Time to despair? 322
It seems at the moment that a majority of Americans want the Democrats with their socialist agenda and pro-Islam sentiment to rule them, and therefore to change everything that the United States has stood for from the beginning.
If Obama is re-elected, and has his way – which he will if both houses of Congress are given Democratic majorities – what will happen?
Let’s look at the worst plausible scenario.
Most Americans will be poorer. The national debt, vast as it is, will grow even bigger. Unemployment will increase. The value of the dollar will fall as inflation rises. More tens of thousands will be on food stamps (45.8 million are now).
Much private housing will be expropriated. Large numbers of people will be herded into government-supplied accommodation. How warm you may keep your room in winter and how cool in summer will be decided by local government. Car ownership will be discouraged by high gas prices, lack of parking facilities, and pressure on town-dwellers to use bicycles and commuters to use public transport. The countryside will be returned to wilderness. Roads will be destroyed. (All this in line with Agenda 21. Put “Agenda 21” in our search slot for corroboration.)
“Free Speech” will be severely restricted and so cease to be free. This is happening already with the Obama administration trying to stop criticism of Islam.
Your guns will be confiscated.
Sharia law will be applied in courts across the land and take precedence over the Constitution.
What you may eat in restaurants, schools and hospitals, and what food stores may sell, will be decided by Michelle Obama (assisted by New York’s Mayor Bloomberg). (See our post The orderers, June 5, 2012.)
Obamacare will prevail. The treatment you may have or be refused when you are ill will be decided by bureaucrats. If you are old and ill your survival will be arbitrated by a death-panel, whatever euphemism of a name it goes under. You have only to look at the British National Health Service to see the horrid future of health care in America. (Put “death-panels” and “NHS” into our search slot to find the grisly details.)
The Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) will be turned into the equivalent of the KGB. It is almost there now.
There will be no more free elections.
China, Russia, North Korea, Pakistan, and Iran will all become more powerful as America is deliberately weakened militarily. What will that mean? Let your imaginations soar.
World government by that collection of corrupt and savage despotisms, the United Nations, will be established with the enthusiastic help of the American government.
Innovation will cease as freedom goes. The great experiment in freedom that was America, its prosperity and its power, will be over. There will be no turning back.
And all that is just first-thought – but bitterly informed – prediction.
Readers’ gloomy predictions are invited. And expressions of despair.
*
The Republican Party is allowing this to happen. It seems to have lost the plot. The last election was the turning point when it insanely put up John McCain as it’s presidential candidate. With such a feeble alternative to a candidate who offered the electorate a chance to feel good by voting for him chiefly because he was black (a thoroughly racist reason), the ideology of collectivism triumphed. Now that so many people have been reduced to dependence on the state is it likely they will vote away their free ride through life?
Of course, socialism does not work. The system will collapse as it always has because it must. And the country will come to ruin, like Greece. But apparently more than half the voters of America are unaware of this terrifying fact, or else they don’t give a damn.
Why aren’t the Republicans telling the voters in the strongest terms that this is what will happen?
It’s a real question. We’d like to know why.
Government and the people 57
The Democrats believe we all “belong to the government”. Here’s part of the the video clip shown at the Democratic National Convention in which they say so:
The Left really does think that the government is a sort of parent and master to whom we belong and who has a duty to nurture us, direct us, run our lives.
We on the other side think that the government should be our servant. As President Ronald Reagan did.
Here are some of the things he said about government:
Government exists to protect us from each other. Where government has gone beyond its limits is in deciding to protect us from ourselves.
Government’s first duty is to protect the people, not run their lives.
Government does not solve problems; it subsidizes them.
Man is not free unless government is limited.
Government is not the solution to our problems, government is the problem.
It is not my intention to do away with government. It is, rather, to make it work – work with us, not over us; to stand by our side, not ride on our back. Government can and must provide opportunity, not smother it; foster productivity, not stifle it.
A government big enough to give you everything you want is big enough to take it all away.
Government, the people said, was not our master, it is our servant; its only power that which we the people allow it to have.
Obama’s government has taken too much power. The people must take it back again.
Swinging to the right 138
The extreme importance of the 2012 presidential election is recognized by (among millions of others, we hope) Diana West, who warns at Townhall that “Election 2012 is anything but politics as usual. It is an existential crisis.”
She writes:
This election is for keeps. If Barack Obama doesn’t lose his bid for a second term, he and his vast, left-wing support network of Marx-inspired think tanks, strategists and elected officials will fulfill Obama’s 2008 campaign promise to “fundamentally” transform this nation, thus bringing the American experiment in liberty to what could be the final curtain…
Americans are about to decide whether to empower the increasingly dictatorial executive branch of Barack Hussein Obama, whose future plans to distort “checks and balances” promises to transform the U.S. government out of all recognition, or to break the momentum of government centralization by electing Romney-Ryan.
Yes. And we find signs that are good; signs that there is a swing to the right in public opinion, considerably boosted since Paul Ryan was selected as candidate Mitt Romney’s vice-presidential choice.
This is by Scott Johnson at PowerLine:
GOP vice presidential candidate Paul Ryan appeared at a rally this morning at Deep Run High School in Glen Allen, Virginia. … An audience of more than 2,000 turned up for the rally. More impressive than the size of the crowd is the fact that supporters started lining up for the event around 2:00 a.m. Recent alumni of Deep Run High School, where Ryan spoke … joined the line around 7:00 a.m. with [Chick-fil-A] breakfast in hand.
In these faces we can see what optimism looks like:
Ryan is a star. Romney’s pick of him for his vice-president has energized the Republican Party and brought excitement to the electorate. Even the heavily left-biased British newspaper the Guardian has to concede that:
Democrats’ nerves start to show as Ryan fires up conservative voters …
And:
The Democrats have been sending out panic-laden appeals for donations, one of them expressing concern over the size of the crowd. One of the appeals, for $3 or more, said of Romney-Ryan attacks: “This could cost us the election.”
And quoting American pundits with a message the left canot be happy with, the Guardian raises the prospect of Republican government for the next 16 years:
If Romney wins, then Ryan, as vice-president, will be well placed as a Republican presidential candidate for the future. …
Roger L. Klavan writes at PJ Media that the Democrats are scared of Ryan:
Obama’s main man David Axelrod looks depressed. Why wouldn’t he be? Forced to run a campaign based on lying about or distorting what the other side says, fanning the flames of non-existent racism, etc., is a sure loser, even if you win — perhaps especially if you win. Winning ugly in this instance will not be a triumph of any sort. Obama, at his worst, may succeed in destroying America as we know it, but he would destroy himself and everyone around him in the process. At this moment, I’m betting none of this will happen. Romney’s choice of Ryan, for me, saved the day.
But the black vote – that’s remaining pretty solid for Obama, isn’t it?
Or is it? A formerly prominent black Democrat has gone over to the Republicans. Former Democratic Representative Artur Davis, who was also a candidate for the governorship of Alabama in 2010, and was one of Barack Obama’s campaign managers in 2008 – making one of the nominating speeches for him at the 2008 Democratic National Convention – is to speak this year at the Republican National Convention in support of the Romney-Ryan ticket. (Read more about this in the Washington Post here.)
And there’s this (also from the Washington Post). The story of a black community organizer’s disillusionment with Obama. He is “disillusioned” for the wrong reasons, and he probably will not be coming over to the right, but if he decides to cast his vote for Obama, it won’t be with any enthusiasm. The point is, redistributive economics and collectivist politics don’t work, and the Obama episode in American history has proved it. Once Obama has gone – and go he absolutely must with the coming election – his bad four years in the White House can be seen as a lesson millions of Americans needed to learn.
He still walks the same streets here as his old acquaintance Barack Obama once did. That is about all they have in common anymore. At 50, Chicago activist Mark Allen … [is] the head of a small, community-assistance organization called Black Wall Street Chicago. Allen regards his personal survival alone as a small victory, grateful he can pay the rent on his modest office space, aware he is doing better than many on this city’s restive South Side.
“Things haven’t gone the way we’d hoped after Barack got elected,” he says. Surveys place unemployment rates above 25 percent here, and indications are that South Side residents such as Allen aren’t nearly as passionate about the 2012 election as they were during Obama’s trailblazing 2008 campaign.
Historically, community organizers such as Allen have wielded outsize influence in the black-majority neighborhoods of the South Side, with none better known than Obama, who directed a group called the Developing Communities Project for three years during the 1980s. But old bonds between the two have frayed. Allen, who as a member of another group worked on community issues with Obama during their organizing days, has grown frustrated with his former ally in the Oval Office.
Obama’s much ballyhooed 2009 stimulus package has failed to touch ordinary South Side residents, says Allen, who has reached out to Obama administration officials, including fellow Chicagoan and prominent White House adviser Valerie Jarrett, to express his dismay. …
Allen, who views the South Side’s pain as common to U.S. inner cities, also offers a political warning for Obama’s campaign strategists. The disillusionment of once fierce Obama admirers, he suggests, may hamper the president’s reelection chances by subtly dampening black voter turnout.
Best of all there’s this:
Wrecking America 80
David Limbaugh asks these questions at Townhall:
Does Obama truly harbor a grudge against America? What did he mean when he said he wanted to fundamentally change America? What did his wife mean when she said she’d never been proud of America in her adult life before he rose to power? What possesses Obama to deride and apologize for America? What drives him to instinctively distrust business and the private sector and to believe that federal planners ought to have enormously more discretion in how our income and wealth are distributed? What drives him to reject the American concept of equal opportunity and promote the notion of equality of outcomes? Why is he determined to energize labor unions and encourage a permanently adversarial climate between labor and management? Why is he so adamant about the United States deferring to international bodies in the conduct of its foreign affairs? Why is he hellbent on downscaling our nuclear and conventional forces and dismantling our military space program and our missile defenses?
The questions ineluctably give rise to another. He asks:
Do I believe that he wants to “destroy” America, as such?
To which he answers?
No.
!
Then why is Obama doing this wrecking job?
Apparently, David Limbaugh thinks, out of a kind of insanity:
In his mind, as warped and foreign as I think it is, he doubtlessly believes he is helping to create a better America – a utopia of sorts. That is, he is intentionally trying to fundamentally transform America into something that he believes would be better but that most Americans – and infinitely more if they understood the full scope of what he is up to – would consider horrific, an America that we would barely recognize as the one bequeathed to us by our ancestors.
On the financial front alone, Obama is single-handedly preventing entitlement and discretionary spending reform, without which — as I’ve said dozens of times — America will face financial catastrophe. There is less than zero question that he is doing that on purpose, regardless of whether you think he is otherwise intentionally damaging America. There is no question that he is acting as though he has a vendetta against the oil, coal, natural gas and nuclear power industries. There is also little question that he is intentionally dividing Americans on the basis of race, economic class, gender, sexual orientation and, sometimes, religion.
You don’t have to be a conspiracy theorist to recognize the damage Obama is doing to the republic, and we haven’t even touched on his unconstitutional and lawless usurpations of authority.
And yet –
The question isn’t whether he is intentionally destroying America. The question is whether he is intentionally pursuing a set of policies that are definitely damaging America, irrespective of his motives.
The answer is — irrefutably, emphatically — “yes.”
So David Limbaugh thinks that Obama is destroying America; that everything he is doing that is destroying America he is doing on purpose; but that he might not really mean to destroy America, only make it something quite different that he – Obama – thinks will be better, because his mind is “warped and foreign”.
While he is right about all that Obama is doing, and we applaud him for raising the questions he does, we find that his explanation doesn’t make sense. Ignoring the implications of the possible “foreignness” of Obama’s mind, we consider the plea-in-mitigation that his mind is “warped” as he deliberately wrecks the Republic and turns it into a poorer, weaker, ever more collectivist, nightmare.
We declare it a monstrous crime, and reject the insanity defense.
Trying to stop submission to Islam 80
A brave stand against the dhimmification of the West, using the law.
We applaud the effort, and the 13 successes in stopping mosques being built. But we are sorry to say that in our deeply pessimistic view …
Like a finger in a breaking dyke, it will not keep the tide of Islam out.
Too little, too late.
Gavin Boby talks about his campaign.
Government v. business 16
A few days ago Obama told a crowd in Roanoke, Va., “If you’ve got a business — you didn’t build that. Somebody else made that happen.”
In Obama’s phrase book, “somebody else” means the government.
Here’s the opposite opinion.
The story of O: becoming a dictator 297
Obama is energetically pursuing his policy of making as many Americans as he can dependent on the government.
This is from the Heritage Foundation:
The imperial Presidency has overturned Congress and the law again. Not content to stop at rewriting immigration policy, education policy and energy policy, yesterday, President Obama’s Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) released an official policy directive rewriting the welfare reform law of 1996. The new policy guts the federal work requirements that were the foundation of the Clinton-era reform. …
Welfare reform replaced the old Aid to Families with Dependent Children with a new program, Temporary Assistance for Needy Families (TANF). … The whole point was that able-bodied adults should be required to work or prepare for work as a condition of receiving welfare aid.
This reform was very successful. TANF became the only welfare program (out of more than 70) that promoted greater self-reliance. It moved 2.8 million families off the welfare rolls and into jobs so that they were providing for themselves. Child poverty fell, and single-parent employment rose. Recipients were required to perform at least 20–30 hours per week of work or job preparation activities in exchange for the cash benefit.
Now, Obama’s HHS is claiming that it can waive those work requirements that are at the heart of the law, and without Congress’s consent.
When it established TANF, Congress deliberately exempted or shielded nearly all of the TANF program from waiver authority. They explicitly did not want the law to be rewritten at the whim of HHS bureaucrats. In a December 2001, the non-partisan Congressional Research Service clarified that there was no authority to override work and other major requirements…
But that did not stop the Obama Administration, which has been increasing welfare spending at an alarming rate already. President Obama has added millions to the welfare rolls, and his Administration has come under fire lately for its efforts to expand and add more Americans to the food stamp program. …
Over the past two decades, welfare spending has grown more rapidly than Social Security and Medicare, education, and defense. The TANF reform was one small step in the direction of reducing Americans’ dependence on government programs and getting them back on their feet. Cutting its work component is likely to unnecessarily swell the ranks of welfare recipients and with no way to pay for it.
Heritage experts Robert Rector and Kiki Bradley explained further …:
In the past, state bureaucrats have attempted to define activities such as hula dancing, attending Weight Watchers, and bed rest as “work.” These dodges were blocked by the federal work standards. Now that the Obama Administration has abolished those standards, we can expect “work” in the TANF program to mean anything but work. The new welfare dictate issued by the Obama Administration clearly guts the law.
What can be done about a president who breaks the law, whose administration executes his orders in defiance of the legislature?
Will the Supreme Court stop him? Probably not.
This is from Townhall, by Ken Blackwell:
Chief Justice Roberts shows extraordinary deference to the federal government when the actions of the president or Congress are challenged for exceeding federal powers under the authority clauses. …
Part of the consternation from the Obamacare decision was seeing Chief Justice Roberts engage in linguistic gymnastics to ignore Congress’ word choice in writing the statute and the president’s televised vows, upholding the individual mandate as a tax despite 200 years of precedent that penalties are not taxes. …
This reluctance to unapologetically apply judicial review when authority clauses are implicated bodes ill for many current court challenges. There might not be five votes to succeed in challenges to Dodd-Frank, EPA’s cap-and-trade rules, the FCC’s internet-control rules, the recess-appointment challenges, and other power grabs.
Mr. Obama announced on July 6 in Ohio that this election is about a “clash of visions” about the role of government in our lives, arguing for massive entitlements and regulatory controls. If he wins, he will claim a mandate and take federal power to heights we’ve never seen. We can no longer be confident that the Supreme Court will stop him.
Liberty endures only when each branch fully and fearlessly checks and balances the other two branches. Abdicating judicial review empowers President Obama to subvert the Constitution with an imperial presidency, and fundamentally transform the United States to the detriment of future generations.
One remedy of course is to vote Obama out of office.
But if he is not voted out in November, how will the Republic be saved from becoming a full-blown dictatorship?
Speak up, Mr Romney, we can’t hear you! 152
We quote from Arnold Ahlert’s open letter to Republican presidential candidate Mitt Romney, because we too are irritated by the flaccid, passionless, MacCain-like campaign he is running:
The letter comes from Canada Free Press:
Dear Mr. Romney:
Since you apparently have advisors that are very clever people, perhaps a word from a troglodyte like me might be refreshing. In the last two weeks, you have tried to explain the difference between “off-shoring” and “outsourcing” with respect to the economy, and despite the great gift handed to you by our addled Chief Justice, John Roberts, you insisted on playing a semantical game between calling Obamacare a “constitutional tax” or an “unconstitutional penalty.”
Let me give you a clue: the overwhelming number of people who understand and/or appreciate the nuances in such parsing of the language already know who they’re going to vote for. They’re the ones who follow politics, have a far higher understanding of economics than the average American, and make an ongoing effort to pay attention to what’s happening in general.
The rest of America knows there is an election in November, and not a whole lot else. Luckily for you, most of them won’t even be paying attention to the details of that election until September or October. That doesn’t make them unintelligent … For the most part it means that a lot of them are busy living their lives, trying to get from one day to the next. And while a lot of them know there’s something not quite right with this economy, they can’t immerse themselves in the kind of facts and figures — or nuance — that you and your campaign managers seemingly think they can.
You know why a slogan like “tax the rich” works so well? Because it taps into one of mankind’s baser instincts, namely envy. And as you and yours have likely surmised by now, Mr. Obama and Democrats will tap into whatever negative instincts human beings possess, if it means winning the 2012 election. Divide-and-conquer is as old as the Romans, and has been effective for that long as well.
So here’s my advice. First, reduce your campaign to its simplest terms. …
The bottom line here is this: you need a slogan that captures the essence of American exceptionalism. …When Ronald Reagan referred to America as a “shining city on a hill,” Mr. Peanuts had no comeback. …
Yet even more importantly, maybe game-changing, have the guts to admit that your Massachusetts healthcare plan was a stinker. That’s right, admit you made a colossal mistake, even if it was for what you considered all the right reasons. If you don’t understand why, let me explain it in political terms that are quite germane, even if somewhat oblique: the cover-up, or in this case the cover-my-ass, is worse than the original “crime.” Watergate, Monica Lewinsky, and Fast and Furious are as in-your-face as it gets regarding that truism. A presidential resignation, an impeachment leading to a $90,000 fine and disbarment, and a contempt of Congress citation are a testament to the kind of arrogance and stubbornness that turns people off. So does giving Mr. Obama and his media harpies something to club you with, over and over again. …
Understand something else as well. You’re never going to be perceived as a regular Joe, no matter how hard you try. It’s just not part of your DNA, it’s never been part of your DNA, and any attempt to make it so will be taken for exactly what it is: overt pandering. What you need to demonstrate above all else is quite different.
You need passion.
It’s not enough to have the right argument, if you’re going to deliver it in measured — dare I say sleep-inducing — terms. Ask John McCain how staying “above the fray” works in a presidential campaign. I know this seems like a contradiction, but it’s worth remembering Ronald Reagan, in the midst of praising the nation, wasn’t afraid to ask the question that became the quintessential slogan of the 1980 election campaign. To wit: are you better of now than your were four years ago? …
Any criticism of this president and his policies will be deemed racist by the Democrats and their useful idiots in the media. Get over it.
And get over the idea that any topic, from the president’s associations with race-baiter Jeremiah Wright and Weather Underground Terrorist Bill Ayers, to the various scandals of this administration, such as the Operation Fast and Furious gun-running debacle and the crony capitalism surrounding Solyndra and LightSquared., are “off-limits” because a bunch of progressives say so.
Finally, stop pretending Barack Obama is anything less than a Constitutionally-contemptuous, Congress-bypassing, fact-challenged, socialist/Marxist, no matter how “appalled” the chattering classes become.
This country is hanging by a thread, and if you can’t make the case — and make it with gusto — that he and his administration are an unmitigated disaster, you’re going to lose an election you should win in a walk. In other words, a little righteous anger goes a long, long, long way.
Cleverness is for losers, and nice guys finish last. Step out of the self-generated campaign bubble, sir. Whether you like it or not, you may be the last best hope for our nation.
Start acting like it.
Suggestions for a Romney campaign slogan are invited.