Best I've seen yet: Your Own Personal Jesus.Via Liberalguy
I coined the phrase Jesus Obamasattva last year, before the election. I knew he'd get elected, because Americans wanted a savior in a president. The Cult of the Presidency, Gene Healy has called it. It's a part of our national "dialogue" -- a disgrace in place of fortitude.
Darkness has descended upon our land. It has enveloped the heart, soul and minds of those who recognize and acknowledge purposeful, willful evil has been set upon us.
What are you doing America? How long will you continue to suffer this long train of abuses? What are you doing about it?
The time to act is now. Liberty and the exercise thereof is a daily event. If you fail to exercise your liberty, if you fail to be free, then ultimately you have no one to blame but yourself as your liberties diminish and eventually disappear. No one is taking them from you. You are giving them away.
Accordingly there has been some activism; rallies, meetings, protests, and other meaningless activity that has done little if anything to stem the statist juggernaut steadily grinding your liberty to death under its boot. You are and have been of little consequence to them. Like masturbation it feels good and accomplishes little. You can continue to protest, continue to vent your spleen. In the end it will amount to nothing.
As we move into a new year you had better contemplate what it is that YOU are going to do to stem the totalitarian tide that seeks your very destruction and that of your family, your society, and anything else that you hold dear. We are here to assist you though we will not be holding your hand. It’s your liberty. You need to earn it to keep it.
Gentle reader you must become active. You, the individual, are one of the most powerful forces on the planet if you simply chose to exert yourself. There are any number of activities that you can launch and participate in that will assist in defeating your would be masters. As all actions have consequences many of these activities don’t come without a price. However freedom and responsibility are inseparable thus translating your will to action should be of little concern to you.
In this New Year we fully expect you to take action. Deprive the machine of the tax revenue required to fuel the engine of your destruction. Buy from the grey market, sell in the grey market, and participate in cash only transactions. Don’t buy from government motors. Don’t conduct business with banks or other institutions that participated in the TARP or other government programs. Become active in your local community. Become active in local politics. Hold your local leaders accountable for their actions and/or inactions in regards to their defense of liberty. We will assist you in identifying meaningful ways in which you can assist yourself in resisting the leviathan that has become a threat to all though it is going to require that you get up off YOUR ASS and participate.
With or without you we will move forward. We will eventually be victorious. What say you? What are you going to tell your children and grandchildren? Are you going to tell them that you were a man and did the right thing regardless of the cost or are you going to tell them that you sat out and shucked your responsibility?
We’re men ‘round here. We do what needs doing. If you can hang with us then you are welcome. If you are part of the pragmatic mob that is too afraid to do anything meaningful to secure liberty for its progeny then you need to move on. You and your soft hands need to go find more comfortable surroundings. We’re not here to be nice. We are, after all, Washington Rebel with an emphasis on REBEL.
We’ll see you in 2010. You best be ready to get to work. If not we’ll be eating you in the future. You probably won’t taste too good but we’re sure you’ll be fattened for the slaughter.
One of the tricks of being a Big Time Writer is that anxiety and depression and sexual arousal are masks for having something to say. Old rounders like me hide behind cat shadows, when there are no Librarians around to irritate. These considerations have led to a continuing debate: are we pessimistic, or optimistic?
I think I'm pessimistic because, in the words of a logger friend of mine, "our roots run deep." That is to say, I was raised in the country. My Old Dad had me digging when I was eight and wasn't afraid to snap my head with a whistlin' fist when I wasn't diggin' fast enough, see? I was lucky enough to see animals in the wild, and had animals and birds whose welfare I was responsible for. To this day I still dream about our two old pack horses. They were as much friends to me as any human friend I've ever had.
By the time I started getting exposed to city specimens of mankind on a regular basis, I was repulsed. For the most part, I still am. There's something missing from them. Their souls are absorbed in manic narcissism. What else can I say? They talk more than they listen; their "sexuality" is mercenary and exhibitionistic; they put great stock in their own vanity, which to me is empty, nihilistic. I think that's why corporate folks seem girly to me. The men, I mean. They were never really boys, so they can't really be men. Likely their mothers were more receptacles of consumer vitality than actual mothers. They produced children as one would exhibit jams and pies.
Dark?
Oh yeah.
I summarize my pessimism this way: All systems, of whatever kind and origin, evolve to a level of complexity wherein they are doomed to die. An old Goodyear training manual put it this way:
To evolve you must eliminate; to develop you must discard.This is unfailing law.Nature is constantly eradicating remnants in order that she may weave new fabrics unhindered.She purges to progress.And man is ever abandoning the useless old and adopting the useful new.He rejects in order to revise and reform.
In my world, Barack Obama is not a bright, articulate leader. He is a boy, as in, not yet a man. He is symptomatic of a society that no longer knows the difference between the two, a society that seeks security from a lonely little boy who needs attention.
For our folly, we must and will pay. Him I do not resent. In fact, I don't resent any of it (though I am grateful to be old enough to know my eyes won't have to watch the complete cycle!). I see what has to happen, that's all. I feel sorry for Barack and people like him. There's a big chunk of them missing. He's acting out his absence on the absence of those who need to believe. You see that?
Our thanks this morning to The Barrister for these links:
The Frightening 'New' Side of Barack Obama. No offense to Charles Hurt and you other fools for failing to recognize adolescent resentment and self-righteous narcissism in a man barely qualified to run for city ward.
When Clinton won in1992 with a Democratic House and Senate there was no partisanship. There was a mandate. An agenda. Progress. When America reacted to the big government Democrats tried to enact in 1993 and 1994 by electing a Republican House and Senate the dreaded "partisanship" arose. Grover Norquist
The Classical Liberal and I read the same tea leaves on the effort to push the U.S. toward an international directorate. Who is Maurice Strong? Not a patriot's friend, that's who.
A persistent irritant of mine are my so called "liberal" friends who can't handle alternative thought. If I send them one of my posts I can feel the alarm bells ring back over the ethers. They jutht don't know what to thay! As das and I have frequently remarked, "liberal" ideas have to be digested by us. It's impossible to attend school in the United States, listen to the news in the United States, read book reviews in the United States, without getting the prissy little school girl version -- that is to say, the "liberal" view -- of life. Once, when meeting for lunch with several influential bloggers, the question was posed: what turned you conservative? With the exception of das, who was shocked into reality by 9/11, the rest of us had been challenged by books we read when we were younger. For example, two books that challenged my Seventies worldview were
Permit me, Sir, to add another circumstance in our Colonies which contributes no mean part towards the growth and effect of this untractable spirit. I mean their education. In no country perhaps in the world is the law so general a study. The profession itself is numerous and powerful; and in most provinces it takes the lead. The greater number of the deputies sent to the Congress were lawyers. But all who read, and most do read, endeavor to obtain some smattering in that science. I have been told by an eminent bookseller, that in no branch of his business, after tracts of popular devotion, were so many books as those on the law exported to the Plantations. The Colonists have now fallen into the way of printing them for their own use. I hear that they have sold nearly as many of Blackstone's Commentaries in America as in England. General Gage marks out this disposition very particularly in a letter on your table. He states that all the people in his government are lawyers, or smatterers in law; and that in Boston they have been enabled, by successful chicane, wholly to evade many parts of one of your capital penal constitution . . . . . If the spirit be not tamed and broken by these happy methods, it is stubborn and litigious. Abeunt studia in mores. This study readers men acute, inquisitive, dexterous, prompt in attack, ready in defence, full of resources . . . . .They augur misgovernment at a distance, and snuff the approach of tyranny in every tainted breeze. Edmund Burke's Speech of Reconciliation.
Among the numerous problems our country faces, the primary spiritual or moral conundrums might be summarized as follows:
1) The growth of the Leviathan national state, commandeered by ideologues. In other words, the debate between Republican and Democrat isn't really a debate. The debate is whether our citizens choose slavery over self-rule. That is the debate.
Even the idealized "communism" of Native Americans is an illusion fostered by the Warm Fuzzy Liberal. First, the Indians' technology didn't go very far. You can't survive winters very well when you're living in a Neanderthal economy. Second, Indian societies had their wealthy, their privileged. It's built into human DNA. Trying to legislate it away does just the opposite: you create a de jure ruling class that can't be removed.
Probably the best solution to our problems would be 1) a consensus to restore the vitality of the Tenth Amendment (and also repeal the Seventeenth Amendment). This would limit the corruption ideology of by restoring authority to states, where politial extremes are easier to contain; and 2) our politicians instituting the same sorts of financial reforms we have been imposing on debtor nations for decades, to wit . . . .
We'd have to dismantle the entitlement structures!
You couldn't do it all at once, of course. It would have to be done strategically.
Our entitlement state is our slavery of Lincoln's time. Those of us with guts know it can't be sustained. The poofters among us can't think past the next bumper sticker. And they vote Democrat.
Of course, we aren't going to institute those reforms, which means a social and legal breakdown is on the way.
Right?
Meanwhile, our Warm Fuzzies believe that man can have NO FUTURE!! unless people like Harry Reid and Nancy Pelosi regulate the markets.
If you believe that sort of drivel, you are truly pathetic, weak, and dangerous.
I spent a lot of time studying our Founders and people like Samuel Adams and the original Tea Party. What Adams and the Sons of Liberty did in Boston was spread the word about the abuses of the British. They had Committees of Correspondence that got the word out to the colonies. We need Committees of Correspondence now, and we are getting them. That is what is happening with the Tea Parties. I wrote a column called "The Second American Revolution" about the fact that people are acting for themselves as it happened with the Sons of Liberty which spread throughout the colonies. That was a very important awakening in this country. A lot of people in the adult population have a very limited idea as to why they are Americans, why we have a First Amendment or a Bill of Rights. Nat Hentoff, America Under Obama
These elites are not simply milling about waiting for “the next chapter of trouble.” I think in too many cases they -like troubled eldest siblings, the “first children” who have never quite gotten over the subsequent additions to the family- have been actively fomenting chapter after chapter of trouble, for some 40 years. They are complacently building little fortresses, but they are doing so for a reason. Having written all of these chapters of trouble, they are feeling quite confident that their story is solidly structured, and they are ready for the dénouement they have planned. The anticipation of their surprise ending is making them almost giddy.
The ending, of course, is the coup d’état. Believing that the rest of us, now disillusioned, are no longer clinging to romantic ideals of honor, or truth or nobility, these always-restless First Children, devoted to deconstruction, believe they are about to take down the presidency, the churches, the “old” government and even the “old” media. They expect to put into place something “brand new.” But believe me when I tell you what they are building is older than dirt. And up from it. Which is why they will need their fortresses. Castro lives in one, too.
They’ve been practicing all of this, by the way, perfecting the Art of the Painless Coup so thoroughly that most ordinary folks do not even realize what has occured. Anchoress, Art of the Painless Coup
The 10th Amendment Foundation. What is the Federal Government's genuine strategic role? A strong dollar, strong defense, and firm foreign policy in a wicked, deceitful world. In America, it's at the state and local level where society is built. The "progressive" mania to build the ideological state at the expense of community is partly a hangover from Mother Jones' 19th Century, and mostly a masturbatory refusal to take one's own inventory. Show me a "liberal", and I'll show you a meddling school girl. I have yet to meet a bumper sticker liberal with a fully formed character.
Believe me, when I do there'll be an entire post dedicated to that discovery.
We'll be praying for a bountiful harvest at the Reb. We entertain no illusions about Islam.
Peter Wehner: "When it comes to the public outrage that will emerge based on the deals that took place to secure passage of the Senate health-care bill, the degree of tone-deafness among Democrats is nothing short of startling."
Call us what you will, but Cicero and I wrote-off America 30 years ago. We could see what was coming, i.e., the people we saw from urban areas exemplified what we discussed in From Citizens to 'Stakeholders'. Is there room for optimism? More on that in a moment
The fact is, our country is under a Leftist seige. This is a huge powerplay. A Revolution. That's just how it is. You're living through history. In both the Soviet and the Nazi revolutions, there were opening years where things seemed normal, natural. You know, those guys can't do that! We'll change things!
But then Change took root, and people started going to prison.
Cicero and I take the position that to preserve a republic you nee a Republican Citizenry, i.e, one that puts individual and civic virtue before personal appetites. We don't have that. Haven't had that in 30 years. 30 years ago, the men and women who ran the shops in downtown Port Angeles had style. Class. They understood that private morality and public virtue determined the fate of this nation, America. That's a big deal, you know: when you take pride in public virtue by nursing character, you're creating a safe environment for children, prosperity, and happiness.
How many of your children could understand the two sentences I just wrote?
That's your country, friends.
Newsflash for you "liberals": If virtue comes from the State, you may as well cut your throat now. You're useless as a human being.
1) The dollar will collapse; 2) America will either be brought under an international order or, more likely, a world war will break out over resources in the next 10-20 years; and 3) America will suffer a civil breakdown, in which the country breaks up into regional states. America the superpower will be no more.
At some point in your children's, or grandchildren's, future, our spiritual heirs, American patriots, will establish a new republic.
This one ended 30 years ago. You're just hearing Taps now.
Make sure and visit our friend Liberalguy for news updates. He's no Instapundit. He's more succinct.
The Abolition of Man is a stunningly brilliant masterpiece, prophetic in its insight. Several of the other reviewers here who gave the book is plainly deserved five stars have done a fine job of reviewing its contents. Let me respond briefly to the fundamentalist (rousaswgnr) in Campsville, CA and the leftist bigot in Vancouver, WA. Both fail to scratch the surface of the book for opposite reasons.
The reviewer in Campsville (rousaswgnr) apparently thinks that any appeal to right and wrong that doesn't simply quote Bible verses is anti-Christian. Obviously, he would be completely incapable of trying to convince nonChristians that there are universal moral laws that are contravened at our peril -- the very thing Lewis was trying to do. At one point this seeming "fundamentalist" wrote that only scripture teaches right and wrong and things about God. That statement is ironically contrary to scripture itself which says "the heavens declare the glory of God" and that God has revealled His ways and parts of His nature in nature itself and in human consciences (Romans 1). The reviewer rousaswgnr contradicts scripture while trying to defend it. That's a pity. For if he really understood scripture or C. S. Lewis he would know that Lewis is saying what scripture says: God has universal moral laws that He has written into nature that all people can see and that have been generally recognized by major civilizations throughout the ages. Lewis also says it with breath-taking beauty.
The leftist from Vancouver, WA is even more vacuous than the fundamentalist. (That's typical.) Like the typical leftist, he imagines that he's brilliant while proving that he doesn't have a clue. He thinks he's clever by quoting Lau Tzu on the meaning of "Tao." But if he'd bothered to have really read Lewis or found out the meaning of the Chinese word "Tao", he would know that Lewis was not referring to Taoism but to the much more pervasive use of the idea of "Tao" in Chinese culture: that offered by Confucianism. The humanist from Vancouver, WA condemns Lewis for not getting it because he assumes that anyone who disagrees with his leftist ideology is empty-headed. His mindless repitition of Marxist ideology -- that moral systems are the mere fronts for political powers -- shows he's the one who hasn't understood Lewis. The Vancouver, WA leftist's statement that Lewis is merely defending "western" morals is absurd to the point of questioning whether he actually read the book -- or whether he's capable of really reading anything that isn't pre-committed to his Marxist politics. Indeed, the Vancouver leftist demonstrates that he's one of those men without chests about whom Lewis is writing while the fundamentalist from Campsville shows why modern conservative Christianity -- so frigthened of innovative communication -- has been so impotent, even though it holds the solution to the cultural problem Lewis diagnoses if only it could get over its reactionary anti-intellectualism and rigidity of mind that the reviewer exemplifies. Book Review by John B. Carpenter
Democracy is the result of the democratic process and someone is now trying to hijack that process. Personal freedoms (life) are being threatened and are endangered.
This raises an important point in the simplest terms. What happens when the Democratic process becomes the enemy? What do you do? What dynamics are created? What unintended consquences arise as a result?
a) My own pessimism is my own. Since I didn't have children, I don't have to watch my own fleshly heritage pay the price for this madness. I may have sinned against God in some sense, but my own sufferings are circumscribed to that extent.
b) The real source of my 'pessimism' is anger. I am angry that Americans rejected their heritage in exchange for adolescence, masturbation, and yes, slavery.
The 13th Amendment repeals by implication under our first African American president: the Anti-Lincoln.
I understand the Democrats accused us Conservatives of committing the same sin under George Bush. There are differences between the two. Here is one:
What's affecting freedom in this country is a reversion to a fetal position. Real freedom is competitive, often harsh, and involves criticism.
Real racism in this country means, for example, not being able to tell black folks the truth: you are your own problem, not me. Political correctness, if nothing else, is guaranteeing the destruction of freedom for many, many people. Freedom is an inside job.
Real Freedom ain't pretty.
I saw a cartoon the other day to the effect of: you want health care? Try exercise and eating right! I should have kept it for this moment, but didn't. You get the picture.
This presentation is all the sweeter with introducer Lozano Smith's humor. Smart man! "The people trying to save the country aren't that worried about the weather."
!!
He also says something dear to myself: "A great teacher can show you what's required to learn. To become eduated." The greatest virtue is learning, or education. You can't get that from 99% of our schools today, and if the general public doesn't see that virtue as a virtue, we're in trouble.
Though the Democrats have a majority of 20 seats in the Senate and 79 seats in the House, now, just a week before Christmas, the speaker of the House, the Senate majority leader and the White House have failed — so far — to pass into law their desired legislation in the matters of 1) health care provision and financing, 2) public debt and deficit reduction, and 3) carbon regulation and taxation.
There are various anti-liberty forces at work today. Take basic engineering. If you attempted to build a water treatment system for Los Angeles County from scratch, it would require a Trillion-Something; it couldn't be done by manual labor; it couldn't be done (presumably) from a notepad. It would require computers and major mobilization of capital, not a band of hungry Irish and Mexican laborers. In such a world, individual genius can get buried.
But the most disturbing development for me as an American has been to witness the erosion of the human spirit. The sort of rugged "show me" individualism of 1930s and 40s journalists; the vital independence of educators of generations past, when cabins in the far-flung reaches of Montana were filled with books, as opposed to compouter games; the will to educate oneself and challenge life -- all these attributes seem to be at their weakest at this moment in history. Who are these people that drank Al Gore's Kool-Aid on global warming? Why are they in charge of information and education? Is this a conspiracy, or mass insanity?
Undoubtedly the most controversial subject of my lifetime has been sexual freedom. The two hot topics of 1970-1974 were abortion and divorce. (For you kids, most states had a fault system of divorce in them olden days. You had to prove your case. Now we argue about "gay" marriage. Gotta be some irony in there somewhere.)
As much as a rounder as I have been in my life, I have no doubt that sexual profligacy is at the root of much unhappiness. It's not difficult to figure, really. If a man can get sex without committment, over time male-female relationships must degrade. Like it or hate it, The Facts of Life Are Conservative. I think there's a simple psychology here. You're either moving back toward poop-sniffing dogdom, or you're moving forward to the exaltation of Love. The oft-degraded French had a word for it: Amour. More than a literal translation, amour meant something lofty, inspired, something that required a warrior's courage and devotion. The union of man and woman is the road to Christ in these more advanced lines of Western thinking -- the "mystical Christianity" that makes literalists crazy. Men and women are called to their highest conduct in Parzival. There is no panty-waisted "I've been Saved" business, here. You train as a warrior, not brag about your alleged status. A real vital difference, friends. Worthing thinking about.
If you're man -- or woman -- enough.
Those of us who were once "liberal" perhaps have more to say on these topics than true-believer brat conservatives. The most degrading job interview I ever had took place here. Three privileged, skinny-assed kids had no idea what to do with a firecracker like me. I can understand how "liberals" despise conservatives. I despised them myself that day.
I didn't get the job.
True conservatives, in my book, are lusty folk. They don't argue with life, just like they don't argue with moral principle. Life is a lesson we must learn, not a script to be played out by light-loafers with scrawny backs. That's the difference.
My favorite personality at this time is "Robin of Berkeley." She has a new one out today: The Left's Corruption of Youth. This article has at least two strains: one, the deliberate historical attempts to corrupt America's moral vitality:
Beginning in the l930‘s, the Frankfurt School plotted the installation of Marxism in the West. They knew that a debauched citizenry was easier to manipulate.
The School found willing henchman in the amoral Left, which worships at the altar of pleasure: if it feels good, do it. Their hedonism has been legitimized by a host of mad scientists, such as Drs. Wilhelm Reich and Alfred Kinsey.
A principal architect of the sexual revolution, Kinsey purportedly falsified evidence to support his subversive theories: that everyone, babies included, is hyper-sexual and bisexual.
The other angle is more contemporary: we are living in a time in which moral judgments are viewed with alarm. Warm Fuzzy Liberals being what they are, they can't see that their kind will be the first to get slaughtered as society continues to degrade. There is no morality in these folks because there is no courage either. I, Cicero, tell you your day will come when you'll understand how brutally stupid the whole business about being "gay" is.
Well, it's a lesson we have to learn. I'm a comfortable stage in this world where I'm very happy for you: I've seen what's coming, and I don't have to pretend. But those of you who are pretending . . . .
Last fall we posted text from an email I received from a friend inside the corporate world. Many of us conservatives tend to have a more tolerant view of private sector activities than many people inside the corporate world deserve, just as many conservatives tend to give law enforcement a pass because "they have tough jobs." Got news for you. Living is tough. It's tough that improves you, or turns you into a "nuanced" (whiny) Democrat.
The question is always one of power, as I explain in What I Learned as a Prosecutor, Part I. The person you owe money to has power over you; the school girl in a black robe judging you for a behavior you yourself can't explain has power over you. There are only two questions you ever have to answer, whether it's your wife you're arguing with, or deciding where to stand on a piece of legislation: 1) Is this a power that needs to be legislated into a de jure power; and 2) if so, what sort of judicious limitations need to be placed on the exercise of that power? If you tell me, "All policeman are heroes", I may agree with the sentiment, but what you're telling is that your thinking skills are those of an eigth grader, not a citizen. It's the equivalent of saying "All policeman are pigs." You haven't addressed constitutional limitations on state authority because you're wallowing in sentiment. It's sort of like being a fat man yelling at athletes on the tv. You need to get up from the couch, my friend.
When Andrew Breitbart launched Big Government in September, we asked if he was gearing up to be the next Arianna Huffington: An opinion blog rainmaker with a one-stop digital powerhouse, but presented from the opposite end of the political spectrum.
Three months later, hyperbole has become reality as Breitbart is adding to his network of vertical blogs. The newest site to join the Breitbart network is “Big Journalism,” which will launch in January of next year. His target is much bigger than HuffPo — or any other website for that matter. Breitbart is gunning for the institution of mainstream media, or what he calls “the Democratic-media complex.”
In an exclusive interview with Mediaite, Breitbart shares his vision for his expanding network of “Big” right-of-center sites.
A common complaint of Hoh River Boy is that conversation isn't what it was 40 years ago, when we were yutes. We were raised by the last generation that was fully formed BT (before television) and they were, over all, a far more gracious kind of human than the crude variety so common now. When relatively more time is spent cultivating social grace, as opposed to cheering and farting in front of the tv, you end up with a better breed of little gods. Two Washington Rebel links that attempt to address that are:
What a shame my country has become: crude, ignorant, and really, pretty goddamn boring. People who don't cultivate character aren't worth talking to, in our humble opinion, and there really aren't that many of us walking around -- folks who read and cultivate social intelligence, as opposed to shouting out what we own and how wonderful and important we are, or thrusting our virtual boobs in the other boob's face. People tell me, oh, there are plenty of good people in America!
I suppose you're right, but darn it, it just doesn't feel that way to me!
This was a sparkling week on the Blogosphere for reflections on freedom. Let's start with a brilliant Bird Dog post at Maggie's Farm innocuously called "A Note to Our Readers":
Obama’s seeming restlessness is a matter of record. Until recently he was routinely charged with throwing outworn sponsors, including his old mentor the Rev. Wright, “under the bus.” And as a Chicago politician, he used wealthy, influential backers (mainly women), discarding them as better prospects hove into view.
Just four years ago he was a backbencher in the Illinois legislature, but since then he has served a partial term in the U.S. Senate, where he spent most of his tenure campaigning for the next giant step in his upward mobility, to the Oval Office. He has never in any office run for re-election, but has instead used any current position as a boost platform for his next installation.
Observers of his presidency have been puzzled by the continuing pattern: Obama is still in campaign mode, spending a good deal of time giving major policy speeches, not only in the states, but around the globe. “What office is he running for now?” One can ask. David Gutmann, Obama for World President?
[A]s a tool for watermelon Marxists -- green on the outside and red on the inside -- climate change orthodoxy represents an opportunity to achieve age-old dreams of communist wealth redistribution. Don't take my word for it. Listen to Cass Sunstein, Obama's new regulatory czar and perhaps the most powerful bureaucrat in America:
It is even possible that desirable redistribution is more likely to occur through climate change policy than otherwise, or to be accomplished more effectively through climate policy than through direct foreign aid.
Clean White Guys? Sure, But They Were Wrong on Race.
While We're on the Subject of Slavery:
The Democratic Party vehemently opposed the abolition of slavery, Reconstruction, and black suffrage. Today, the Democratic Party aggressively pursues an enslavement platform through socialist ideology. One cause of the Civil War was the contrasting economic philosophies between the North and the South. Northern Republicans embraced free-market economic principles while Southern Democrats embraced a labor-based economy reliant upon slavery for its existence.
Formed in the mid-1850s, the Republican Party plank called for the immediate abolition of slavery in the southern states, while the Democratic Party plank explicitly called for a continuation of slavery. This was not only an issue of "all men are created equal and no person shall be deprived of life, liberty, and property without due process of the law," but also of states' rights versus the federal government and a free-market society versus a slave-labor society. Scott Strzelczyk, Harry Reid Likens Health Care Opponents to Slavery Opponents
Poor, Poor Harry Reid . . . . All that animal (enemal?) magnetism may not be enough!
Either Obama will stop the astronomic spending and spiraling debt, or he will not only destroy his presidency, but take his party—and many of us— down with him. He apparently did not understand that the fury against Bush was not just due to Iraq, but the unprecedented $300-400 billion annual deficits. But rather than address that, Obama has scheduled a number of trillion-dollar-plus annual deficits for the rest of his term.
Obama’s legacy is to reduce the word “trillion”—which used to be a mind-boggling concept—to the equivalent of “billion”, as in a “trillion here, a trillion there.”
There are solutions, of course. Don’t laugh: the ridiculous can become the real when the money runs out. We can furlough federal employees 1 -5 days a month. We can inflate our way out by expanding the money supply. (I started farming with 12% inflation, and 19% interest rates and 10% unemployment, and watched the price of raisins go from $1,350 a ton to $480 in a single year: ergo, anything, I learned, is possible. [There is really no "they" who will step in and save us.]) Victor Davis Hanson, Our Present Anxieties
America's nerves are frayed and tempers are short. The country is uneasy, even queasy, because Obama and Congress seem to be dashing through an ambitious agenda in a slapdash manner. Their haste reflects a hubris that prevents them from acknowledging that they do not know how to do all that they are attempting. Consider the exasperation of Lamar Alexander. Frayed Nerves, Short Tempers
Some of us have been saying this entire affair is intentional: Obama is a revolutionary -- but not like Che Guevera. More like a kid who discovered his parents are spineless pukes who won't stand up to him.
Summer of '88, freshly divorced, and horny, I began what would turn out to be a near-career of prosecution. Didn't think I'd be there that long. Just wanted a paycheck that involved trial work. Jeff Sullivan, the elected prosecutor, offered me a job after watching me argue a motion in court one day. I said 'yes.' On an August afternoon, I became a deputy prosecutor.
Yakima was a shooting gallery. There was a drive-by almost every week. I felt like I was in a war zone. Almost every desk in the office displayed body pics, autopsy pics, busted eyes, swollen vaginas, protruding bones. I walked into a nightmare of death and depravity. My brain chemistry took an abrupt shift toward ugly.
I stepped into the role. I was a prosecutor. Every asshole that terrorized someone became my little project. I learned how much fun it could be playing with a defendant the way a cat does a mouse. I got good. You can ask about me. There are cops still in Yakima that'll tell you, ol' Cicero was a swingin' dick. Why? Was I doing all the heavy lifting? Nope. I was just a grunt. But I was a grunt with fucking style. My ability to inflict pain became razor sharp. I made it personal. Like collecting trophies.
It didn't occur to me that I might be getting sick. Sick? The whole fucking world was sick. I picked up a pack of photos my first week at the office. It was an autopsy of a baby beaten to death by its mother and her boyfriend. He was just about one-year old when he was dispatched to the void. Who you callin' sick? I can still see that little fella. He's been in my brain now 21 years. Don't tell me what's sick. I sleep with the memory of a little baby whose mother helped it die. You talk about "hope and change" because you want someone to excuse you from duty.
I had a talent for criminal stuff. Can't tell you why, exactly. I just did.
Now you got a big yen to do some killin'. Okay, we'll do some killin' for you. But don't expect us to stand up and cheer.
The one thing you can really appreciate about Rod Serling is that he was a combat vet. Like all our fathers from that era, his whole psychic constitution was shaped by 10 years of Depression and 5+ years of a shitty war. It took a lot of Hollywood money to glorify insanity. Guys like my Old Dad didn't look at war as a fine sport. We couldn't watch war movies with either of my folks around, as my mother's first husband was killed at Normandy, and my Dad went from Normandy to the Bulge to VE Day. War was not a dinner topic. It was spoken of, if at all, in somber tones. Our folks were trying to forget, not remember. We lived in a house where the specters of the dead didn't allow us to forget.
Rod Serling was born into a Reform Jewish family, he later became a Unitarian upon his marriage in 1948.
Suffered from combat-related flashbacks and insomnia.
Outspoken supporter of the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU).
Military decorations from the Second World War include: World War II Victory Medal, American Campaign Service Medal, Asiatic-Pacific Campaign Medal (with Arrowhead Device), Good Conduct Medal, Phillippine Liberation Medal (with 1 bronze service star), Purple Heart, Combat Infantryman Badge, Parachutist Badge, and Honorable Service Lapel Pin. Also retroactively authorized the Bronze Star Medal, based on receipt of the Combat Infantryman Badge during the Second World War.
Served in the Army of the United States, under the service number 32 738 306, from January 1943 to January 1946. Discharged in the rank of Technician 5th Grade (the equivalent of a Corporal) having served as an Infantry Combat Demolition Specialist and a Paratrooper.
Host of the syndicated radio show "The Zero Hour" (1973-1974).
Many was the time I've thought of that particular Serling tale, Quality of Mercy. I purchased the entire Twilight Zone series on video and watched 'em when I prosecuted. Now that I defend, Quality of Mercy is more poignant than ever. How can you defend the guilty, they ask?
It's easier than you imagine. Rod Serling shows you how in that episode of Twilight Zone!
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