To collectivists (progressives, socialists, statists, call them what you will) –

No man is an island. Every man is a traffic jam.

That perceptive summary comes from an article by Daniel Greenfield, from which we now happily quote more. Do yourself a favor and read it in full here.

The gun control debate, like all debates with the left, is reducible to the question of whether we are individuals who make our own decisions or a great squishy social mass that helplessly responds to stimuli. Do people kill with guns or does the availability of guns kill people? Do bad eating habits kill people or does the availability of junk food kill people?

To the left these are distinctions without a difference. If a thing is available then it is the cause of the problem. The individual cannot be held accountable for shooting someone if there are guns for sale. Individuals have no role to play because they are not moral actors, only members of a mob responding to stimuli. …

The clash that will define the future of America is this collision between the individual and the state, between disorganized freedom and organized compassion …

The final failure of accountability for the left is a failure of moral organization, while for the right it is a failure of personal character. The right asks, “Why did you kill?” The left asks, “Who let him have a gun?”, “Who didn’t provide him with a job” and “Who neglected his self-esteem?” If you eat too much, it’s because corporations make you eat. If you kill, it’s because corporations encourage you to buy guns. You are not an individual. You are a social problem.

The defining American code is freedom. The defining liberal code is compassion. … On one side stands the individual with his rights and responsibilities. On the other side is the remorseless state machinery of supreme compassion. And there is no bridging this gap.

Liberal compassion is not the compassion of equals. It is a revolutionary pity that uses empathy as fuel for outrage. It is the sort of compassion practiced by people who like to be angry and who like to pretend that their anger makes them better people. It is the sort of compassion that eats like poison into the bones of a man or a society, even while swelling their egos with their own wonderfulness.

Compassion of this sort is outrage fuel. It is hatred toward people masquerading as love. And that hatred is a desire for power masquerading as outrage. Peel away the mask of compassion and all that is underneath is a terrible lust for power.

Freedom goes hand in hand with personal moral organization of the individual by the individual. Organized compassion, however, requires the moral organization of the society as a whole. A shooting is not a failure of the character of one man alone, or even his family and social circle; it is the total failure of our entire society and perhaps even the world, for not leveraging a sufficient level of moral organization that would have made such a crime impossible. No man is an island. Every man is a traffic jam.

Social accountability on this scale requires the nullification of the personhood and accountability of the individual, just as the moral organization that it mandates requires removing the freedom of choice of the individual, to assure a truly moral society. When compassion and morality are collective, then everyone and no one is moral and compassionate at the same time. And that is the society of the welfare state where compassion is administered by a salaried bureaucracy.

Choice is what makes us moral creatures and collective compassion leaves us less than human. …

This is the society that the left is creating; a place filled with as many social problems as there are people, where … freedom is the enemy of a system whose moral code derives from creating a perfect society by replacing the individual with the mass. It is a society where there is no accountability, only constant compulsion. It is a society where you are a social problem and there are highly paid experts working day and night to figure out how to solve you.

One of our constant themes is freedom versus collectivism. Obviously, we are on the side of freedom. We find it awkward, sometimes exasperating, that many (and in America most) of our fellow fighters for individual freedom are enslaved to one or another religious superstition: mostly Christianity, from which the sentimental, somewhat contemptuous, and inevitably hypocritical doctrine of love-and-compassion as a guiding principle of societal organization* – as also the leftist ideal of material equality** – derives. This makes it odd that the Christian Right in America is on the same side as we are in the political war. Odd that they don’t see the collectivist Left as their natural political home. But we soldier on with whatever allies present themselves, because individual freedom is the highest value, the condition of human existence that must be protected at any cost.

* See our post Tread on me: the making of Christian morality, December 22, 2011.

** eg. 2 Cor. 8:14: “But by an equality, [that] now at this time your abundance [may be a supply] for their want, that their abundance also may be [a supply] for your want: that there may be equality.”

Fascism has always been ill-defined. It has come to mean little more than a style of behavior that the user of the word does not like.

So we must say what we mean by it, and that is: Government behaving as the master instead of the servant of the people. For decades now fascist authoritarianism has been manifested almost exclusively by the Left wherever it is in power. Socialism is intrinsically authoritarian. The Left is intrinsically fascist.

Fascist government can be less or more oppressive, less or more brutally sadistic.

In Britain it is becoming more oppressive and brutally sadistic, as the following stories demonstrate.

This is from PJ Media by Mike McNally:

Officials at a left-wing British council have removed three children from their foster parents because of the parents’ political affiliation and unsubstantiated allegations of racism against them.

Social workers from Rotherham council in Yorkshire, which is controlled by the Labour party, removed the three Eastern European children from the foster parents — and from what was by all accounts a stable and loving home — after learning that the couple were members of the right-of-center UK Independence Party, or UKIP. Among other policies, UKIP wants to tighten Britain’s notoriously lax immigration laws.

Council officials said the party was “racist,” and Joyce Thacker, the council’s director of children and young people’s services, said she had to consider the “cultural and ethnic needs” of the children: a baby girl, and an older girl and boy. But the council’s argument is a series of evasions based on a blatant lie. This is a clear case of left-wing officials abusing their power to persecute individuals for holding politically incorrect beliefs.  …

Just as Democrats spent the last few years playing the race card to silence critics of President Obama, when it comes to immigration and Britain’s relationship with Europe, British leftists have for years used accusations of racism to smear their opponents and to discredit their arguments.

UKIP is not racist. … The party campaigns not for an end to immigration, but for an overhaul of the system to end the wave of largely uncontrolled mass immigration that’s transformed large areas of Britain in recent years. It would also like to see Britain leave the European Union, which in recent years has moved from a trading bloc to an increasingly centralized and unaccountable political entity.

Both positions are supported by majorities of the British people. And both are fiercely opposed by the progressive, statist, bureaucratic liberal-left elite which controls swaths of British public life, and which invariably dominates the social services departments of councils such as Rotherham.

The couple appear to have unimpeachable credentials as foster parents. The husband works with disabled people and was a Royal Navy reservist for more than 30 years. His wife is a qualified nursery nurse. They’ve successfully fostered around a dozen children over a period of several years.

It’s been reported that the boy has been separated from his sisters and placed with a different family. …

Amid the political fallout from the Rotherham case, it’s important not to lose sight of who the real victims are: three vulnerable children, desperately in need of love and stability, who have been wrenched from parents who were providing both. …

While the council’s decision to remove the children is a chilling assault on freedom of thought and political belief, it’s also dreadful policy in practical terms. Britain is facing an adoption crisis. In 2010, just over 3,000 children were adopted, out of more than 65,000 in the care system, with the rest shunted between foster parents or languishing in children’s homes. The head of a leading children’s charity has warned that under the draconian rules imposed by social services departments, most parents wouldn’t be allowed to adopt their own children. …

You get the distinct impression that fanatics like Joyce Thacker and her colleagues would rather half the children in Britain were raised by the benevolent and right-thinking state than by any parent — however responsible and loving — who dares to deviate from the party line.

It’s difficult to imagine a more cruel and perverse manifestation of “progressive” left-wing thinking.

Only with the  last statement we disagree.  We don’t have to imagine worse. We are about to describe worse in the reality of socialist Britain.

This is what happens when a nation puts the responsibility for its health care – which is to say for each individual’s life and death –  in the hands of the state.

The story of National Health practice in one district is an example of practice throughout the United Kingdom. It comes from the Mail Online:

Sick children are being discharged from NHS hospitals to die at home or in hospices on controversial ‘death pathways’.

Until now, end of life regime the Liverpool Care Pathway was thought to have involved only elderly and terminally-ill adults. But the Mail can reveal the practice of withdrawing food and fluid by tube is being used on young patients as well as severely disabled newborn babies.

One doctor has admitted starving and dehydrating ten babies to death in the neonatal unit of one hospital alone.

Writing in a leading medical journal, the physician revealed the process can take an average of ten days during which a baby becomes ‘smaller and shrunken’. …

Medical critics of the LCP insist it is impossible to say when a patient will die and as a result the LCP death becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy. They say it is a form of euthanasia, used to clear hospital beds and save the NHS money.

The use of end of life care methods on disabled newborn babies was revealed in the doctors’ bible, the British Medical Journal.

Earlier this month, an un-named doctor wrote of the agony of watching the protracted deaths of babies. The doctor described one case of a baby born with ‘a lengthy list of unexpected congenital anomalies’, whose parents agreed to put it on the pathway.

The doctor wrote: ‘They wish for their child to die quickly once the feeding and fluids are stopped. They wish for pneumonia. They wish for no suffering. They wish for no visible changes to their precious baby.

‘Their wishes, however, are not consistent with my experience. Survival is often much longer than most physicians think; reflecting on my previous patients, the median time from withdrawal of hydration to death was ten days.

‘Parents and care teams are unprepared for the sometimes severe changes that they will witness in the child’s physical appearance as severe dehydration ensues. 

‘I know, as they cannot, the unique horror of witnessing a child become smaller and shrunken, as the only route out of a life that has become excruciating to the patient or to the parents who love their baby.’ …

In a response to the article, Dr Laura de Rooy, a consultant neonatologist at St George’s Hospital NHS Trust in London writing on the BMJ website, said: ‘It is a huge supposition to think they do not feel hunger or thirst.’ …

Amazing that anyone should suppose such a thing.

Bernadette Lloyd, a hospice paediatric nurse, has written to the Cabinet Office and the Department of Health to criticise the use of death pathways for children.

“Death pathways” sound peaceful and painless; a conscience-soothing euphemistic phrase for forcing children to die of thirst and starvation.

‘‘I have seen children die in terrible thirst because fluids are withdrawn from them until they die’

She said: ‘The parents feel coerced, at a very traumatic time, into agreeing that this is correct for their child whom they are told by doctors has only has a few days to live. It is very difficult to predict death. I have seen a “reasonable” number of children recover after being taken off the pathway.

‘I have also seen children die in terrible thirst because fluids are withdrawn from them until they die.

‘I witnessed a 14 year-old boy with cancer die with his tongue stuck to the roof of his mouth when doctors refused to give him liquids by tube. His death was agonising for him, and for us nurses to watch. … ’

The power of life and death in the hands of bureaucrats. The sadistic use of that power. There you have a glimpse of America’s future under Obamacare.

As everybody knows, a short video purporting to be the trailer for a film that was apparently never made, and which hardly anyone noticed for months, was publicly blamed by President Barack Obama, Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, UN Ambassador Susan Rice, and White House spokesman Jay Carney, for an outbreak of anti-US riots in Islamic countries, and for the murder of Ambassador Stevens and three other Americans in Benghazi, Libya, on the eleventh anniversary of 9/11.

The filmlet – puzzlingly titled “Innocence of Muslims” – mocks the Prophet Muhammad. The Prophet Muhammad is a mythical construct (even if based on one or more obscure historical figures of the 7th century), made by his inventors in accordance with their own ideals as an intolerant mass-murdering lecher. And that’s how the filmlet depicts him.

For making it, a small-time hoodlum named Nakoula Basseley Nakoula has been put in prison. Ostensibly his criminal offense is breaking terms of parole in trivial harmless ways such as going on the internet, but in fact he is a political prisoner who used his Constitutionally granted freedom of speech to say something the regime that now rules the United States of America does not like.  

(For more about the video, Nakoula, the riots and how the video was used to stoke them up, see our posts: Muslim evil rising, September 13, 2012; Islam explodes, and Obama lit the fuse, September 14, 2012; The pretext giver, September 15, 2012; To make a mocking movie, September 23, 2012; Muslims made the anti-Muhammad video?, September 26, 2012.)

This is from PowerLine by John Hinderaker:

Liberal support for free speech has been waning for a long time, and at present it seems to be just about extinct. The latest evidence is a story in today’s New York Times about Nakoula Basseley Nakoula, the man who made the video that was falsely blamed for the Benghazi attack, and has languished in jail for the last two months as a result. One might think that the Times would regard jailing a man for exercising his First Amendment rights as an outrage requiring daily denunciations, but no – the tone of the article, by Serge Kovaleski and Brooks Barnes, suggests that Nakoula deserved what he got.

Start with the article’s title: “From Man Who Insulted Muhammad, No Regret.” The Times finds it remarkable that Nakoula isn’t penitent:

“Fuming for two months in a jail cell here, Nakoula Basseley Nakoula has had plenty of time to reconsider the wisdom of making ‘Innocence of Muslims,’ his crude YouTube movie trailer depicting the Prophet Muhammad as a bloodthirsty, philandering thug.”

So is America now a country where we imprison people so they can rethink the wisdom of making a video with the wrong political point of view? Apparently the Times thinks so; there is strong evidence that Barack Obama does, too.

“Does Mr. Nakoula now regret the footage? After all, it fueled deadly protests across the Islamic world and led the unlikely filmmaker to his own arrest for violating his supervised release on a fraud conviction. Not at all. In his first public comments since his incarceration soon after the video gained international attention in September, Mr. Nakoula told The New York Times that he would go to great lengths to convey what he called ‘the actual truth’ about Muhammad.”

Which raises an interesting point. I have never seen anyone comment on the historical accuracy of Nakoula’s film (assuming that anyone has actually seen it) or the YouTube trailer. Muhammad was, in fact, a “bloodthirsty, philandering thug.” You could say worse things about him than that without straying from the truth. But this question is not one that the Times, or any other media outlet I am aware of, has seen fit to explore.

The Times tries to keep alive the fiction that Nakoula’s video might have had something to do with the Benghazi attack:

“There is a dispute about how important the video was in provoking the terrorist assault on the American diplomatic mission in Benghazi, Libya, that killed the United States ambassador and three other Americans.”

Actually, I don’t think there is any dispute at all. To my knowledge, there is zero evidence that the Ansar al-Sharia terrorists who carried out the attack knew or cared about Nakoula’s video.

The main point of the Times article – the only point, really – is to establish that Nakoula is disreputable and untrustworthy. But this is an odd perspective to take on what appears to be an extraordinary violation of the First Amendment – jailing a man for political speech regarded as inconvenient by the Obama administration. …

The Obama administration doesn’t even pretend that Nakoula was imprisoned for any reason other than as punishment for his impermissible speech. Recall Charles Woods [father of Tyrone Woods, one of the Americans murdered in Benghazi] recounting how Hillary Clinton approached him at his son’s memorial and said, “We’re going to have that person arrested and prosecuted that did the video.” And it is blindingly obvious that tossing a probationer in the slammer for using an alias and accessing the internet, notwithstanding that those actions violated the terms of his probation, is not standard practice.

The writer asks –

In the view of the New York Times, is the First Amendment reserved for the honest and the respectable?

And comments –

That certainly wasn’t the Left’s position when Communists were availing themselves of the bourgeois right of free speech.

Now, it seems, it may be reserved for those who submit to Obama and Islam.

In fact, the New York Times and American “liberals” in general have been against freedom as such for a long time now. Collectivists calling themselves liberal  – in the manner described by George Orwell as Newspeak  – is like Communist tyrannies commonly calling themselves People’s Democratic Republics. Or the main party of the Left in America calling itself the Democratic Party.

*

11/29/12. The real name of  Nakoula Basseley Nakoula may have finally emerged. Fox News reports:

An Egyptian court convicted in absentia Wednesday seven Egyptian Coptic Christians and a Florida-based American pastor, sentencing them to death on charges linked to an anti-Islam film that had sparked riots in parts of the Muslim world [ie had been used to spark riots]. … The man behind the film, Mark Basseley Youssef, is among those convicted. He was sentenced in a California court earlier this month to a year in federal prison for probation violations in an unrelated matter. Youssef, 55, admitted that he had used several false names in violation of his probation order and obtained a driver’s license under a false name. He was on probation for a bank fraud case.

Can capitalism and individual freedom be preserved in a post-national world? Because the Republican Party stood for both, we supported it. We tolerated its deplorable weaknesses – chiefly its habit of being far too nice to the Left, and its incessant god-bothering.

The Constitutional Republic has now been so corrupted it cannot be purified. But it is still the best ever political idea. Its principles need to be re-established in a changed world.  

So let’s imagine it possible to remake the Republican Party better to suit the times; to turn the GOP into a GNP – a Grand New Party. What would it look like? About half of GOP membership at present is made up of Evangelical and “born again” Christians. In our ideal reconstitution, they are cut out. In their stead we would bring in a host of Libertarians. They would need to be Libertarians prepared to adopt for as long as necessary a sensible foreign policy and accept a strong defense. (Is this make-believe already becoming too farfetched?)

Certain issues would be left out of the Party platform: abortion and gay marriage, as prime instances. The law has to come in somewhere in the matter of abortion, but the issue has been confused by religious dogma and is best omitted from the agenda of the Great Abstract Gathering (GAG) called to rebuild the Republican Party.

Assuming that there will be national borders for a while yet, a new immigration policy would be given much thought. It would have to be realistic, enforceable, but humane; true to the melting-pot idea as engraved on the Statue of Liberty. The new Libertarian membership would be invited to contribute massively and energetically to this debate in particular.

To cement the alliance between secular conservatives and the new large Libertarian element, an instant consensus would be sought on free market principles, tending towards an extremist position on the rejection of “regulation” – the old Republican Party’s euphemism for government meddling with the market.

Comment and suggestions for the agenda of the GAG, outlines of desirable policies, opinions as to whether the Republican Party could be revived and returned to power, are invited.

Meanwhile here is an old prophecy that deplorably came true (hat-tip, our reader and commenter Frank):

Millions of voters who have resided in America their whole lives have immigrated without moving an inch. They don’t live in the country of their birth even if they’ve never travelled outside its borders. This is not your father’s America. It’s not even your older brother’s. 

So writes Daniel Flynn, in an article at Front Page.

The electorate that voted Ronald Reagan into the presidency in 1980 was 88 percent white, ten percent black, and two percent Hispanic. The body politic that reelected Barack Obama in 2012 was 72 percent white, thirteen percent black, ten percent Hispanic, three percent Asian, and two percent “other” …

But –

The changing complexion of America may be the most superficial of the major demographic shifts. Getting married and bringing children into the world are less popular now than at any point in U.S. history. In 1980, just 18 percent of births occurred to women not married to their child’s father. Now, that figure exceeds 40 percent. Without a daddy in their house, many single mothers look for a daddy in the White House. …

So many Americans now depend on government for food, shelter, retirement, education, health care, and even jobs that the party of government almost guarantees itself a majority long before the campaign has started. Consider that in 1980 slightly more than twenty million Americans received food stamps. In 2012, the number approaches fifty million. From bailed-out Toledo autoworkers to the comfortably unemployed approaching 99 weeks of benefits in Detroit to Georgetown co-eds desiring free birth control, the Democrat constituency is the coalition of the bought. …

Republicans Tuesday suddenly came to grips with the changes that have been slowly transforming the United States of America. …

There has been a revolution within the form.

The nation’s name remains the same. Its habits, and inhabitants, have changed beyond recognition. 

A majority of Americans chose socialism. They may not call it that, but that is what they’re getting with their choice of Obama.

As Daniel Flynn says, the transformation of America did not come suddenly. The November 2012 election was only the consummating event. Preparation for it started decades ago. To choose an arbitrary date, one might say 1968. But the realization that it has happened has come suddenly to the Republican Party.

The change came to the West in general.

Since the advent of the “New Left”, generations of children have been educated to believe that socialism is good, capitalism is bad. In American public schools, the teaching of every branch of the humanities is an indoctrination of socialism. American history is taught as a shameful tale. The books of modern fiction prescribed for student reading more often than not carry the messages of the left: anti-capitalism, egalitarianism, environmentalism, multiculturalism. The nation state and military strength are bad. Pacifism and world socialist government are good. Business is a bad thing. (“Making a profit is a disease in our society”, declares that icon of the left, Noam Chomsky.) The person who succeeds in making money in business is ipso facto a bad person.

All this they were taught. It was a long concerted campaign. “The  long march through the institutions” (the slogan that became a program, first uttered by Antonio Gramsci, founder of the Italian Communist Party) was patiently undertaken by the footsoldiers of the left, and steadily achieved. One by one the institutions were conquered: the schools and universities, many of the churches (easily turned from irrationalism to irrationalism, from one faith to another), the media, the entertainment industry; in Europe, and parts of America, even the police and the courts of law; eventually the government, and so the military and the intelligence services.

And conservatives did not notice the march. Or if they noticed it, they didn’t think it worth the effort to stop it. And now it cannot be reversed. It is a one-directional movement, a political ratchet.

So America goes socialist. The spectacle of other societies failing under socialism/communism/collectivism/statism should, in reason, make Americans shudder, not emulate them. But it hasn’t. Americans have caught the disease that is destroying the West.

What is its name?

As a failure to notice that socialist experiments have failed, it’s mental blindness.

As a failure to understand why they’ve failed, it’s mental feebleness.

As an open-eyed, fully conscious commitment to self-destruction, it is, in the medical term, suicidal ideation.

Democracy kills itself.

November 6, 2012, the day on which Barack Obama was re-elected to the presidency of the United States, was a moment when the history of America was decisively changed. Some – and we are among them – think that the old America, the America founded in 1776, died on that day.

We have selected passages from several post mortems (see the whole articles).

Dr. Ileana Johnson Paugh, who has lived under a communist regime, writes a lament:

Our Constitutional Republic died a peaceful death on November 6, 2012. Having reached the point of no return in a comatose state after years of progressive and illegal immigration assaults, the fabric of conservative society is now completely unraveled and Uncle Sam’s America is no more.The United States of America is now relegated to the dust bin of history as a “has been” empire. The Shining City on the Hill, the hope of so many millions since July 4, 1776, no longer exists. What rises from the ashes is a country that few of us will recognize, like, or learn to accept submissively. After 236 years of existence, a new country emerges today … The Supreme Court will be forever altered after its last conservative members will be replaced by the liberal academics who call themselves “progressives.” The rule of law will be implemented by Executive Orders, making Congress irrelevant. The communist motto “Forward” that resonated with so many ignorant Americans will plunge us into many years of darkness from which we will never be able to recover. We have proven our Founding Fathers right, they did give us a Constitutional Republic and we were unable to maintain it. … The welfare dependent Americans, unions, and illegal aliens have chosen for the rest of us the dark path of serfdom to big government and to socialist utopia. … Rallies in support of conservatism overwhelmed venues for Mitt Romney while rallies for our bumbling President became scarcer and scarcer. Yet, miraculously, at the ballot box, our President won all over the countrt. … Americans chose high unemployment, reduction of our military, communist indoctrination of their children, and loss of personal freedoms … I am saddened by the loss of millions and millions of American soldiers who have died to preserve freedom yet we lost it on November 6, 2012.

Ron Radosh gives some advice. He writes:

The president will argue that the nation has given him a mandate and endorsed the policies he sought to pursue, and that he will do all he can to move the United States to the “fundamental transformation” he said was his goal in the 2008 election campaign. That means the opposite of any attempt for serious compromise, and a hunkering down to try to move ahead with ObamaCare and other politically leftist programs. …  So what should conservatives do? … Those opposed to the direction Obama favors should provide serious and meaningful alternatives of their own, and present them to the nation. They should do everything possible to reveal to the nation that it is the White House, and not the defeated Republicans, that is failing to deal with the coming crisis of a growing entitlement state.  In foreign policy, which is the most dangerous of the coming crises that will face the Obama administration, conservatives should relentlessly forge ahead on issues like the failure of the White House in the murders of our diplomats at Benghazi, which candidate Romney foolishly failed to deal with in the last days of the campaign … It also means a continuing effort to raise the issue of the danger to the world of the growing radical Islamic movements abroad, to attack their ideology, and to make it clear that although Bin Laden is dead, his death did not put an end to a regrouped al-Qaeda.

J. Christian Adams sounds a note of optimism, looking to the individual states to preserve liberty. He  writes:

The Founders gave us a Constitutional architecture which was designed to delay the arrival of demagogues. And make no mistake about it, Obama is a demagogue. He has totalitarian tendencies which manifest over and over and over again. Whether attacking religious liberty, or secured Chrysler bondholders, this man comes from a worldview distinctly un-American. Thankfully the Constitution still is operative. Some of the liberties the Founders secured are still ours to treasure. The press remains free. We can still assemble. And I suspect after tonight, gun ownership will substantially increase. But another part of our Constitutional architecture provides solace tonight – the 10th Amendment. Sure, we’ve heard the 10th thrown about for years. But tonight it ripened. Whatever powers aren’t given to the federal government, it doesn’t have. And the states are empowered to push back against federal power. It’s funny how those wise architects 200 years ago anticipated things we couldn’t anticipate just a decade ago. It is providential that the document contains seeds that sprout over time. The 10th Amendment does not lend itself to the sort of corrupt interpretation that the Commerce Clause does. States retain power, period. …

Bryan Preston writes in a spirit of mea culpa but let’s-now-do-it-right encouragement:

We can blame the candidate, sure. Romney didn’t fully capitalize on his first-debate win, and apparently the Chris Christie/Barack Obama lovefest turned a lot of votes back to the president, too. But overall, Romney ran almost as competent a challenger’s campaign as I’ve seen. We can blame the press, sure. Benghazi alone would have sunk most presidents — most Republican presidents — in weeks if not days. The coverup by the Complicit Media was shameful in the extreme. But we’ve faced down the MSM before, and won. So, no, I don’t think we can just blame Romney and I don’t think we can just blame the press. Even combined, those two aren’t enough to explain what happened today. There is something deeply wrong with our country. We’ve been living on borrowed time — and trillions of borrowed dollars — for a decade already. We seem to think that we can keep on doing so. That more than anything else is “the new normal.” Thomas Jefferson famously said of the slavery issue, “I tremble for my country when I reflect that God is just; that his justice cannot sleep forever.” I tremble for my country when I think that the God of Compound Interestis a far more jealous God than Jahweh, Allah, and Zuul all wrapped up into a single, bloody package. Maybe that truth — the truth — doesn’t sell in a country that’s been suffering for four years now, and with no real end in sight. This election should have been something like a walkover for the challenger. But no. Our economic destiny is already written in stone, with four trillion in new debt run up by Bush and the GOP, and another six trillion by Obama and the Democrats. Our only hope is rapid and wrenching reform. The alternative is hyperinflation, Cloward-Piven [forcing the break-down of the system and then establishing communism], and all the rest of the Zimbabwe-like horror. And that means Mitt Romney didn’t fail us. That means people like me — people like you — failed our country. We had years to make the case, and we didn’t. We worked our bottoms off, but it wasn’t enough. So we must redouble our efforts. … Do not tire, do not flag, do not quit. … We will need to fight [Obama] at every turn. I’m not quitting. Don’t you quit now, either.

We won’t be quitting.

The worst is yet to be, and for as long as we have the freedom to say what we think, we – and all our readers, we trust and hope – will continue to do so.

… And, on further thought, do so even after that freedom is denied us, because then it will be even more necessary. That’s our pledge.

Yesterday, by a majority of 1,057,148* (a figure we have just derived from the Drudge Report), Americans chose to give up liberty by re-electing the socialist Islam-lover Barack Obama to the presidency.

And so “government of the people, by the people, for the people” is perishing, contrary to President Lincoln’s hope.

It is no wild exaggeration but a sober truth that Obama prefers to govern in the manner of a tyrant, against liberty in principle, and destructive of it in practice.

Thomas Sowell gives a few of many possible examples of Obama’s contempt for American Constitutional democracy:

The checks and balances of the Constitution have been evaded time and time again by the Obama administration, undermining the fundamental right of the people to determine the laws that govern them, through their elected representatives.

You do not have a self-governing people when huge laws are passed too fast for the public to even know what is in them.

You do not have a self-governing people when “czars” are created by Executive Orders, so that individuals wielding vast powers equal to, or greater than, the powers of Cabinet members do not have to be vetted and confirmed by the people’s elected representatives in the Senate, as Cabinet members must be.

You do not have a self-governing people when decisions to take military action are referred to the United Nations and the Arab League, but not to the Congress of the United States, elected by the American people, whose blood and treasure are squandered.You do not have a self-governing people when a so-called “consumer protection” agency is created to be financed by the unelected officials of the Federal Reserve System, which can create its own money out of thin air, instead of being financed by appropriations voted by elected members of Congress who have to justify their priorities and trade-offs to the taxpaying public.

You do not have a self-governing people when laws passed by the Congress, signed by previous Presidents, and approved by the federal courts, can have the current President waive whatever sections he does not like, and refuse to enforce those sections, despite his oath to see that the laws are faithfully executed.

Barack Obama … has refused to carry out sections of the immigration laws that he does not like, unilaterally creating de facto amnesty for those illegal immigrants he has chosen to be exempt from the law. The issue is not — repeat, NOT — the wisdom or justice of this President’s immigration policy, but the seizing of arbitrary powers not granted to any President by the Constitution of the United States.

You do not have a self-governing people if President Obama succeeds in having international treaties under United Nations auspices govern the way Americans live their lives, whether with gun control laws or other laws. …

The desire to circumvent the will of the American people was revealed even more ominously when Barack Obama said to Russian President Medvedev – when he thought the microphone was off – that, after he is reelected and need never face the voters again, he can be more “flexible” with the Russians about missile defense.

There are other signs of Obama’s contempt for American Constitutional democracy, but these should be more than enough. Dare we risk how far he will go when he never has to face the voters again, and can appoint Supreme Court justices who can rubber stamp his power grabs?

A majority of 1,057,148 chose to force the nation to risk it.

America is no longer the political embodiment of the idea of liberty.

Thomas Sowell ends by asking rhetorically –

Will this still be America in 2016?

No.

* Later numbers of popular and electoral college votes may be found here.

The revolutionaries who founded the United States of America were willing to kill and die to establish a Republic in which all would be free. The First Amendment, enshrining the principle of free speech, was passed on December 15, 1791,  two and a half years after the final ratification of the Constitution on June 24, 1787.

Are there still Americans willing to kill and die to preserve freedom? They may be found in the armed forces, but are there any in government? Or among those who vote for a government which urges the nation to submit to an aggressive enemy of freedom?

[That America] remains one of the very few places in the world, even among Western democracies, where freedom of speech is absolute, came about through stirring speeches, deeply felt debates, classical ideas and a passionate political culture — but most of all it came about because large numbers of people were willing to kill over it.

Currently large numbers of people are willing to kill over the idea that Islam is the supreme religion, that Mohammed is a deity whom all mankind should respect and that the infidels living in the suburban sprawl of a thoroughly explored continent should accept that or die. Our government calls those people a tiny minority of extremists. Our unofficial name for them is, “Muslims.”

Laws are decided by many things, but sweep away all the lawbooks, the pleas from tearful mothers, the timed publicity campaigns, the novel legal theories and the greedy bureaucrats expanding their turf, and under the table you will find a gun. The first and final law is still the law of force.The law begins with the power to impose its will on others. It ends with the enforcement of that power.

Law either has force behind it or it does not, and if it has no force behind it then it is an optional thing that is subject to custom. And every now and then the law is challenged, not with novel legal theories or with petitions, but with force, and it either responds with force or submits to a new law. That is what we call revolution.

Islam has made laws that it expects all of mankind to abide by. These laws are not backed by novel legal theories or by petitions, though its practitioners are willing to offer both, they are backed by the naked practice of force. And the imposition of these laws can only be defended against by force. …

The lawyers who run all our national affairs have chosen to respond to the Islamic legal briefs of bombs and bullets with the equivocation with which they meet all difficult questions. They will not abandon the principle of freedom of speech, but they will lock up the filmmaker whose imprisonment the murderous Muslim legalists called for. They will not censor YouTube, but they will encourage YouTube to censor itself. They will not ban speech that offends Islam, but they will strongly condemn and discourage it.

These equivocators offer to abandon the practice of freedom so long as they are allowed to retain the theory of freedom. The Bill of Rights will not change, but as in the Soviet Union it will not apply. The authorities will pay lip service to the freedoms that we only think we have until we actually try to use them and then we will discover that we don’t actually have any of these freedoms left in stock.

In theory America will be an independent country, in practice it will be a vassal state of the Muslim world whose displays of outrage will be our law telling us what we can and cannot say, what we can and cannot think, and what we can and cannot do.

This is the typical kind of bargain that decadent empires make with the barbarous warlords on their doorstep. The empire will keep its splendor and its titles, while the barbarians will tell the empire what to do. …

A demand for a code of conduct backed by violence is law. It is not our law, it is not the law of the civilized man, but it is the law that we are slowly adopting. It is the law of the decadents appeasing the savages. …

Under this code, Muslim violence dictates our permissible forms of speech. To know whether a thing may be said, drawn or filmed, we must first determine how Muslims will react to it. If they will react with violence, as they do to a sizable percentage of things, then it becomes incitement, retroactively, that must be punished and condemned.

Muslim violence has become our law. It is the law of action which determines our laws of speech. To understand what we can say, we first have to decide what Muslims will do about it. …

When we were revolutionaries, our government saw force as a way of dealing with other countries who wanted to tell Americans what to do. But since then our government has really gotten used to telling us what to do. …

Our new breed of lawyer-kings is composed of urban utopianists ruling through central government. To them the Bill of Rights is a piece of incomprehensible lunacy that prevents them from getting anything done. They are not concerned with rural government trespasses, they are worried about bombs and riots in their cities and they are terrified of their global goals being sabotaged by some movie trailer.

They are making Muslim violence into our new law, just as they made urban violence into our new law, just as they have made their own bureaucratic mandates backed by SWAT teams and prisons into our new law.

The age when laws were made by men, rather than machines of social progress composed of lawyers and activists, bureaucrats and think-tanks, lobbyists and judges, is long since gone. There is no law in our laws, but the law of force. The Constitution sits on a dusty shelf while the judges bang their gavels and practice the law that mandates something because those in power want it that way.

And now our utopian lawyer-kings, our armies of bleeding-heart social justice activists, our legions of bureaucrats stamping their papers over our skulls, our grinning black-robed activist judges wielding their gavels like swords, are cringing in terror before a Muslim mob. The bullies who have bullied us for so long have proven to be cowards. While they dismantle our army to sell it for scraps so that the EPA and HUD and the cowboy poetry festivals can get their billions, they order us to fall on our knees before the Army of Allah.

The liberal bullies who bullied us for so long have been successfully bullied and have handed us over to the bully’s bully. But bullies, of the liberal or Muslim kind, are cowards. Their bullying only works until they are successfully bullied and without their threat of force, their laws wither and blow away on the wind.

These quotations are from an article by Daniel Greenfield  at Canada Free Press.

Read it ALL here.

“The American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU),”, to quote Wikipedia, “is a nonpartisan non-profit organization whose stated mission is to defend and preserve the individual rights and liberties guaranteed to every person in this country by the Constitution and laws of the United States.”

But “not in the case of the Muhammad movie”, Investor’s Business Daily reports, referring to the video film titled “Innocence of Muslims”, which has been absurdly blamed by the Obama administration for Muslim protests and uprisings across the globe, violent attacks on US embassies, and the torture, sodomizing, and murder of US Ambassador Stevens in Libya.

The silly little film had been on YouTube for months without being taken notice of. Then it was found, pounced on and used by Arab media men, politicians, al-Qaeda leaders, and imams to boost an Islamic campaign to put an end to freedom of speech in the West, particularly in the US. And the Obama administration, ever sympathetic if not passionately devoted to Islam, is doing its best to help them achieve their aim.

And they’re not being opposed in this by the ACLU which exists to defend rights and liberties in America.

Here is more from the IBD report:

The ACLU’s executive director failed to release an official statement condemning the outrageous efforts of the White House to deep-six the film including pressuring YouTube to remove its trailer from the Web. …

Not until The Daily Caller contacted the ACLU did it speak out, and only meekly so. It said it was “concerned” about the White House request to censor the “repellant film.”

The ACLU’s strangely muted response contrasts sharply with its militant reaction to post-9/11 measures to crack down on Islamic terrorists.

“The government has gone to extraordinary lengths to squelch dissent (in the Muslim community) — from censorship and surveillance to detention,” it says on its website, complaining it was “encroaching” on the “free speech rights” of Muslims. …

Where is this bias coming from? Muslims. The ACLU now counts at least eight on its national executive staff alone. In fact, a Muslim runs the ACLU’s Center for Democracy, while another heads its National Security Project.

The irony is not lost on Steve Emerson, director of the Investigative Project on Terrorism. “The ACLU was founded on the basis that there shouldn’t be any blasphemy laws,” said Emerson … “Yet in the last 10 years, they’ve appointed (to their boards) members of the Muslim Brotherhood who believe in blasphemy laws.”

The top Muslim lawyer in ACLU’s stable is [a Canadian named] Jameel Jaffer, … [who] successfully sued the U.S. to reveal CIA secrets for interrogating terror suspects. …

[Jaffer is] a Muslim activist closely tied to major Muslim Brotherhood figures and front groups. [He] now heads the ACLU’s Center for Democracy after heading its National Security Project.

[He is] pals with Tariq Ramadan, the grandson of the Egyptian founder of the radical Muslim Brotherhood .. [who] was denied a visa in 2004.  …  Jaffer successfully sued the U.S. to get Ramadan’s visa restored. …  Secretary of State Hillary Clinton lifted the six-year ban in 2009. …

Jaffer has lobbied the Justice Department to remove CAIR and other Brotherhood and Hamas front groups from its blacklist of groups complicit in a criminal conspiracy to raise money for terrorists.

He’s also pressured the FBI to purge names of Muslim terrorist suspects from the no-fly list.

What’s more, Jaffer wants to deny the feds one of its most effective weapons in the war on terror — freezing the assets of terrorist front groups.

He’s also sued to kill the government’s drone program, perhaps its most effective weapon of all.

This is who’s controlling the agenda at the ACLU these days. It was bad enough when the group was run by leftists. Now it’s also run by Islamists.

The purposes of Islam could not be more different from the purposes for which the ACLU was created. Plainly the ACLU no longer exists to protect liberty. It is now run by adherents of a movement which opposes liberty.

Is there an American institution of any importance which has not been infiltrated and corrupted by Islam?

… and get an unwelcome answer.

Do Muslims “have a right to be offended?”  Right or no right, human beings take offense. But which is more offensive to a rational mind: a bad video, or acts of atrocious cruelty?

Ayaan Hirsi Ali, self-emancipated from Islam, superbly intelligent, superbly lucid, speaks truth to a morally deaf TV interviewer, and is sharply cut off when she makes an inarguable point.

(Video clip via Creeping Sharia)