This amount of arrogance, the sheer impardonable pretension, is bound to be popular.
I wonder if Barack Obama's tepid, mealy-mouthed response to the violent protests by the Iranian opposition stems from his own complicity in election fixing?
Nah. That would imply possession of a conscience.
I'm tivoing the Iranian revolution. I have people right now gathering the information into book form, and in a few months I will purchase the paperback.
That's my way of saying it's great the the Iranians are dissatisfied with Ahmedicatedad, but I don't have to spend my day following it. It's not like I can affect the situation.
On the other hand, it does show once again that the global connectivity in general and the Internet in particular make it hard to keep tyranny going. Just as the PC and fax machine are said to have helped bring down the former Soviet Union, it appears that the Iranian revolution is being broadcast on Twitter.
But that presupposes that this is a revolution. It's impossible for me to know whether that is true or not -- are the protests against Ahmedinnerjacket, or against the Islamic regime itself?
And if they are against the Islamic regime, with what form of government will the revolution replace it?
I guess Barack Obama thinks maybe the revolution will bring something worse than totalitarian dictatorship - capitalism.
Rick Moran, writing at The Next Right:
I will say frankly that this is the nuttiest part of Limbaugh's speech. There is probably no one answer to what ails conservatism but there is widespread agreement among profressionals (sic) that people like Rush, who wish to repeal not only the Great Society but also the New Deal, are anachronisms. It is not going to happen - ever. The question then becomes do conservatives chase a will o' the wisp goal that guarantees them permanent minority status or do they apply conservative principles to government as it is and not as we would wish it to be?
Now comes Barack Obama, with his vast experience as a mortgage broker, corporate CEO, Chairman of the Board, and Wall Street investment analyst, to
In the days of the Soviet Union, the Communist Party existed as a kind of shadow government. There was an official government, with a President, ministers, a legislature, and so on. As The Columbia Encyclopedia puts it, the Communist Party of the Soviet Union
... had been organized to parallel the territorial hierarchy of government administration and all significant institutions, including the press and armed forces, thereby effectively controlling all policy.
To the extent that the world has a leader, it is not free.
I should end this post there, but something else occurs to me.
Obama, by virtue of his international and liberal upbringing, Muslim father, and not least his African lineage, may be tempted to see Southwest Asian and African leaders as more like himself than not.
Perhaps that will be a net positive for civilization in the long run, but there remains a distinct possibility that he will presume a false familiarity. Like an undercover agent trying to infiltrate a criminal operation, there are shades of loyalty and of distrust that no American can ever cast aside, as long as he remains such. Will the mullahs and warlords play on his heritage, and if so, will he play along as the cat or as the mouse?
Ross Douthat at The Atlantic writes of Armageddon, and the choice to retaliate or not to retaliate after the fall of a national capitol.
As Douthat has it, the British Prime Minister has break-the-glass orders with nuclear submarine commanders at the bottom of the ocean for what to do in case London were vaporized, King and Parliament with it. Ross wonders what Reagan would have done, and speculates that after his country were razed, Reagan may not have retaliated. He suggests that the Lion of Reykjavik would have lain down with the Wolf of Glasnost, saying that at that point, "What's the use?"
The utility of following through with destruction of their following destruction of ours is simple: lovers of liberty must oppose tyranny with every tool at their disposal. If the submarine fails to deliver retribution, evil men will dictate the history books. There, done.
The more interesting question is if the submarine commander would be bound to follow the orders of a dead Prime Minister.
Military doctrine, upon which the Geneva Conventions are based, holds that an officer's legitimacy stems from his loyalty to the State. Supposing that State no longer to exist, or to have been captured by opposing forces, the commander would be a rogue actor, or a member of the armed resistance, should he choose to obey the orders written in the safe.
But does the State no longer exist once its administrative offices and its Head are so much glowing dust? I think no easy answer to this question is possible, because there are levels of existence. If a State loses its monarch, bureaucracy, executive leadership and entire flag officer corps, does the State exist? Perhaps the question can only be answered post hoc, should the citizens of the State reformulate it into something able to control its territory.
Supposing the entirety of the nation's is land rendered inhabitable, or during the time in which the State is nonfunctional, we still have our submarine (or lunar base) commander, out of communication with the rest of the race. He may have information as to the source of the destruction that came upon his nation, or he may lack it, and in any case he will be confronted with some amount of uncertainty.
During the Cold War, he might safely have assumed that the former Soviet Union were the responsible party, and could be counted blameless for expending his arsenal against any high-value targets he could reach.
But in the 9/11 era, even a worldwide intelligence network may fail to uncover the source of mass destruction. An incommunicado commander, wishing to remain hidden, would have somewhat less certainty over how to retaliate, and against whom.
But such a commander would be loyal not just to a chain of command or the laws of a particular nation, but first to the noblest lady of our civilization: Liberty herself. If he could band together with like-minded warriors at sea, and perhaps find some undefended shoal to call home, they could once again breath the air as free men. Their war would continue until victory or defeat, by enemy or age.
Over at Power and Control, Simon says:
The government IS the Devil. Not metaphorically. Really.
Everything you get from government will have a price much larger than the value of the object gained. Some times the price will not be extracted from you. Sometimes it will be from your children, your grand children, or ten generations hence. But the full price the government wants will be extracted at compound interest.
We are still paying the price for trying to be a free people while holding slaves. My great great grand parents lived on another continent when all that went on. And yet the price is being extracted from me.
Man: Hey, little fella, why are you banging those sticks together?
Boy: To keep the tigers away.
Man: There are no tigers around here!
Boy: Works, don't it.
Writing at Cato, Jim Harper notes that the airport security behavioral profiling program is a failure on multiple levels:
Works, don't it.According to this story in USA Today, interviewing or patting down 160,000 people with (unreported) indicia of suspicion at airports has resulted in 1,266 arrests. It has failed to find wrongdoing 99.3% of the time. Occassionally, investigations based on behavioral profiling have turned up such things as drug possession and the use of fake identification.
Behavioral profiling has never turned up someone planning harm to aviation security. It has never turned up a person with weapons, guns, bombs, or any other implement that would cause a flight to be delayed, much less brought down.
A 0.7% success rate in finding crime is not relevant. Behavioral profiling has a 0% success rate in finding threats to aviation. Behavioral profiling does not have a proximate relationship to securing against harm coming to commercial aviation.
Legal counsel for aged Congressman John Murtha (D-PA) claimed in open court that his client is immune from laws which limit ordinary citizens.
Murtha is being sued for saying that Marines involved in an incident at Haditha, Iraq, were "murderers" guilty of "war crimes".
From the via Malkin:
Assistant U.S Attorney Darrell Valdez, who represents Murtha, argued that a member of Congress is “absolutely immune” from a defamation suit because there’s no circumstance in which speaking to the media is not within the scope of a lawmaker’s employment.
News outlets are reporting a vicious fight in the wake of Democrats seizing power over Republicans in the recent US elections. The socialist wing of the party, led by the aging Steny Hoyer (D-MD), vows to defeat the marxist faction led by former homosexual pimp Barney Frank (D-MA) and Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-CA) in order to keep the radicals from destroying the nation too quickly.
Hoyer, remaining alert at the twilight of his career, still boasted of his hold on the majority of newly elected Congressmen. Voters are more interested in implementing the ideas of Karl Marx in a practical way than in finding enlightenment through ideological purity, Hoyer noted. "The 33 new Members of Congress coming to Washington to swell our side of the aisle are pragmatic, not dogmatic."
It is not yet clear if Hoyer retains the ability or the will to stand up to Pelosi and powerful incoming Executive branch official Barack Obama (D-IL). During the campaign, Pelosi and Hoyer squabbled over the role superdelegates should play in selecting the Democrat nominee for Obama's position. The Hoyer camp eventually won out. As Hoyer urged, the superdelegates disregarded the popular vote to select Obama over defeated socialist wing candidate Hillary Clinton (D-NY).
Speaker Pelosi argued during the campaign that after being vital to his selection for office, she and her marxists would be more bipartisan and ally with the more conservative socialist wing in support of Obama.
Jay Nordinger at NRO finds the continental divide in this election. Is Communism good or bad? Is it a wonderful idea which has had some suboptimal implementations, or is it a rotten idea which has been tried and found to be a rotten idea?
I think it's a rotten idea. Barack Obama appears to think it just needs his special touch to make it work.
Your call.
Barack Obama is trying to divert attention from his collectivist economic policies through his usual redefinition+strawman tactic. Noting that John McCain and Joe "the Plumber" Wurzelbacher called his wealth-spreading ideas "socialism", Obama complains joyfully:
"By the end of the week, he'll be accusing me of being a secret communist because I shared my toys in kindergarten. I shared my peanut butter and jelly sandwich."
Barack Obama has been predicting that in a short time his election would "change America". The phrase goes along with his campaign theme of change, but in typical Liberal overreach, says more than perhaps it ought to say, if the goal is not to lose votes.
Because while it's sometimes appropriate to change direction, you don't have to change who you are to change direction. And to "change America" suggests a change to who we are.
If Obama were merely talking about changing our priorities, or changing our politics, or changing direction, he would stick to saying those things. But to speak of changing America is going not to a tailor but a surgeon, expressing a desire for an alteration not to the clothes, but to the wearer.
And change America how? That is, to change something implies a prior state of being and a future one.
But the America that Obama says he wants to change from appears to be the America that his racist and anti-semitic pastor Jeremiah Wright knows: still stuck not in 1958, but in an alternate reality of 1958 in which the government conducts experiments on black people to control them. (Jerry, clue in: the government doesn't use experiments to control black people, they use the Democrats).
Taken with recent revelations about Obama's desire to redistribute wealth, it becomes pretty obvious that, as is a defining characteristic of liberals, he wants to throw away the baby with the bathwater and do away with the economic system that made America the most powerful country in the world, replacing it with a system that purports ensure social and economic justice.
But ensuring those things would require enforced equal outcomes. And no matter how many times it's tried, nor how many names it's given, tyranny doesn't work.
w/t Mona Charen, and Terrestrial Musings agrees.
One of the foundational principles of my philosophy is the inseparability of the freedoms, including but not limited to liberty of thought, speech, religion, press, self defense, private property, travel, assembly, and the use of the secret ballot. Violate or eliminate any, and the others are at risk, and must be employed to restore those violated.
And I would greatly prefer a foreign policy which allied us with those who agreed with our esteem of those freedoms, rather than with those whose economic or military interests align with our current strategy. Label me a foreign policy idealist, and tar me with the neocon brush if you will, but this diplomatic strategy by which we strike alliances with those who share only a passing acquaintance with the principles we hold most dear can lead only to eventual betrayal, by one party or another, with ourselves the likely loser.
And so I was somewhat off-put to read at MEMRI:
Muhammad Al-Munajid: "Some of these heretics say: 'Islam is not the private property of anyone.' So what do they want? They say: 'No sect has a monopoly on Islam.' So what do they want? They say: 'We want to issue rulings.' Someone who is ignorant, who does not know any Arabic, or who has no knowledge of Islamic jurisprudence wants to issue rulings?!OK, not so bad so far, right? A cleric wants control of his own religion. It's to be expected, as that is what religions do. So what got under my fingernails?
"The problem is that they want to open a debate on whether Islam is true or not, and on whether Judaism and Christianity are false or not. In other words, they want to open up everything for debate. Now they want to open up all issues for debate. That's it.
"It begins with freedom of thought, it continues with freedom of speech, and it ends up with freedom of belief. So where's the conspiracy? They say: Let's have freedom of thought in Islam. Well, what do they want?
"They say: I think, therefore I want to express my thoughts. I want to express myself, I want to talk and say, for example, that there are loopholes in Islam, or that Christianity is the truth.
"Then they will talk about freedom of belief, and say that anyone is entitled to believe in whatever he wants... If you want to become an apostate - go ahead. You like Buddhism? Leave Islam, and join Buddhism. No problem. That's what freedom of belief is all about. They want freedom of everything. What they want is very dangerous.
That is what happens when a religion is made official. An official religion cements in place the authority of those who adhere to it most zealously over those who merely tolerate it or agree not to fight against it, setting up an alternate power structure to that underpinned by the ballot box.
Ironically, I do not believe that I have ever in the halls of the Academy touched on the topic of education, that is, what the government proffers as such.
For it is galling that the State should be a provider of education at all.
We have in the free world in general and the United States in particular a fine tradition of the free press, which institution generally operates as a check against government excess. If there is a hint of the personal peccadilloes of an elected official or if someone claims that the single most nationally unifying event in the last 50 years was the product of a government conspiracy of absurd design and dubious motivation, our faithful media are there to report it.
But the media have shown themselves completely unable to fulfill this function in one key aspect. While the press do jealously guard their own sacred cows in the First Amendment, they fail miserably as guardians of the others. Pointedly, they fail to question the legitimacy of government involvement in new ventures as they come along. They regard their role as ensuring proper government function and spreading truth, yet they disregard the fundamental truth of our republic, that government should only be allowed to interfere in certain matters, but no others. While they seem to understand particular limits on government, the more general concept of a limited government eludes them.
And I place the blame for this failure at the feet of government-run education. Whatever else a government school teaches, the superiority of private education is not it. Rather, the goal of public education is to socialize, to create a population that is not wary of government intrusion but accepting and welcoming, even demanding of it.
The schools should teach basic skills in letters and numbers, literature, the sciences, and mathematics. They should provide knowledge about our history and that of the wider world. And they should teach critical thinking skills such as logical analysis and the spotting of demagoguery. But there ought to be a wild diversity of political, religious, social views taught, and none to the exclusion of the others. When the State hires the teatchers and the State mandates not just what is to be taught but how, no doctrine which is contrary to its expansion can long expect currency.
So the problem isn't merely, or precisely, that the media is full of liberal hacks, which it incontrovertibly is. The problem is that thanks to years of government training, it's full of closed-minded liberal hacks.
Nancy Pelosi, Speaker of the House and really bad economist, has one thing right. China is our enemy.
When Bill Clinton arranged for China to get Most Favored Nation trading status, he said trading with them would encourage them on the road to democracy. Nancy opposed him, saying we should not trade with wicked nations. In 1991, while Bill Clinton was seeking to pay back his Chinese masters, Pelosi went to China, as well, and found her way to Tiananmen Square:Along with two other members of Congress, Pelosi unwrapped a banner that read, "To those who died for democracy in China." The decidedly undiplomatic delegation was immediately surrounded by police and Chinese "tourists" who pulled walkie-talkies from their backpacks.
Pelosi continues her fight against the state of affairs in China. While the Chinese Communists are calling for 'stepped up "patriotic campaigns"' in Tibet, which yearns for freedom:
Unrest among Tibet's Buddhist clergy has been blamed in part on compulsory "patriotic education" classes, widely reviled by monks for cutting into religious study and forcing them to make ritual denouncements of the Dalai Lama, who fled to India in 1959 after a failed uprising against Chinese rule.Freedom of thought, religion, and speech are non-negotiable. I encourage athletes all over the world to reject the Chinese demand for their complicit silence during the Games.
I recall past scandals, with their logs of text messages sent to Congressional pages, their descriptions of seedy encounters in airport restroms.
So I must admit to a certain partisan satisfaction when New York Governor Eliot Spitzer (D-NY), smug and self-righteous, admitted to involvement with paying for services which he ought to have got for free, or done without. Perhaps relief is a better descriptor than satisfaction -- relief that it isn't someone with whom I share a philosophy. But I am disappointed whenever anyone fails in their struggle over wickedness.
I must admit to a certain partisan satisfaction, no, anticipation when I hear that in all likelihood Illinois Governor Rod Blagojevich (D-Chicago) continues the long standing Illinois tradition of political corruption, or Senatory Barack Obama (D-IL) is not forthcoming about his relationship with that same corruption. But I am disappointed whenever anyone fails in their struggle over wickedness.
I must admit to a certain partisan satisfaction, no, gloating when Governor Jennifer Granholm (D) of Michigan is caught refusing to pay taxes for her reelection financing. No matter how complicated the tax code is, the IRS is very clear when you owe them money, and ignoring that is really poor judgement. But I am disappointed whenever anyone fails in their struggle over wickedness.
But then I realized something. With each of these scandals of public malfeasance and abuse of the public trust, Americans have one less reason to trust their government.
And that is a cause for celebration, howsoever how it comes about.
The quote from William F. Buckley, "I will not cede more power to the state.", gave me reason to recall a principle that is not spoken enough. Whenever we ask the government to do anything for us that we like, we are giving it the power to do something we don't.
If we wish to keep our freedoms of speech, press, and public meeting, we cannot allow the freedom of religion to be curbed, for it is only by limiting the first three that the fourth can be impinged.
Ask government to limit freedom of speech, press, art, or any other freedom in the interest of morality, and you also give it the power to limit your own freedom of speech, press, or art when next the pendulum of change swings against you.
We cannot demand a war on drugs without losing the battle for liberty. And if one poor lifestyle choice is so illegal as to allow the police to seize your assets without due process, why are the other poor lifestyle choices any different? Should drinking, smoking, gambling, pornography, foul language, overeating or speeding on the highway be any different?
We cannot ask the government to spend money it doesn't have without incurring a higher tax burden. While it's true that government revenues tend to increase over time when taxes are lowered, that is not a reason to increase spending in anticipation of higher revenue. Government spending requires that the government get funds via taxation at some point. If we lower taxes and wait for the increased revenue (from greater economic activity), increased spending counts against a future tax cut.
Looking at the bigger picture, many people entertain the fantasy that only certain parts of government are problematic. Some wish to increase defense spending, or farm subsidies, or education funding, or some other portion of government, without realizing the implications for the rest of government. Any increase in spending, unless it is accompanied by an equal cut in another area, increases the size of government. That increase requires increased taxation, and neither the increase in spending nor the taxation required to achieve it will ever go away even once the problem they ostensibly address is no longer a concern.
If you ask the government for "free" health care (or even "free" health insurance), be prepared to have government then control your behavior in the interest of decreasing medical costs.
Not only must we not cede power to the state, we must not ask of it any favors.
I will not cede more power to the state. I will not willingly cede more power to anyone, not to the state, not to General Motors, not to the CIO. I will hoard my power like a miser, resisting every effort to drain it away from me. I will then use my power, as I see fit. I mean to live my life an obedient man, but obedient to God, subservient to the wisdom of my ancestors; never to the authority of political truths arrived at yesterday at the voting booth. That is a program of sorts, is it not? It is certainly program enough to keep conservatives busy, and Liberals at bay. And the nation free.--- William F. Buckley, Jr. (1925-2008) in Up From Liberalism (Rowman & Littlefield Publishers, Inc., 1961)
