Title/Series Name 2
Thursday, September 9, 2010
Status and the Economies of the East
Once again, I take up the gloomy topic of why China will fail to live up to the expectations of most observers here in the West. It is almost impossible to completely describe the headwinds faced by the Orient in the quest for material bliss, mostly because it takes so long to illuminate the innumerable differences between our two mindsets and the fantastic number of obstacles these differences create. I find that I can sit and write entry after entry about why the East, and China in particular, will likely fail, and each time I have new and almost unrelated reasons in support of my thesis. Which is to say—there are many, many problems to address.
I have occasionally written before about several intertwined, self-reinforcing characteristics of Chinese culture that lead to many of the dynamics one tends to observe there—hypercompetitiveness, despair/hopelessness, survivalism, the arbitrariness of fate. This time I will focus on another which is intimately involved with the others but was not included—the issue of status.
* * *
Too often, understanding of the East is attempted on the basis of parallels with the West. Thus Christianity is compared with Buddhism or Confucianism, Western feudal history with Chinese, and Western family structure with Eastern. But there are no parallels. These are not parallel institutions. Easterners, for example, expect very different things from their ‘religions’ than we do, so much so that it is almost worthless calling them the same word.
Buddhism and Confucianism are more like philosophy, Hinduism more like a mythology. None are like Christianity any more than Christianity is like mathematics, and nobody tries to make useful comparisons between those two because to do so would be obviously stupid. No offense to Christianity, Hinduism, Buddhism or math alike, they’re just not in the same category. Comparisons are invalid, and one is better off understanding each on its own terms—whether working from West to East, or East to West.
I think the two systems are best understood as systems of mutually reinforcing attitudes or suppositions, especially the Eastern system as it tends towards ‘cyclical self-reference,’ with no real core to define it. None in particular stands alone, but each depends on the others for reinforcement and support to a point of inseparability. I cannot decide if the best analogy is a house of cards, where each card would be unable to stand on its own but for leaning for support on its neighbors, and when taken together produce an elaborate shape, or like the strands of a rope, where the strength and resiliency is due to many separate strands tangled together to the point that they cannot be easily separated or broken. That rope, or house of cards, whichever suits the reader, has tremendous implications for everything operating withing the Eastern sphere, including economics.
Eastern ‘Scarcity’—and Waste
The seminal economic fact that almost nobody understands is how spectacularly wasteful the Chinese economy is, and as a result, how poorly resources are put to use there. And since we are talking about the subject of economics, that would tend to indicate poor performance. I can remember riding in a car along the bank of the Yangtze and being amazed at a bustling little city huddled along the opposite bank, with lush and utterly wild-looking mountains above stretching away as far as one could see. The thing that struck me was just how little impact that number of people was having on their surroundings. If only one tenth as many Americans were living in that same area, the hillsides and mountains would be covered with houses and roads would criss-cross the place. As it was, apart from the specifics of the city and the cars on the roadway, I doubt the place would have looked much different a thousand years ago. It really gave the place an ancient feel.
All of which is to point out that China is not starved for resources, as so many would have it. It is positively drowning in them, but they go unused or wasted. I was located in a fairly developed and populated area. The Western two-thirds of China is largely undeveloped and sparsely uninhabited.
Status—The Prime Commodity
Much of that wastefulness is intimately tied up with one of the most ancient and fundamental facts of Eastern civilization—its seemingly never-ending love affair with hierarchical regimentation and, more importantly, the core element of all hierarchies—status.
Anyone who wants to make a fortune off of consumers in China—pay attention! I am about to give away the secret that has eluded every Western corporation and merchant sailor since colonial times. Status is easily the most valuable commodity in that society. If you can figure out a way to manufacture status and put it in a bottle, you’ll be rich beyond your wildest dreams.
Now, that is not to say that China is a nation of chest thumping apes or stuck-up prigs. That would be to draw too direct a parallel to Western notions, and incorrect. Most Chinese don’t give much more thought to that kind of thing than anyone else does as far as I can tell.
The difference is that, for them, status defines to a very great degree who they are as individuals, how they relate to one another, and strongly influences individual prosperity. Like it or not, it is an integral and inescapable aspect of that society, far more so than in the West. Easterners are extremely sensitive to issues which to Westerners are trivial—age, occupation, level of education, or anything else that might be tied to how they are viewed. It crops up in almost all social situations, even what Westerners would consider ‘informal’ and therefore excluded from any relevance to the subject. Not so in the East.
Saving Face
Most people have heard, for example, of the peculiar Eastern phenomenon of ‘saving face.’ If such behaviors strike one as preposterous and irrational, and that nobody could possibly be so prideful or believe such pretenses as are often on display in Eastern conflicts, he would have stumbled onto more truth than he had realized. The real secret to ‘saving face’ that it is not primarily an issue of pride. It is fear. In a society where status is everything, to lose status is some degree of suicide. An apology is much more than an admission of error, it is an invitation of personal destruction. The accused prefers to double down, heaping insult on his accuser and daring him to put his own reputation on the line in the hopes that he will back down rather than accept even a tiny amount of blame. The higher the station, the greater the risk and the higher the tendency to such behavior.
In reality, nobody is fooled, not even the accused. The show of bluster is not intended to persuade. It is for fending off the circling sharks. The thing about a society based on status is that whatever status one man has is status another can not have, but would often like. Status is conserved, so to speak, so it is a zero-sum game. As the principle source of personal well-being, it is highly coveted. So the way to advancement and prosperity is often through personal destruction. Perfection is demanded, or at least a defensible pretense of it, and anyone found wanting might as well be trash. He will be destroyed.
Longing for a Different Way
There is great irony in the way many Chinese immigrants talk wistfully of Americans’ ‘carefree attitude’ and ‘frankness,’ as though toying with a dream of being so easygoing and straightforward. Which is understandable. Oriental status-mongering is no doubt very stressful. There is a feeling of being trapped, however, and this is revealing. Most who have tasted life in the West would really like to put an end to the pettiness. They don’t like it. They don’t want to obsess over status, but when it defines who they are and the entirety of their well-being, they feel they don’t have any choice but to participate. When the bureaucratic hierarchy is all that there is, to be excluded is to be destroyed. Opportunity is perceived to be in tight supply, and there is none outside the social order in a regimented society. Therefore, the system perpetuates itself. The American way of things is often viewed as being a childish indulgence of people who have never really had to face the harsh realities of life.
Thus one can understand a great deal about Eastern culture—the preoccupation with elaborate customs and manners (though that has become more lax in China since the revolution), the exceptional political viciousness, pretence, dishonesty, and obsessive pettiness, which are integral components of all politics everywhere but multiplied many times over by status hypersensitivity in the East, the emphasis of recognition and prestige over actual achievement, such as in the idealization of advanced degrees and employment in established bureaucracies over bootstrap-entrepreneurship, and a strict aversion towards indebtedness, to name just a few. All derive in large part from the preoccupation with status.
The Status Factor in Real-Estate
Status issues saturate the markets as well. For example, the market everyone is talking about—real estate. It is well known that for a young Chinese man wishing to get married, a house is more or less a prerequisite these days. Without one, a girl won’t give him the time of day. While this does have something to do with the horrible skewing of the sex ratio, which is itself a status issue—the favoring of boys over girls—it is also an issue of competitiveness between women, like showing off an expensive engagement ring here in the West, only it is taken far more seriously, especially by her family.
Likewise, it is well known that this whole affair drags in previous generations of the groom’s family to help him buy a house. Why do they get dragged in? Once again, issues of status. Older generations are expected to cough up money for that kind of thing. Not to do so would look bad. Worse, there is no real anchor in individualism to prevent ‘social stampedes’ into such behaviors, which only a decade ago were virtually unheard of. ‘Peer pressure’ is obviously going to be a big issue in a status obsessed culture. Too much standing is given to what everybody else is doing and thinking for individuals who might consider it a bad idea to resist. This leads to a terrible sort of herd mentality, also quite well known, where the right thing to do is what everybody else is doing and what they expect others to do. It’s either follow the herd or become a pariah and be trampled by it. Once again—status.
Homes as Status Symbols
What is less well known (or at least talked about as far as I have seen) is the gaping difference between the way Westerners think of real estate and the way Easterners seem to. The house is a status symbol in both cultures, but far more so in China. Simply walking through paired houses would reveal it. Westerners tend to buy houses for the purpose of filling them up with all the junk that makes them happy. They would all like bigger houses, probably, but not so much to express their worth as people. The larger size is mostly for holding more stuff/happiness, and maybe a little showing off.
In China, where people were forced into tiny unadorned apartments for generations, having a very large living space is a sign of status. Now people prefer to live in gigantic unadorned homes and apartments. But they are mostly just giant empty spaces, with little in the way of furniture, ornaments or ammenities. The preferred architectural style is grandiose, with unusually high ceilings and oversized windows, less designed for human convenience and more for creating a visual perception of expansiveness. In my experience they are remarkably bare relative to ours, which usually leaves the average Westerner scratching his head. What’s the point of having a garishly huge, empty house? Likewise, commercial real estate. Bigger office, taller building—more status, just like here. But it’s a bigger issue there.
Empty Homes, Empty Lives
That big empty house really illustrates to me the ‘hollowness,’ of the situation. Call it ‘Empty Shell Syndrome.’ It is not as if there is no such thing as status symbols and such here in the West. But there is also much more than that in people’s lives. People spend money on all kinds of things, like boats, vacations, cars, houses, and land, that do have an element of status tied up in them. But it is a much smaller ingredient in the motivation for purchasing them than the happiness they bring to the buyer. That is the main thing. Westerners also have hobbies to immerse themselves in, and belong to volunteer organizations and give to charities, all of which have little to do with status. Those kinds of activities tend to be squeezed out of Eastern societies. Instead, it is common to hear of someone spending two months salary on a cell phone or some other such triviality. Which is to say, on status.
Where Westerners’ visible lives are usually fair reflections of themselves, in the East the life becomes a large hollow shell for others to see—as large as money can buy. On the inside, where the individual resides, is often a stressed-out, longing emptiness, and fear that someday that emptiness will be discovered, the lie revealed, and the individual destroyed by his peers and neighbors who are instinctively seen as competitors. More than all the other symptoms of that famous Eastern despair, that is the true materialist curse of the East—that so much is expended for the attainment of what is known and felt to really be worthless, whether it is an extensive education in an uninteristing subject, a pile of expensive material posessions, or mastery of some showy performance art for which no passion is felt. In the end, all is for show, not real worth. All attainment is aimed at empty status, and yet not to attain is to perish.
Status Bubbles in a Status Driven Economy
So all told, you have the makings of a fantastic real estate bubble, or really in any market that emerges as status-sensitive, when coupled to an expanding money supply. You have a human stampede as people pile into a single market quite literally with all that they have for dear life. You also have the potential for spectacular levels of waste, as for example people pile on more and more square footage in an attempt to keep up with their neighbors. When guys like Jim Chanos sarcastically remark that there is enough office space in China either built or under construction to provide a twenty-five square foot cubicle for every living Chinese, he’d better take this penchant for wastefulness into account. It may very well be that the Chinese office of the future averages 500 square feet per person, ridiculous as that sounds.
You also have the potential for fantastic social instability and bloodletting when markets blow up and collapse and people have so much of themselves tied up in them, and so little else available to define individual meaning. In the West, one has other places to turn. Primitivism and rugged individualism is also a respectable and frequently invoked alternative here when things go south. We can ‘let go’ a bit easier, it seems, and put status in new terms more easily. But it is not so in the East, at least to the same degree.
Status-Mongering and the Division of Labor
But the real estate example is actually a trivial one, if a bit more approachable and revealing. Status-mongering raises its ugly head in many other, and far more substantive, instances as well. With respect to the division of labor, status issues can pose an absolute nightmare in getting people to cooperate in a productive fashion. It introduces all sorts of barriers to interaction—stupefying and debilitating levels of pretense, a tendency to take things far too personally, obstacles to establishing working business relationships, difficulty handling promotions and other internal politics, inflexibility in the assignment of tasks, stifling of creativity and self-expression, inability to identify and admit mistakes accurately (and therefore to correct them), envy, pettiness, hypercompetitiveness, disloyalty, jealousy, and eventually dishonesty and corruption—that are all extremely difficult to deal with and can paralyze or destroy an organization. So, the division of labor tends to suffer, or where it is forced higher, to operate very inefficiently. That is probably the greater indictment against status obsession in view of economic growth—it directly impedes the development of the division of labor itself.
So much for the status based economy. Status issues wreak havoc from both sides—production and consumption. If you ask me, China is too entangled in various social pathologies to really flourish by Western standards, economically or otherwise. Forget about ‘free-markets’ and political reform—for China to really bloom, it will have to deal with its deep cultural dysfunction first.
The Never-Ending Bureaucracy
Those who speak of the fall of Communism and the abandonment of the ‘old-ways’ imagine China somehow ‘reverting’ to a flourishing, liberal, enlightened state in its immediate past which simply did not exist. They do not know of what they speak. Before the present bureacratic, status-obsessed power-mongering State Pragmatism, China was a bureaucratic status-obsessed Communist state, and before that it passed through a tumultuous bureaucratic, status-obsessed colonial period, and before that it spent right around a millenium as a bureaucratic, status-obsessed feudal empire. Old habits are hard to break, and though the fading of Communism may be coughing up a dividend, it really is hard to imagine having gone downhill from that point. It seems to me obvious that the older barriers to greatness are still firmly in place.
Status mongering is inherently wasteful and morally corrosive. As G. K. Chesterton said of the Eastern philosophies:
Something different, something detached and irresponsible, tinges the moral atmosphere of Asia and touches even that of Islam… Deeper than the depths of metaphysics, far down in the abysses of mystical meditations under all that solemn universe of spiritual things, is a secret, an intangible and a terrible levity. It does not really very much matter what one does. Either because they do not believe in a devil, or because they do believe in a destiny, or because experience here is everything and eternal life something totally different.
Any Christian will recognize the dangers inherent in instinctive despair and other such beliefs coupled with a preoccupation with status—only a shade away from that most destructive temptation of pride. Corruption, the ultimate nemesis of prosperity, cannot follow far behind where these have begun to hold sway. Until the East grapples with its deepest, darkest demons, it will never really break free of the cords that continue to bind it in its ancient, desperate prison cell.
Perhaps the rope analogy was the best.
The Next War?
Some threats blend villainy and absurdity so perfectly that the reader laughs as he primes his musket:
After a year of humiliating setbacks, United Nations Secretary General Ban ki-Moon and about 60 of his top lieutenants — the top brass of the entire U.N. system — spent their Labor Day weekend at a remote Austrian Alpine retreat, discussing ways to put their sprawling organization in charge of the world’s agenda.Details concerning the two-day, closed-door sessions in the comfortable village of Alpbach were closely guarded. Nonetheless, position papers for the meeting obtained by Fox News indicate that the topics included:
- how to restore “climate change” as a top global priority after the fiasco of last year’s Copenhagen summit;
- how to continue to try to make global redistribution of wealth the real basis of that climate agenda, and widen the discussion further to encompass the idea of “global public goods”;
- how to keep growing U.N. peacekeeping efforts into missions involved in the police, courts, legal systems and other aspects of strife-torn countries;
- how to capitalize on the global tide of migrants from poor nations to rich ones, to encompass a new “international migration governance framework”;
- how to make “clever” use of new technologies to deepen direct ties with what the U.N. calls “civil society,” meaning novel ways to bypass its member nation states and deal directly with constituencies that support U.N. agendas.
As one underlying theme of the sessions, the top U.N. bosses seemed to be grappling often with how to cope with the pesky issue of national sovereignty, which — according to the position papers, anyway — continued to thwart many of their most ambitious schemes, especially when it comes to many different kinds of “global governance.”
Emphasis added by your Curmudgeon. The position papers of which columnist George Russell speaks may be downloaded via this link. Sadly, they're image based, and so difficult to search, but they're not long, and well worth reading.
The United Nations, in FDR's original design, was supposed to be a continuous mutual diplomatic mission among its member nation-states, a means by which they could avert wars and settle nagging conflicts among them. At least, that was the overt rationale. It's quite possible that Roosevelt also saw the UN as a way to enhance American international prestige and influence, as some commentators and analysts have suggested. By either measure, it's been a colossal failure. But original intentions no longer matter to those who control it. Its masters seek greater power and stature than any American would want them to have. In particular, they hope to make the UN a global legislature, and to subordinate national governments, including ours, to UN decisions.
Washington, Jefferson, Jackson, and Lincoln would not approve. Your Curmudgeon certainly doesn't. But how serious a threat is it?
The UN is unable to impose its dictates on the United States by force, and will remain so for as far into the future as your Curmudgeon can peer. A single division of United States Marines would massacre all the UN "peacekeepers" ever deployed, even if our men were armed only with toothpicks. Only if America were to surrender its sovereignty in favor of UN dominance would we lose our sovereignty -- and that, to be gentle about it, isn't very likely. But your Curmudgeon is aware that there are special interests in America that would like it very much, and some of them would not be averse to working hand in glove with the UN, against American interests.
Such interests must be watched closely. Beyond that, in these final months of Democrat hegemony over Washington, it is vital that the words of our Pretender-In-Chief and any coordinated developments on Capitol Hill be carefully monitored. The Obamunists have more power than any American government has ever enjoyed, but they want still more. It is not unthinkable that they see an "enhanced relationship" with the UN as a means to that end.
Mark Steyn once wrote, most perceptively, that Obama sees himself as larger than the presidency:
Many Americans are beginning to pick up the strange vibe that, for Barack Obama, governing America is "an interesting sociological experiment," too. He would doubtless agree that the United States is 'the place on earth that, if I needed one, I would call home.' But he doesn't, not really: It is hard to imagine Obama wandering along to watch a Memorial Day or Fourth of July parade until the job required him to. That's not to say he's un-American or anti-American, but merely that he's beyond all that. Way beyond. He's the first president to give off the pronounced whiff that he's condescending to the job -- that it's really too small for him and he's just killing time until something more commensurate with his stature comes along.
Such a man might well be attracted to the notion of a single world government -- with himself at the helm.
Keep your powder dry.
Wednesday, September 8, 2010
The War With Islam, “Moderate Muslims,” And The Florida Koran Roast
The planned Florida Koran bonfire has elicited statements of concern from numerous public figures in America, and (of course) shrill messages of condemnation from Muslims everywhere. The overall thrust of the adverse American reactions has been that this sort of act will "alienate moderate Muslims," supposedly "the very allies we need to defeat the Islamists and Wahhabi extremists."
There's no need for your Curmudgeon to elucidate the adverse reactions of Muslims, is there?
A few subliterates -- at least, that's one explanation for their inadequate knowledge of history -- have commented to the effect that we would be outraged by a Muslim bonfire of Bibles, and that the two cases are exactly parallel. Therefore, they say, the planned bonfire would be a betrayal of the values we claim to hold.
Don't ask them about what values those might be. Freedom, justice, and manly defiance of those who seek to intimidate us won't be among them. And don't ask them whether they're aware that Bible bonfires have occurred many times in Islamic nations, particularly Iran and Saudi Arabia. If they are, they'll wave it aside; if not, they'll claim you must be lying.
Clearly, it's time for some light on the subject, rather than more heat.
First, the self-delusion about "moderate Muslims" simply has to stop. There's no such thing as a moderate Muslim, because there's no such thing as moderate Islam. Islam proclaims certain premises:
- That the Koran is the literal Word of Allah, never to be edited nor reinterpreted;
- That the Prophet Muhammad was the Perfect Man, to be emulated in all ways;
- That Muslims are obligated to make Islam the only accepted religion on Earth by any means expedient, including lethal violence.
Those premises are absolute. For a Muslim to question any one of them is called Zandaka -- heresy -- and is punishable by death.
There's nothing moderate about the ethos that flows from those premises. It sanctions all manner of vileness, including deceit and stealthy violence against "the unbeliever;" the subjugation of all non-Muslims; polygamy and pedophilia; the chattelization of women; and a criminal code so barbaric that a Westerner can scarcely credit it, even though it's put into practice every day.
Yet no one who disputes any aspect of that evil code can call himself a Muslim. That would undermine the creed in toto, and put him in jeopardy of death at the hands of other Muslims. Ergo, the "moderate Muslim" is a fiction concocted for public-relations purposes among persons not yet subjugated to "the religion of peace."
What we have here in the United States are not "moderate Muslims" but temperate Muslims: persons who, whatever they might believe or advocate among themselves, are indisposed to act on the commands of their creed at this time. If polls conducted among Middle Eastern Muslims of every station can be taken to measure the attitudes and preferences of Muslims in America, they support the "extremists" in principle, approve of their overall aims, and will neither speak nor act against them.
To seek to conciliate such persons is fatuous. To trust them is insane.
Just in case you've napped away the past thirty years, there's a war on. No, not in Afghanistan, and certainly not in Iraq. The war of which your Curmudgeon speaks is the stealth jihad of which Robert Spencer and others have so eloquently warned us: the ongoing, loosely organized Islamic campaign to demoralize the nations of the West so that shari'a, Islam's law code, can penetrate our lands and eventually displace our native arrangements. That campaign uses Western "tolerance" toward religious differences to disarm our resistance to Islam's advance.
But Islam is not a religion. It's a totalitarian ideology with a few theological trimmings. If you're aware of its prescriptions, its proscriptions, and its record when in the saddle, you cannot sincerely disagree. If not, you need to complete your education before allowing yourself an opinion on the subject.
Persons throughout recorded history have done terrible things in the name of a religion, but only Islam, "the religion of peace," literally commands its adherents to do such things, and to support those who advance Islam in that manner, unconditionally. In that sense, the war between Islam and the Christian-Enlightenment West goes back a lot further than thirty years.
One does not fight a war by conciliating the enemy. No, not even a war of ideas, insofar as Islam can be considered an idea to be assessed objectively and rationally. In a war successfully concluded, there can only be victory and defeat. Inasmuch as Islam has defined itself as a war creed unalterably opposed to all others -- read the Koran if you don't believe your Curmudgeon on that score -- our choice is to prosecute the war to victory, or to meekly accept defeat.
Estimates of the world population of Muslims hover around 1.3 billion. That's a formidable number. If it were necessary to slaughter them all to prevail in the war between us, we would probably be unable to do it -- not for lack of military capacity, but for lack of will. Fortunately, we can prevail without such wholesale slaughter if we can contrive to sever the bonds between the temperate fraction and their activist brethren.
How does one persuade persons disinclined to violence to separate themselves from persons of the opposed inclination? In one of two ways only:
- By appealing to their better natures;
- By appealing to their self-interest.
No mortal conflict in all of history has been settled by appealing to the enemy's better nature. If he truly desires to subjugate you, any gestures of conciliation toward him will indicate weakness, unreadiness or unwillingness to fight; they will merely strengthen his resolve. The sole positive course is to put the enemy in a position in which his self-interest plainly requires that he surrender: that he accept the cessation of hostilities on terms you dictate.
Sun Tzu and other writers on warfare have emphasized the importance of breaking the enemy's will to fight. How this is to be done depends on the nature of the enemy and the contest. In a war such as ours with Islam, the available strokes in that direction must emphasize:
- That we recognize that a state of war exists between us;
- That we're ready, willing, and able to fight it all the way to a conclusion;
- That we regard victory as the only acceptable outcome;
- That the alternatives available to them are:
- Utter extinction;
- Unconditional surrender and complete withdrawal from the field of battle.
The first step is the one we've been most reluctant to take. A Koran bonfire is one way of announcing that we've taken it.
We are not the Americans who fought World Wars I or II. We have far greater material resources than they, but we haven't demonstrated the same moral courage or resolve. Unless and until we marshal our spirits to the imperative task of our age, our bodies will remain flaccid.
We can begin by burning a Koran on September 11. Your Curmudgeon plans to do so himself. Are you willing to join him?
Tuesday, September 7, 2010
A friend of mine likes to “stir up the masses” as Obama says. He sent me everything but the ladle.
This note is from one of my old Sea Cliff buddies.
“Homeowners - Better Read This one
“Don’t want to be bothered with “Political stuff?” You’d better read this one. It will come as a huge shock to you if you aren’t informed as to what Obama is up to, and it has already passed one hurdle. It will take very little now to put it into actual law!! YOU’D BETTER WAKE UP AMERICA !!!!
“So you think you live in a free country.
“Boy have you got a surprise coming.
“A License Required for your HOUSE?
“If you own your home you really need to check this out. If the country thinks the housing market is depressed now, wait until everyone sees this. No one will be buying homes in the future.
“We encourage you to read the provisions of the Cap and Trade Bill that has passed the House of Representatives and are being considered by the Senate. We are ready to join the next march on Washington! This Congress and their “experts” are truly out to destroy the middle class of the U.S.A.
“A License will be required for your house...no longer just for cars and mobile homes....Thinking about selling your house? Take a look at H.R. 2454 (Cap and Trade bill). This is unbelievable! Home owners take note and tell your friends and relatives who are home owners!
Beginning one year after enactment of the Cap and Trade Act, you won’t be able to sell your home unless you retrofit it to comply with the energy and water efficiency standards of this “Cap & Trade” bill, passed by the House of Representatives. If it is also passed by the Senate, it will be the largest tax increase any of us has ever experienced.”
From Rachel:
This is probably just some conservative fear mongering as Obama puts it. Even as nutty as Obama is, he can’t be fixing to license homes. He’d be thrown out on his ears.
On the chance it’s not made up, though, I suggest come November second, we vote as if our freedom depends on it. Oh, did I mention there’s a mole in the White House? Would somebody please figure out a way to remove it? The mole is really starting to bug me.
Assorted
1. Soldier turns PR expert.
Beware the specialist who ventures beyond his demonstrated expertise:
A Florida church's plan to burn Korans on Sept. 11 isn't doing the troops in Afghanistan any favors, Gen. David Petraeus said Monday.Hundreds of Afghans protested Monday in Kabul over the decision by the Gainesville, Fla.-based Dove World Outreach Center to burn copies of what Muslims consider the word of God.
Petraeus said he's concerned that the protests could spread across the country.
"It could endanger troops and it could endanger the overall effort in Afghanistan. It is precisely the kind of action the Taliban uses and could cause significant problems. Not just here, but everywhere in the world we are engaged with the Islamic community," Petraeus said in a statement provided to Fox News.
Trouble is, whether or not such incidents occur, the Taliban, HAMAS, Hizbollah, and similar forces will act as if we were doing that and far worse.
We cannot conciliate persons who believe that it is God's wish that we be converted, subjugated, or slaughtered. Our only hope of gaining the upper hand against such forces is to persuade the hypothetical majority of temperate Muslims to disown them -- indeed, to ally with us in the effort to extirpate them. And we cannot do that until those hypothetical temperate Muslims realize that, far from preparing to back down and make concessions to Islam and shari'a, we're getting angrier and more resolute -- that we're on the verge of whipping out the really big guns and laying "restraint" aside.
Cultural confidence is the key to any such posture. Demonstrating that confidence is an unmistakable message to those who believe us weak. In short: Pile those Korans high, douse them with kerosene, and apply a match.
Memo to General Petraeus: You're in the field to kill those bastards, not to make them giggle. You've demonstrated the former expertise in the recent past. Let's see more of it, and faster. Besides, in the current economy it's unwise to be changing trades so precipitously, n'est-ce pas?
2. Rights abusers? Nous?
The Obama Administration's perfidies are many, but high on the list is its recent denunciation of the United States to the United Nations as an abuser of human rights because of Arizona's SB 1070:
Two weeks ago, the Obama administration issued a report to the United Nations Human Rights Council on alleged human rights abuses by the United States. In what marks an unprecedented act of elitism and arrogance by the political class in Washington, our own federal government has complained to a corrupt international organization about the purported sins of Americans....For example, the Obama administration criticized Arizona’s new illegal immigrant law in the report. In effect, our own federal government has complained to foreigners that Americans who favor controlling the border are would-be human rights violators. How it would be a human rights violation for the U.S. to try to control its border—as does every advanced nation—is left unexplained. But regardless of what one thinks of the Arizona law, Americans should be concerned that the federal government is criticizing before the corrupt U.N. the states and people it is supposed to represent.
Well, yes. Especially since the model of "human rights" the Obamunists have adopted is explicitly anti-Constitutional and socialist:
The White House is also attempting to redefine human rights. In the American context, human rights constrain the power of government to control the individual. They are limitations on the government’s ability to censor us, govern us without our consent, prevent us from practicing religion as we see fit, take our property, take our arms, etc.Socialists on the other hand reject these individual rights and talk instead about communal rights, group rights and rights to material goods and services. This basically involves hijacking the human rights moniker and using it to justify a larger government that redistributes wealth.
By bragging about Obamacare in its report to the U.N., and criticizing the U.S. for deficiencies in housing, jobs and healthcare for minorities, the Obama administration has essentially adopted this collectivist view of human rights.
However, because the executive branch of the federal government has essentially unbounded latitude to speak for the United States to other nations, there's little we can do about it short of evicting the Obamunists from power, our next opportunity for which is more than two years away. Until then, the most pernicious of all Cabinet departments will be empowered to slander the very nation whose international interests it was created to protect and advance.
3. September lack-of-surprise.
The Democrats are sensing a large setback come November 2. All the polls indicate that Republican strength in both houses of Congress, and in a number of state legislatures, will increase dramatically after the mid-term elections. In consequence, the Punditocracy has been nattering about the probability of an "October surprise" or two, that might tilt the electorate back toward the status quo.
But a surprise one expects is no surprise at all. More, a number of figures on the left are already heating their irons in the hope of staving off electoral disaster:
- Obama is composing a huge tax-breaks-for-business bill;
- In recognition of the massive shift of corporate donations away from the left, he's also getting ready to propose additional relief for homeowners in mortgage trouble;
- On the class-warfare / beggar-thy-neighbor front, Robert Reich wants to raise the top income tax rate to 90%;
- To motivate the black racialists, Uber-racialist agitator Al Sharpton has been ranting that once a state senate seat has been held by a black man, it has to remain in black hands;
- And of course, the Pretender-In-Chief himself is whining about his his opponents are treating him.
The Internet has changed everything. It's no longer possible to conceal anything substantive about oneself, if one has ever dared to disclose it. It's also no longer possible to disavow one's prior statements or positions, at least not without an elaborate explanation of increased understanding or changed principles that a listener might or might not accept. And "surprises" have become the hardest of all political gambits to make truly surprising.
November 2 is only 56 days away. We shall see.
Sunday, September 5, 2010
Instead of going to shovel ready jobs, some of the Stimulus money is going to shovel something else.
It ain’t shinola. But it could be a close cousin. In relative terms. But let’s get back to the money.
If memory serves me, the total Stimulus was 862 billion dollars. Between now and November 2, unspent Stimulus dollars will be spent in the billions, used as a kind of cover to the millions that’ll be finding their way into Democratic coffers; countless commercials. Do I have proof? Nope. But on a one to ten scale of belief, I’m at a ten. I’d bet my bottom dollar on it. Taxpayer money is going to be spent on the Democratic campaign effort. Big time.
Of course, I wish I had the goods on Obama’s corrupt Democratic machine this minute, but I don’t. At the same time, proof never stood in the way of Barack Obama from saying something he knew to be untrue. A while back, for example, since Obama said ObamaCare would lower premiums, I wanted to know what his position papers and press releases had to say specifically to back that statement on. Would you believe it? From Google to Dogpile, I couldn’t find a single site that would shed light on that question. It’s as if Obama made the statement during his State of the Union Address and nobody from the mainstream media followed up to find out what Obama based that “premium lowering” statement on.
The President’s people admit a couple hundred billion of Stimulus money hasn’t as yet been spent. As to the monies that have been spent, I’ve read that taxpayer money has lined the pockets of supporters from sea to shining sea, but without proof, who can really say. Obama’s big on offering jobs so people won’t run for office, but he’s not big on naming special prosecutors to investigate possible crimes.
Desperate men do take desperate measures. I think the President knew all along that his left-as-Lenin positions would catch up to him. In the November 2, election, he could lose both houses. But I believe the destructive left turn Obama’s taken the country is, in his warped mind, worth it. And in the sharp minds of his lawyers, using the Stimulus money was always going to be the last ditch trump card play to save the House and Senate.
Is it corrupt? Of course it is. Federal Statutes say it is.
But when you’re the most corrupt President in the history of this nation, well, you don’t need me to tell you. We have a crook in the White House who’s capable of anything.
Saturday, September 4, 2010
Just Right!
I don’t care if you love country music or detest it: Make this go viral:
And sing it loud!
Friday, September 3, 2010
“Our Cultural Inheritance”
Rarely does a day pass that I am left uninspired by one or more of my Esteemed Co-Conspirators. Aaron Brenzel's piece, immediately prior to this one, is another example in a long and impressive series, especially as Aaron's predictions couple to this equally impressive insight into the core of feeling behind the August 28th Restoring Honor rally at the National Mall:
Beck gets that there is a deeply and urgently felt conviction emerging organically across a broad swath of the American populace that the spectacular economic and political collapses of recent years were made possible -- even inevitable -- by a much longer Great Moral Decline. Americans' commitment to Judeo-Christian principles, secured for most by a belief in biblical authority, long served to fuel the engine and fortify the rails of our government and economy. Yet now, it is feared, that commitment is no longer powerful and pervasive enough to propel the American marketplace and constrain the excesses and abuses in private and public sectors. In the words of Dr. Alveda King: "Our material gains seem to be going the way of our moral losses."......Americans for generations have passed down a set of values, principles, and practices that honor integrity over greed, frugality over conspicuous consumption, industry over dependency and liberty over coercion. There may be other cultures capable of sustaining a reasonably sound democratic government and free market economy, but the American Judeo-Christian culture undergirded a government and an economy that have arguably been the most successful in all of history.
The deep concern across the United States appears to be that we have squandered our cultural inheritance. We have exchanged the extraordinary treasury of Judeo-Christian stories, values, and wisdom that sustained us for generations in favor of the cheap culture of corruption, indolence, and dissolution that has swiftly bankrupted our economy and our government.
The values embedded in the "cultural inheritance" of which commentator Timothy Dalrymple speaks above are not utterly inseparable from America's Christian heritage. However, they have been transmitted down the generations overwhelmingly through our Christian faith. That transmission line has been seriously abraded.
Over the decades since World War I, religious faith in general and Christianity in particular have been attacked as no abstraction ever has, in all of recorded history. Though the attackers remain a minority among us, because of their control of our major channels of communication they have been remarkably successful at delegitimizing values born from religious faith and propagated through religious faith as political positions. In effect, Thou shalt not murder, Thou shalt not steal, Thou shalt not bear false witness, and Thou shalt not covet have been excluded from political discourse.
A military man will tell you: The moral is to the material as a foundation is to the house built upon it.
Aaron's prognosis for the November elections, particularly as regards the low name recognition of the surging "outsider" candidates, illuminates an important aspect of Americans' current attitude toward Washington: the majority of energized voters will be going to the polls to vote against. The prevailing mood isn't so much anti-Democrat as anti-Establishment and anti-Washington. Party alignments are of secondary importance.
Why? Until recently, the grumbling about the federal government's intrusions and exactions was fairly moderate. Yes, we complained, especially those of us with personal priorities that were being neglected, or personal oxen being gored. But we haven't edged this close to outright rebellion since Daniel Shays and the Whiskey Rebels. Even specially passionate electoral rejections of the sitting hegemons have been rare: FDR's massive defeat of Herbert Hoover in 1932; Ronald Reagan's overturning of Jimmy Carter's skiff in 1980. Clearly, something big is afoot.
At such a time, it's well to look beyond the polls, and to address a wider field than the political prognosticators allow themselves.
I'm acquainted with several persons, not all of them politically like-minded, who sense a calamity approaching. It's possible to endorse government activism in principle without approving of the results of specific exertions thereof; thus, many a welfare-state liberal has taken exception to the excesses of the present administration and Congress. It only requires open eyes to read the writing on our wall.
The folks of whom I speak have been forting up. They're following the advice of the broker in the old gag: "Buy canned goods and ammunition." And they're not at all happy about it.
They sense that their retirements are dubious.
They sense that their livelihoods are threatened.
They sense danger for their children, and their friends...and their country.
And they have begun to sense, however inchoately, that the approaching storm was ignited, and continues to be fueled, in Washington.
A key concept for the analysis of our political devolution is that of agency. An agent is, of course, one who acts on another's behalf. Agent Smith is hired by principal Jones to do something Jones wants done. Perhaps it's something Smith is more skilled at than Jones; alternately, it might be a chore Jones finds arduous or distasteful. But whatever the character of the task or Jones's reasons for delegating it, it is fixed in the everlasting congruity of things, immovably embedded in the moral order of the Universe, that if Jones has no right to do it, then Smith has no greater right to do it on Jones's behalf.
That's easy enough to understand when put in terms of individuals. But what if the agent in the tableau is an organization...or a government?
Marshall Fritz, founder of the Advocates for Self-Government, liked to illuminate this critical moral truth with a sequence of stories about thieves and their unwilling victim. If the thieves outnumber the victim -- if they take a vote on whether or not to steal the victim's belongings -- if the victim is permitted to vote alongside them -- can that sanctify their subsequent theft?
Can wrong be made right by majority approval? Can it be made right by turning the proceeds to charitable ends? Can it be made right if the wrongdoer's intentions are sufficiently benign?
Hearken to the words of the foremost sociopolitical analyst of all time, the great Herbert Spencer:
I asked one of the members of Parliament whether a majority of the House could legitimize murder. He said no. I asked him whether it could sanctify robbery. He thought not. But I could not make him see that if murder and robbery are intrinsically wrong, and not to be made right by the decisions of statesmen, then similarly all actions must be either right or wrong, apart from the authority of the law; and that if the right and wrong the law are not in harmony with this intrinsic right and wrong, the law itself is criminal. [From "The Proper Sphere of Government," in The Man Versus the State]
Government is an agent. Except in an absolute monarchy whose founding principle is that God Himself has given the monarch unchallengeable authority over "his" people and lands, a government has no independent moral standing; it exists solely to act on others' behalf. It cannot make right what is intrinsically wrong. Yet every government known to Man, throughout all the millennia for which we have records, has arrogated to itself that very privilege.
If a people should grant the government over it that privilege, it will be used...and abused.
I wrote some time ago, in addressing another aspect of our political problems, that a class is defined by its privileges. Our political class is no exception.
When our rulers sit together to "make law" and "decree justice" -- yes, yes, those are "sneer quotes" -- their individual interests and agendas are conveniently concealed behind a committee's facade. That doesn't depend at all on the size of the committee; two consuls acting in concert are no more and no less a committee than the House of Representatives. Every individual member can deflect the odium for the decisions of the whole onto his fellows. In recent years, a member's rationales for doing so even if he's concurred in the committee's majority decision have become quite elaborate.
Note how the privilege of setting aside the moral law when our rulers sit in committee has been "informally delegated" to our rulers as individuals. The plethora of scandals, especially financial scandals, that have touched elected officials in recent years bears witness to their fondness for that privilege, and to their desire to exploit it to the fullest. Most notably, every attempt by Us the People to qualify or limit that privilege has been met with a resistance so multifarious and fierce as to defeat my powers of description.
I believe we have found the nerve nexus upon which the Restoring Honor rally, the Tea Party movement, and Glenn Beck and Sarah Palin, the most visible representatives thereof, have pressed: the unassuaged, ever-growing ache Americans feel from having let our political class "get away with it."
The Commandments of Mount Sinai are ten in number, but there was an unspoken eleventh, implied by the enunciation of the others: Thou shalt not get away with it. God will have the final Word on our lawless lawgivers. Whether he will include all of us who hold ourselves individually blameless as their accessories before and after the fact, we cannot know.
I'd rather be safe than sorry.
When Timothy Dalrymple speaks of "our cultural inheritance" in the essay cited above, he speaks not only of the moral strictures that comprise the Judeo-Christian ethos, but also of the breadth of mechanisms by which they've been propagated down the centuries. And indeed, when we strain to explain our political maladies, the enervation of those mechanisms are more important than the ethos itself.
Glenn Beck's Restoring Honor rally was billed, organized, and operated as a non-partisan, even non-political event, despite the presence of former Alaska Governor Sarah Palin and several other political figures. Beck's personal focus was on the return to faith and trust in God and attention to His laws. To the dismay of Beck's many detractors (and no doubt our entire political class), that was the most brilliant stroke of the past two years, a game-changer in the exact sense.
God is non-partisan. His laws bind Democrats and Republicans alike.
The religious conduits through which Americans' moral educations have flowed have been most seriously obstructed by a cultural elite that dominates the education, communications, and entertainment industries. That elite has done its damnedest to efface the moral absolutes graven into the foundation of the Universe by trumpeting messages of relativism and nonjudgmentalism. To this they've coupled baseless yet thunderous denunciations of our "racism," "sexism", "homophobia," and "hard-heartedness." They've slandered the proponents of traditional moral standards as "Puritanical," and have aimed blistering accusations of "hypocrisy" at anyone who defends that standard yet occasionally fails to meet it perfectly. They've abjured God in favor of Cthulhu; they've rejected progress in favor of Congress. The indirectly expressed theme is that, since we are fallen, we might as well dismiss the possibility of rising and enjoy a thorough wallow.
Though I dislike to say it, most Americans have been inhibited from contradicting those emissions, at least overtly. But the conviction that we've gone badly wrong has been swelling in us nevertheless. It could not remain unarticulated forever.
A personal note, which you might find relevant: regular readers of Eternity Road who've dipped into the Short Fiction section are aware that I write the occasional bit of erotica. Being a religious sort, I have a rather different approach to erotica, as you might have guessed. A dear friend has called my stuff "Catholic family-values porn," a phrase I've made my own and have employed in the promotion of my works.
I've included my erotica in my recent E-publishing efforts at Smashwords. Those three volumes have attracted thousands of readers, and have garnered quite a lot of email as well. The common message that runs through those emails has been Why can't I find more material like this?
My most recent offering in that vein is Farm Girl, an unabashed celebration of family life and family love. The response, measured by emailed reader reactions, has been nothing short of stupendous. There's an actual hunger abroad for a return to virtue that doesn't command asceticism or condemn pleasure. Thousands of people, judging solely from what they've written to me, are desperate for a path back to God that embraces life and joy and disdains sackcloth and ashes.
To me, that is quintessentially, even uniquely American. As P. J. O'Rourke says in Parliament of Whores, this is the Happy Kingdom. That's written into the birth certificate of the Republic, right there in the central paragraph, and cannot be excised.
But we cannot be enduringly happy while we reject our moral knowledge. Sociopaths excepted, our consciences cannot be permanently numbed. Nor can we accept the rule of an amoral and rapacious political elite, whose appetite grows with each passing year, while we strain to remain within the bounds of the laws God has written into our natures.
I've written on several occasions that the atheist who leads a blameless life -- Dante's "virtuous pagan" -- will be raised to eternal bliss at its end. But that way is far harder to travel than the Christian or Jewish path; it requires an insight into moral absolutes that few persons possess, and a firmness of conviction that few atheists can sustain.
For the great majority of Americans -- 74% at the last completed census -- Glenn Beck is pointing the proper way. To capitalize on his insight and direction, we must revitalize our "cultural inheritance:"
- The great moral fables of Aesop, Hans Christian Andersen, and the Grimms;
- The philosophical bequests of Aristotle, Augustine, and Aquinas;
- The literary patrimony of the Western Canon;
- Most important of all, the Gospels.
These things must be taken out of our cultural trunk and made vibrant in new stories, new poems, new songs and movies. We must relearn their lessons and proclaim them to our fellows and our children without embarrassment, and certainly without fear. Equally important, we must accept and admit that we are fallen: when we depart from virtue, we must acknowledge our failures, and resolve to do better next time.
We must hold our political class accountable by those standards, without exceptions, evasions, or excuses. We must exact the proper penalties for their betrayals and deceits.
And we must begin at once.
Thursday, September 2, 2010
What’s Coming
For quite awhile now, we’ve been reading prognostications about what the election results in November might look like. The serious ones have usually be prefaced with the caveat “if nothing changes between now and November.”
Well, we’re quickly running out of time.
In order to understand what’s going to happen in a few month’s, it’s important to know what dynamics shape midterm elections. Sean Trende at RealClearPolitics has done an able service of outlining them:
- What is the economy like?
- What do voters think of the President and his agenda?
- What is the size of the majority (if the incumbent party has one) and how recently was it established?
For those keeping score at home, the worst-case scenario looks like this:
- The economy is in the toilet
- The President’s agenda was over-ambitions and very unpopular
- The incumbent party has recently acquired a large majority
If you’re thinking that worst-case scenario gives a pretty accurate description of what’s happening this year, you would be absolutely correct. In truth, we have not seen the stars align in this way for any election in living memory. By many counts 1932 would qualify, although if we dismiss 1932 then we would have to revisit the 19th century to find an environment as bad for the incumbent party as this year is. In 1932, the Democrats rode Franklin Roosevelt’s wave to a 97-seat pickup in the House of Representatives, the closest any party has come to a triple-digit gain.
Could we see a similar defeat for the Democrats this year? I have hesitated to say so publicly until now, but my opinion is an emphatic yes!. One major caveat is that the Republicans will not be riding a resoundingly victorious presidential candidate into office. Such presidential candidates have very real effects on the outcome of elections, for two (related) reasons:
- A well-liked presidential candidate can serve to mask unpopular candidates beneath him because he is the focus of attention and his party label matters to voters. In 2008, voters who were excited to elect Barack Obama also elected candidates whom in other years they would have rejected, like Alan Grayson or Al Franken.
- The presidency is unique among American offices in its ability to set the agenda and produce change. For that reason, even presidential elections involving an incumbent are often forward-looking in nature. In contrast, Congress’s subordinate role in agenda-setting means midterm elections are by nature reactive to the record of the incumbent Congress.
Point (1) would seem to be a net negative for Republicans this year, while point (2) would be a net positive. Notice, however, that the policy platform of the opposition nor their campaign cash nor their television presence has so far entered the debate. This will prove a crucial point as the media gears up into full “horse race” mode in the fall.
In a midterm election, the views of the opposition mean little if nothing on the whole. The views of individual candidates can certainly have an effect on those races, but distributed over roughly 450 federal races and countless state and local races nationwide, those effects will tend to even out. Unless the challenger is particularly controversial or well-known for other reasons, the incumbent in races below the statewide level (governor and senator) will maintain a significant name recognition advantage all the way to Election Day more often than not. Even today, with all the news about the elections, we see results like this:
- AZ-1: “Despite Representative Ann Kirkpatrick having 95 percent name ID (with a 42 to 37 percent favorable-unfavorable rating) compared to challenger Paul Gosar’s 46 percent (23 to 6 percent favorable), Gosar leads on the ballot by a 47 to 41 percent margin.”
- CA-11: “Despite Representative Jerry McNerney having 93 percent name ID (with a 41 to 34 percent favorable-unfavorable rating) compared to challenger David Harmer’s 47 percent (19 to 8 percent favorable), Harmer currently leads McNerney on the ballot by a razor-thin 45 to 44 percent margin.”
- CO-4: “Despite Representative Betsey Markey having 98 percent name ID (with a 37 to 50 percent favorable-unfavorable rating) compared to challenger Cory Gardner’s 57 percent (23 to 13 percent favorable), Gardner leads on the ballot by a 50 to 39 percent margin.”
First, these are truly horrific numbers for the Democrats, but notice how low the challengers’ recognition levels are compared to the incumbents’. By Election Day, it will be a safe bet that more than 46% of voters in AZ-1 will know who Paul Gosar is, but it is also safe to say that percentage will likely be lower than 95%. More importantly, if 95% of the district already knows who Ann Kirkpatrick is and still wants to vote for someone else, how much good will all the advertising money in the world do? Harry Reid will face this same problem, and this is why months of negative advertising against Sharron Angle have at best put him in a tie with her. Finally, notice two of the three Democrats above are losing despite decent favorable ratings. This is some of the first evidence I have seen that we will be in an anti-Democrat year rather than an anti-liberal year.
There is very little, other than some kind of positive personal event for Obama, that is going to change any of these dynamics in the next two months. The economy is not bouncing back, and Obamacare is not going to become suddenly more popular. For those who enjoy electoral history, you are most likely going to witness a slice of it in just a few months.
Wednesday, September 1, 2010
A madman has taken this nation hostage. If only we could call in a SWAT team.
Trying to negotiate with this fruitcake leader of a self proclaimed ruling class, in my opinion, is fruitless. So what should be done about this nattering nabob of socialist dogma? His recent TV performance from the oval office reminded me of a wolf on its high horse howling at the moon while trying to balance a spinning plate on his nose.
How to free the country from ObamaInsanity.
Can the American people, the governed which Obama has lost the consent of, afford to use stretched legal means, albeit extra legal means, to unseat the President who can’t say what he believes any more than OJ could admit to murder? We can’t afford not to.
The constitutional, political, social, economic and military ramifications of inaction are too dire; the carnage Obama leaves in his wake at every turn makes two years the equivalent of an eternity.
Really, the problems faced by America are the same problems faced by a number of Western countries (perhaps all of them bar Switzerland). The problem isn’t any particular political party or ideology but rather with the political class, along with their allies in the bureaucracies. They’re utterly indifferent to the will of the people because they’re able to buy enough support by bribing and threatening the uninformed, the indifferent, the apathetic and the cowardly with money and services taken from others. And we enable it by our acquiescence and cowardice.
“The ballot box won’t fix this. Not soon enough.
“A determined minority, prepared to stand together and demand change-and threaten real violence or crippling disruption if change isn’t forthcoming- just might.
The unforeseen consequences of such action could well turn out to be horrible. But not half as horrible as a slow descent into serfdom.” (KG, Comments, Eternity Road)
Last night, you heard the disjointed, disingenuous, downright ridiculous speech delivered by a President who can no longer make a case even for himself. The crooked Chicago politician who can’t remember pewing in a racist Trinity Church with a pastor who welcomed the terrorists on 9/11 with mellifluous tones of brotherhood is now suffering from thinking that’s crooked to the nth degree. You almost want to feel sorry for him. Almost.
One of his internal dilemmas: Obama has a huge rhetorical problem, one Hitler never had. One Stalin never had.
While the dynamically dastardly duo that I named, more evil than the double play combination of Aparicio and Fox was skilled, meant what they said, Obama is in the unenviable position at almost every turn of believing one thing and having to say another. This is the confusion and double talk so many try to wrap their minds around. He’s President of the wrong nation.
Guys, Obama’s inability to repeat the oath of office was the first major national clue that Obama doesn’t believe what he says. Like the eye moves to motion, the brain fights untruth. To the brain, it’s a dissonant note. To come unscathed out of ObamaMouth, “Preserve, protect and defend the constitution” didn’t stand a prayer.
Obama believes what Rich and Dowd and Olbermann believe. The destiny of Obama in his own mind is to transform America. He’s committed to kill every element of freedom, free enterprise and individual rights that formed this nation’s foundation more than two centuries ago. Looting our treasury in quantities of million dollar paybacks to supporters is disgraceful, not to mention criminal. Getting part of these monies are Hollywood allies who cast TV shows and movies to conform to ObamaWishes.
You couldn’t make up a script that anyone would buy and call it “The Obama Presidency.” William Morris would call it too unbelievable.
Unbelievably, Obama has succeeded in redistributing the wealth of America; just as he mistakenly let slip was his intention that day he walked up to the house of Joe the Plumber.
When Obama speaks off the cuff, truth has a habit of coming out. About little things like redistribution of wealth. About slightly larger things like Obama’s belief in the national destruction of the exceptional nation that leads the free world.
In a country that believes in the supreme law of the land Obama is the exception.
He doesn’t care about following court decisions he disagrees with because he doesn’t believe in the American rule of law. He’s a constitutional lawyer who doesn’t believe in the constitution. Is that pitiable irony lost on anyone? He mocked the Supreme Court during his State of the Union Speech. And lied about why he did it. Don’t you remember? For the first time ever, a congressman yelled, “lies” during the lying halls of congress speech. Have you forgotten when Alito mouthed, “untrue”? Now and then the truth does escape ObamaMouth, but when it does, it’s nasty; you can smell the stink a mile away. But most of the time Obama is curving the truth like an old Nolan Ryan roundhouse.
If Obama were to talk straight, he’d admit that every knee jerk ObamaReaction is to go against the will of the American people. If there’s 70% agreement in this country about most anything, “I’m a thirty percenter 100% of the time” an honest Obama would say. I can hear him sing like a canary.
Hail, hail the Victory Mosque, the whole socialist, marxist gang is here. Where?
In highly paid positions in the White House, carrying out Saul Alinsky dictims.
The Mosque fiasco is the perfect example of Obama letting something that’s inside him escape, like-to-many-baked-beans might cause gas to escape into a movie theatre seat. The result stinks. The American people smell the rottenness of the indecent mosque and Obama’s support of it. And they’re repelled by the odor of that ObamaTruth escaping. Some things, Obama just can’t hold in even though he ends up with egg on his face.
That campaign statement about Americans clinging to their guns and bibles is precisely what I’m talking about.
Consequently, when he’s giving a speech to the American people, the writing of it is as tortured as the delivery. Of course he’s emotionless when he speaks to us. It’s almost impossible to speak with passion about something you totally disagree with; don’t believe. Only the finest actors can pull it off. Or the best con artists.
Of course, electing Obama was a huge mistake. Like sending off a spacecraft with a defective o-ring. He’s like a guy who lies his way into the position of Pope without believing in Catholicism.
Okay, Ollie, another fine mess you’ve gotten us into. What do we do now to free the nation? I’m afraid that inaction isn’t an option.
It took Hitler twelve years to destroy Germany. Obama thinks he can bring the United States to its knees in four. If Obama were President in 1941, we’d have lost the war. If we can’t call a SWAT team to release a hostage nation, what do we do?
A super mole takes up residence in the White House. How to remove it is the question. At this point, I’ll even try the yellow pages. Maybe the Orkin Man is available.
