The Straw Men of the Left

Via Pajama Media

Obama and his allies would rather fence with imaginary partners than mix swords with actual conservatives and their ideas.

When I was a lad my father gave me one piece of advice concerning politics: “Son, the Democratic Party cares about the poor whereas the Republican Party cares only for the rich.” I believed him as would most five-year-olds. Luckily, later in life upon meeting actual conservatives and studying their works, I developed second thoughts. Firsthand experience with the welfare state moved me even further to the right. Unfortunately, my dad — while in countless ways a more knowledgeable man than I — knew nothing about politics. However, his take on Republicans was fairly typical. The quip regarding the GOP being disinterested in “the poor” is but a leftist straw man posing as a legitimate argument. It is full of emotion but signifies dysfunction alone. Moreover, it is a fallacy, and this particular brand of irrationality occurs when one ignores another’s “actual position and substitutes a distorted, exaggerated, or misrepresented version of that position” in its stead.
Conservatives are vested in the unfortunate. We are troubled by the vast discrepancy that exists between the intentions of the pseudo-liberals and the welfare state they created, one that entrenches and continues to expand the underclass.
The Great Society was a great disaster. It continues to provide incentives for the needy to remain destitute and has destroyed millions of family structures.
Why should women marry men when they can marry the government? Why should they improve their lives when a monthly check ensures a (subsistent) living?
Most on the right wish to overhaul the system. We believe that the solution to penury is three letters long: “j-o-b.”
Republicans would like to see governmental obstacles — excessive taxation, mindless regulations, and an anti-business climate — removed, which would allow the wonder of economic growth to finally win the war on poverty.
Alas, all of these facts are inconvenient for the left, who can neither answer them nor explain how raising taxes and inflating the Leviathan is going to get our nation out of a recession.
Therefore, in order to maintain power, pseudo-liberals deliberately disseminate lies about the motivations of conservatives even though they never consult with us long enough to know what they are in the first place. They distort, deceive, and confuse the general public as a vehicle to win elections and remake society.
The results of the 2008 election reveal that their nefarious, timeless strategies remain successful. For this reason, constructing straw men is a practice as endemic to Democrats as self-righteousness, worrying about (life-sustaining) carbon dioxide, and the uproarious belief that taxes are charity.
Yet recognizing their dishonorable approach to discourse is only a quarter of the battle. Refuting their mumbo-jumbo is a challenge for most conservatives who, unlike their foes, are constrained by the limits of logic.
Naive Republicans — those who have yet to experience a partisan drone baptism by bile — dispute policy scenarios in good faith but soon discover that their opponents ignore their points entirely. Their contentions are met with personal attacks alone.

The leftist does not attempt to refute the rightist. Instead he, in the words of Lenin, seeks to “wipe him from the face of the earth.” It is the fictional conservative, as opposed to the ideas the real one verbalizes, who becomes the focus for statist rage.

Barack Obama is a devout practitioner of this black, emotional art. A glaring example of his addiction to the straw man technique came during the (pathetically limited) legislative quarrel over the stimulus bill.

The president boasted that it was a showdown between himself and those who wished to do nothing about the recession. He instructed his countrymen, “Nothing is not an option. You didn’t send me to Washington to do nothing.”

Gee, which GOP politician campaigned on the platform of doing nothing? Obama did not say. This is quite telling. He favors fencing with imaginary partners to mixing swords with real human beings.

Contrary to his assertion, conservative plans abounded concerning the economy. We wanted to suspend the payroll tax, slash income tax rates permanently, and cut the confiscation rates for businesses along with those for capital gains.

All of these proposals would have put more money in the hands of the people and less in the coffers of the federocracy … which is why they were all non-starters for the Democratic Party. Any option that lessens their control over the general population is verboten.

If Obama acknowledged this truth it would remove the mote from the eyes of his supporters, some of whom honestly believe that the pseudo-liberals represent “the little guy.”

Recently the MSDNC network yielded another perfect example of the straw man fallacy which so poisons our public square. It occurred during Keith Olbermann’s program.

The irrational host asked Richard Wolffe — another leftist masquerading as a journalist — a question about Michael Steele, the chairman of the Republican National Committee. What followed was Erroneousness 101:

The poor guy has got no leash — it’s not even a short leash. And to get to the
race question you have to understand the party’s calculation in putting him
there in the first place. It was a simplistic and crude equation they made: that
to cover themselves against any accusations of racism — and, boy, it’s not that
hard to find them — they needed to have a black figure going up against an
African-American president and they didn’t have many people to choose from with
this token gesture and so they had to choose someone that plainly wasn’t ready
for prime time.

Is that what the Republicans did? How would Wolffe know? Was he there during those closeted sessions which eventually became the protocols of the elders of the elephant? Of course not; Wolffe is clueless.

Further, based on his last book, he knows very little about Republicans. As opposed to confessing ignorance, he chose to attribute the hiring of Michael Steele to evil intent. Wolffe deems the right wicked … so our every action must then be.

Along the same lines were Janeane Garofalo’s bizarre comments on HBO during an episode of Real Time with Bill Maher. Everyone recalls her racist outburst earlier in the year concerning the tea parties and she compounded her original incoherence with the following drivel for Maher:

It’s obvious I think to anybody who has eyes in this country that tea-baggers,
the 9-12ers, these separatist groups that pretend that it’s about policy. They
are clearly white identity movements; they are clearly white power movements.
What they don’t like about the president is that he’s black or half black. …
What also is shocking is that people keep pretending that that’s not really the
case with these people. … They are no different than any other white identity
movement that’s part of our history.>

Is it obvious? Is it clear? No, she was lying. Ms. Garafalo’s made it up. People like me took to the streets in April not for conspiratorial reasons, but to combat excessive government expenditure, reckless debt, and the threats posed to our liberty. pWhat we do know for absolute certainty is that our protests did not involve race or racism. That these absurd charges of bigotry failed to stick is a product of their being mindless assertions devoid of substance.

They continue to be made for pragmatic reasons as everyone in America is repulsed by racism, so the left disperses their mustard gas in the hopes of alienating independents who are too busy to take an interest.

Lastly was the sideshow in late September involving MSLSD rodeo clown host Ed Schultz. He pursued a separate — but equally lethal — line when attempting to delegitimize his rivals.
The resentment wonk addressed health care but was not content to merely suggest that the GOP is evil. He stated it explicitly:

The Republicans lie! They want to see you dead! They’d rather make money off your dead corpse! They kind of like it when that woman has cancer and they don’t have anything for her.
Does anyone know any Republicans who possess such wishes? I don’t. I’m sure Schultz doesn’t either. His statement was vile hogwash, though he is probably aware that if our side is not depicted as loathsome then folks might give our ideas a listen … and who knows where that could lead.

In the final analysis, striking a sanctimonious pose is cherished more than truth by the left. Yet the country would benefit from their focusing on what conservatives actually say rather than fixating upon apocryphal antagonists.

The left’s habitual lying and “fear-mongering” alienates the citizenry and convinces the ignorant that the United States is a country not worth defending.

All their pyrotechnics and histrionics make many conservatives reluctant to openly proclaim their views. Like a fictional king, they wonder: “What can men do against such reckless hate?”
There is but one answer. You must fight them with your voice, your written word, your ballot, and your presence. At this point, only emphatic action will ensure that America remains the land of the free.

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For kicks and giggles ?

Via-Jer
from AP today 10-22-2009 :

Romer: Impact of stimulus will level off

WASHINGTON — A top White House economist says spending from the $787 billion economic stimulus has already had its biggest impact on economic growth and will likely not contribute to significant expansion next year.

Christina Romer, the chair of President Barack Obama's Council of Economic Advisers, said Thursday that the $194 billion already spent gave a jolt to the economy that contributed to growth in the second and third quarters of the year. She told a congressional panel that by the middle of next year, the impact of the stimulus will level off. Romer said spending so far has saved or created 600,000 to 1.5 million jobs but warned that unemployment will remain high, above 9.5 percent, through the end of 2010.

Now consider this released yesterday:

7 Months After Stimulus 49 of 50 States Have Lost Jobs

America Now Over 6 Million Jobs Shy of Administration's
Projections

The table below compares the White House's February 2009 projection of the number of jobs that would be created by the 2009 stimulus law (through the end of 2010) with the actual change in state payroll employment through September 2009 (the latest figures available). According to the data, 49 States and the District of Columbia have lost jobs since stimulus was enacted. Only North Dakota has seen net job creation following the February 2009 stimulus. While President Obama claimed the result of his stimulus bill would be the creation of 3.5 million jobs, the Nation has already lost a total of 2.7 million – a difference of 6.2 million jobs. To see how stimulus has failed your state, see the table below.

Click on article to see chart for the individual states.

Although I do believe that the stimulus has "saved" jobs primarily teachers, police, fireman and other public sector jobs, that is not what a stimulus is supposed to do. Saving jobs is really not rel event at all. A recession is a slow down in the economy which causes unemployment. The purpose of a stimulus is to "stimulate" the economy which will increase employment.

Saving jobs does not stimulate the economy, at best it can help stem the recession because more people will have more money to spend than if they were unemployed-obviously. The same is true with unemployment benefits, giving unemployment to the unemployed does not stimulate anything, in fact it inhibits people from actively seeking employment, why work when those that are working pay for you not to work? which is exactly what happens when someone collects unemployment. Not that we should do away with unemployment benefits but the idea that it is somehow stimulative is ridiculous.

Now consider this graph:

Now looking at the above graph it appears like the more of the stimulus they have spent the more unemployment rises. Is there a correlation? Perhaps slightly since unlike government businesses live in a reality based world, not a hypothetical one. All that spending which sucks money from the private sector along with all the bailouts, health care reform plans, regulatory reform plans,cap and trade and all the other uncertainty thrown into the business world has frozen prudent business planning and everyone is waiting to see what will happen. When businesses are hunkering down, they are not employing, they are laying off.

The other important item on the graph is that black dotted line. That Projected Unemployment Without Stimulus. As you can see we have blown right by that with stimulus. The 8.8% projection which was to happen if we did nothing is now 9.8% so we have spent or are on the way to spending 787 billion dollars to be worse off than we would have been had we done nothing. Who came up with that worse case if we do nothing number? Christina Romer, the same Christina Romer who is now telling us (see story 1) that all that debt we incured to keep ourselves from reaching that terrible 8.8% unemployment "has already had its biggest impact on economic growth and will likely not contribute to significant expansion next year" and that "unemployment will remain high, above 9.5 percent, through the end of 2010"

It would be bad enough if we had spent our children's future away to keep unemployment just one percent above what we would have, based on the projections of the "smartest people in the world", but that doesn't even show how far off they are .

As you can see our 787 billion was spent in order to keep us at a maximum of 8% unemployment and by now we should have begun to gain jobs. But the facts are that we are still losing jobs and the very same people who said that spending that tremendous sum to "stimulate" the economy would stop the recession and the job losses are now telling us that not only will it not do what they told us, we are stuck with the current conditions (minimum) for another year (minimum).

Why isn't this administration being excoriated in the media? Why does anyone have any faith in their ability to manage an economy, which isn't their job anyway but we Americans seem to to have abdicated that right to a bunch of academics to do so.

This isn't a small thing, this is a very big thing. Ask yourself this, what if they had not spent any money to stimulate the economy, what would have happened?

Well Christine Romer the architect of this disaster says that spending all this money "has saved or created 600,000 to 1.5 million jobs", which of course is nonsense and totally unprovable and something no other Administration would get away with. Now we are being told "well that's about it don't expect much more stimulus from all that money". That means that since there is still more than a half a trillion to spend it basically is not going to do much of anything at all! "[the] economic stimulus has already had its biggest impact on economic growth and will likely not contribute to significant expansion next year" So why are we going to spend it? For kicks and giggles? Or so that we can make the graph below look worse than it already does and totally impoverish my grand kids.

As remarkable and patheticly inacurate as these predictions and projections are. The ineptitude the waste and outright stupidity of all this debt is. There are elitist nincompoops who say we need to spend more money. The reason , they reason in their little minds that the stimulus is not working is because it is not big enough. We must create more debt, more waste, more corruption and then the economy will be sufficiently stimulated to recover. Insanity.
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Life, Liberty and the Pursuit of Happiness

A second look by a former liberal



By-Jer

If you had asked me well into the eighties what my political leanings were I would have answered “I am a liberal” with only a tinge of doubt.

During the eighties I began to change and probably had ceased to be a liberal long before I admitted it even to myself. Looking back I know a large part of why this occurred. A quote attributed to Churchill put it best.

"If you're not a liberal when you're 20, you have no heart. If you're not a conservative when you're 40, you have no head."

I have known very intelligent liberals but have inevitably found that their political arguments are centered on theoretical compassion rather than a true altruistic foundation. The sad part is that they believe that because the conservative argument is more often centered on reason, facts and reality their political opponents (the conservative) have no heart.

My observation is that liberals are not only wrong but in order to justify their lack of reason they must twist themselves into an unrealistic mental and moral position. This constant battle within ultimately leads them to be less compassionate and bitter in order to maintain their belief structure and they project their own bitterness onto those with whom they disagree. Liberals generally live in a very complicated mindset where the simple truth must be defeated by ever more complex arguments and justifications. I suspect this is why most elitist intellectuals are liberals, the admission of the beauty of simplicity is anathema to their ego.

The reason I began to change also had to do with the not so simple process of living in a world where observed reality as opposed to the theoretical is the best teacher. In my mind I can live in a Utopian world where everyone, including me, always does the right thing in every situation and everyone is at peace with his neighbor. But reality is that I am not alone in my imperfection. I live and move and interact with multitudes of others who are as imperfect as me.

This interaction of imperfect humans is not prone to follow theoretical outcomes, no matter the wishes or desires of those who through their elitist controlling natures hope to dictate it so.



PART 1 LIFE

Consider this, the same mind that would vehemently demonstrate against war on the grounds that it is immoral would also be the one most likely to support a political policy that would enable an eight month old “fetus “ to have a spike driven through it’s skull in the name of “Choice”.

This same philosophy would also be most likely to hold candlelight vigil outside of a prison to honor the “immoral” execution of a diabolical murderer while simultaneously sneering at those who carry signs in front of a Planned Parenthood and condemning them as self righteous.

This contradiction of beliefs if beliefs is the right word, is not only hypocritical it is in the long run dangerous to a society. A society is built upon its shared values, what is the value in the death of the innocent?

I am not a big moralist, actually I tend towards a libertarian outlook, “live and let live”, but I have noticed over the years a growing tendency to place less and less value on life in America. This attitude cuts across the spectrum of our society. Children grow up with realistic games, cartoons, movies that portray killing as entertainment and perhaps worse is the devaluation of the elderly. In our youth oriented society more and more the aged are looked upon as a burden to society rather than a source of wisdom and strength.

Life is viewed as cheap and I contend that this is in large part due to the growth of the abortion ideology. Initially the argument that a woman should have a right to determine what she does with her own body was not only a reasonable argument but supported by a majority of a generation of Americans, including me.

This reasonable argument though has fostered a very distorted and in many ways destructive ideology. For one the idea of choice has become a one-way street, choice is only acceptable to the pro-choice zealots when the choice is pro-abortion.

Pro-life is also a choice when it comes to the issue, I would argue a far superior choice. A woman who chooses life is not only making the greater sacrifice, she is following the natural order of-life.

One of my all time favorite quotes comes from Mark Twain:

“Man is the only animal that blushes. Or needs to.”

In this context we could say:

(Wo)man is the only animal that consciously kills their unborn offspring but do they need to?

Of course the argument has always been about when life begins and another quote really hit home with me on this issue Peggy Noonan once wrote:

"You know why they call it birth control? Because it's meant to stop a birth
from happening nine months later. We know when life begins. Everyone who ever
bought a pack of condom knows when life begins. To put it another way, with
conception something begins. What do you think it is? A car? A 1948 Buick?" "

There really is no doubt scientifically, morally or using simple common sense when life begins, it begins at conception. All the arguments that attempt to muddle this simple truth are just an attempt to justify the taking of life. Which brings me to the crust of the matter.

As a former pro-choice advocate I was simply that, pro-choice not pro abortion. The argument was framed along the lines of a woman’s right to choose. It has always been framed in the context of a soul searching, intensely reflective decision by an individual woman about what is best for her and the child based on her individual circumstances.

Unfortunately the reflective choice argument has not held up to the test of time. I have little doubt that for many women the choice to have an abortion is indeed an intensly reflective decision. However the moral equation, the moral choice has been stripped from the decision by the very political and immoral crusaders that are not pro-choice but in fact pro-abortion.

Let’s make this simple, abortion in the natural order of things, putting aside any religious arguments is unnatural. Let me restate that abortion is not natural. Can there really be any argument against that simple statement? Of course not. In nature the female of the species does not kill their unborn offspring. Any debate about abortion must begin with that simple truth, abortion is an unnatural act-period.

Yet in so called popular American society today, those who oppose an unnatural act are somehow considered villains and uncaring, whereas those who promote the unnatural destruction of life are considered enlightened. This is not only backwards, it is sick and it is by any moral precept-wrong. Worse, this backward, sick, immoral thinking is promoted and championed in our society to the detriment of our moral structure which corrodes the very fabric of any truly progressive society. When any society champions death over life, the death of that society is inevitable.

Abortion is not a choice in American society today it is a cause; death should never be a cause. When the death of an innocent unborn baby becomes a political cause for individual liberty, a tool to be used to promote political agendas and a defining measure of womanhood in popular society, we truly have lost our way.

The irony of course is that we live in a society that proclaims that we would rather see a hundred guilty men go free than one innocent man falsely executed. Yet we would slaughter countless thousands of the most innocent and call it freedom of choice. Destruction of the innocent has become not only accepted it has become fashionable and openly promoted .

It really is simple. If, as many of our liberal friends would proclaim , that the life of a tree is precious subject to protection from unwarranted destruction by man, then how much more precious, is the life of an unborn child? Where is the balance? Where is the compassion?

The mindset that we have reached in this country where opposition to death is considered backwards and the promotion of death is championed is not only wrong, it is pathetically contrary to both human decency and the American ideal. If this philosophical abortion of all that is good and natural is not reversed, we as a people and a society are doomed.

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Paul Rahe: Obama's gestures, part 3

Via-Power Line

Hillsdale College Professor Paul Rahe writes to comment on the Obama administration's announced abandoment last week of the so-called Third Site of missile defense systems in Poland and the Czech Republic. Claremont Institute President Brian Kennedy addressed the subject in the Wall Street Journal Asia column "Obama's strategic confusion." Kennedy writes:

"The cancellation of the Third Site demonstrates the Obama administration's complete confusion over strategic defense." Professor Rahe argues that it also suggests Obama's peculiar animus against friends of the United States, if not the United States itself:

In the Week in Review section of this past Sunday's New York
Times, Robert Gates argues that the plan announced last Thursday by
President Obama for shifting American policy regarding the defense of Europe
against nuclear missile attacks will leave Europe in general and Eastern Europe
in particular safer. I do not doubt that he believes what he says.

I do not, however, find this consoling. Back in June, in two separate
posts on Power Line - here and here -- I
drew attention to our current president's propensity for communicating different
messages to different audiences by means of gestures of one kind or another.
Here is what I then wrote:

Barack Obama has a history of belittling his adversaries in just such a
fashion. In April, 2008, he was caught on tape during a debate with Hillary
Clinton, rubbing his hand across the right side of his face and extending his
middle finger in an obscene gesture that many in the audience could see it but
she could not, and when this provoked laughter on the part of his supporters he
responded with a knowing smile. Later, after accepting his party's nomination,
he did precisely the same thing during a debate with John McCain; and, after
Sarah Palin remarked at the Republican National Convention that the only
difference between a pit bull and a soccer mom was lipstick, he observed at a
rally that a pig with lipstick is still a pig. Again, many in the audience
caught the dig and they, too, were rewarded with a knowing smile.
Obama is,
in fact, a master of the insulting gesture. There is no other construction that
one can put on his conduct towards Gordon Brown when the British prime minister
paid him a visit shortly after his inauguration. First, in an ostentatious
manner, he returned to the British embassy a bust of Winston Churchill that had
been loaned to his predecessor. Then, when Brown presented him with a pen made
from timber used in a British ship once involved in putting down the slave
trade, he gave him in return a stack of movies on DVD which could not be played
on machines sold in Europe.

Were Obama a yokel, one might be able to explain this away. But a yokel
he is not, and there are State Department protocol officers who are highly
sensitive to the proprieties. It is no accident that, at about the same time,
the White House press secretary intimated in the presence of members of the
British press that there was no special relationship between the United States
and Great Britain. Obama's gesture was a calculated insult--meant to be
understood only by those to whom it was directed.

If we are to comprehend what is going on, we must pay close attention
not only to what Obama says but to what he conveys in other ways. His tone is
nearly always moderate but what he hints at and what he intimates by way of body
language often convey the opposite Witness his warm embrace of Hugo Chavez.
Behind the thin veneer of politeness, there is, I suspect, something ugly
lurking. In the first of the autobiographies that he claims to have written,
Barack Obama frequently speaks of himself as being in the grips of rage. We
would do well to take him at his word. If we are to stop him from doing great
damage to this country and to our friends and allies, we must take every
opportunity that comes our way to unmask the man.

We now know - thanks to events in the Honduras - the meaning of Obama's
gesture with respect to the Venezuelan dictator, and I would suggest that we
must regard in a similar light the timing of Obama's announcement of his
administration's shift in policy regarding missile-defense in Europe. For it can
hardly be an accident that he chose the seventieth anniversary of the Soviet
Union's invasion of Poland as the occasion.

We must keep in mind the fact that Obama is not a yokel and that the
State Department is there to prevent an ill-informed president from
unnecessarily stepping on toes. What happened last Thursday was a deliberate
gesture. It was aimed at our allies in eastern Europe and at Russia, and it was
recognized as such in Poland, the Czech Republic, and Russia. Vladimir Putin
spoke of Obama's decision as a courageous act. Our friends in eastern Europe
would not have used that adjective. A signal has been given, and they know the
meaning.

We are living in a dangerous time. It seems highly unlikely that Barack
Obama will get his way in domestic affairs. The Democrats may control Congress,
but they now fear a rout in 2010, and they are likely to tread with caution from
now on. In foreign affairs, however, presidents have a relatively free hand, and
this president has ample time to do damage to a country that, there is reason to
suspect, he deeply hates.

Paul A. Rahe holds the Charles O. Lee and Louise K. Lee Chair in the Western Heritage at Hillsdale College. He is the author, most recently, of Montesquieu and the Logic of Liberty: War, Religion, Commerce, Climate, Terrain, Technology, Uneasiness of Mind, the Spirit of Political Vigilance, and the Foundations of the Modern Republic, published today, and of Soft Despotism, Democracy's Drift: Montesquieu, Rousseau, Tocqueville, and the Modern Prospect.

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It's the Liberty, Stupid

Via-RCP

By Robert Tracinski
Well, it's official. The Obama phenomenon is over. Permanently.

It's not just that Obama's favorite weapon, the Big Speech, no longer moves public opinion. (Last Wednesday's health-care speech produced a slight "bounce" in public support for the health-care bill, but it disappeared in less than a week.)

What really ends the era of Obama is this: a major part of Obama's appeal was his symbolism as the first black president, which was supposed to give Americans an opportunity to put the whole ugly history of racial politics behind them. Yet here we are, less than eight months into Obama's administration, and the racial politics are worse than they have been in a long time.

Within days of Saturday's giant "tea party" rally in Washington, Obama's supporters in the press began denouncing the protesters as racists. That's what Jimmy Carter says, and Time's Joe Klein, and The American Prospect's Paul Waldman, and Paul Krugman and Maureen Dowd at the New York Times, among others.

What is their evidence? Well, they don't have any—just over-active imaginations. Krugman opines that the "driving force" behind the tea party movement is "probably…cultural and racial anxiety," while Dowd says that when Joe Wilson told Obama he was lying, "what I heard was an unspoken word in the air: You lie, boy!... Some people just can't believe a black man is president and will never accept it." Those are the journalistic standards at the Times nowadays: it's OK to libel half the population based on what you imagine they are "probably" thinking and on words they didn't say.

Along the same lines, Klein attributes opposition to Obama to "implicit" racism, while "social psychologist" Thomas Pettigrew makes explicit what this charge of "implicit racism" means: "The general idea is that people who don't recognize it in themselves look for legitimate means to carry out their subtle beliefs, sometimes even without awareness on their part that they're doing it." That's how a "social psychologist" gets to project onto you his own preconceptions about your character and motives—without actually needing to talk to you and ask you what you think.

And they have not asked us what we think, none of them. It is obvious from all of the accusations of racism that these crack reporters haven't attended the "tea party" protests, haven't talked to anyone there, haven't bothered to find out who we are and what we believe. They have simply projected onto us the ugliest motive they can think of, without the need for any evidence to validate it. It is one of the most gratuitous political smear campaigns I have ever seen.

For a dose of reality, check out this set of photos taken by one of my readers at Saturday's rally. The defining characteristic of the tea party rallies, and especially last Saturday's, is the profusion of signs—the movement's dominant medium of expression. You don't have to resort to imagining words these people didn't say or projecting what was "probably" in their minds. They tell you what they're thinking, with an enormous variety and creativity of homemade signs. A few favorites: "Do I Look Like an ATM to You?" The ever-popular "Give Me Liberty, Not Debt." "Congress Is a Toxic Asset." "Free Markets Not Free Loaders." And addressing the race issue head-on: "It Doesn't Matter the President Is Black. It Matters That He's Red." The most unusual sign: a genuine one-million-Mark banknote from the German hyperinflation of the 1920s, surrounded by the motto: "Never Again."

(If you scroll down about halfway, you will also see a picture of yours truly. I'm the fellow in the blue shirt carrying a big sign with a quote from Ayn Rand expressing this "racist" sentiment: "Your life belongs to you and the good is to live it." Clearly code words for the Ku Klux Klan.)
The common theme of the signs was individual rights versus collectivism, an advocacy of limited government held to the restrictions placed on it by the Constitution. One of the signs in the photo essay sums up the message of the tea party rally: "It's the Liberty, Stupid."

The fact that the tea party had such a clear philosophical message, and that the bogus racism smear so thoroughly evades this message, says a lot about the intellectual confidence of the tea party movement—versus the lack of philosophical confidence on the left. The tea partiers are very happy to have a philosophical debate on the most basic political issues. The left, by contrast, wants to change the subject with personal, ad hominem attacks—which indicates that they are not confident that they can win the debate if it stays on the question of the size and role of government.

To say that the left is resorting to "racial politics" is a bit too vague. Let's define exactly what they are doing: they are resorting to a decades-old politics of racial slander, reflexively accusing any opponent of racism in an attempt to shut down discussion.

Racism is one of the worst insults you can throw at someone today, only a few steps up from accusing him of being a child molester. That this is so is, in fact, a tribute to the heroic change in American culture in recent decades. In less than fifty years, America has gone from a country in which segregation was openly enforced and defended to a country in which an accusation of even indirect racism can ruin a man's reputation and career. Just ask Don Imus. But this has come to be used as a weapon—a bludgeon of intimidation wielded by the left.

Barack Obama's color-blind campaign, the idea that he was running as if race didn't matter, promised us an uplifting break from this history. There were indications from the beginning, however, that he didn't really mean it. Obama had to tap dance around his close, longstanding association with the race-baiting preacher Jeremiah Wright, and he sat back while his proxies used accusations of racism as a weapon against the Clinton campaign.

If he could do that in the Democratic primary, there's no reason to think he'll object to those who are doing it again now. Obama allegedly wants to stay out of the current racism smear campaign—but leaders don't get that option. By remaining silent, he is signaling his approval; he is voting "present" on the revival of the racism smear in American politics. This is an enormous disappointment to many people who once voted for Obama—and to many others, like myself, who once saw an element of nobility in his campaign, even if we disagreed with everything else he stood for.

If Obama doesn't immediately and forcefully reject the new racism smear against the tea party movement, then he will have destroyed the last remaining element of his appeal to voters—and he will have made millions of passionate new enemies among the voting public.
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Palin’s Advocacy: The Turning Point in Health Care Reform Debate

Via-Pajama Media




It was her timely intervention that put the Democrats off their game and turned the debate around.

For an uneducated, unsophisticated rube and former governor from a backwater state, Sarah Palin sure can drive a debate. With prospects for passage of his sweeping overhaul of the American health care delivery system fading with every speech, President Barack Obama is making it increasingly clear that Palin will be recognized, for good or ill, as perhaps the most prominent single political figure responsible for stopping it in its tracks.

It’s a remarkable story. A failed vice-presidential candidate and resigned governor — unfairly viewed by many as a cruel joke – reached from beyond the political grave her elitist critics prematurely dug for her and her political future to thwart a popular president prematurely regarded by the same elite that shunned her as perhaps the most gifted politician this nation has ever produced. If Sarah Palin were a sitting governor, a failed presidential candidate, or even a state legislator, her influence in the health care debate would not be as unexpected. It is the fact that she is a private citizen, completely out of politics save for a small political action committee, that makes this story unique.

How did she do it? That’s where the story gets even more remarkable.

There were no public appearances or speeches, no glitzy ad campaigns, no publicity tours, no interviews in the mainstream press or any new media outlet. Sarah Plain killed health care reform with a posting on her Facebook page, an op-ed in the Wall Street Journal, and an exquisite sense of timing.

If history remembers one thing from the current debate over health care, it will remember the phrase “death panel.” Just as Harry and Louise form the enduring image from President Clinton’s failed attempt to take over the health care system, the “death panel” image will come to symbolize Obama’s failure and Palin’s triumph.

It’s almost the perfect political catchphrase. “Death panel” encapsulates everything people fear about the consequences of a government with too much power over those it is supposed to serve.

That turn of phrase, delivered just as Congress was getting ready for the August recess, was the bolt of lightning that set ablaze the brush fires of public unrest over Obama’s plan which manifested itself in town hall meetings across the country. It robbed the White House of message control at a critical juncture and forced the administration to respond to the charge — and to Palin.

The media rushed to Obama’s defense to debunk Palin’s critique. But when the Senate Finance Committee announced a week later that it was removing end-of-life counseling provisions from the bill it was negotiating, the game was up. The White House was exposed and Palin stood vindicated.

Palin returned to the debate on the day before President Obama’s speech to a joint session of Congress with an op-ed in the Wall Street Journal. She skillfully refuted points made by Obama in a New York Times op-ed and made the case for Republican alternatives to the top-down government-run plan that the president espoused. It may be giving Palin too much credit to say that her criticisms influenced the tone of the president’s address. But there is no doubt that she took Obama off his game.

Obama responded with one of the ugliest and most partisan speeches ever delivered by a president of the United States from the rostrum of the House chamber. Gone was the soaring rhetoric, the confidence, and the hope. The spectacle of the most powerful man in the world attacking a private citizen — calling her a liar — in that setting was extraordinary. Obama abandoned all pretense of honest debate, making claims about his plan that are not born out in the actual legislation. It was a small speech, delivered by a very thin-skinned man.

Now, even unapologetic liberal Charlie Rangel admits that Obama’s speech may have hurt chances to get his health care reform plan passed.

How many political figures are there in America who could be so thoroughly derided and written off as Sarah Palin, yet still manage to command so much attention and wield so much influence? The number can likely be counted on one hand.

Sarah Palin challenged a popular president in the arena of ideas, armed with little more than the force of her personality and a steadfast belief in her principles, and emerged victorious. Not bad for a cruel political joke.

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People Power

A wake-up call for America's political elites.
by Matthew Continetti



Via-The Weekly Standard

Congress returns this week, and here's hoping that its members, Democrats in particular, learned a little something from this summer's town hall meetings. The lesson to be drawn from these occasionally raucous events is that America is on the verge of--or already knee-deep in--one of those moments that periodically roil the country and rearrange our preconceived notions about public life. And not a moment too soon.

Popular outbursts serve as a check on, and corrective to, our elites' behavior. The people know things the elites forget or don't want to remember. The political class is supposed to serve the people, not the other way around. As Gerald Ford said after assuming the presidency on August 9, 1974, "Here the people rule."

For a while now, the message from Washington has been that we know what's good for the public, whether the public likes it or not. One after another, both parties have attempted to foist a series of grand reforms on a skeptical populace--in areas ranging from Social Security and immigration to energy and health care. Politicians have made decisions affecting millions of lives without accountability and oversight. The upshot has been more government, more debt, and--coming soon to a 1040 form near you--more taxes. No wonder the public is anxious.

It should hardly come as a surprise that the public views American elites with suspicion and disdain. Ordinary Americans have a point when they assign blame for the current mess to Wall Street CEOs, federal regulators, corrupt politicians, and gullible reporters. When Americans
look at

the economic landscape, they see dismal growth, high unemployment, and large deficits. But when they listen to the president and Congress, they hear that "stimulus"--borrowing ever more from tomorrow to spend today--will work like some kind of magic cure. They hear that this perilous moment is the time to build a "new foundation" with even more expenditures and taxes through "cap-and-trade" and Obamacare. It's as if spending and debt are no problem; as if it's fine that the federal government--which failed in its fundamental duties to build guardrails for the financial system--owns large chunks of that system; as if the political, financial, and think-tank elites have proven themselves worthy of the public's trust.

Two issues are at the center of the present discontent. The first is the state of public finances. The activists and other concerned citizens who showed up at the first tea parties last spring weren't protesting Obamacare (yet). They were protesting Obama's bailouts, budgets, and deficits. Obama's expansion of the state is an offense to liberty, but also to equity. People understand that as the government grows, they will have less opportunity to dispose of their income as they see fit. So the deficit is more than a number or a "structural imbalance." It's a symbol of unrestrained and irresponsible governance.

The second thing that is motivating the new public outcry is a sense of estrangement from political decisionmaking. The worry that Obamacare will result in fewer personal choices and more government fiat is legitimate. That's what Obamacare is set up to do. The debate is not merely a matter of which inputs will produce--voilà!--the desired outcomes, as the Obamacrats think. It's about freedom and responsibility. It's about a family's ability to control its fate, an individual's ability to shape his nation's future.


Rather than examine the reasoning and emotions behind the public expressions of concern, however, the president and his allies in Congress and the media have dismissed the opposition as crazy, misinformed, cynical, and artificial. To the contrary: In 1985, Irving Kristol wrote that the public activism of the Reagan era "is no kind of blind rebellion against good constitutional government. It is rather an effort to bring our governing elites to their senses." That's a fair description, it seems to us, of the public activism on display at town hall meetings across the country over the last month.

As for the elites, especially the liberal elite: They remain deaf, dumb, and blind.
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Just Call Him the Green Pitchfork Czar

Via- The Corner

[Andy McCarthy]

At Hot Air, Captain Ed Morrissey offers an astute comparison of the mainstream media’s dereliction in the matter of “Truther Van” Jones to its similar non-performance four years ago in the matter of CNN honcho Eason Jordan. As Ed observes, in the Jordan case, it could be said that the media was protecting one of its own. With Van Jones, they're still protecting their own — it's just that they're now de facto part of the Obama administration.

Leaving aside the obvious reasons to be disgusted by the dying legacy press here, the Times is insipid in reporting Sunday that "Mr. Jones did not go through the traditional vetting process for administration officials who must be confirmed by the Senate. So it was not until recently that some of Mr. Jones’s past actions received broad airing" — albeit certainly not by the Times. See? Having deigned to say hello now that it's time to say goodbye, the Gray Lady wants you to know this is simply a good-governance issue: If only "Green Jobs Czar" was a confirmation position, there might have been more careful vetting — at both the administration and congressional level.

The point, of course, is that Obama vetted Jones just fine. President Obama is not Mr. Magoo — haplessly gravitating to Truther Van and Ayers and Dohrn and Klonsky and Davis and Wright and the Chicago New Party and ACORN, etc. Jones is a kindred spirit. Obama knows exactly who he is. Jones was given a non-confirmation job precisely because that circumvented the vetting process. This isn't one of those things that just happen. This is Barack "Transparency" Obama gaming the system.

As former Reagan staffer Jeffrey Lord explains at the Spectator, the Secret Service carefully scrutinizes the background of everyone who works at the White House. With his background, Van Jones couldn't possibly have gotten into the White House, much less had physical access to the president, unless the top echelon of the administration (I'd wager, the very top) overrode any objections.

The issue here isn't process. It's that Obama picked Van Jones because Obama adheres to Jones's Alinskyite views and tactics, and is entirely comfortable with what most of the public would see as the horrifying specter of Jones managing how billions of public dollars are spent. Note the Times's account of Jones's time at STORM:

Mr. Jones’s involvement in the 1990s with a group called Standing Together to
Organize a Revolutionary Movement prompted recent accusations by conservative
critics that he associated with Communists. The group, according to a
post-mortem written by some of its founders, was an anti-capitalist, antiwar
organization committed to achieving “solidarity among all oppressed peoples”
with “direct militant action.”

Hold on there. Direct-action? The use of intimidation and extortion tactics, including law-breaking, to achieve political results? Where have we heard that before? Well, there was ACORN, which happens to be both a stalwart Obama ally and "an anti-capitalist, antiwar organization committed to achieving solidarity among all oppressed peoples with direct militant action.”

Remember the name Madeline Talbott? Stanley Kurtz tried to tell the country about her before the election—back when conventional Beltway wisdom nuanced itself into the notion that Obama, a five-alarm radical, would govern from the center. Talbott is the Chicago ACORN leader who was so impressed by Obama's organizing skills that she brought him in to train her staff. And what sort of stuff was she into? Here's Stanley:

Talbot turns out to have been a key leader of that attempt by Acorn to storm the
Chicago City Council (during a living-wage debate).... The details are worth a
look: On July 31, 1997, six people were arrested as 200 Acorn protesters tried
to storm the Chicago City Council session. According to the Chicago Daily
Herald, Acorn demonstrators pushed over the metal detector and table used to
screen visitors, backed police against the doors to the council chamber, and
blocked late-arriving aldermen and city staff from entering the session. Reading
the Herald article, you might think Acorn’s demonstrators had simply lost
patience after being denied entry to the gallery at a packed meeting. Yet the
full story points in a different direction. This was not an overreaction by
frustrated followers who couldn’t get into a meeting (there were plenty of
protestors already in the gallery), but almost certainly a deliberate bit of
what radicals call “direct action,” orchestrated by Acorn’s Madeleine Talbot. As
Talbot was led away handcuffed, charged with mob action and disorderly conduct,
she explicitly justified her actions in storming the meeting.

Because the mainstream media was about as interested in investigating Obama’s direct-action stunts as it was in investigating Truther Van, not much is known about them. Despite the paper-trail purge, though, Stanley did manage to unearth one small episode of what anyone with eyes willing to see could have told you was the Obama way: the time Obama sent an intimidating group of protestors on a "surprise visit" to a meeting of local officials. The protestors surrounded the table while one of their number dressed down the officials, after which the group filed out of the room en masse. Message sent: Do what we say or prepare to be harassed.

A few months back, Obama and his mouthpieces tried to whip the public into a frenzy about the banks and high corporate salaries. The president then summoned the bank CEOs into his White House woodshed, where he bluntly told them, "My administration is the only thing between you and the pitchforks."

Think of Truther Van as the guy passing out the "Free Mumia" tee-shirts and the green pitchforks.

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Comic Relief

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the monetary value of nothing

Via- Skeptic's Corner

Sometimes I'll read something that basically takes my breath away, no pun intended. Usually it has to do with climate modelling and the faith that so called scientist put into it, but today's example literally is about nothing at all. It is not a new revelation it is just a new found appreciation of the absurdity of what the world is in the process of doing.

Here is the little article that brought about my most recent trip into the realm of la la land. It is from Carbon Offsets Daily "Financial Solutions Idiots guide to Carbon Credits." The entire idiocy of this is explained in the very first paragraph:

Carbon credits are the latest international commodity. Very simply put, a carbon credit is one ton of carbon avoided or negated from the atmosphere. This commodity has an estimated value in the trillions of dollars on carbon trading markets throughout the world, Financial Solutions research shows.

Consider this, an invisible trace gas generated by every living being is now a commodity, But that is not true either, as bad as the idea of carbon dioxide being considered a commodity is -the reality is that carbon dioxide is not really the commodity at all:

a carbon credit is one ton of carbon avoided or negated from the atmosphere

So in fact a non entity is now a commodity. Making an invisible gas readily available everywhere without charge a commodity is ridiculous enough, but the idea of not making an invisible gas readily available everywhere without charge a thing of value is beyond absurd, it is surreal.

Let's look at the common definition of a commodity to see how far over the edge we have gone. From Merriam Webster:

1 : an economic good: as a : a product of agriculture or mining b : an article of commerce especially when delivered for shipment c : a mass-produced unspecialized product
2 a : something useful or valued ;

Not only are we creating value out of thin air, we are creating value for the production of nothing whatsoever. This of course is mainstream now everyone is just debating the details of the plan and the monetary value of nothing.

The world has indeed lost it's collective mind.


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The revolt against the elite

Via-American Thinker

By Gary Horne

The revolt keeps growing, from tea parties to angry town hall meetings across the country, an uprising against the attempts of an elite to force on us an all-powerful State, about as welcome as grandma's cod-liver oil. Examples of revolt go beyond irate callers to radio talk shows. Take for instance the incident at a Frankie Valli concert recently posted on American Thinker, and the disgust and anger in Joe Sheffat's article. Sen. Barbara Boxer encountered it, as did Sen. Claire McCaskill, who made the mistake of asking if she was trusted.

The elite seem unable to comprehend that anyone could possibly oppose their infinitely superior wisdom, hence the strange and radical smears against the town hall opposition. No one could possibly have a better idea than us, the elite, therefore the town hall "mobs" must be fakes. Anyone, like Ronald Reagan, George Bush, or Sarah Palin, who thinks differently than us, the elite, surely must be of lower intellect. The elite are unable to understand that this is not about taxes, or health care, or politics. It is about them!


The American Elite Shoppe carries several varieties (not available in Walmart): Elites in Power, Elites in Towers, Elites in Flowers, and Elites in Choirs.


The Elites in Power are much of the Congress and many with powerful positions in the administration or as government bureaucrats. There they proceed to coerce the rest of us since they know better than us how to run our lives. The Elites in Towers (otherwise known as intellectuals) are in university humanities and "social science" departments or think tanks where they make the irrational appear rational, turn black into white, and take theories which have never worked and spin them into golden dreams. They hold a mysterious "wisdom" known only to themselves which invariably is contrary to common sense. They provide the ideas for the Elites in Power. Elites in Flowers curse mankind for not bowing before nature. Elites in Choirs sing from their media posts the praises of the other elites and their ideas.


This is not to impugn the integrity of members of Congress who respect the views of their constituents and the Constitution, professors who think rather than "intellectualize," true outdoorsmen, or responsible journalists. These do not currently wield any power and the revolt is not against them.


Most elites have spent their lives in universities or politics, or otherwise isolated from the rest of us, and almost never have run a business, or even earned a living in the manner most of us do. (Community organizing does not qualify.)


Some examples for Elites in Power (from government web site biographies):


*Sen. Harry Reid - degree: law, business experience: 0, In Congress since: 1982
*Sen. John Kerry - degree: law, business experience: 0, In Congress since: 1984
*Barney Frank - degrees: political science, law, business experience: 0, In Congress since: 1981
*Nancy Pelosi - business experience: 0 (worked for DNC), In Congress since 1987

Lack of experience doesn't stop the elite from thinking themselves superior and not subject to the same rules as rest of us. Congress often excludes itself from laws, as in the proposed health care legislation. Corruption for them can be overlooked, or pasted over with a sufficient dose of BS. To erase any accountability when caught breaking the rules, the elite simply use the magic word; mistake.
Some examples:

*The White House today called Daschle's failure to pay more than $100,000 in back taxes a "serious mistake," but the president still "absolutely" supports his nomination to be secretary of Health and Human Services.

*The Obama team said Mr. Geithner's taxes have been paid in full, and that he didn't intend to avoid payment, but made a mistake common for employees of international institutions.

*Rangel has been under fire for failing to report income from a rental property he owns in the Dominican Republic. He admitted Tuesday he had not paid tax on the income, but said it was a mistake and that he would pay whatever back taxes he owes.

*During his confirmation hearing Thursday, Attorney General-designate Eric Holder conceded that he "made mistakes" during the Marc Rich pardon incident that were "not typical" of his conduct over the bulk of his career.

*The White House says Judge Sotomayor admits she made a mistake when she suggested a Latino woman would make a better judge than a white male.

The elite think our mistakes are more serious and see us as needing their benevolent care, since we don't have their level of "sophistication". Such arrogance is the road to tyranny, as warned by writer C. S. Lewis:

Of all tyrannies, a tyranny sincerely exercised for the good of its victims maybe the most oppressive

For the sake of benevolence, the Elites in Power are willing to implement by force the Elites in Towers' utopian fantasies. The Benevolent Eliteness accepts the advice of intellectuals with little or no critical scrutiny. The blind acceptance of global warming is one example. As a result, unrealistic grandiose schemes are proposed which always seem to result in the need for more Benevolent Elitenesses.


Many of Ronald Reagan's accomplishments were after passing over advice from intellectuals. As Peggy Noonan says in When Character Was King,

For instance, he did not think that people with great degrees or great success were necessarily smart. He had little interest in credentials. He once told me - he told a lot of people - that an economist was a person with a Phi Beta Kappa key on one end of his watch chain and nothing on the other. Meaning: A lot of them don't know what time it is.


He didn't dislike intellectuals, and to the extent he had heroes a lot of them were intellectuals - Madison, Jefferson, the founders - and in his own time Milton Friedman, Friedrich Hayek, Whittaker Chambers. But in general he did not favor the intellectuals of his time because he found so many of them to be high-IQ dimwits. He had a natural and instinctive agreement with George Orwell's famous putdown that a particular idea was so stupid only an intellectual would believe it.

A degree from Harvard does not wisdom make. In fact, the longer an individual stays in academia, the fewer credits they earn in the College of the Real World.


Implementing the ideas of such intellectuals can result in disaster. Pol Pot was merely putting into practice the philosophical principles he learned from French intellectuals. Recent events caused me to dust off my copy of The Ominous Parallels by Leonard Peikoff (1982), which demonstrates the parallels of our situation to pre-Hitler Germany. Dr. Peikoff discusses the role of philosophy and the intellectuals:

The root cause of Nazism lies in a power that most people ignore, disparage - and underestimate. The cause is not the events hailed or cursed in headlines and street rallies, but the esoteric writings of the professors who, decades or centuries earlier, laid the foundation for those events.

"[The Nazi] death camps," notes a writer* in the New York Times, "were conceived, built and often administered by Ph.D.'s"


Dr. Peikoff describes the roots of today's revolt:

The hope of the United States lies in the philosophical breach between the American people and the intellectuals.


The people admire material wealth, practical success, technological innovation. The intellectuals dismiss such values as "middle class," and say that machines are destroying the globe. The people admire self-reliance, productiveness, and the other virtues of the so-called "work ethic." The intellectuals say that these virtues are impossible, unnecessary, antisocial, and/or "Puritan compulsiveness."


The people approve of personal ambition, are eager to pursue their own happiness, think that a man should not live on handouts but should earn what he gets, and reject the insistent demands for self-immolation. The intellectuals denounce this - every element of it - as selfish and therefore vicious.


The people hotly reject the proliferating manifestations of the welfare state, from soaring welfare rolls to forced busing to sexual quotas. The intellectuals condemn this as unfeeling, racist, "sexist."

Leonard Peikoff's observations are just as valid, maybe more so, than 27 years ago. The gap between the people and the elites has become a chasm, into which the elites are about to fall.


*(Fred Hechinger, "Educators Seek to Teach Context of the Holocaust," May 15, 1979)



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