Showing posts with label Liberalism. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Liberalism. Show all posts
Saturday, June 4, 2016
Saturday, March 12, 2016
Thursday, November 19, 2015
Obama Wants to Defeat America, Not ISIS
By Daniel Greenfield
Last year at a NATO summit, Obama explicitly disavowed the idea of containing ISIS. "You can't contain an organization that is running roughshod through that much territory, causing that much havoc, displacing that many people, killing that many innocents, enslaving that many women," he said.
Instead he argued, "The goal has to be to dismantle them."
Just before the Paris massacre, Obama shifted back to containment. “From the start, our goal has been first to contain them, and we have contained them,” he said.
Pay no attention to what he said last year. There’s a new message now. Last year Obama was vowing to destroy ISIS. Now he had settled for containing them. And he couldn’t even manage that.
ISIS has expanded into Libya and Yemen. It struck deep into the heart of Europe as one of its refugee suicide bombers appeared to have targeted the President of France and the Foreign Minister of Germany. That’s the opposite of a terrorist organization that had been successfully contained.
Obama has been playing tactical word games over ISIS all along. He would “degrade and ultimately destroy” ISIS. Or perhaps dismantle the Islamic State. Or maybe just contain it.
Containment is closest to the truth. Obama has no plan for defeating ISIS. Nor is he planning to get one any time soon. There will be talk of multilateral coalitions. Drone strikes will take out key figures. And then when this impressive war theater has died down, ISIS will suddenly pull off another attack.
And everyone will be baffled at how the “defeated” terrorist group is still on the march.
The White House version of reality says that ISIS attacked Paris because it’s losing. Obama also claimed that Putin’s growing strength in Syria is a sign of weakness. Never mind that Putin has all but succeeded in getting countries that were determined to overthrow Assad to agree to let him stay.
Weakness is strength. Strength is weakness.
Obama’s failed wars occupy a space of unreality that most Americans associate with Baghdad Bob bellowing that there are no American soldiers in Iraq. (There are, according to the White House, still no American ground forces in Iraq. Only American forces in firefights on the ground in Iraq.)
There’s nothing new about any of this. Obama doesn’t win wars. He lies about them.
The botched campaign against ISIS is a replay of the disaster in Afghanistan complete with ridiculous rules of engagement, blatant administration lies and no plan for victory. But there can’t be a plan for victory because when Obama gets past the buzzwords, he begins talking about addressing root causes.
And you don’t win wars by addressing root causes. That’s just a euphemism for appeasement.
Addressing root causes means blaming Islamic terrorism on everything from colonialism to global warming. It doesn’t mean defeating it, but finding new ways to blame it on the West.
Obama and his political allies believe that crime can’t be fought with cops and wars can’t be won with soldiers. The only answer lies in addressing the root causes which, after all the prattling about climate change and colonialism, really come down to the Marxist explanation of inequality.
When reporters ask Obama how he plans to win the war, he smirks tiredly at them and launches into another condescending explanation about how the situation is far too complicated for anything as simple as bombs to work. Underneath that explanation is the belief that wars are unwinnable.
Obama knows that Americans won’t accept “war just doesn’t work” as an answer to Islamic terrorism. So he demonstrates to them that wars don’t work by fighting wars that are meant to fail.
In Afghanistan, he bled American soldiers as hard as possible with vicious rules of engagement that favored the Taliban to destroy support for a war that most of the country had formerly backed. By blowing the war, Obama was not only sabotaging the specific implementation of a policy he opposed, but the general idea behind it. His failed wars are meant to teach Americans that war doesn’t work.
The unspoken idea that informs his strategy is that American power is the root cause of the problems in the region. Destroying ISIS would solve nothing. Containing American power is the real answer.
Obama does not have a strategy for defeating ISIS. He has a strategy for defeating America.
Whatever rhetoric he tosses out, his actual strategy is to respond to public pressure by doing the least he can possibly do. He will carry out drone strikes, not because they’re effective, but because they inflict the fewest casualties on the enemy.
He may try to contain the enemy, not because he cares about ISIS, but because he wants to prevent Americans from “overreacting” and demanding harsher measures against the Islamic State. Instead of fighting to win wars, he seeks to deescalate them. If public pressure forces him to go beyond drones, he will authorize the fewest air strikes possible. If he is forced to send in ground troops, he will see to it that they have the least protection and the greatest vulnerability to ISIS attacks.
Just like in Afghanistan.
Obama would like ISIS to go away. Not because they engage in the ethnic cleansing, mass murder and mass rape of non-Muslims, but because they wake the sleeping giant of the United States.
And so his idea of war is fighting an informational conflict against Americans. When Muslim terrorists commit an atrocity so horrifying that public pressure forces him to respond, he lies to Americans. Each time his Baghdad Bob act is shattered by another Islamic terrorist attack, he piles on even more lies.
Any strategy that Obama offers against ISIS will consist of more of the same lies and word games. His apologists will now debate the meaning of “containment” and whether he succeeded in defining it so narrowly on his own terms that he can claim to have accomplished it. But it really doesn’t matter what his meaning of “containment” or “is” is. Failure by any other name smells just as terrible.
Obama responded to ISIS by denying it’s a threat. Once that stopped being a viable strategy, he began to stall for time. And he’s still stalling for time, not to beat ISIS, but to wait until ISIS falls out of the headlines. That has been his approach to all his scandals from ObamaCare to the IRS to the VA.
Lie like crazy and wait for people to forget about it and turn their attention to something else.
This is a containment strategy, but not for ISIS. It’s a containment strategy for America. Obama isn’t trying to bottle up ISIS except as a means of bottling up America. He doesn’t see the Caliph of the Islamic State as the real threat, but the average American who watches the latest beheading on the news and wonders why his government doesn’t do something about it. To the left it isn’t the Caliph of ISIS who starts the wars we ought to worry about, but Joe in Tennessee, Bill in California or Pete in Minnesota.
That is why Obama sounds bored when talking about beating ISIS, but heats up when the conversation turns to fighting Republicans. It’s why Hillary Clinton named Republicans, not ISIS, as her enemy.
The left is not interested in making war on ISIS. It is too busy making war on America.
Sultan Knish
Last year at a NATO summit, Obama explicitly disavowed the idea of containing ISIS. "You can't contain an organization that is running roughshod through that much territory, causing that much havoc, displacing that many people, killing that many innocents, enslaving that many women," he said.
Instead he argued, "The goal has to be to dismantle them."
Just before the Paris massacre, Obama shifted back to containment. “From the start, our goal has been first to contain them, and we have contained them,” he said.
Pay no attention to what he said last year. There’s a new message now. Last year Obama was vowing to destroy ISIS. Now he had settled for containing them. And he couldn’t even manage that.
ISIS has expanded into Libya and Yemen. It struck deep into the heart of Europe as one of its refugee suicide bombers appeared to have targeted the President of France and the Foreign Minister of Germany. That’s the opposite of a terrorist organization that had been successfully contained.
Obama has been playing tactical word games over ISIS all along. He would “degrade and ultimately destroy” ISIS. Or perhaps dismantle the Islamic State. Or maybe just contain it.
Containment is closest to the truth. Obama has no plan for defeating ISIS. Nor is he planning to get one any time soon. There will be talk of multilateral coalitions. Drone strikes will take out key figures. And then when this impressive war theater has died down, ISIS will suddenly pull off another attack.
And everyone will be baffled at how the “defeated” terrorist group is still on the march.
The White House version of reality says that ISIS attacked Paris because it’s losing. Obama also claimed that Putin’s growing strength in Syria is a sign of weakness. Never mind that Putin has all but succeeded in getting countries that were determined to overthrow Assad to agree to let him stay.
Weakness is strength. Strength is weakness.
Obama’s failed wars occupy a space of unreality that most Americans associate with Baghdad Bob bellowing that there are no American soldiers in Iraq. (There are, according to the White House, still no American ground forces in Iraq. Only American forces in firefights on the ground in Iraq.)
There’s nothing new about any of this. Obama doesn’t win wars. He lies about them.
The botched campaign against ISIS is a replay of the disaster in Afghanistan complete with ridiculous rules of engagement, blatant administration lies and no plan for victory. But there can’t be a plan for victory because when Obama gets past the buzzwords, he begins talking about addressing root causes.
And you don’t win wars by addressing root causes. That’s just a euphemism for appeasement.
Addressing root causes means blaming Islamic terrorism on everything from colonialism to global warming. It doesn’t mean defeating it, but finding new ways to blame it on the West.
Obama and his political allies believe that crime can’t be fought with cops and wars can’t be won with soldiers. The only answer lies in addressing the root causes which, after all the prattling about climate change and colonialism, really come down to the Marxist explanation of inequality.
When reporters ask Obama how he plans to win the war, he smirks tiredly at them and launches into another condescending explanation about how the situation is far too complicated for anything as simple as bombs to work. Underneath that explanation is the belief that wars are unwinnable.
Obama knows that Americans won’t accept “war just doesn’t work” as an answer to Islamic terrorism. So he demonstrates to them that wars don’t work by fighting wars that are meant to fail.
In Afghanistan, he bled American soldiers as hard as possible with vicious rules of engagement that favored the Taliban to destroy support for a war that most of the country had formerly backed. By blowing the war, Obama was not only sabotaging the specific implementation of a policy he opposed, but the general idea behind it. His failed wars are meant to teach Americans that war doesn’t work.
The unspoken idea that informs his strategy is that American power is the root cause of the problems in the region. Destroying ISIS would solve nothing. Containing American power is the real answer.
Obama does not have a strategy for defeating ISIS. He has a strategy for defeating America.
Whatever rhetoric he tosses out, his actual strategy is to respond to public pressure by doing the least he can possibly do. He will carry out drone strikes, not because they’re effective, but because they inflict the fewest casualties on the enemy.
He may try to contain the enemy, not because he cares about ISIS, but because he wants to prevent Americans from “overreacting” and demanding harsher measures against the Islamic State. Instead of fighting to win wars, he seeks to deescalate them. If public pressure forces him to go beyond drones, he will authorize the fewest air strikes possible. If he is forced to send in ground troops, he will see to it that they have the least protection and the greatest vulnerability to ISIS attacks.
Just like in Afghanistan.
Obama would like ISIS to go away. Not because they engage in the ethnic cleansing, mass murder and mass rape of non-Muslims, but because they wake the sleeping giant of the United States.
And so his idea of war is fighting an informational conflict against Americans. When Muslim terrorists commit an atrocity so horrifying that public pressure forces him to respond, he lies to Americans. Each time his Baghdad Bob act is shattered by another Islamic terrorist attack, he piles on even more lies.
Any strategy that Obama offers against ISIS will consist of more of the same lies and word games. His apologists will now debate the meaning of “containment” and whether he succeeded in defining it so narrowly on his own terms that he can claim to have accomplished it. But it really doesn’t matter what his meaning of “containment” or “is” is. Failure by any other name smells just as terrible.
Obama responded to ISIS by denying it’s a threat. Once that stopped being a viable strategy, he began to stall for time. And he’s still stalling for time, not to beat ISIS, but to wait until ISIS falls out of the headlines. That has been his approach to all his scandals from ObamaCare to the IRS to the VA.
Lie like crazy and wait for people to forget about it and turn their attention to something else.
This is a containment strategy, but not for ISIS. It’s a containment strategy for America. Obama isn’t trying to bottle up ISIS except as a means of bottling up America. He doesn’t see the Caliph of the Islamic State as the real threat, but the average American who watches the latest beheading on the news and wonders why his government doesn’t do something about it. To the left it isn’t the Caliph of ISIS who starts the wars we ought to worry about, but Joe in Tennessee, Bill in California or Pete in Minnesota.
That is why Obama sounds bored when talking about beating ISIS, but heats up when the conversation turns to fighting Republicans. It’s why Hillary Clinton named Republicans, not ISIS, as her enemy.
The left is not interested in making war on ISIS. It is too busy making war on America.
Sultan Knish
Sunday, July 5, 2015
They're Just Committing the Crimes Americans Won't Commit
July 5, 2015
By Selwyn Duke
With the San Francisco woman murdered by one of Barack Obama’s “new Americans,” we should ask: how much innocent blood will be spilled on the altar of the Left’s “fundamental transformation” of America? While callow and cowardly corporations are severing ties with Donald Trump because he dared speak a truth in an age of lies, the reality of far too many of the illegals invading our country is this:
They are just committing the crimes Americans won’t commit.
Some will say, of course, that Americans sometimes do such evil as well. But it’s also true that Americans do sometimes take the menial jobs so often performed by illegals, yet we nonetheless hear the statement, “They’re just doing the jobs Americans won’t do.” So since we’re indulging rhetoric and generalizations here, turnaround is fair play.
Will people ever rise up and make that sickening agenda-facilitating suppression of truth known as political correctness exactly what it should be: a recognized vile heresy, to be stamped out with extreme prejudice? I recently heard someone take exception to the term “illegals,” making that now stale point that “no one is illegal” (cue the tiny violin). This person argued that bank robbers break the law as well, but we don’t brand them “illegals.” Point taken. We call bank robbers “criminals.”
And if the Left wants to apply the same descriptive to illegal aliens, it works for me.
(Or would “undocumented criminals” be preferable?)
It would be wholly accurate, too. Generally lost in our self-flagellating, suicidal pander-fest is that every illegal migrant is a criminal by definition. This is why the lying Left — ever engaging in language manipulation — dislikes the word “illegal”: accurate terminology relates the truth of a matter. This is intolerable when your agenda is completely contrary to Truth.
An even better adjective for illegals, however, is “invaders.” And Francisco Sanchez, the vile murderer of the San Francisco woman, Kathryn Steinle, certainly fits the bill. He repeatedly invaded our country for the purposes of destruction, dealing drugs and being convicted of felonies seven times until he finally took a life. Yet he is not the only one culpable in his malevolent act.
What do you call government officials who not only abdicate their responsibility to halt an invasion, but actually aid and abet it? Quislings? Traitors? Leftists? But I repeat myself.
These terms are not too strong. I previously reported on Obama’s plan to “seed” communities around America with foreigners who would, as the scheme goes, “navigate” and not assimilate as they “push citizens into the shadows” (that is, those they don’t push into graves). Again, what do you call such people?
It isn’t just Obama, of course. These traitors have many names, such as Jerry Brown, Jeb Bush, Rahm Emanuel, Hillary Clinton, Luis Gutierrez and Mark Zuckerberg. But, hey, who can blame them, right? They’re just pushing the policies Americans won’t push.
Unfortunately and as has been said before, treason today is now the norm. If you don’t drink deeply of the cup of multiculturalism, internationalism, Western demographic genocide and cultural suicide, you’re a “nativist” or, worse still, a “racist,” the latter of which has just come to mean “anything bad” to young skulls full of mush whose now putrefying gray matter endured endless sanitary spin cycles in the propaganda mills masquerading as universities. The inmates not only run the asylum, they’re numerous enough to classify the normal as abnormal. You’re a boy who’s sure he’s a girl? You’re white but identify as black? You think an invader is the equivalent of a citizen? Those people who’d cramp your style with that pesky Objective Reality are the problem. Off to re-education camps with them.
Another fancy is that Mexico isn’t a profound enemy. If you’re an illegal alien in Mexico, the best thing that can happen to you is that you merely get deported; also possible is that the police will beat you Pelosi-senseless or even kill you (it’s said that you can buy your way out of a fatal hit-and-run in Mexico for $450; the rule of law isn’t exactly big there). And no ACLU will come running and sue the government on your behalf. None of this stops that dysfunctional cartel-ridden nation from issuing its people actual instructions on how to better invade the U.S. and game our system. Nor does it stop them from lecturing us on the humane treatment of undocumented criminals. This is why a real president would tell the Mexican regime that if it didn’t stop weaponizing its population against us, we’d demonstrate that borders can be transgressed both ways and make Black Jack Pershing look like a missionary.
Instead, people are more worried about the Confederate flag flying in America than the Mexican flag flying here. As for Obama and his ilk, they welcome invaders because, upon being naturalized, 70 to 90 percent of them vote for leftists. And our leftists truly would rather reign in Hell than serve in Heaven.
But who is really to blame? Our Hell-raisers are only in power because far too many of us are just voting for the politicians Americans wouldn’t vote for.
Contact Selwyn Duke, follow him on Twitter or log on to SelwynDuke.com
American Thinker
By Selwyn Duke
With the San Francisco woman murdered by one of Barack Obama’s “new Americans,” we should ask: how much innocent blood will be spilled on the altar of the Left’s “fundamental transformation” of America? While callow and cowardly corporations are severing ties with Donald Trump because he dared speak a truth in an age of lies, the reality of far too many of the illegals invading our country is this:
They are just committing the crimes Americans won’t commit.
Some will say, of course, that Americans sometimes do such evil as well. But it’s also true that Americans do sometimes take the menial jobs so often performed by illegals, yet we nonetheless hear the statement, “They’re just doing the jobs Americans won’t do.” So since we’re indulging rhetoric and generalizations here, turnaround is fair play.
Will people ever rise up and make that sickening agenda-facilitating suppression of truth known as political correctness exactly what it should be: a recognized vile heresy, to be stamped out with extreme prejudice? I recently heard someone take exception to the term “illegals,” making that now stale point that “no one is illegal” (cue the tiny violin). This person argued that bank robbers break the law as well, but we don’t brand them “illegals.” Point taken. We call bank robbers “criminals.”
And if the Left wants to apply the same descriptive to illegal aliens, it works for me.
(Or would “undocumented criminals” be preferable?)
It would be wholly accurate, too. Generally lost in our self-flagellating, suicidal pander-fest is that every illegal migrant is a criminal by definition. This is why the lying Left — ever engaging in language manipulation — dislikes the word “illegal”: accurate terminology relates the truth of a matter. This is intolerable when your agenda is completely contrary to Truth.
An even better adjective for illegals, however, is “invaders.” And Francisco Sanchez, the vile murderer of the San Francisco woman, Kathryn Steinle, certainly fits the bill. He repeatedly invaded our country for the purposes of destruction, dealing drugs and being convicted of felonies seven times until he finally took a life. Yet he is not the only one culpable in his malevolent act.
What do you call government officials who not only abdicate their responsibility to halt an invasion, but actually aid and abet it? Quislings? Traitors? Leftists? But I repeat myself.
These terms are not too strong. I previously reported on Obama’s plan to “seed” communities around America with foreigners who would, as the scheme goes, “navigate” and not assimilate as they “push citizens into the shadows” (that is, those they don’t push into graves). Again, what do you call such people?
It isn’t just Obama, of course. These traitors have many names, such as Jerry Brown, Jeb Bush, Rahm Emanuel, Hillary Clinton, Luis Gutierrez and Mark Zuckerberg. But, hey, who can blame them, right? They’re just pushing the policies Americans won’t push.
Unfortunately and as has been said before, treason today is now the norm. If you don’t drink deeply of the cup of multiculturalism, internationalism, Western demographic genocide and cultural suicide, you’re a “nativist” or, worse still, a “racist,” the latter of which has just come to mean “anything bad” to young skulls full of mush whose now putrefying gray matter endured endless sanitary spin cycles in the propaganda mills masquerading as universities. The inmates not only run the asylum, they’re numerous enough to classify the normal as abnormal. You’re a boy who’s sure he’s a girl? You’re white but identify as black? You think an invader is the equivalent of a citizen? Those people who’d cramp your style with that pesky Objective Reality are the problem. Off to re-education camps with them.
Another fancy is that Mexico isn’t a profound enemy. If you’re an illegal alien in Mexico, the best thing that can happen to you is that you merely get deported; also possible is that the police will beat you Pelosi-senseless or even kill you (it’s said that you can buy your way out of a fatal hit-and-run in Mexico for $450; the rule of law isn’t exactly big there). And no ACLU will come running and sue the government on your behalf. None of this stops that dysfunctional cartel-ridden nation from issuing its people actual instructions on how to better invade the U.S. and game our system. Nor does it stop them from lecturing us on the humane treatment of undocumented criminals. This is why a real president would tell the Mexican regime that if it didn’t stop weaponizing its population against us, we’d demonstrate that borders can be transgressed both ways and make Black Jack Pershing look like a missionary.
Instead, people are more worried about the Confederate flag flying in America than the Mexican flag flying here. As for Obama and his ilk, they welcome invaders because, upon being naturalized, 70 to 90 percent of them vote for leftists. And our leftists truly would rather reign in Hell than serve in Heaven.
But who is really to blame? Our Hell-raisers are only in power because far too many of us are just voting for the politicians Americans wouldn’t vote for.
Contact Selwyn Duke, follow him on Twitter or log on to SelwynDuke.com
American Thinker
Saturday, March 21, 2015
Why Morning Will Come
By J. Robert -- Bio and Archives
March 20, 2015
Recognition of the inevitability of comprehensive bureaucratization does not solve the problems that arise out of it.—Joseph Schumpter, Capitalism, Socialism and Democracy
Many of us—including me—worry about the downward arc of liberty, ethics and economic freedom. If you are taking the time to read this short article, in all likelihood, I needn’t detail the myriad challenges we face, even at a high level. Rather, the question is: is there any hope? Or are we fated to descend into a new Dark Age, aided and abetted, in the famous words of Winston Churchill regarding National Socialism, by “perverted science?”
Notwithstanding those who look forward to the return of Jesus Christ—of which I count myself one—or a spiritual revival, are there any other reasons to hold out hope in the interim? I think there is reason for optimism. It is not a certain hope, but is a hope that—accompanied by courage, elbow grease, intelligence and audacity—should give conservatives, libertarians, Constitutionalists and other allies a reason for positivity. And please note by “audacity,” I do not allude to the book by Barack Obama, who is one of the leading unlights pushing us towards a new Dark Age; rather, I make reference to the words of a true American hero, George Patton, whose motto was “Audacity, audacity, always audacity.” Patton, of course, led the charge in destroying a similar national socialism we see here today.
What is this hope for a better morning based on? Simply this: the leftist experiment has always and everywhere—by virtue of its complete misapprehension of human nature - eventually reverted to its natural ouroborotic state. It is, as Jacques Mallet du Pan (1749—10 May 1800), wrote about the first leftist reign of terror, in his 1793 essay
that ”...the Revolution always eats its own children” (“A l’exemple de Saturne, la révolution dévore ses enfants”)
Examples of du Pan’s thesis? The prototypical example is Robespierre falling to his own guillotine, of course. But let’s look at more history. Do you recall the Red Chinese attack on fellow communist Vietnam immediately on the heels of the US withdrawal and collapse of South Vietnam? If not, perhaps you recall the Sino-Soviet war on the Ussuri River border area in 1969, amid reports Soviet leadership had inquired of US leadership if there would be any problems if the Russians nuked Mao’s China. Or you may recall Leon Trotsky, one of those who brought into being the Soviet nightmare along with Lenin, becoming persona non grata in the Soviet People’s Workers Paradise, being forced to flee to Mexico and finally being murdered there with an ice pick. The story of former NKVD (predecessor to the KGB) head and Stalin buddy Lavrentiy Beria falling out of favour, is particularly chilling. He was dragged before a special session (“Spetsialnoye Sudebnoye Prisutstvie”) the a day before Christmas 1953 with no defense counsel and no right of appeal, then summarily dragged off to be shot—after they stuffed a rag in his mouth to shut up his whining before they pulled the trigger. A little more recently, perhaps you recall Robert Mugabe and Joshua Nkomo in the old Rhodesia? Of course. Operation Barbarossa, where the National Socialists of Germany invaded the socialists of the Soviet Union is a classic example. (Please… if you do not understand that the war between Hitler and Stalin was an internecine one, one version of socialism vs. another, simply go read the planks adopted at the very first Nazi convention, Munich, Feb. 1920, and tell me how they differ in any substantive way. Or consider Hitler’s own words, “There is more that binds us to Boshevism than separates us from it… I have always made allowances for this circumstance, and given orders that former Communists are to be admitted to the party at once,” or again, “I am not merely the vanquisher of Marxism, I am its implementer… The whole of National Socialism is contained in Marxism… the industrial cells, the mass demonstrations, the propaganda material.”) Most recently, we see similar dynamics where “Obama’s brain” Valerie Jarrett has made vigorous attempts to derail the Hillary Clinton presidential campaign by purportedly being the agent behind Hillary’s State Department email imbroglio.
But of course, the Fabian socialists in power today deign to use a velvet glove rather than the hammer and sickle to crush the skulls of their opposition—at least much of the time. That is, the new socialists desire to not smash your skull, but rather to get in and reside within it (another mindless “Yes we can!” chanting session, anyone?). The goal today is generally not the guillotine (though all those banker “suicides,” or the abnormal deaths of Andrew Brietbart, Tom Clancy or Michael Hasting do not leave one with warm and fuzzies), but rather, as Charleton Heston wrote, the usurpation of culture: “Modern media fills the cultural airwaves with a mist of anesthesia, so that principles and values are slowly desensitized to the coming onslaught. The new culture arrives on the heels of this propaganda. It simply moves in and takes over, like slipping a fine new glove over a numbed hand. The outcome of the war is just as devastating, but without bombs bursting, twisted bodies to bury, or rubble to rebuild. A new class, a different culture, simply takes over.” Andrew Brietbart, before his peculiar death, put it more succinctly: “Politics is downstream from culture.” In fact, the quotes from Heston and Brietbart are merely a shortened version of Saul Alinsky’s Rules for Radicals.
Where the velvet hammer fails, there is cultural marginalization, or failing at that, always the hammer of punitive legal measures, such as fining an Oregon baker a quarter million dollars for exercising her freedom of conscience re. homosexual marriages; sending another baker in Colorado to a re-education camp for the same “sin,” or Elaine Huegenin- the photographer who graciously refused to photograph a gay “wedding” - who was informed by the New Mexico Supreme Court that her very right of citizenship was predicated on her submitting to the radical Brownshirt homosexual agenda.
Homosexuality uber alles… including the 1st Amendment—is just part of the game. Al Gore and his merry band of anti-science global warmers also illustrate the naked leftist hammer, where Gore recently stated that those who question global warming should “be punished.” And of course, there are always the ubiquitous campus speech and thought police, who are no more than Red Guards without the Mao suits . For them, it is as famed leftist Herbert Marcuse—who popularized the “repressive tolerance” theory of modern progressives ‚Äìsaid:“Liberating tolerance would mean intolerance against movements from the right and toleration of movements from the left. Certain things cannot be said, certain ideas cannot be expressed, certain policies cannot be proposed.”
Famed leftist Mario Savio and his free speech crusade on the steps of the student union at UC Berkeley in the 1960s is now proven to be just part of the “realpolitik” in taking over the levers of control. Free speech be damned when there is control to be had!
But here is the optimistic twist about the leftists/fascists: As there is no God, power is the highest value in their universe. Indeed, it is ultimately all that exists for them. You know this from watching Hillary and Obama. And from this assumption flows their whole hellish world, where it is as Dostoyevski wrote,“if there is no God… everything is permitted.” (Без бога всё позволено, всё дозволено (the second clause is a variant of the phrase “everything is permitted.”). And because power is their “god”—as opposed to the God the Founding Fathers invoke —the left is open to all kinds of distortions, corruptions and self-destructiveness. These self-proclaimed leftist savants have rejected the wisdom of those informed by absolutes (again… think here of America’s Founding Fathers, who were generally informed by Judeo-Christian presuppositions, which - critically - led to the division of powers) and instead have left themselves open to raw, fallen human nature… without having the intellectual grid to even be aware of the full ramifications of this. Or as one two thousand year old book—not much read today—once stated, “Proclaiming themselves wise, they became fools.” Or as another writer from that era, Roman satirist Juvenal, asked, Quis custodiet ipsos custodes? (Who will guard the guards?) There is no answer to this, because none is possible in the amoral world of the left.
And herein lies the hope: Simply, that the left will, as it always has, destroy itself. The only question is, of course, how many must suffer or die before that implosion? Will it be the 100 million that the Black Book of Communism (Oxford Univ. Press) says were murdered last century by the left? Or will people rise before that to derail the train to darkness?
It has often been observed that the Soviet leftist beast died of its own internal contradictions and misapprehension of human nature (that is the reason why Ludwig von Mises’ best known book was called “Human Action”—downloadable here.) The point is, the leftist gyroscope is, by definition, not “in spec,” and thus can never lead anywhere that is recognizably human. And of course a million human decisions made locally every second will always and everywhere trump the decisions by some self-appointed “best and brightest (the same “best and brightest” that gave us Vietnam) constructing today’s version of a Soviet 5 year plan while isolated in Moscow or Washington DC.
There is hope in that the left is utterly intellectually dishonest. Think the global warming scam. Science is decided by “consensus” rather than experimentation and hypothesis testing?
Notwithstanding the fact that there has been ZERO global warming since 1998, has anyone told Galileo, Copernicus about this? Has anyone told Ignaz Semmelweis—who insisted his doctors wash their hands between operation and was drummed out of the medical business in the mid-1800s because germs were not in the consensus—about this? Perhaps Mr. Gore could ask Albert Einstein - about whom Hitler had published a book entitled “100 Scientists Against Einstein” (to which Einstein replied “Why one hundred? If their facts are right, only one would be needed)—about that “consensus” scam.
The left thinks it can create a new man, a new reality based on their utterly flawed premises about human nature. But they are wrong—and permanently and forever wrong. No matter how much propaganda the left musters, it is as Horace (65—8 BC) said, “You can drive nature out with a pitchfork, but she will nevertheless come back.” Similarly, Solzhenitsyn predicted the downfall of the Soviet Union many decades ago, by noting simply that Communism could not, by their central presuppositions, see man as he was, and was thus inexorably doomed to fail.
There is more. Once the inevitable economic and ethical implosions occur, exactly how long will they be able to find the foot soldiers required to do leftist bidding? Not only will there be little money with which to hire mercenaries, the intellectual bankruptcy of the matter will be visible to all. In short, the Wicked Witch of the West will have no more flying monkeys at her command. People will not sacrifice their lives for something they know is bankrupt. And once this state is arrived at, the end is only a matter of time.
How do I know? I have lived in the capital of socialist Canada for many, many years, and worked with thousands of government employees. Exactly how many do you think really gave a flying rat’s derriere about anything other than their pensions and getting out the door precisely at 4 PM? Need I go through the litany of stories the US side of the border (my favourite being that distasteful issue where the EPA was having problems with employees defecating in the hallways). Let me ask you this: this article is being written for free—my only interest is truth and justice. How many on the Big Government side would take even five minutes of their time to do the same? The truth is, that as the leftist Orwellian dystopia continues its descent, more and more will see the intellectual bankruptcy of the naked emperor, or—more narrowly—at least become disenchanted as they see a chronically unemployed brother, an elderly parent living in poverty, or their children with no future. Slowly but surely, with no bell rung at the bottom, people will one by one check out of Hotel Kalifornia.
It is true that there will always be the committed Bolsheviks; and it is true, as Margaret Mead said, that change generally comes through small committed groups (think the vile Saul Alinsky here). But recall, too, that there is no honour among thieves—let along ethics—and the world of the left will—long or short - devolve into a Lord of the Flies scenario. Worse, as the left knows it is creating an ever shrinking pie, there will be mad scrambles for the diminishing number of crumbs. There can only so many Michelle Obama-style vacations available, and that number will become smaller each year. In fact, the old apocryphal story of Leonid Brezhnev is a perfect example: In the 1970s, Leonid Brezhnev’s elderly grandmother, who had lived in pre-communist Russia, came to visit him at his communist headquarters. Leonid is beaming with pride as he introduces her to all his aides and servants, shows her his gold plated desk, his 15 Zil limousines waiting, all with engines running, pictures of all his well-appointed dachas in exclusive, VIP areas across the USSR, etc. Finally, at the end of the day, all the assistants, aides and servants leave. The old granny very nervously and very carefully looks around to make sure absolutely no one is anywhere near, then leans over and very, VERY quietly whispers in Leonid’s ear:
“This is all very well, Leonid…. BUT WHAT IF THE COMMUNISTS COME!?!?”
The truth is, formerly an army travelled on its stomach. However, today, with MREs, McDonalds and GMOs, food is not as great of an issue. There will be food (as non-nutritious as it may be!). Rather, today’s army travels on its worldview—but just like every other socialist experiment, ranging from Zimbabwe to the USSR, this worldview is neither intellectually tenable, economically sustainable nor morally bearable. Therein lies our hope.
Finally, for the left, their very fallen, imperfect human nature—which is addressed through the division of powers in traditional America, but dominated by czars, elites and autocrats in the totalitarian leftist world (remember: power is the only “god” they worship, and people become increasingly like that which they worship)—will be the final cause of their downfall.
In sum, there is hope. It is, as Dale Dauten wrote in his Greatest Quotations of All-Time “Willpower subverts passion. Bureaucracy subverts willpower. Idiocy subverts bureaucracy. If you need an example of this, just look at Obama’s cabinet.
Canada Free Press
March 20, 2015
Recognition of the inevitability of comprehensive bureaucratization does not solve the problems that arise out of it.—Joseph Schumpter, Capitalism, Socialism and Democracy
Many of us—including me—worry about the downward arc of liberty, ethics and economic freedom. If you are taking the time to read this short article, in all likelihood, I needn’t detail the myriad challenges we face, even at a high level. Rather, the question is: is there any hope? Or are we fated to descend into a new Dark Age, aided and abetted, in the famous words of Winston Churchill regarding National Socialism, by “perverted science?”
Notwithstanding those who look forward to the return of Jesus Christ—of which I count myself one—or a spiritual revival, are there any other reasons to hold out hope in the interim? I think there is reason for optimism. It is not a certain hope, but is a hope that—accompanied by courage, elbow grease, intelligence and audacity—should give conservatives, libertarians, Constitutionalists and other allies a reason for positivity. And please note by “audacity,” I do not allude to the book by Barack Obama, who is one of the leading unlights pushing us towards a new Dark Age; rather, I make reference to the words of a true American hero, George Patton, whose motto was “Audacity, audacity, always audacity.” Patton, of course, led the charge in destroying a similar national socialism we see here today.
What is this hope for a better morning based on? Simply this: the leftist experiment has always and everywhere—by virtue of its complete misapprehension of human nature - eventually reverted to its natural ouroborotic state. It is, as Jacques Mallet du Pan (1749—10 May 1800), wrote about the first leftist reign of terror, in his 1793 essay
that ”...the Revolution always eats its own children” (“A l’exemple de Saturne, la révolution dévore ses enfants”)
Examples of du Pan’s thesis? The prototypical example is Robespierre falling to his own guillotine, of course. But let’s look at more history. Do you recall the Red Chinese attack on fellow communist Vietnam immediately on the heels of the US withdrawal and collapse of South Vietnam? If not, perhaps you recall the Sino-Soviet war on the Ussuri River border area in 1969, amid reports Soviet leadership had inquired of US leadership if there would be any problems if the Russians nuked Mao’s China. Or you may recall Leon Trotsky, one of those who brought into being the Soviet nightmare along with Lenin, becoming persona non grata in the Soviet People’s Workers Paradise, being forced to flee to Mexico and finally being murdered there with an ice pick. The story of former NKVD (predecessor to the KGB) head and Stalin buddy Lavrentiy Beria falling out of favour, is particularly chilling. He was dragged before a special session (“Spetsialnoye Sudebnoye Prisutstvie”) the a day before Christmas 1953 with no defense counsel and no right of appeal, then summarily dragged off to be shot—after they stuffed a rag in his mouth to shut up his whining before they pulled the trigger. A little more recently, perhaps you recall Robert Mugabe and Joshua Nkomo in the old Rhodesia? Of course. Operation Barbarossa, where the National Socialists of Germany invaded the socialists of the Soviet Union is a classic example. (Please… if you do not understand that the war between Hitler and Stalin was an internecine one, one version of socialism vs. another, simply go read the planks adopted at the very first Nazi convention, Munich, Feb. 1920, and tell me how they differ in any substantive way. Or consider Hitler’s own words, “There is more that binds us to Boshevism than separates us from it… I have always made allowances for this circumstance, and given orders that former Communists are to be admitted to the party at once,” or again, “I am not merely the vanquisher of Marxism, I am its implementer… The whole of National Socialism is contained in Marxism… the industrial cells, the mass demonstrations, the propaganda material.”) Most recently, we see similar dynamics where “Obama’s brain” Valerie Jarrett has made vigorous attempts to derail the Hillary Clinton presidential campaign by purportedly being the agent behind Hillary’s State Department email imbroglio.
But of course, the Fabian socialists in power today deign to use a velvet glove rather than the hammer and sickle to crush the skulls of their opposition—at least much of the time. That is, the new socialists desire to not smash your skull, but rather to get in and reside within it (another mindless “Yes we can!” chanting session, anyone?). The goal today is generally not the guillotine (though all those banker “suicides,” or the abnormal deaths of Andrew Brietbart, Tom Clancy or Michael Hasting do not leave one with warm and fuzzies), but rather, as Charleton Heston wrote, the usurpation of culture: “Modern media fills the cultural airwaves with a mist of anesthesia, so that principles and values are slowly desensitized to the coming onslaught. The new culture arrives on the heels of this propaganda. It simply moves in and takes over, like slipping a fine new glove over a numbed hand. The outcome of the war is just as devastating, but without bombs bursting, twisted bodies to bury, or rubble to rebuild. A new class, a different culture, simply takes over.” Andrew Brietbart, before his peculiar death, put it more succinctly: “Politics is downstream from culture.” In fact, the quotes from Heston and Brietbart are merely a shortened version of Saul Alinsky’s Rules for Radicals.
Where the velvet hammer fails, there is cultural marginalization, or failing at that, always the hammer of punitive legal measures, such as fining an Oregon baker a quarter million dollars for exercising her freedom of conscience re. homosexual marriages; sending another baker in Colorado to a re-education camp for the same “sin,” or Elaine Huegenin- the photographer who graciously refused to photograph a gay “wedding” - who was informed by the New Mexico Supreme Court that her very right of citizenship was predicated on her submitting to the radical Brownshirt homosexual agenda.
Homosexuality uber alles… including the 1st Amendment—is just part of the game. Al Gore and his merry band of anti-science global warmers also illustrate the naked leftist hammer, where Gore recently stated that those who question global warming should “be punished.” And of course, there are always the ubiquitous campus speech and thought police, who are no more than Red Guards without the Mao suits . For them, it is as famed leftist Herbert Marcuse—who popularized the “repressive tolerance” theory of modern progressives ‚Äìsaid:“Liberating tolerance would mean intolerance against movements from the right and toleration of movements from the left. Certain things cannot be said, certain ideas cannot be expressed, certain policies cannot be proposed.”
Famed leftist Mario Savio and his free speech crusade on the steps of the student union at UC Berkeley in the 1960s is now proven to be just part of the “realpolitik” in taking over the levers of control. Free speech be damned when there is control to be had!
But here is the optimistic twist about the leftists/fascists: As there is no God, power is the highest value in their universe. Indeed, it is ultimately all that exists for them. You know this from watching Hillary and Obama. And from this assumption flows their whole hellish world, where it is as Dostoyevski wrote,“if there is no God… everything is permitted.” (Без бога всё позволено, всё дозволено (the second clause is a variant of the phrase “everything is permitted.”). And because power is their “god”—as opposed to the God the Founding Fathers invoke —the left is open to all kinds of distortions, corruptions and self-destructiveness. These self-proclaimed leftist savants have rejected the wisdom of those informed by absolutes (again… think here of America’s Founding Fathers, who were generally informed by Judeo-Christian presuppositions, which - critically - led to the division of powers) and instead have left themselves open to raw, fallen human nature… without having the intellectual grid to even be aware of the full ramifications of this. Or as one two thousand year old book—not much read today—once stated, “Proclaiming themselves wise, they became fools.” Or as another writer from that era, Roman satirist Juvenal, asked, Quis custodiet ipsos custodes? (Who will guard the guards?) There is no answer to this, because none is possible in the amoral world of the left.
And herein lies the hope: Simply, that the left will, as it always has, destroy itself. The only question is, of course, how many must suffer or die before that implosion? Will it be the 100 million that the Black Book of Communism (Oxford Univ. Press) says were murdered last century by the left? Or will people rise before that to derail the train to darkness?
It has often been observed that the Soviet leftist beast died of its own internal contradictions and misapprehension of human nature (that is the reason why Ludwig von Mises’ best known book was called “Human Action”—downloadable here.) The point is, the leftist gyroscope is, by definition, not “in spec,” and thus can never lead anywhere that is recognizably human. And of course a million human decisions made locally every second will always and everywhere trump the decisions by some self-appointed “best and brightest (the same “best and brightest” that gave us Vietnam) constructing today’s version of a Soviet 5 year plan while isolated in Moscow or Washington DC.
There is hope in that the left is utterly intellectually dishonest. Think the global warming scam. Science is decided by “consensus” rather than experimentation and hypothesis testing?
Notwithstanding the fact that there has been ZERO global warming since 1998, has anyone told Galileo, Copernicus about this? Has anyone told Ignaz Semmelweis—who insisted his doctors wash their hands between operation and was drummed out of the medical business in the mid-1800s because germs were not in the consensus—about this? Perhaps Mr. Gore could ask Albert Einstein - about whom Hitler had published a book entitled “100 Scientists Against Einstein” (to which Einstein replied “Why one hundred? If their facts are right, only one would be needed)—about that “consensus” scam.
The left thinks it can create a new man, a new reality based on their utterly flawed premises about human nature. But they are wrong—and permanently and forever wrong. No matter how much propaganda the left musters, it is as Horace (65—8 BC) said, “You can drive nature out with a pitchfork, but she will nevertheless come back.” Similarly, Solzhenitsyn predicted the downfall of the Soviet Union many decades ago, by noting simply that Communism could not, by their central presuppositions, see man as he was, and was thus inexorably doomed to fail.
There is more. Once the inevitable economic and ethical implosions occur, exactly how long will they be able to find the foot soldiers required to do leftist bidding? Not only will there be little money with which to hire mercenaries, the intellectual bankruptcy of the matter will be visible to all. In short, the Wicked Witch of the West will have no more flying monkeys at her command. People will not sacrifice their lives for something they know is bankrupt. And once this state is arrived at, the end is only a matter of time.
How do I know? I have lived in the capital of socialist Canada for many, many years, and worked with thousands of government employees. Exactly how many do you think really gave a flying rat’s derriere about anything other than their pensions and getting out the door precisely at 4 PM? Need I go through the litany of stories the US side of the border (my favourite being that distasteful issue where the EPA was having problems with employees defecating in the hallways). Let me ask you this: this article is being written for free—my only interest is truth and justice. How many on the Big Government side would take even five minutes of their time to do the same? The truth is, that as the leftist Orwellian dystopia continues its descent, more and more will see the intellectual bankruptcy of the naked emperor, or—more narrowly—at least become disenchanted as they see a chronically unemployed brother, an elderly parent living in poverty, or their children with no future. Slowly but surely, with no bell rung at the bottom, people will one by one check out of Hotel Kalifornia.
It is true that there will always be the committed Bolsheviks; and it is true, as Margaret Mead said, that change generally comes through small committed groups (think the vile Saul Alinsky here). But recall, too, that there is no honour among thieves—let along ethics—and the world of the left will—long or short - devolve into a Lord of the Flies scenario. Worse, as the left knows it is creating an ever shrinking pie, there will be mad scrambles for the diminishing number of crumbs. There can only so many Michelle Obama-style vacations available, and that number will become smaller each year. In fact, the old apocryphal story of Leonid Brezhnev is a perfect example: In the 1970s, Leonid Brezhnev’s elderly grandmother, who had lived in pre-communist Russia, came to visit him at his communist headquarters. Leonid is beaming with pride as he introduces her to all his aides and servants, shows her his gold plated desk, his 15 Zil limousines waiting, all with engines running, pictures of all his well-appointed dachas in exclusive, VIP areas across the USSR, etc. Finally, at the end of the day, all the assistants, aides and servants leave. The old granny very nervously and very carefully looks around to make sure absolutely no one is anywhere near, then leans over and very, VERY quietly whispers in Leonid’s ear:
“This is all very well, Leonid…. BUT WHAT IF THE COMMUNISTS COME!?!?”
The truth is, formerly an army travelled on its stomach. However, today, with MREs, McDonalds and GMOs, food is not as great of an issue. There will be food (as non-nutritious as it may be!). Rather, today’s army travels on its worldview—but just like every other socialist experiment, ranging from Zimbabwe to the USSR, this worldview is neither intellectually tenable, economically sustainable nor morally bearable. Therein lies our hope.
Finally, for the left, their very fallen, imperfect human nature—which is addressed through the division of powers in traditional America, but dominated by czars, elites and autocrats in the totalitarian leftist world (remember: power is the only “god” they worship, and people become increasingly like that which they worship)—will be the final cause of their downfall.
In sum, there is hope. It is, as Dale Dauten wrote in his Greatest Quotations of All-Time “Willpower subverts passion. Bureaucracy subverts willpower. Idiocy subverts bureaucracy. If you need an example of this, just look at Obama’s cabinet.
Canada Free Press
Friday, January 2, 2015
The Left's Base Motive: Vengeance
January 2, 2015
By J.R. Dunn
American leftism has gotten an awful lot of mileage by monopolizing the moral high ground. It is the sole force in American that favors the poor. The sole enemy of racism. The sole comforter of rape victims. The sole protector of defenseless Muslims. The sole guardian of the environment, and so on ad nauseum.
It all falls apart eventually -- with friends like the left, nobody needs enemies. But often overlooked is that fact that it’s bogus from the start. Any prolonged glance at the left reveals it to be an ideology of power, its major tool violence, its goal revenge.
Leftism has always been about revenge. The works of Marx are filled with fantasies of retribution and judgment. Their tone reeks of resentment and paranoia, with blame cast for even the most trivial. "The bourgeoisie,” Marx once declared in a letter to Engels, “will remember my carbuncles until their dying day.” That’s leftism in a nutshell.
The Paris communards of 1870, the first instance of an actual leftist government-in-being, immediately began shooting bourgeois on taking power, giving full rein to the European hatred for the middle class that is all but incomprehensible to Americans. That practice has been repeated by every hard left government that has ever taken power -- the USSR, communist China, Castroite Cuba, Pol Pot’s Kampuchea, down to minor examples such as Bela Kun’s Hungarian “Regime of Light” (1919), which reintroduced the Roman practice of decimation.
This unvarying tendency toward atrocity suggests that all these regimes had something in common, and it’s not that they all suffered from boils. It’s the lust for vengeance -- revenge for slights and crimes either real or imaginary, that can be found in every leftist from Nechaev to Bill Ayers. No less than Barack Obama spilled that when, his back apparently against the wall in 2012, he began ranting about “voting for revenge”.
This was displayed clearly enough this past holiday season.
First in the wave of bogus rape stories, brought up not to assure prosecution or to curtail such crimes, but solely as ideological weapons for use by feminists.
American leftism has always been about magnifying trivial complaints to serve as excuses for revolutionary action. The U.S. has never had a feudal system, nor a proletariat, nor any other conceivable reason for revolution. (German Marxist Werner Sombart pointed out in 1903 that the American masses already possessed what the left was promising them. His comrades badgered him mercilessly for this insight.) Instead we see trivia blown up to apocalyptic proportions -- and nowhere less than in feminism. Betty Friedan hated the suburbs. Gloria Steinem served as a Playboy bunny and never got over the humiliation. They therefore set out to upend Western civilization by inflating these slights while millions of other women fastened on atrocities such as “the male gaze,” having doors opened for them, “manspreading,” and attempted pickups -- or lack of the same.
The one actual atrocity available was rape, which feminists have utilized as heavy artillery -- “all men are rapists”, “all sex is rape”, and the like. The latest barrage came from Tawana Dunham and Rolling Stone’s “Jackie.”
Dunham, the East Coast sophisticate’s 300-lb. “It” girl, claimed in a memoir that she had been raped by an infamous Republican while at college, while “Jackie” regaled Rolling Stone with a tale of gang rape at the hands of the always-reliable frat house.
Suffice to say not a single detail of either story help up. A “Barry” did attend Oberlin, and he was a power in local campus conservative politics, but he lacked a handlebar mustache and he’d never met Dunham. The fraternity in “Jackie’s” yarn threw no party the night in question, nor did she show any signs of suffering such an ordeal. One of the grotesque aspects of this scandal is that nobody in the legacy media so much as alluded to the Brawley and Duke hoaxes, which in many ways were identical to these accounts. In the Brawley case a black teenage girl, afraid to return home after a late night out, claimed to have been raped by a gang of whites under degrading circumstances. A gullible media hooted the story to the skies, egged on by the “Rev.” Al Sharpton. In the Duke case, the entire lacrosse team was publicly indicted for the mass rape of a stripper brought in to entertain a stag party.
Both these stories began to collapse almost immediately, but proponents insisted it didn’t matter -- white men had raped black women innumerable times before, so collective guilt demanded that someone be persecuted. As for Duke, lacrosse was an upper-class WASP sport, and the team deserved to be punished for that alone.
Dunham and “Jackie” would do well to contemplate the fates of the accusers in these hoaxes.
Although Brawley’s champion Al Sharpton used the incident as his next step in clawing his way to the heights (if that’s the word) of MSNBC, Brawley herself today lives pseudonymously in Northern Virginia owing millions in legal fines. The Duke athlete’s accuser, Crystal Mangum, is serving hard time for the murder of a paramour.
Both Dunham and “Jackie” were looking for revenge for something -- all that we know is that it wasn’t rape.
Even more serious -- for the nation as a whole as well as those directly involved -- is current racial unrest triggered by blatant attempts to manipulate racial tensions through the actions and rhetoric of Barack Obama and Eric Holder et al. Long-term efforts to decriminalize the actions of black lawbreakers, beginning with the Trayvon Martin incident and progressing to the Ferguson shooting, have dovetailed with several standard episodes of police incompetence in Cleveland and Staten Island to create as fraught a racial atmosphere as at any time since the late 60s. (So much for the “post-racial” president.) This culminated in the assassination of two police officers in Brooklyn by an unstable career criminal, Ismaaiyl Brinsley, who had boasted on his Facebook page that he was out to avenge the Brown shooting by “giving wings to pigs.” (With the customary competence of the urban gangster, Brinsley shot not white officers but Wenjian Liu, an Asian, and Rafeal Ramos, a Hispanic.)
Here is a case where the leftist yearning for vengeance was reified by a maniac -- a not at all uncommon occurrence. Their rhetoric and posturing brought their fantasies and desires for vengeance to life before their eyes -- though certainly not in a way that they would have approved of, seeing as there can be little opportunity to exploit it. Whatever else he was, Brinsley is in no way a revolutionary hero.
The left’s entanglement with vengeance is easily understood -- it has nothing else. Their messiah has failed to lead them into Eden -- his policies, both domestic and foreign, have failed catastrophically one after another, leaving him nothing to show for six years as president and a nightmare gauntlet for the remainder of his term. His response -- and the response of the left as a whole -- amounts to little more than disjointed and incoherent actions. In the past six years, every last hope and dream of the left has been exposed -- there is nothing left.
So what does the left have but vengeance? It got them this far -- it will have to maintain them through the rest of Obama’s tenure, and beyond.
So it follows that we will see more of it over the coming two years. It could be argued, in fact, that a number of Obama’s recent actions amount to revenge. His immigration “reform” was punishment for a nation not worthy of him. His “opening” to Cuba acts as a punishment of Hispanics for letting him down in the midterms.
“Revenge is a dish best eaten cold”; “When seeking vengeance, be sure to dig two graves”. All the adages concerning revenge are cautionary. It’s something to be avoided, to be left to fate or karma or the hands of the Almighty. This is not something to be overlooked, if the condition of Tawana Brawley and Crystal Mangum are any indication.
But the left will overlook it. They despise ancient wisdom and they don’t have an Almighty. That being the case, we should prepare for a parade of Trayvons and “Jackies”, Lenas, and Ismaaiyls.
By J.R. Dunn
American leftism has gotten an awful lot of mileage by monopolizing the moral high ground. It is the sole force in American that favors the poor. The sole enemy of racism. The sole comforter of rape victims. The sole protector of defenseless Muslims. The sole guardian of the environment, and so on ad nauseum.
It all falls apart eventually -- with friends like the left, nobody needs enemies. But often overlooked is that fact that it’s bogus from the start. Any prolonged glance at the left reveals it to be an ideology of power, its major tool violence, its goal revenge.
Leftism has always been about revenge. The works of Marx are filled with fantasies of retribution and judgment. Their tone reeks of resentment and paranoia, with blame cast for even the most trivial. "The bourgeoisie,” Marx once declared in a letter to Engels, “will remember my carbuncles until their dying day.” That’s leftism in a nutshell.
The Paris communards of 1870, the first instance of an actual leftist government-in-being, immediately began shooting bourgeois on taking power, giving full rein to the European hatred for the middle class that is all but incomprehensible to Americans. That practice has been repeated by every hard left government that has ever taken power -- the USSR, communist China, Castroite Cuba, Pol Pot’s Kampuchea, down to minor examples such as Bela Kun’s Hungarian “Regime of Light” (1919), which reintroduced the Roman practice of decimation.
This unvarying tendency toward atrocity suggests that all these regimes had something in common, and it’s not that they all suffered from boils. It’s the lust for vengeance -- revenge for slights and crimes either real or imaginary, that can be found in every leftist from Nechaev to Bill Ayers. No less than Barack Obama spilled that when, his back apparently against the wall in 2012, he began ranting about “voting for revenge”.
This was displayed clearly enough this past holiday season.
First in the wave of bogus rape stories, brought up not to assure prosecution or to curtail such crimes, but solely as ideological weapons for use by feminists.
American leftism has always been about magnifying trivial complaints to serve as excuses for revolutionary action. The U.S. has never had a feudal system, nor a proletariat, nor any other conceivable reason for revolution. (German Marxist Werner Sombart pointed out in 1903 that the American masses already possessed what the left was promising them. His comrades badgered him mercilessly for this insight.) Instead we see trivia blown up to apocalyptic proportions -- and nowhere less than in feminism. Betty Friedan hated the suburbs. Gloria Steinem served as a Playboy bunny and never got over the humiliation. They therefore set out to upend Western civilization by inflating these slights while millions of other women fastened on atrocities such as “the male gaze,” having doors opened for them, “manspreading,” and attempted pickups -- or lack of the same.
The one actual atrocity available was rape, which feminists have utilized as heavy artillery -- “all men are rapists”, “all sex is rape”, and the like. The latest barrage came from Tawana Dunham and Rolling Stone’s “Jackie.”
Dunham, the East Coast sophisticate’s 300-lb. “It” girl, claimed in a memoir that she had been raped by an infamous Republican while at college, while “Jackie” regaled Rolling Stone with a tale of gang rape at the hands of the always-reliable frat house.
Suffice to say not a single detail of either story help up. A “Barry” did attend Oberlin, and he was a power in local campus conservative politics, but he lacked a handlebar mustache and he’d never met Dunham. The fraternity in “Jackie’s” yarn threw no party the night in question, nor did she show any signs of suffering such an ordeal. One of the grotesque aspects of this scandal is that nobody in the legacy media so much as alluded to the Brawley and Duke hoaxes, which in many ways were identical to these accounts. In the Brawley case a black teenage girl, afraid to return home after a late night out, claimed to have been raped by a gang of whites under degrading circumstances. A gullible media hooted the story to the skies, egged on by the “Rev.” Al Sharpton. In the Duke case, the entire lacrosse team was publicly indicted for the mass rape of a stripper brought in to entertain a stag party.
Both these stories began to collapse almost immediately, but proponents insisted it didn’t matter -- white men had raped black women innumerable times before, so collective guilt demanded that someone be persecuted. As for Duke, lacrosse was an upper-class WASP sport, and the team deserved to be punished for that alone.
Dunham and “Jackie” would do well to contemplate the fates of the accusers in these hoaxes.
Although Brawley’s champion Al Sharpton used the incident as his next step in clawing his way to the heights (if that’s the word) of MSNBC, Brawley herself today lives pseudonymously in Northern Virginia owing millions in legal fines. The Duke athlete’s accuser, Crystal Mangum, is serving hard time for the murder of a paramour.
Both Dunham and “Jackie” were looking for revenge for something -- all that we know is that it wasn’t rape.
Even more serious -- for the nation as a whole as well as those directly involved -- is current racial unrest triggered by blatant attempts to manipulate racial tensions through the actions and rhetoric of Barack Obama and Eric Holder et al. Long-term efforts to decriminalize the actions of black lawbreakers, beginning with the Trayvon Martin incident and progressing to the Ferguson shooting, have dovetailed with several standard episodes of police incompetence in Cleveland and Staten Island to create as fraught a racial atmosphere as at any time since the late 60s. (So much for the “post-racial” president.) This culminated in the assassination of two police officers in Brooklyn by an unstable career criminal, Ismaaiyl Brinsley, who had boasted on his Facebook page that he was out to avenge the Brown shooting by “giving wings to pigs.” (With the customary competence of the urban gangster, Brinsley shot not white officers but Wenjian Liu, an Asian, and Rafeal Ramos, a Hispanic.)
Here is a case where the leftist yearning for vengeance was reified by a maniac -- a not at all uncommon occurrence. Their rhetoric and posturing brought their fantasies and desires for vengeance to life before their eyes -- though certainly not in a way that they would have approved of, seeing as there can be little opportunity to exploit it. Whatever else he was, Brinsley is in no way a revolutionary hero.
The left’s entanglement with vengeance is easily understood -- it has nothing else. Their messiah has failed to lead them into Eden -- his policies, both domestic and foreign, have failed catastrophically one after another, leaving him nothing to show for six years as president and a nightmare gauntlet for the remainder of his term. His response -- and the response of the left as a whole -- amounts to little more than disjointed and incoherent actions. In the past six years, every last hope and dream of the left has been exposed -- there is nothing left.
So what does the left have but vengeance? It got them this far -- it will have to maintain them through the rest of Obama’s tenure, and beyond.
So it follows that we will see more of it over the coming two years. It could be argued, in fact, that a number of Obama’s recent actions amount to revenge. His immigration “reform” was punishment for a nation not worthy of him. His “opening” to Cuba acts as a punishment of Hispanics for letting him down in the midterms.
“Revenge is a dish best eaten cold”; “When seeking vengeance, be sure to dig two graves”. All the adages concerning revenge are cautionary. It’s something to be avoided, to be left to fate or karma or the hands of the Almighty. This is not something to be overlooked, if the condition of Tawana Brawley and Crystal Mangum are any indication.
But the left will overlook it. They despise ancient wisdom and they don’t have an Almighty. That being the case, we should prepare for a parade of Trayvons and “Jackies”, Lenas, and Ismaaiyls.
American Thinker
Friday, December 26, 2014
What is America's survival plan against Islam?
December 26, 2014
By Carol Brown
We’re facing the greatest national security threat we have ever known and there is no coherent plan to battle the enemy. This nation is so far behind the eight ball, the president and his minions won’t even name the enemy, no less fight it.
Name = Islam
Even worse, those in positions of power and influence misrepresent what the enemy stands for. Like a pre-recorded announcement that just won’t stop, we are endlessly subjected to the false refrain: Islam is a religion of peace. By Muslim lights, we live in the Dar al Harb, the territory of war, simply because we refuse to accept Islam. We didn’t declare war, Mohammed did.
And when it comes to the threat of Islamic supremacism, it’s not only the left that’s putting us at risk.
The right is hardly better, as both parties serve up a boatload of ignorance, complicity, and cowardice on a daily basis. Our elected officials draft legislation, set foreign policy, speak at podiums, sit on panels, write press releases, pen op-eds, and yack away on talk shows about the wonders of Islam. If anyone challenges what they’re peddling, the peddlers get rather hot under the collar. As for the truth-tellers, they are mocked, marginalized, and vilified.
And what a truth it is, as we confront a totalitarian ideology bent on world domination ruled by one religion -- an ideology that is infecting every aspect of our culture and which has the potential to destroy all of civilization.
Despite this grave threat, you can count on one hand how many leaders are informed and speaking the truth. And even they -- and God bless every single one of them -- have offered ideas in bits and pieces, with faint calls to investigate Huma Abedin, a proposal to designate the Muslim Brotherhood a terrorist organization, a proposal to strip citizenship from Americans who travel overseas to fight for terrorists, along with a few states that passed anti-Sharia laws. Woefully inadequate as these actions are, three-quarters of them barely saw the light of day as the truth-tellers were pilloried and the legislation never came to pass. In any case, the solutions noted above are not an overarching strategy.
Not even close.
How can that be? The most brutal and ruthless enemy is advancing toward us and has infiltrated every arm of our government, and there is hardly a word said, no less a plan offered, as to how to beat them back. Quite the opposite. We are welcoming them with open arms. Giving them the keys to the kingdom.
If we are to survive, this madness must end. And toward that end, I suggest the following:
Name the enemy: If you don’t name the enemy, how can you win the war? Let’s stop talking like idiots. We’re battling a totalitarian ideology as written in the Koran, and the people who follow it. It’s called Islam. Not “radical Islam.” Just Islam. By any standard, the teachings in the Koran are radical. When people say “radical Islam,” it suggests there is some other form of Islam that is more tempered. Moderate, as they say. But such a thing does not exist, except as neglect of scriptural imperatives.
And should anyone claim there are peaceful verses please point them to Chapter 2, Verse 106 (Abrogation) which states that later (violent) verses override and/or replace earlier (peaceful) ones.
Stop saying “war on terror”: This expression is vague and minimizes the scope of the battle. We’re fighting Islamic jihad in all its forms -- from physical violence to creeping Sharia and everything in between. We are at war with those who follow the teachings of the Koran -- whether they are violent jihadists or members of the school board trying to influence curriculum.
Shut down Iran’s nuclear program: Iran is a mortal threat to Israel, the United States, and indeed the entire civilized world. We should not be involved in negotiations with a nation that has declared its murderous intentions against America and her allies. If Iran develops a nuclear weapon, the world as we know it will be forever altered as a blanket of death will descend. We must destroy Iran’s ability to develop a nuclear weapon before it is too late. And the clock is running down. Quickly.
Address the malevolent influence of the Muslim Brotherhood: It is critical that we address how deeply the Muslim Brotherhood has infiltrated our government. We must designate the Muslim Brotherhood a terrorist organization, remove members of the Muslim Brotherhood from government positions, and shut down all Muslim Brotherhood front groups. We cannot survive if the enemy is not only attacking from without, but also from within (per their stated plan). Terrorists have no place on American soil, no less within our government. Identify them, arrest them where appropriate, and send the rest packing.
Stop construction of mosques and shut down most of those already built: Mosques are popping up all across America, with a 75% increase in new construction since 9/11. There are now well over 2,000 mosques in America (some of them “mega mosques”) with no end in sight. Two separate studies document that 80% of mosques in the United States preach jihad. That number is staggering. The situation is intolerable. It pushes the limit of freedom of religion and freedom of speech. A nation cannot endure direct threats against it if it hopes to survive.
Shut down Islamic schools and get Islam out of public school classrooms: We cannot allow Islamic schools to indoctrinate the next generation of Muslim Americans, where students are taught Islamic dominance, forced conversions, death to non-believers, and the destruction of Israel. This is not a reflection of American values and serves as a direct threat to our future. If Muslim Americans want their children to attend such schools, the family should relocate to an Islamic country. We must also remove Islamic propaganda from our public schools, private schools, college and universities. And while we’re on the subject, Muslim colleges are blossoming. The most prominent (Zaytuna College) opened five years ago in Berkeley, California. But there have been others, including the Islamic Online University. At the very least, these institutions must be monitored.
Shut down American jihadist training compounds: We cannot tolerate Muslim enclaves in America where jihadist training is taught. Muslims of America have training compounds scattered throughout the country poised to inflict violence on a massive scale. This cannot stand. America is a nation that is free, not a nation that is stupid. “Anything goes” is not our founding principle. It is sheer insanity to tolerate people and organizations that train jihadists to attack Americans. Plus, last I checked, it’s against the law. We know where these compounds are. We must shut them down. Immediately.
Address prisons as breading grounds for Muslim converts: Prisons have become breeding grounds for Islamic converts and jihadist indoctrination. We must block the outside influence from Saudi Arabia and terror states, ensure those in the prison power structure become educated about Islam, and involve subject matter experts to help vet and monitor Muslim chaplains. No one -- imams or prisoners -- must be allowed to engage in violent rhetoric or activity, Muslim prison gangs must be broken apart, and perks that Muslim prisoners alone get must be stripped away.
Stop immigration from Islamic countries: As seen throughout Europe, it doesn’t take a lot of Muslims to wreak havoc on a nation. To help ensure we don’t wind up like Europe, we must halt all immigration from Islamic countries. The risks are simply too high. No nation has an obligation to allow immigration from any and all countries. And in the case of immigration from Islamic countries, it is impossible to fully vet Muslim immigrants for the following reasons: (1) We cannot know who has an agenda to impose Sharia law (and stats show most support it). (2) We need to recognize that increasing numbers of Muslims who seem like regular folks are morphing into jihadists. (3) We must understand the role that taqiyya (sanctioned deception) plays in any vetting process. Islam is not compatible with Western values. It is not compatible with Judeo/Christian values. It is not compatible with liberty and freedom. It’s illogical to import people from cultures where some, many, or most individuals hate America and want to destroy everything we stand for. (When considering this issue, one should also keep in mind the 3 stages of jihad.)
Stop moral equivalence: All cultures are not the same. All ideas are not the same. All religions are not the same. Stop speaking as if they are. Islam is the 21st century Nazism. As Prime Minister Netanyahu said, “We’ve seen this before. There’s a master race; Now there’s a master faith.” Human beings have the ability to discern. Let’s start using this God-given gift. Western cultures are better than Islamic cultures. The idea of liberty is better than the idea of oppression. Values of love and life trump those of darkness, death, and destruction. Everything is not the same. Spread the word.
Ban the burqa and niqab: A person’s face must be exposed for all the obvious reasons. In addition, swaths of fabric draped over and around one’s body mask the human form and can also hide weapons. We’ve already had criminals exploit burqas in order to commit crimes. This sort of identity-hiding garb has no place in a modern, Western society. If a Muslim insists on wearing a burqa I suggest she move to any one of the dozens of Muslim countries where such attire is welcome, if not required. It’s not how we do things in the United States and we shouldn’t start. Cultures are different.
Values are different. The United States, thank God, is not an Islamic nation. And we shouldn’t slide any further down the path of embracing Islamic values (such as they are) and norms. Including Islamic dress codes.
Allow people who want to join terror groups overseas to leave the country and ensure it’s a one-way ticket: When we become aware of persons planning to travel overseas to join ISIS or any other terror organization, we should not stop them. There is no reason to have such individuals among us. We should let them go, then slam the door behind them so they can never return: revoke their passport, visa, and U.S. citizenship. They must not be allowed to engage in this treasonous act without consequence (as is currently the case).
Secure the border: The United States must secure its borders so that, among other things, we don’t leave ourselves open to terrorists coming across. It defies common sense and sound national security to have open borders. The border must be secured.
Achieve energy independence: We must break our reliance on oil from Saudi Arabia and other Middle Eastern countries that are run by dictators who use their power and influence to undermine our nation. There is no reason this great nation cannot become energy independent if we set about to achieve that goal. We have the resources. Now we must find the will.
Stop supporting terror: We must stop all funds that go to the Palestinian Authority. We must investigate Turkey and Qatar as state sponsors of terror and reassess our ties with these nations. We should suspend funding for the UN Human Rights Commission.
Become citizen activists: This battle must be fought on all fronts by everyone. Leftists might be permanent goners, but there are a lot of folks who are simply uninformed. Get involved and speak out. Be savvy about the best way to approach others. Don’t overwhelm. Choose your focus, your words, and your support materials carefully. Here are a few ideas:
Educate others about the Koran: This is critical. Islam is a totalitarian ideology at its core and we must tell it like it is when we speak about it. Educate yourself. Then educate others. Robert Spencer has two excellent books that I highly recommend if you haven’t read them already: The Complete Infidel’s Guide to the Koran and The Politically Incorrect Guide to Islam (and the Crusades)
Educate others about the 3 stages of jihad: Islam has a methodical method to the bloody madness. Part of that method involves how to advance jihad in three stages to reach its most bellicose form.
David Wood of Answering Muslims has an excellent video on the subject, here.
Support people and organizations that are on the front lines of this battle: There are many brave patriots working tirelessly to wake people up to the threat of Islam. They are a great resource and they also need our support. For blogs that focus exclusively on Islam, see here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, and here among countless examples. See here and here for political action organizations focused exclusively on Islam.
(Remember, you don’t have to reinvent the wheel. Joining Act for America, for example, can help provide focus.) For legal centers on the front lines of this battle, see here and here.
Reach out to others in your place of worship: Churches and synagogues should be leading voices in this battle. Sadly, they’re not. “Interfaith dialogue” has become all the rage as many churches and synagogues enable the enemy. In addition, many churches have joined the BDS movement against Israel -- a nation on the bleeding edge of the fight against jihad. We must shift this dangerous course. (When enlightening members at your place of worship, the Christian Action Network might be a resource for some that is particularly resonant.)
Know what’s going on in your community: In addition to the construction of new mosques, there are myriad ways that creeping Sharia creeps. Stay on top of what’s going on in your community and take action. See here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, and here for a snapshot among an endless battery of examples that are reminders of how vigilant we must be.
Stay on top of what is going on in schools: Whether you have children in school or not, it behooves all of us to know what’s going on in the school system. Lord knows, CAIR and other Muslim Brotherhood front groups are campaigning, lobbying, applying pressure, and in some cases, suing to make sure Islam marches through the halls of our public and private schools (as well as colleges and universities). We will all pay a price for the next generation’s brainwashing if we don’t address it. See here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, and here among countless examples.
Let your elected officials know where you stand and what you expect from them: Most of them are clueless. At best. They need to be educated. Who’s going to educate them? That would be us. We cannot, for example, ever again have an imam lead a prayer in Congress. Not. ever. again.
Contact the media: Speak out about biased and erroneous coverage of Islam, Sharia, and terror. Urge them to stop inviting guests who are members of Muslim Brotherhood front groups. Educate them about this issue.
Be creative and take initiative: Every day, whether on an international, national scale, or local level, the West is increasingly in the grip of Islamic law. Find ways to speak the truth and educate the public. Here’s an inspiring story: A group of concerned citizens formed an organization called the Counter Jihad Coalition. They created brochures on Islam and, armed with knowledge and these materials, they stand in a public square (in this case, 3rd Street Promenade in Santa Monica, California) and educate others. To read more about them and hear an interview, see here.
And: The Counter Jihad Report has compiled a comprehensive list of things citizens can do. Each item on the list links to a page with more detail on the particular area of interest. There are also excellent suggestions on the best ways to approach people. I highly recommend AT readers visit this page where you can explore and find one or two things to act on, here.
In closing, I would like to say that the current state of affairs with respect to our nation’s retreat is unsustainable. We either fight with everything we have, or we will be undone. The terrifying command to “convert or die” will not be a savage reality forced upon people in other nations. It will be bellowed through this land. And while many of us feel overwhelmed with our time and energy stretched thin, please consider that if we don’t take this on now, an inconceivable darkness will envelope our lives that will silence our voices -- if not our beating hearts -- on this, and every single thing.
No one will be immune to the evil that is coming. Democrats, Republicans and Independents; patriots and dhimmis; men, women, and children; the young, the old and everyone in between; rich and poor; Christians, Mormons, Jews, Hindus, Buddhists, agnostics, and atheists; black, brown, and white; the educated and uneducated; public servants and private sector employees; doctors, teachers, roofers, truck drivers, lawyers, veterinarians, CEO’s, cooks, plumbers, dog walkers; as well as dogs.
America is the ultimate target of this evil. We either fight now, or face the unthinkable later. And later is much sooner than we think.
American Thinker
By Carol Brown
We’re facing the greatest national security threat we have ever known and there is no coherent plan to battle the enemy. This nation is so far behind the eight ball, the president and his minions won’t even name the enemy, no less fight it.
Name = Islam
Even worse, those in positions of power and influence misrepresent what the enemy stands for. Like a pre-recorded announcement that just won’t stop, we are endlessly subjected to the false refrain: Islam is a religion of peace. By Muslim lights, we live in the Dar al Harb, the territory of war, simply because we refuse to accept Islam. We didn’t declare war, Mohammed did.
And when it comes to the threat of Islamic supremacism, it’s not only the left that’s putting us at risk.
The right is hardly better, as both parties serve up a boatload of ignorance, complicity, and cowardice on a daily basis. Our elected officials draft legislation, set foreign policy, speak at podiums, sit on panels, write press releases, pen op-eds, and yack away on talk shows about the wonders of Islam. If anyone challenges what they’re peddling, the peddlers get rather hot under the collar. As for the truth-tellers, they are mocked, marginalized, and vilified.
And what a truth it is, as we confront a totalitarian ideology bent on world domination ruled by one religion -- an ideology that is infecting every aspect of our culture and which has the potential to destroy all of civilization.
Despite this grave threat, you can count on one hand how many leaders are informed and speaking the truth. And even they -- and God bless every single one of them -- have offered ideas in bits and pieces, with faint calls to investigate Huma Abedin, a proposal to designate the Muslim Brotherhood a terrorist organization, a proposal to strip citizenship from Americans who travel overseas to fight for terrorists, along with a few states that passed anti-Sharia laws. Woefully inadequate as these actions are, three-quarters of them barely saw the light of day as the truth-tellers were pilloried and the legislation never came to pass. In any case, the solutions noted above are not an overarching strategy.
Not even close.
How can that be? The most brutal and ruthless enemy is advancing toward us and has infiltrated every arm of our government, and there is hardly a word said, no less a plan offered, as to how to beat them back. Quite the opposite. We are welcoming them with open arms. Giving them the keys to the kingdom.
If we are to survive, this madness must end. And toward that end, I suggest the following:
Name the enemy: If you don’t name the enemy, how can you win the war? Let’s stop talking like idiots. We’re battling a totalitarian ideology as written in the Koran, and the people who follow it. It’s called Islam. Not “radical Islam.” Just Islam. By any standard, the teachings in the Koran are radical. When people say “radical Islam,” it suggests there is some other form of Islam that is more tempered. Moderate, as they say. But such a thing does not exist, except as neglect of scriptural imperatives.
And should anyone claim there are peaceful verses please point them to Chapter 2, Verse 106 (Abrogation) which states that later (violent) verses override and/or replace earlier (peaceful) ones.
Stop saying “war on terror”: This expression is vague and minimizes the scope of the battle. We’re fighting Islamic jihad in all its forms -- from physical violence to creeping Sharia and everything in between. We are at war with those who follow the teachings of the Koran -- whether they are violent jihadists or members of the school board trying to influence curriculum.
Shut down Iran’s nuclear program: Iran is a mortal threat to Israel, the United States, and indeed the entire civilized world. We should not be involved in negotiations with a nation that has declared its murderous intentions against America and her allies. If Iran develops a nuclear weapon, the world as we know it will be forever altered as a blanket of death will descend. We must destroy Iran’s ability to develop a nuclear weapon before it is too late. And the clock is running down. Quickly.
Address the malevolent influence of the Muslim Brotherhood: It is critical that we address how deeply the Muslim Brotherhood has infiltrated our government. We must designate the Muslim Brotherhood a terrorist organization, remove members of the Muslim Brotherhood from government positions, and shut down all Muslim Brotherhood front groups. We cannot survive if the enemy is not only attacking from without, but also from within (per their stated plan). Terrorists have no place on American soil, no less within our government. Identify them, arrest them where appropriate, and send the rest packing.
Stop construction of mosques and shut down most of those already built: Mosques are popping up all across America, with a 75% increase in new construction since 9/11. There are now well over 2,000 mosques in America (some of them “mega mosques”) with no end in sight. Two separate studies document that 80% of mosques in the United States preach jihad. That number is staggering. The situation is intolerable. It pushes the limit of freedom of religion and freedom of speech. A nation cannot endure direct threats against it if it hopes to survive.
Shut down Islamic schools and get Islam out of public school classrooms: We cannot allow Islamic schools to indoctrinate the next generation of Muslim Americans, where students are taught Islamic dominance, forced conversions, death to non-believers, and the destruction of Israel. This is not a reflection of American values and serves as a direct threat to our future. If Muslim Americans want their children to attend such schools, the family should relocate to an Islamic country. We must also remove Islamic propaganda from our public schools, private schools, college and universities. And while we’re on the subject, Muslim colleges are blossoming. The most prominent (Zaytuna College) opened five years ago in Berkeley, California. But there have been others, including the Islamic Online University. At the very least, these institutions must be monitored.
Shut down American jihadist training compounds: We cannot tolerate Muslim enclaves in America where jihadist training is taught. Muslims of America have training compounds scattered throughout the country poised to inflict violence on a massive scale. This cannot stand. America is a nation that is free, not a nation that is stupid. “Anything goes” is not our founding principle. It is sheer insanity to tolerate people and organizations that train jihadists to attack Americans. Plus, last I checked, it’s against the law. We know where these compounds are. We must shut them down. Immediately.
Address prisons as breading grounds for Muslim converts: Prisons have become breeding grounds for Islamic converts and jihadist indoctrination. We must block the outside influence from Saudi Arabia and terror states, ensure those in the prison power structure become educated about Islam, and involve subject matter experts to help vet and monitor Muslim chaplains. No one -- imams or prisoners -- must be allowed to engage in violent rhetoric or activity, Muslim prison gangs must be broken apart, and perks that Muslim prisoners alone get must be stripped away.
Stop immigration from Islamic countries: As seen throughout Europe, it doesn’t take a lot of Muslims to wreak havoc on a nation. To help ensure we don’t wind up like Europe, we must halt all immigration from Islamic countries. The risks are simply too high. No nation has an obligation to allow immigration from any and all countries. And in the case of immigration from Islamic countries, it is impossible to fully vet Muslim immigrants for the following reasons: (1) We cannot know who has an agenda to impose Sharia law (and stats show most support it). (2) We need to recognize that increasing numbers of Muslims who seem like regular folks are morphing into jihadists. (3) We must understand the role that taqiyya (sanctioned deception) plays in any vetting process. Islam is not compatible with Western values. It is not compatible with Judeo/Christian values. It is not compatible with liberty and freedom. It’s illogical to import people from cultures where some, many, or most individuals hate America and want to destroy everything we stand for. (When considering this issue, one should also keep in mind the 3 stages of jihad.)
Stop moral equivalence: All cultures are not the same. All ideas are not the same. All religions are not the same. Stop speaking as if they are. Islam is the 21st century Nazism. As Prime Minister Netanyahu said, “We’ve seen this before. There’s a master race; Now there’s a master faith.” Human beings have the ability to discern. Let’s start using this God-given gift. Western cultures are better than Islamic cultures. The idea of liberty is better than the idea of oppression. Values of love and life trump those of darkness, death, and destruction. Everything is not the same. Spread the word.
Ban the burqa and niqab: A person’s face must be exposed for all the obvious reasons. In addition, swaths of fabric draped over and around one’s body mask the human form and can also hide weapons. We’ve already had criminals exploit burqas in order to commit crimes. This sort of identity-hiding garb has no place in a modern, Western society. If a Muslim insists on wearing a burqa I suggest she move to any one of the dozens of Muslim countries where such attire is welcome, if not required. It’s not how we do things in the United States and we shouldn’t start. Cultures are different.
Values are different. The United States, thank God, is not an Islamic nation. And we shouldn’t slide any further down the path of embracing Islamic values (such as they are) and norms. Including Islamic dress codes.
Allow people who want to join terror groups overseas to leave the country and ensure it’s a one-way ticket: When we become aware of persons planning to travel overseas to join ISIS or any other terror organization, we should not stop them. There is no reason to have such individuals among us. We should let them go, then slam the door behind them so they can never return: revoke their passport, visa, and U.S. citizenship. They must not be allowed to engage in this treasonous act without consequence (as is currently the case).
Secure the border: The United States must secure its borders so that, among other things, we don’t leave ourselves open to terrorists coming across. It defies common sense and sound national security to have open borders. The border must be secured.
Achieve energy independence: We must break our reliance on oil from Saudi Arabia and other Middle Eastern countries that are run by dictators who use their power and influence to undermine our nation. There is no reason this great nation cannot become energy independent if we set about to achieve that goal. We have the resources. Now we must find the will.
Stop supporting terror: We must stop all funds that go to the Palestinian Authority. We must investigate Turkey and Qatar as state sponsors of terror and reassess our ties with these nations. We should suspend funding for the UN Human Rights Commission.
Become citizen activists: This battle must be fought on all fronts by everyone. Leftists might be permanent goners, but there are a lot of folks who are simply uninformed. Get involved and speak out. Be savvy about the best way to approach others. Don’t overwhelm. Choose your focus, your words, and your support materials carefully. Here are a few ideas:
Educate others about the Koran: This is critical. Islam is a totalitarian ideology at its core and we must tell it like it is when we speak about it. Educate yourself. Then educate others. Robert Spencer has two excellent books that I highly recommend if you haven’t read them already: The Complete Infidel’s Guide to the Koran and The Politically Incorrect Guide to Islam (and the Crusades)
Educate others about the 3 stages of jihad: Islam has a methodical method to the bloody madness. Part of that method involves how to advance jihad in three stages to reach its most bellicose form.
David Wood of Answering Muslims has an excellent video on the subject, here.
Support people and organizations that are on the front lines of this battle: There are many brave patriots working tirelessly to wake people up to the threat of Islam. They are a great resource and they also need our support. For blogs that focus exclusively on Islam, see here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, and here among countless examples. See here and here for political action organizations focused exclusively on Islam.
(Remember, you don’t have to reinvent the wheel. Joining Act for America, for example, can help provide focus.) For legal centers on the front lines of this battle, see here and here.
Reach out to others in your place of worship: Churches and synagogues should be leading voices in this battle. Sadly, they’re not. “Interfaith dialogue” has become all the rage as many churches and synagogues enable the enemy. In addition, many churches have joined the BDS movement against Israel -- a nation on the bleeding edge of the fight against jihad. We must shift this dangerous course. (When enlightening members at your place of worship, the Christian Action Network might be a resource for some that is particularly resonant.)
Know what’s going on in your community: In addition to the construction of new mosques, there are myriad ways that creeping Sharia creeps. Stay on top of what’s going on in your community and take action. See here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, and here for a snapshot among an endless battery of examples that are reminders of how vigilant we must be.
Stay on top of what is going on in schools: Whether you have children in school or not, it behooves all of us to know what’s going on in the school system. Lord knows, CAIR and other Muslim Brotherhood front groups are campaigning, lobbying, applying pressure, and in some cases, suing to make sure Islam marches through the halls of our public and private schools (as well as colleges and universities). We will all pay a price for the next generation’s brainwashing if we don’t address it. See here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, and here among countless examples.
Let your elected officials know where you stand and what you expect from them: Most of them are clueless. At best. They need to be educated. Who’s going to educate them? That would be us. We cannot, for example, ever again have an imam lead a prayer in Congress. Not. ever. again.
Contact the media: Speak out about biased and erroneous coverage of Islam, Sharia, and terror. Urge them to stop inviting guests who are members of Muslim Brotherhood front groups. Educate them about this issue.
Be creative and take initiative: Every day, whether on an international, national scale, or local level, the West is increasingly in the grip of Islamic law. Find ways to speak the truth and educate the public. Here’s an inspiring story: A group of concerned citizens formed an organization called the Counter Jihad Coalition. They created brochures on Islam and, armed with knowledge and these materials, they stand in a public square (in this case, 3rd Street Promenade in Santa Monica, California) and educate others. To read more about them and hear an interview, see here.
And: The Counter Jihad Report has compiled a comprehensive list of things citizens can do. Each item on the list links to a page with more detail on the particular area of interest. There are also excellent suggestions on the best ways to approach people. I highly recommend AT readers visit this page where you can explore and find one or two things to act on, here.
In closing, I would like to say that the current state of affairs with respect to our nation’s retreat is unsustainable. We either fight with everything we have, or we will be undone. The terrifying command to “convert or die” will not be a savage reality forced upon people in other nations. It will be bellowed through this land. And while many of us feel overwhelmed with our time and energy stretched thin, please consider that if we don’t take this on now, an inconceivable darkness will envelope our lives that will silence our voices -- if not our beating hearts -- on this, and every single thing.
No one will be immune to the evil that is coming. Democrats, Republicans and Independents; patriots and dhimmis; men, women, and children; the young, the old and everyone in between; rich and poor; Christians, Mormons, Jews, Hindus, Buddhists, agnostics, and atheists; black, brown, and white; the educated and uneducated; public servants and private sector employees; doctors, teachers, roofers, truck drivers, lawyers, veterinarians, CEO’s, cooks, plumbers, dog walkers; as well as dogs.
America is the ultimate target of this evil. We either fight now, or face the unthinkable later. And later is much sooner than we think.
American Thinker
Sunday, December 7, 2014
Sunday, October 19, 2014
The Progressive Missionaries of Unhappiness
by
Daniel Greenfield
There is no one that the left hates more than a man who does not hate, who goes through the day without outrage and who does not spend his life stewing with vindictive resentments.
Leftists call it “privilege” now. They have called it apathy, escapism and a hundred other things.
They will find a thousand other names for it as they march through the future centuries grinding their teeth and cursing their country for its backwardness, their people for their provincialism and their culture for its mercantilism. But privilege is simply freedom from resentment.
To be of the left is to confuse perpetual outrage with righteousness. The professional leftist believes that the path to utopia on earth lies in constantly denouncing thought criminals until they have all been unthought so that only their kind of ethical and empathetic people walk the earth.
Like most utopians, they plan for a utopia that they could never actually live in.
Leftists without grievances are like an army without guns. That is why leftist experiments in communes dissolved into denunciations, power grabs and authoritarian rules as soon the drugs ran out. Often even before. The leftist isn’t seeking freedom from capitalism, religion, nationalism, racism, sexism, office dress codes, bar codes and any of the other great evils of the moment. These are just the outrage fuel of the willfully outraged whose resentment has become both culture and religion.
What he wants is to express an egotistical grievance at a world that is not built around him. His resentments came before his ideology. They are in a very real sense his ideology. The idealistic leftist is a passing phenomenon. He is useful for getting the actual work done while everyone else shouts. Unless he is very dim, he eventually realizes that and heads off to volunteer in Africa. The core is the aggrieved leftist whose grievances merge with his storytelling skills into the compelling narrative of a narcissist.
The perpetually aggrieved deeply resent those who are oblivious to their anger. It is the theme that dominates the literature, the music and the political writings of an infuriated left throwing its anger at a mindless mass that is perfectly happy collecting paychecks, living in the suburbs and watching television. It is not their prosperity that the left hates, but their uncomplicated happiness.
It is this uncomplicated happiness that the left sets out to ruin at all costs.
Leftist activism is drama. It is deliberately destructive and disruptive. It glories in taking the happy lives of ordinary people and wrecking them. It plays the part of the troubled sibling, the one who is driven to destroy the happiness of the rest of the family out of his or her own willful unhappiness.
Happiness is a choice. It is not dependent on the condition of the individual, but on his state of mind. The essence of enduring happiness is a state of stability. Leftist politics are instability incarnate; the opposite number of happiness. That is why the left acts as the destroyer of happiness.
The left does not think that anyone should be happy. It is not unhappy because it is personally enmeshed in suffering. The ideological leaders of the left tend to come from the upper classes. They know no hunger except when they are dieting. They experience so few material shortcomings that they treat poverty as a lifestyle; slumming in poor areas and showily living on a few dollars a day.
It is the happiness of others that makes the left unhappy. It is convinced that this happiness is unearned and illegitimate because it does not take into account how unhappy this happiness makes the left.
Privilege is the accusation that the very lack of resentment and grievance, neurotic responses to simple phrases and a cloud of free-floating anger, represents an ignorant oppression. The happy are only happy at the expense of the unhappy and must recognize the unhappy privilege of their happiness.
Leftists are missionaries of unhappiness. Their creed is salvation through anger. Their governing philosophy is to make others miserable in order to teach them how they have overlooked the misery of others. They are forever spreading misery around the world for the sake of the greater good.
If the left sees anyone being happy, it must immediately set out to ruin the fun. The simple joy of others turns out to be only a cover for monstrous abuses that they are determined to make everyone else see. If it’s an object, it was made by oppressed workers. If it’s a social group, it’s discriminatory. If it’s food, it makes you sick. If it’s a sport, it’s abusive. If it’s art, then it’s escapism from the misery the left creates.
It is straightforward happiness that the left hates most of all. It is unable to appreciate anything directly unless it is medicated. It likes things only askew. It says that it likes bad art and ugly fashions because it is being ironic. What it really means is that it is only capable of liking something as a commentary on the absurdity of the thing and the emotion of liking it. Even its happiness is a critique of happiness.
Its joys are as sour as the rest of its nature.
The left views simplicity as dishonest. It is full of secret agendas and projects this in paranoid fashion. It is always finding the subtext in everything because it brings the subtext to the table. It is forever carrying around Rorschach inkblots in its head and shouting about all the terrible things it sees around it.
Deriving its happiness from the unhappiness of others, the left must see the destruction of happiness as moral and its victims as immoral. Happiness is selfish, it insists, while the awareness of how many evils are hidden beneath the simplistic façade of happiness is ethically enlightening. And yet its own obsession with destroying the happiness of others is the selfish way in which the left finds its happiness.
The left is only truly happy when it is destroying something. Its sublime transcendent moments are revolutionary. Their joy is derived not from what is being created, but from what is being destroyed. Every leftist revolution from the reign of Madame Guillotine to Obama’s election was full of vicious glee at things coming undone. Under the banner of equality, the left inaugurates inequality. Through calls for peace, it brings war and with cries of prosperity, it ushers in an age of terrible poverty.
Unable to create, the left ultimately only destroys. Its creative energies spring from bitterness. It glories in subversively undermining the happiness of others, directly and indirectly, but once all the things that it sought to destroy have been banished, it has nothing more to offer. Its hatred is sterile. It poison can be artfully disguised as idealism, humor and passion, but when there is nothing left to attack or subvert, it shows its true viral form by dying, as every virus that kills its host must inevitably do.
When the left finally triumphs, its first order of business is a total ruthless purge of its own professional dissenters because without such a purge, it would remain in the same dysfunctional state.
The left is satanic in its original sense of ‘antagonist’. It represents the darker side of human nature. It is the ideology of those who cannot let their anger go, who gain a perverse enjoyment from their grudges and define themselves less by what they are for than by what they are against. Its followers are motivated by an endless resentment that cannot be appeased because the resentment is their purpose.
It is impossible to meet the left halfway or to compromise with it because it is not seeking the stable balance that so many conservatives are. It finds its true purpose in the chaos of conflict. It gains its meaning in opposition not in co-existence. To compromise with the left is to rob it of its purpose. And the left pushes back against any such efforts through renewed bursts of radicalism.
Conservative parties lose when they fail to come to terms with this antagonistic dynamic and assume their opponents on the left also seek a stable state that they can find common ground on. Stability is the enemy of the left. Stability is privilege. Stability is happiness. Stability is everything that the left despises.
The left has learned to cloak its animosity and destructive aims in positive rhetoric. It destroys economies, families and freedoms in the name of equality. Its cheering mobs realize too late that its cause is not the equality of opportunity, happiness or liberty, but poverty, misery and slavery.
The left does not redistribute wealth. It redistributes want. It does not want everyone to share in the happiness of others, but to be burdened with a larger burden of their miseries.
No compromise can be had with the missionaries of unhappiness. Happiness can be shared without diminishing its quality, but the division of misery is the aim of the professionally miserable.
The left has suffered its worst defeats at the hands of the happy warriors of the right. Its greatest vulnerability is its meanness of spirit. Its defeat comes when its malaise is contrasted with happiness, when its deep suspicion of humanity is met with patriotic optimism and when its alarmist crises are met with laughter.
Sultan Knish
There is no one that the left hates more than a man who does not hate, who goes through the day without outrage and who does not spend his life stewing with vindictive resentments.
Leftists call it “privilege” now. They have called it apathy, escapism and a hundred other things.
They will find a thousand other names for it as they march through the future centuries grinding their teeth and cursing their country for its backwardness, their people for their provincialism and their culture for its mercantilism. But privilege is simply freedom from resentment.
To be of the left is to confuse perpetual outrage with righteousness. The professional leftist believes that the path to utopia on earth lies in constantly denouncing thought criminals until they have all been unthought so that only their kind of ethical and empathetic people walk the earth.
Like most utopians, they plan for a utopia that they could never actually live in.
Leftists without grievances are like an army without guns. That is why leftist experiments in communes dissolved into denunciations, power grabs and authoritarian rules as soon the drugs ran out. Often even before. The leftist isn’t seeking freedom from capitalism, religion, nationalism, racism, sexism, office dress codes, bar codes and any of the other great evils of the moment. These are just the outrage fuel of the willfully outraged whose resentment has become both culture and religion.
What he wants is to express an egotistical grievance at a world that is not built around him. His resentments came before his ideology. They are in a very real sense his ideology. The idealistic leftist is a passing phenomenon. He is useful for getting the actual work done while everyone else shouts. Unless he is very dim, he eventually realizes that and heads off to volunteer in Africa. The core is the aggrieved leftist whose grievances merge with his storytelling skills into the compelling narrative of a narcissist.
The perpetually aggrieved deeply resent those who are oblivious to their anger. It is the theme that dominates the literature, the music and the political writings of an infuriated left throwing its anger at a mindless mass that is perfectly happy collecting paychecks, living in the suburbs and watching television. It is not their prosperity that the left hates, but their uncomplicated happiness.
It is this uncomplicated happiness that the left sets out to ruin at all costs.
Leftist activism is drama. It is deliberately destructive and disruptive. It glories in taking the happy lives of ordinary people and wrecking them. It plays the part of the troubled sibling, the one who is driven to destroy the happiness of the rest of the family out of his or her own willful unhappiness.
Happiness is a choice. It is not dependent on the condition of the individual, but on his state of mind. The essence of enduring happiness is a state of stability. Leftist politics are instability incarnate; the opposite number of happiness. That is why the left acts as the destroyer of happiness.
The left does not think that anyone should be happy. It is not unhappy because it is personally enmeshed in suffering. The ideological leaders of the left tend to come from the upper classes. They know no hunger except when they are dieting. They experience so few material shortcomings that they treat poverty as a lifestyle; slumming in poor areas and showily living on a few dollars a day.
It is the happiness of others that makes the left unhappy. It is convinced that this happiness is unearned and illegitimate because it does not take into account how unhappy this happiness makes the left.
Privilege is the accusation that the very lack of resentment and grievance, neurotic responses to simple phrases and a cloud of free-floating anger, represents an ignorant oppression. The happy are only happy at the expense of the unhappy and must recognize the unhappy privilege of their happiness.
Leftists are missionaries of unhappiness. Their creed is salvation through anger. Their governing philosophy is to make others miserable in order to teach them how they have overlooked the misery of others. They are forever spreading misery around the world for the sake of the greater good.
If the left sees anyone being happy, it must immediately set out to ruin the fun. The simple joy of others turns out to be only a cover for monstrous abuses that they are determined to make everyone else see. If it’s an object, it was made by oppressed workers. If it’s a social group, it’s discriminatory. If it’s food, it makes you sick. If it’s a sport, it’s abusive. If it’s art, then it’s escapism from the misery the left creates.
It is straightforward happiness that the left hates most of all. It is unable to appreciate anything directly unless it is medicated. It likes things only askew. It says that it likes bad art and ugly fashions because it is being ironic. What it really means is that it is only capable of liking something as a commentary on the absurdity of the thing and the emotion of liking it. Even its happiness is a critique of happiness.
Its joys are as sour as the rest of its nature.
The left views simplicity as dishonest. It is full of secret agendas and projects this in paranoid fashion. It is always finding the subtext in everything because it brings the subtext to the table. It is forever carrying around Rorschach inkblots in its head and shouting about all the terrible things it sees around it.
Deriving its happiness from the unhappiness of others, the left must see the destruction of happiness as moral and its victims as immoral. Happiness is selfish, it insists, while the awareness of how many evils are hidden beneath the simplistic façade of happiness is ethically enlightening. And yet its own obsession with destroying the happiness of others is the selfish way in which the left finds its happiness.
The left is only truly happy when it is destroying something. Its sublime transcendent moments are revolutionary. Their joy is derived not from what is being created, but from what is being destroyed. Every leftist revolution from the reign of Madame Guillotine to Obama’s election was full of vicious glee at things coming undone. Under the banner of equality, the left inaugurates inequality. Through calls for peace, it brings war and with cries of prosperity, it ushers in an age of terrible poverty.
Unable to create, the left ultimately only destroys. Its creative energies spring from bitterness. It glories in subversively undermining the happiness of others, directly and indirectly, but once all the things that it sought to destroy have been banished, it has nothing more to offer. Its hatred is sterile. It poison can be artfully disguised as idealism, humor and passion, but when there is nothing left to attack or subvert, it shows its true viral form by dying, as every virus that kills its host must inevitably do.
When the left finally triumphs, its first order of business is a total ruthless purge of its own professional dissenters because without such a purge, it would remain in the same dysfunctional state.
The left is satanic in its original sense of ‘antagonist’. It represents the darker side of human nature. It is the ideology of those who cannot let their anger go, who gain a perverse enjoyment from their grudges and define themselves less by what they are for than by what they are against. Its followers are motivated by an endless resentment that cannot be appeased because the resentment is their purpose.
It is impossible to meet the left halfway or to compromise with it because it is not seeking the stable balance that so many conservatives are. It finds its true purpose in the chaos of conflict. It gains its meaning in opposition not in co-existence. To compromise with the left is to rob it of its purpose. And the left pushes back against any such efforts through renewed bursts of radicalism.
Conservative parties lose when they fail to come to terms with this antagonistic dynamic and assume their opponents on the left also seek a stable state that they can find common ground on. Stability is the enemy of the left. Stability is privilege. Stability is happiness. Stability is everything that the left despises.
The left has learned to cloak its animosity and destructive aims in positive rhetoric. It destroys economies, families and freedoms in the name of equality. Its cheering mobs realize too late that its cause is not the equality of opportunity, happiness or liberty, but poverty, misery and slavery.
The left does not redistribute wealth. It redistributes want. It does not want everyone to share in the happiness of others, but to be burdened with a larger burden of their miseries.
No compromise can be had with the missionaries of unhappiness. Happiness can be shared without diminishing its quality, but the division of misery is the aim of the professionally miserable.
The left has suffered its worst defeats at the hands of the happy warriors of the right. Its greatest vulnerability is its meanness of spirit. Its defeat comes when its malaise is contrasted with happiness, when its deep suspicion of humanity is met with patriotic optimism and when its alarmist crises are met with laughter.
Sultan Knish
Sunday, August 31, 2014
The Incompetence of Leftist Ideology
By Kevin Wade and Fay Voshell
August 31, 2014
Competence is the ability to get things done. The word itself has no particular value judgment attached to it.
Many perfectly intelligent people have been labeled “incompetent,” particularly by conservatives, when actually they are or have been quite competent -- at achieving disasters. We have such a person sitting in the White House -- quite intelligent, but committed to disastrous ideology. Our present administration is not incompetent in the way its officials go about achieving their goals, using as they do the incredible powers of bureaucracy and executive orders to bypass Congress and override the Constitution. They are perfectly competent in promoting and putting their toxically incompetent leftist ideology into effect.
To put it another way, people who are competent at creating disasters are not necessarily dimwitted, though some are. The problem is not their stupidity. The problem is that their core ideas about how the world works are wrong. If their basic ideas are wrong, everything else goes wrong.
History abounds with cases of bright people who have been zealously committed to wrong ideas they were expert in putting into action.
Trofim Lysenko was an intelligent Russian peasant who rejected Mendelian genetics in favor of agricultural Lamarckianism. He manipulated the scientific method in order it fit into Soviet communist ideology. Political ideology dictated his agricultural methods, with disastrous results that lingered for decades. German race theorists were bright people, but they were committed to a “science” of race glorifying Aryans and denigrating the rest of humanity. We all know how those race theorists’ ideas turned out. Today’s global warmists are not stupid people, but they go beyond the limits of scientific method, endorsing instead what is basically deluded apocalyptic prophecy.
Chairman Mao Zedong’s idea to have citizens smelt iron in their backyards was ineffably stupid, but he himself was a cunning and savvy manipulator who got appalling things done with remarkable efficiency.
It is not hard to find examples of how things have gone wrong because of bad ideas now in ascendency in Washington. A complete list would fill a book, but a random list could include the incompetence of the ObamaCare website and the ACA in general; the incredible expense of trafficking alien children around the U.S. versus the cost of returning them to their own villages; the nonstop printing of trillions and trillions of dollars; the appalling waste and improper payments in Medicare and Medicaid; the corruption of the Food Stamp program and the misuse of the Social Security disabilities program.
The competence to wreak havoc extends to whole nations, which can be completely run into the ground because defective ideology is effectively employed by a bunch of zealous, bright people who are wholeheartedly committed to bad ideas.
As Panos Mourdoukoutas noted in Forbes magazine, recent economic troubles in Greece have been due almost solely to bad ideas put into practice by competent ideologues whose business model very effectively produced economic and societal catastrophe:
When disaster producing ideas are the foundation stones of governance, no amount of finagling with business models; no new techniques or innovative means to improve efficiency; no new five-year planning commissions; no new agencies created to examine the problems of government will ever succeed in improving those governments, state and federal, as life-killing ideas have no ability whatever to enable society to flourish. As long as our leadership is committed to outdated, disproven and ruinous ideologies, the results will be the same as they have been wherever leftist ideals have been promoted and implemented: cataclysmic failure, both economic and societal.
But with the right ideas put into effect, a country’s turnaround can be rapid. As Mourdoukoutas writes:
But the American miracle that is our constitutional republic, along with the gifts it has imparted to the whole world, will not be revived and nursed back to health unless the incompetent ideology of the Left is firmly renounced across the board, both in faith and practice. Leftist ideology is an American political heresy that has no real roots in our history, no consonance with the independence-loving American character, no resonance with American’s highest ideals and therefore no real place in our society.
In the final analysis, one must place a moral judgment on leftist ideology and its deleterious results.
At every turn, leftist ideology has been proved incompetent in producing a flourishing society. It has always produced disaster. Always. There is not one exception in all the Left’s brutal, inglorious and destructive history.
In the end, the goal of government is to contribute to life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness of every citizen. Unless government is committed to and driven by ideals that support those goals, it is not just useless. It is not merely incompetent. It is corrupt and tyrannical.
There is still enough life and enough good in our republic of the United States to return to and to affirm the principles that make us the greatest nation on earth.
The only question is whether or not we will do so.
Kevin Wade is the Delaware’s Republican candidate for the US senate. He may be reached at klw@wadefordelaware.com Fay Voshell is a frequent contributor to American Thinker and other online publications. She may be reached at fvoshell@yahoo.com
American Thinker
August 31, 2014
Competence is the ability to get things done. The word itself has no particular value judgment attached to it.
Many perfectly intelligent people have been labeled “incompetent,” particularly by conservatives, when actually they are or have been quite competent -- at achieving disasters. We have such a person sitting in the White House -- quite intelligent, but committed to disastrous ideology. Our present administration is not incompetent in the way its officials go about achieving their goals, using as they do the incredible powers of bureaucracy and executive orders to bypass Congress and override the Constitution. They are perfectly competent in promoting and putting their toxically incompetent leftist ideology into effect.
To put it another way, people who are competent at creating disasters are not necessarily dimwitted, though some are. The problem is not their stupidity. The problem is that their core ideas about how the world works are wrong. If their basic ideas are wrong, everything else goes wrong.
History abounds with cases of bright people who have been zealously committed to wrong ideas they were expert in putting into action.
Trofim Lysenko was an intelligent Russian peasant who rejected Mendelian genetics in favor of agricultural Lamarckianism. He manipulated the scientific method in order it fit into Soviet communist ideology. Political ideology dictated his agricultural methods, with disastrous results that lingered for decades. German race theorists were bright people, but they were committed to a “science” of race glorifying Aryans and denigrating the rest of humanity. We all know how those race theorists’ ideas turned out. Today’s global warmists are not stupid people, but they go beyond the limits of scientific method, endorsing instead what is basically deluded apocalyptic prophecy.
Chairman Mao Zedong’s idea to have citizens smelt iron in their backyards was ineffably stupid, but he himself was a cunning and savvy manipulator who got appalling things done with remarkable efficiency.
It is not hard to find examples of how things have gone wrong because of bad ideas now in ascendency in Washington. A complete list would fill a book, but a random list could include the incompetence of the ObamaCare website and the ACA in general; the incredible expense of trafficking alien children around the U.S. versus the cost of returning them to their own villages; the nonstop printing of trillions and trillions of dollars; the appalling waste and improper payments in Medicare and Medicaid; the corruption of the Food Stamp program and the misuse of the Social Security disabilities program.
The competence to wreak havoc extends to whole nations, which can be completely run into the ground because defective ideology is effectively employed by a bunch of zealous, bright people who are wholeheartedly committed to bad ideas.
As Panos Mourdoukoutas noted in Forbes magazine, recent economic troubles in Greece have been due almost solely to bad ideas put into practice by competent ideologues whose business model very effectively produced economic and societal catastrophe:
“For years, Greece had the wrong business model -- A Semi-Soviet, semi-Latin model that was backwards -- it applied markets and governments in areas of the economy where each institution fails rather than excels. This resulted in a large and corrupt government that lacked the resources to finance its multiple roles in the economy.
With the former Soviet Union as a model, the Greek economy was subject to the excessively intrusive presence of government in the business and professional lives of citizens, directly controlling more than 50% of the economy. Government was active in the pension fund industry, as manager of employer-employee contributions, deciding who would retire, when their retirement would happen, and what pension they would receive.
Government was present in commodity markets, as regulator and gatekeeper, deciding who could be in what kind of business and for how long; and in labor markets, setting labor compensation and employment standards.”The core incompetency that afflicted Greece and that is now afflicting our own country is leftist ideology, including leftist economic policy.
When disaster producing ideas are the foundation stones of governance, no amount of finagling with business models; no new techniques or innovative means to improve efficiency; no new five-year planning commissions; no new agencies created to examine the problems of government will ever succeed in improving those governments, state and federal, as life-killing ideas have no ability whatever to enable society to flourish. As long as our leadership is committed to outdated, disproven and ruinous ideologies, the results will be the same as they have been wherever leftist ideals have been promoted and implemented: cataclysmic failure, both economic and societal.
But with the right ideas put into effect, a country’s turnaround can be rapid. As Mourdoukoutas writes:
“But now, in the aftermath of the most recent crisis, the Greek economic model has begun to change. The country seems to have gotten its economic model right: the size of government has been reduced, state-owned enterprises have been privatized, transparency is improving, and calm is returning to the streets of major cities.
Result? Government deficits are turning into surpluses, exports and tourism are soaring, shipping leads the world, and real GDP is turning the corner. Slowly, Greece is rebuilding its brand image.
Simply put: Greece is headed in the right direction, applying the right institutions in the right sectors, releasing the ingenuity and creativity of its people.”What is happening in Greece can happen here. It has happened here. In many respects, it started here.
But the American miracle that is our constitutional republic, along with the gifts it has imparted to the whole world, will not be revived and nursed back to health unless the incompetent ideology of the Left is firmly renounced across the board, both in faith and practice. Leftist ideology is an American political heresy that has no real roots in our history, no consonance with the independence-loving American character, no resonance with American’s highest ideals and therefore no real place in our society.
In the final analysis, one must place a moral judgment on leftist ideology and its deleterious results.
At every turn, leftist ideology has been proved incompetent in producing a flourishing society. It has always produced disaster. Always. There is not one exception in all the Left’s brutal, inglorious and destructive history.
In the end, the goal of government is to contribute to life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness of every citizen. Unless government is committed to and driven by ideals that support those goals, it is not just useless. It is not merely incompetent. It is corrupt and tyrannical.
There is still enough life and enough good in our republic of the United States to return to and to affirm the principles that make us the greatest nation on earth.
The only question is whether or not we will do so.
Kevin Wade is the Delaware’s Republican candidate for the US senate. He may be reached at klw@wadefordelaware.com Fay Voshell is a frequent contributor to American Thinker and other online publications. She may be reached at fvoshell@yahoo.com
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