachers who told taxpayers to eat chalk.

So, the question is: Was it worth it?

The average public school teacher makes $63,000, and the average raise this year was roughly 4 percent, so teachers traded $2,520 for these scars, which never will heal. And because Christie and taxpayers asked only for a one-year pay freeze, it’s money teachers could have recovered next year.

Imagine how differently teachers would be perceived today if they had agreed to a pay freeze and willingly offered a few bucks toward their health policies. They’d be heroes.

Heck, we would have staged a rally for them.

Kevin Manahan is a member of the Star-Ledger editorial board.

Want to hear how the public school teachers are responding to being asked to show some responsibility to a massive financial crisis that is threatening their state with bankruptcy?  Want to see how mature and tolerant they are?

Teachers Call Christie ‘Fat F**k,’ ‘A**hole’ On Facebook
GEOFF MULVIHILL | 04/19/10 09:43 PM

HADDONFIELD, N.J. — They’re the kind of obscenity-laced schoolyard taunts that could get a student suspended.

But the target of this tirade is New Jersey’s Gov. Chris Christie – and the perpetrators are the state’s teachers, irate over his calls for salary freezes and funding cuts for schools.

In Facebook messages visible to the world – not to mention their students – the teachers have called Christie fat, compared him to a genocidal dictator and wished he was dead. The postings are often riddled with bad grammar and misspellings.

“Never trust a fat f…,” read one profane post on the Facebook page, “New Jersey Teachers United Against Governor Chris Christie’s Pay Freeze,” which has some 69,000 fans, many of them teachers.

“How do you spell A– hole? C-H-R-I-S C-H-R-I-S-T-I-E,” read another.

The rhetoric has become ever more heated as residents of most of the state’s school districts get ready to vote Tuesday on property tax levies that support district budgets. And while many of the postings are emotional, most aren’t personal attacks.

Christie, a first-year Republican governor who inherited a state in dire financial straits, wants voters to reject the proposals in districts where educators won’t agree to salary freezes for the coming school year.

The acrimony intensified last month when Christie proposed cutting state and federal aid to districts by 11 percent, calling it a way to share sacrifice as the state tries to rein in spending.

That’s when the Facebook attacks really took off. […]

I’ve said it before, and I’ll say it again: these are the loathsome, dishonest hypocrites who have repeatedly attacked the tea party people as being hateful bigots.  When THEY’RE the hateful bigots.

How about praying for Governor Christie to die?

TRENTON, N.J. — A teacher union’s memo hinting that New Jersey’s governor should die has escalated a war of words in a state already squabbling about public schools and how much they cost.

The memo from the Bergen County Education Association to its locals reads in part: “Dear Lord this year you have taken away my favorite actor, Patrick Swayze, my favorite actress, Farrah Fawcett, my favorite singer, Michael Jackson, and my favorite salesman, Billy Mays. I just wanted to let you know that Chris Christie is my favorite governor.”

Christie doesn’t care.  He knows these people are vile, loathsome, and hateful, and that they are selfish, greedy, little Marxist commissars who demand that the system keep paying them top benefits in their cushy 180-day-a-year jobs even as the people reel from high taxes and unemployment.

Here’s Christie on video confronting a teacher.  It’s edited for mainline media news consumption, but Christie still manages to shine through:

I love that exchange.  Teacher: “Bitch bitch bitch, whine whine whine.”  Christie: “Then quit.”

Politico has a brief write-up of the encounter:

New Jersey GOP Gov. Chris Christie told a disgruntled teacher that if she doesn’t like the pay, she doesn’t “have to do it.”

Christie was speaking to a small crowd in a church gymnasium in Rutherford on Tuesday when the Bergen County Record caught the exchange between Kearny teacher Rita Wilson and the governor.

Wilson claimed that if she were getting paid only three dollars an hour for the 30 students she teaches, her salary would be $83,000 a year, a much higher sum than her current take.

“You’re getting more than that if you include the cost of your benefits,” Christie pointed out.

The teacher responded by saying that she has a master’s degree and that her current salary isn’t compensating her for the value of her higher education as well as her experience.

To that, the governor responded: “Well, you know then that you don’t have to do it.”

What doesn’t come out of this exchange is something that Chris Christie couldn’t have known: that Rutherford teacher Rita O’Neil Wilson actually makes $86,389 a year for her 180-day-a-year job, according to the records.  Like all liberals, she lied.  Like all liberals, she couldn’t even come up with an example that actually worked to attack the already-way-too-generous system.

Stop and think about this teacher’s demented, pathologically entitlement-minded demand for $3 an hour per student.  Where in the world does this “$3 an hour per child” mentality come from???  Say that she were teaching 15 students, and then started teaching thirty: did she actually double her work load?  Does she now spend twice the time preparing her lessons?  Of course not.  This woman is making $86,000 a year for a 180-day-a-year job.  And she thinks she should collect more because of some $3 an hour per kid figure some liberal loon pulled out of her butt?  I don’t think so.

But I’d take her up on her offer and have her teach just ONE kid at $3 an hour.  Because if you should get $3 an hour for thirty kids, you should get $4 an hour for one kid.  And that way she’d only get to destroy only one kid’s life through her socialist indoctrination.  Maybe after she left New Jersey could hire a less whiny and less self-centered teacher in her place, who would actually be delighted to teach children 180 days a year for over $86 grand.

Whether America crashes and burns into a failed socialist hellhole, or whether we’re able to pull ourselves up out of a mountain of debt, is up to whether people like union teachers or Chris Christie win the day.

Absence Of Values: Obama Targets American Citizen For Death Without Trial

There’s a phrase that Francis Schaeffer used: “feet firmly planted in mid-air.”  It aptly describes the plight of the secular humanist left.  Here’s a quote to familiarize yourself with the concept:

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.

From the New York Times:

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.

Left Attacks Michelle Bachmann For Inciting Violence; Obama Told Crowds To Bring Guns

The chutzpah of the Democrat Party and their mainstream media lackeys is alarming.

From CBS:

Rep. Michele Bachmann, a Republican from Minnesota, railed against the “gangster government” before thousands of Tea Party protesters on Thursday, but that kind of rhetoric can have serious consequences, former President Bill Clinton said Thursday.

“They are not gangsters,” Mr. Clinton said in an interview with the New York Times. “They were elected. They are not doing anything they were not elected to do.”

The former president, who was in his first term in office when Timothy McVeigh bombed an Oklahoma City federal building, drew parallels between the anti-government rhetoric being used now and what was being said then. He will speak about the Oklahoma City terrorist attack and its current relevance at a symposium today.

You’ll have to forgive me for being somewhat confused: Is Michelle Bachmann’s “gangster government” remark worse than Bill Clinton’s remark about Barack Obama that “he’s got the political instincts of a Chicago thug“???

You see, given the fact that Bill Clinton himself said that the country is being run by a Chicago thug, why would it be so surprising that we’ve got a gangster government?  I mean, Chicago thug + president = gangster government.  It’s like a math equation.

In any event, I’m just 100% certain that Slick Willy decried the hateful and violence-inducing rhetoric of Barack Obama:

Mobster wisdom tells us never to bring a knife to a gun fight. But what does political wisdom say about bringing a gun to a knife fight?

Sen. Barack Obama talks at a town hall meeting at Radnor Middle School in Wayne, Pa., Saturday, June 14. (AP)

That’s exactly what Barack Obama said he would do to counter Republican attacks “If they bring a knife to the fight, we bring a gun,” Obama said at a Philadelphia fundraiser Friday night.

And murder in Philadelphia is over three times the national average.

What’s that?  Bill Clinton DIDN’T decry Obama’s invocation of clearly violent metaphors?  He didn’t even say, “It depends on what the meaning of the word ‘bring’ is”?  But that would mean he’s just a cheap political opportunist, not to mention a demagogue.

Barack Obama implored his supporters to arm themselves with guns and shoot people who would only have knives.  He was inciting people to violence in a city that has a documented record of murderous violence.

Michelle Bachmann merely used a term to describe our government as thieves.  She didn’t advocate mowing them down with guns, as Obama did.

At least according to the “logic” of the left, he did.  Too bad they’re too dishonest to look at their own rhetoric before demonizing everybody else’s.

I’ll tell you what: let’s demand that Barack Obama and Michelle Bachmann both resign in disgrace for their hateful rhetoric.  Just don’t be a bunch of screaming hypocrite turds for decrying Michelle Bachmann unless you first yell yourself hoarse decrying Barack Obama.

Before this nonsense the Democrats and their media tools were out decrying Sarah Palin’s “targeting” Democrat seats.  It didn’t matter one iota that Sarah Palin didn’t used a “target” symbol, but rather a surveyor’s symbol; nor did it matter than Democrats used actual “target” symbols to “target” Republican seats.  Neither the Democrats nor the media are either honest or fair enough to concern themselves with such facts.

And where were either Bill Clinton or the mainstream media when the left was demonizing George Bush something fierce? Where were they when Democrat Rep. Maxine Waters got a crowd frothing mad? Where were they when that same crowd starting chanting, “FUCK THE USA!!!”??? Where were they when Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi told a screaming crowed, “I’m a fan of disruptors!”??? Why was it so okay during the Bush derangement years, but so terrible now?

Why was “dissent the highest form of patriotism” when dissent was directed against George Bush, but the most loathsome form of evil when it is directed at Barack Obama?

There was a time when ‘D’ stood for Democrat; today it stands for Demagogue, Dishonest, Deceitful, Despicable, and Depraved.