Friday, October 31, 2008

From The; “I No Theeenk That Mean What You Theeenk It Mean” Department...








FROM Ace; “MSM Claims 2008 Will See the Lowest Arctic Ice Cover In History; Arctic Might Actually Be Clear of All Ice!!!”

Actual Empirical Evidence: 2008 Arctic Ice Cover More than 25% Greater than 2007!

http://ace.mu.nu/archives/275808.php#275808



OK, I get it, by “the lowest Arctic ice covering ever” they mean “25% greater than 2007’s” AND BY the Arctic might be clear of all ice,” they mean, “the Arctic will have one its deepest ice coverings ever.” Makes perfect sense, when you put it that way.

I get it, “Ix Nay on the Tic-Arc-re.”


H/T Ace of Spades HQ
.
.
UPDATE: From the Nature Conservancy's own Webpage; "Only 18 percent of survey respondents strongly believe that climate change is real, human-caused and harmful." So, global warming skeptics are the MAJORITY and not a minority.

Stockholm Syndrome Takes Hold Throughout The West








In a recent article, the London Times outlined how some jihadist terrorists were encrypting messages into child porn sites.

In part, the article reads, “Images of child abuse have been found during Scotland Yard antiterrorism swoops and in big inquiries in Italy and Spain.

“Secret coded messages are being embedded into child pornographic images, and pedophile websites are being exploited as a secure way of passing information between terrorists.”

The entire article can be referenced at; http://www.timesonline.co.uk/tol/news/uk/crime/article4959002.ece


An interesting enough article, in and of itself, but even more interesting to me, were the responses of the readers (almost all Westerners, almost all from America and the UK). A full 90% of the responses found the basis of the article offensive, bordering on racist and objected, not to the actions of the alleged jihadists, but those of the authorities, in sliming Muslims by insinuating that any good Muslim would stoop to looking at child pornography.

One respondent said, “Surely if they didn’t want to draw attention to themselves if they are passing information they would not use child pornography but something far less innocent, something not quite right with this story in my mind.”

REALLY?

Based on what logic?

That’s very much like the argument that goes, “Violent criminals are motivated by NEED,” that is “poverty is the primary motivator of violent crime.”

That’s been proven NOT SO!

In New York City (NYC), Bill Bratton showed that violent crime was motivated out of a desire for “power over others,” NOT out of any “NEED.”

Same here, pedophilia websites are so anathema to most people that they are, in fact, a perfect haven for terrorists and other such organized thugs.

I know it’s difficult for average citizens to think like thugs, BUT that shouldn’t lead to an anthropomorphizing, or humanizing of those thugs.

Suffice to say, violent predators are not like average people, they don’t think like average people, which is why they generally don’t act like average people.

Moreover, pedophilia websites are NOT places such people would either be more prone to detection OR places they’d shy away from.

The argument that “No devout Muslim would...” is absolutely without merit. The 9/11 hijackers spent the nights before committing their atrocities drinking at strip clubs!

Look, these goons are no more “good Muslims,” than they are “good people,” which it to say they are NEITHER!

The fact is that porn networks allow you to send whatever you want through them, including encrypted messages. Trying to encrypt messages through more innocuous images via Google or Facebook would be blocked by the many filters on those types of sites.

It’s hard for average, non-predatory, non-zealots to put themselves in the shoes of actual predators and fanatics, so it’s understandable that they would, in effect, “anthropomorphize” or humanize this kind of evil – muggers must be motivated out of a desperate need of money, terrorists must be highly emotionally disturbed or feel incredibly violated and victimized, etc..

Unfortunately, this kind of humanizing is not only grossly misinformed and wrong-headed, it’s potentially destructive as it really ultimately serves to rationalize the hideous actions of such barbarous people.

It must be nice to believe that inside every “so-called evil person” is a good one looking to get out, but the reality is that there are indeed EVIL people. The dirty little secret is that Ted Bundy, Mohammed Atta, Eric Rudolph and Abu Abbas are not all that rare...at least not nearly so rare as most of us would like to think.
.
.
H/T Pela at Gummihund - http://www.gummihund.blogspot.com/

Why Do Liberals Attack the Working People they Claim to Champion?








In my view, one of the best articles on what’s currently going on politically in the U.S. today was written by Darcy at DustMyBroom.

In August, the MSM and the Left-wing of the Democratic Party assailed Sarah Palin in the most vile way – sliming over her daughter’s teen pregnancy, insinuating that she may be her youngest (Downs Syndrome) child’s grandmother, etc.

The vicious attacks only ceased when Palin’s favorability ratings skyrocketed in the wake of those attacks and the lackluster McCain campaign began to near double digit lead in the polls.

Earlier this month, the same culprits gleefully sought to destroy yet another real working American, Joe (the plumber) Wurzelbacher for the crime of daring to ask a question that the Obama camp didn’t like.

Darcy’s piece goes a long way toward explaining why the Left goes after so many regular working people.


The War Against Joe the Plumber and Beyond

By Darcy at DustMyBroom
Tuesday, 28 October 2008
http://dustmybroom.com/content/view/5837/


One of the villains was a Koolak, and what a monster he was - fat, lazy, gluttonous, brutal, as scummy a creature as ever trod this earth. Of course in real life one hardly finds such creatures, not even in Russia. The Koolak may at times have been cruel in his treament of the poorer peasants, but he was never the fat, lazy, gluttonous monster that Eisenstein depicts him... In real life the Koolack was among the hardest-working, the thriftiest and most progressive farmers in the village... He was a prodigious indefatigable worker. - Marus Hindus describing a propaganda film by Russian revolutionary communist Sergei Mikhailovich Eisenstein in 1933.

Koolack refers to Kulak and the term gained popularity during Joseph Stalin's dekulakizatation and collectivism campaign from 1929-1932 where the Russian government tried to wipe out the middle class which resulted in the deaths of millions. In many cases those with just a couple of more cows then their neighbours were targeted as kulaks and were rounded up and sent off to the Gulag or were just shot.

I've read of a number of cases where once kulak communities were reformed up somewhere in 'special settlements' they worked hard enough that they had to be dekulakized again. Stalin's class war lead to the liquidation of the most efficient workers in the country. Various propaganda efforts were used to dehumanize the kulak as bloodsuckers and as parasites with no souls. In today's politics of envy we would probably just call them fat cats...


Please read the rest at; http://dustmybroom.com/content/view/5837/


What's really almost as astounding as it is pathetic is the way so many working class folks identify with the Left-wing. As Darcy notes, "Those in the lower classes standing steadfastly behind the campaign haven't figured out that this 'modern communist revolutionary' is in fact coming for them next."

Thursday, October 30, 2008

Catholicism, Christianity and Halloween











The Roman Catholic Church was faced, early on, with the daunting task of trying to convert a continent of pagan Barbarian tribes and get the converted to accept the new Church’s Holidays.

The pagans of Europe had long marked their celebrations around the changing seasons, thus the Vernal (Spring) Equinox, the Autumnal Equinox (Fall) and the Winter and Summer Solstices marked the major pagan celebrations.

In an accommodation with these tribes, the Roman Catholic Church sought to meld its own Holy Days with the pagan celebrations to make it easier for the pagans to accept Catholicism.

In that regard, Christ’s birth was moved from what scholars believed to be September to the Winter Solstice, when the days grew longer and the “Sun was risen.”

Easter was melded into the Vernal Equinox celebrations, but that still left one of the most highly celebrated pagan feasts “the Final Harvest,” disconnected from the Roman Catholic Church’s Holy Days.

Halloween's origins date back to the ancient Celtic festival of Samhain (pronounced sow-in) – Celtic for “Summer’s End.”

Pope Gregory III was the first Roman Catholic Pope to try and meld this pagan celebration with the Catholic Church’s traditions. In the 8th Century Pope Gregory III started the Feast of All Hallows Day, a day in which all the Saints, known and unknown, were honored, later this came to be “All Hallows Eve” and later still, “All Saint’s Day.”

The Celts, who lived over 2,000 years ago, in the areas that are now the United Kingdom and northern France, celebrated their New Year on November 1st. This day marked the end of summer with the final harvest and marked the beginning of the dark, cold winter, a time of year that was often associated with death.

The Celts believed that on the night before the New Year, the boundary between the worlds of the living and the dead overlapped. On the night of October 31, they celebrated Samhain, a night when it was believed that the spirits of the dead returned to earth.

These spirits could be benign or troublesome, either blessing/protecting homes or bringing death or future damaging crops. The Celts believed that the presence of the spirits of the dead made it easier for the Druids, or Celtic priests, to make predictions about the future. For a people, like the Celts, entirely dependent on the volatile natural world, these prophecies were an important source of comfort and direction during the long, dark winter.

To commemorate the event, Druids built huge sacred bonfires, where the people gathered to burn crops and animals as sacrifices to the Celtic deities.

During the celebration, the Celts wore costumes, typically consisting of animal heads and skins, and attempted to tell each other's fortunes. When the celebration was over, they re-lit their hearth fires, which they had extinguished earlier that evening, from the sacred bonfire to help protect them during the coming winter.

By 43 A.D., the Romans had conquered the majority of Celtic territory. In the course of the four hundred years that they ruled the Celtic lands, two festivals of Roman origin were combined with the traditional Celtic celebration of Samhain.

The first was Feralia, a day in late October when the Romans traditionally commemorated the passing of the dead.

The second was a day to honor Pomona, the Roman goddess of fruit and trees. The symbol of Pomona is the apple and the incorporation of this celebration into Samhain may explain how the tradition of "bobbing" for apples became associated with Halloween.

By the 800s, the influence of Christianity had spread into Celtic lands. In the seventh century, Pope Boniface IV designated November 1 All Saints' Day, a time to honor saints and martyrs. It is widely believed today that the Pope was attempting to replace the Celtic festival of the dead with a related, but Church-sanctioned Holy Day. The celebration was also called All-Hallows or All-Hallowmas (from Middle English Alholowmesse meaning All Saints' Day) and the night before it, the night of Samhain, began to be called All-hallows Eve and, eventually, Halloween.

By 1,000 A.D., the Roman Catholic Church made November 2 All Souls' Day - a day designated to honor the dead. All Souls Day was celebrated similarly to Samhain, with big bonfires, parades, and dressing up in costumes as saints, angels, and devils. Together, the three celebrations, the Eve of All Saints', All Saints', and All Souls', were called Hallowmas, which became Halloween.
.
In transforming pagan Europe the Roman Catholic Church transformed itself and Christianity, as well.
.
.
Happy Halloween!

Wednesday, October 29, 2008

Could this be prophetic?...




















.
SNL did this great “Road to the White House” spoof on Senator Biden's and Rep. Murtha’s latest gaffes. Ironically enough, the two major gaffes here, may have already had consequences that are only beginning to show up in the polls.

The video is at: http://www.nbc.com/Saturday_Night_Live/video/clips/road-to-the-white-house/787141/?dst=nbcwidgetNBC%20Video&__source=nbcwidgetNBC%20Video it's worth a look, if you haven't seen it - VERY funny.


Meanwhile, Michelle Malkin reports;

Breaking: New poll shows Russell over Murtha, 48-35

By Michelle Malkin
October 23, 2008
http://michellemalkin.com/2008/10/23/breaking-new-poll-shows-russell-over-murtha-48-35/


A Pennsylvania source has just leaked me brand spanking new poll data showing GOP upstart Bill Russell leading John Murtha among over 800 probable voters by 48-35.

This comes on top of the Susquehanna poll showing Murtha ahead of Russell by 4 points, within the margin of error.

The new poll is from Dane and Associates, which surveyed over 800 probable voters, randomly selected to reflect the district makeup, on Wednesday night.

The new poll shows that 381 of the 800 (47.6%) respondents favor Russell, while 279 (34.8%) support Murtha, with 141 (17.6%) undecided.



AND according to Rasmussen:

In Pennsylvania, John McCain has pulled back within single digits of Barack Obama.

The latest Rasmussen Reports telephone survey of voters in the state shows Obama with 53% of the vote while McCain picks up 46%. That seven-point margin is half the 13-point advantage Obama enjoyed early in October.

Not coincidentally, Obama’s current lead is matched by a seven-point advantage on the question of which candidate is trusted more on the economy.

However, while McCain has closed the gap, virtually all the movement comes from an increase in his support rather than a loss of support for Obama.


http://www.rasmussenreports.com/public_content/politics/election_20082/2008_presidential_election/pennsylvania/election_2008_pennsylvania_presidential_election2


So, is it possible that Murtha’s happily calling his constituents “racists” and “rednecks” is going to cost him his seat to a Marine, Iraqi vet, William Russell and, in the process, swing the tightening PA contest to McCain?

We can only hope.....We’ll see soon enough.

Tuesday, October 28, 2008

Penn and Teller return to comment on Barack Obama's tax plan

WoW!

Penn and Teller really nail the Obama tax plan - and they're RIGHT!

This debate sequence had to be one of Obama's worst moments, but if he follows these policies, there will be many, MANY more to come!

H/T P-Mac

Spreading the Wealth...


















.
A humorous anecdote from P-Mac via email:
.

.
"Today on my way to lunch I passed a homeless guy with a sign that read "Vote Obama, I need the money." I laughed.Once in the restaurant my server had on a "Obama 08" tie, again I laughed as he had given away his political preference--just imagine the coincidence.
.
"When the bill came I decided not to tip the server and explained to him that I was exploring the Obama redistribution of wealth concept.
.
"He stood there in disbelief while I told him that I was going to redistribute his tip to someone who I deemed more in need — the homeless guy outside. The server angrily stormed from my sight.
.
"I went outside, gave the homeless guy $10 and told him to thank the server inside as I've decided he could use the money more. The homeless guy was grateful.
.
"At the end of my rather unscientific redistribution experiment I realized the homeless guy was grateful for the money he did not earn, but the waiter was pretty angry that I gave away the money he did earn even though the actual recipient needed money more.
.
"I guess redistribution of wealth is an easier thing to swallow in concept than in practical application."
.
H/T to P-Mac

Obama WBEZ FM Interview Indicates he Supports Redistribution of Wealth

FROM: http://www.stoptheaclu.com/

If you look at the victories and failures of the civil rights movement and its litigation strategy in the court. I think where it succeeded was to invest formal rights in previously dispossessed people, so that now I would have the right to vote. I would now be able to sit at the lunch counter and order as long as I could pay for it I’d be o.k. But, the Supreme Court never ventured into the issues of redistribution of wealth, and of more basic issues such as political and economic justice in society. To that extent, as radical as I think people try to characterize the Warren Court, it wasn’t that radical. It didn’t break free from the essential constraints that were placed by the founding fathers in the Constitution, at least as its been interpreted and Warren Court interpreted in the same way, that generally the Constitution is a charter of negative liberties.

Says what the states can’t do to you. Says what the Federal government can’t do to you, but doesn’t say what the Federal government or State government must do on your behalf, and that hasn’t shifted and one of the, I think, tragedies of the civil rights movement was, um, because the civil rights movement became so court focused I think there was a tendancy to lose track of the political and community organizing and activities on the ground that are able to put together the actual coalition of powers through which you bring about redistributive change. In some ways we still suffer from that.

As some have rightly pointed out, Barack Obama is actually saying that the courts were the wrong venue to seek such change, not being "radical" enough, and that "community organizing" and assembling "coalitions of power" were the right ways to do so.

Misery Indexes Across the Globe



















.
.
.
Arthur Okun’s Misery Index (the unemployment rate and the inflation rate, added together) remains one of the best “economic snapshots” for measuring how an economy is doing.

Looking at Misery Indexes across the globe, there are quite a few surprises. For instance, America’s most recent full year (2007) Misery Index (7.5) was significantly LOWER than two of Europe’s more Keynesian “paradises,” Sweden and France!

For 2007 Sweden’s Misery Index was 8.3 (with an unemployment rate of 6.1% and an inflation rate of 2.2%) and France’s was 9.4 with an estimated unemployment rate of 7.9% and an inflation rate of 1.5%

For the same year, the United States; Misery Index was 7.5 with a 4.6% unemployment rate and a 2.9% inflation rate.

Moreover, individual nation’s Misery Indexes can tell us a lot about how well certain kinds of economies perform.

For instance, Hong Kong, long regarded as one of the closest economies to a free market (though it remains a lightly regulated market-based economy) had a 6.0 Misery Index with an estimated 4% unemployment rate and 2% inflation rate!

By comparison, Venezuela (one of the nation’s closest to being truly socialist) had a Misery Index of 27.2, with an 8.5% unemployment rate and an astounding 18.7% inflation rate.

Liberals in the United States support more Keynesian policies and we’ve embarked on a return to the Keynesian policies we had in the 1970s, since the 2007 Pelosi-Reid takeover of Congress. The current Democratic nominee (Barack Obama) promises even MORE.

Conservatives (both Democrat and Republican) support more Supply Side policies, the kind most evident today in Hong Kong, while far-Left Liberals who’ve long lauded Sweden and France, though increasingly less so, as those nations have moved away from some of their most Left-wing policies, now often laud Venezuela, which is trying to move beyond mere Keynesian hyper-regulation, to outright socialism.

The simple question to ask is, “Which country would you rather live in, Hong Kong, with its relatively tiny Misery Index of 6.0 OR Venezuela, with its staggering 27.2?”

This year, choosing your Party in America, may go a long way toward choosing your Misery Index, as well.

.
.
Pictured above Hong Kong's Prime Minister Wen Jiabao and Venezuela's President Hugo Chavez

Sunday, October 26, 2008

Bill Shatner On Guns...

This one's for Barry Johnson, over at Cynical Nation (http://www.cynicalnation.com/). A little levity on the gun issue, which is actually about maintaining our right to self-defense.

Without the sacred and natural right to self-defense there is no such thing as self-ownership.

Is America’s Corporate Tax Rate Really Higher Than Sweden’s...and France’s???

.
Can it be TRUE?!

Well according to the accompanying chart, it certainly CAN...and is!
























.
.
https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgfztEhUwA3vBFLYnETryDDmH60NXwjjUyyTMAQOkgEhr8FjZTZg5e3qpsag2r43CpBB861jZUF0YFz3BVoj2RN2ssmFs16eg5ex6_qmhhkBkAjVvL3RmjkvyRk7HoF-rLZ_Bdnc5T7WjI/s1600-h/corp+taxes.jpg


France comes in with a combined or total Corporate Tax rate of 34.43%, Sweden’s is 28%! America's is very nearly 40% (39.25), one of the highest in the industrialized world.

Of course, Ireland’s economy is booming due to one of the world’s lowest Corporate Tax rates (12.5%)!

Here’s a “sort of” trick question for you, “Who pays the Corporate Income tax?”

Hint; This is NOT a “Who’s buried in Grant’s tomb” type question.

The answer is WE all do (you and I).

The misnamed “Corporate Tax" is actually a stealth sales tax.

How so?

Because ALL of the various and sundry “costs of doing business,” from the cost of materials, labor costs, packaging and delivery costs AND, of course, TAXES are all passed on to us, as consumers, because business’s income or intake MUST ALWAYS outpace it’s various OUTPUTS (ie. costs like payroll, materials and TAXES), or that business won’t remain in-business for very long.

So, there you go, WE pay the “Corporate Tax,” in the form of increased costs of the goods and services we purchase.

So, is it clearer now, that those misguided folks who “hate business” and claim “businesses doesn’t pay their fair share of the taxes,” are really misanthropes who really hate their fellow man and want their neighbors to pay MORE for the things they buy?!

Maybe if our Corporate tax rate was as low as Ireland’s, maybe more businesses would relocate HERE! If it did, then that lowered tax rate would almost certainly result in INCREASES corporate tax revenues.

And maybe the things we buy would be cheaper too!
.
H/T Captain Capitalism!
.
http://captaincapitalism.blogspot.com/2008/10/dumbass-liberals.html#comments

The Lamp of Liberty







Some say that “Once the lamp of Liberty is extinguished, it can never be re-lit.”

Nothing could be further from the truth.

NOTHING!

Liberty is NOT unique. Liberty is not rare and Liberty is certainly not singular.

Liberty is the Sun/Son, the LIGHT, the TRUTH and the WAY.

Liberty does not cooperate, it competes.

Liberty doesn’t cajole, it corrects.

Liberty steels the heart and forges the soul.

Liberty burns within the heart of every human being from peasant to King.

Liberty cannot be stifled.

If it is suppressed in one place it emerges to rage even hotter in others.

Liberty is rarely kind.

Liberty is never merciful.

And Liberty is certainly not sweet.

Liberty is a force of nature, a part of the natural law.

You will learn, it will teach you.

When man claims, “I am outside of and above nature, so I must control nature,” nature and the natural law hammer him back into reality.

Liberty is true freedom – self ownership.

Liberty is NOT doing what we like, but what we have to.

Liberty IS the grinding personal responsibility that comes with self-ownership.


There is only day or night, there is only A or B, and there is only Liberty or Slavery. Either you own yourself or someone or some entity (government) owns you.

In 1776 only 12% of Americans supported the “Revolution,” which was really a “rebellion against the Crown.”

Tory detractors derided the Liberty that America’s Founders based their governing model on as, “A system rooted in the worst thing Aristotle warned about, one in which, the strong take advantage of the weak and the smart take advantage of the strong, and in which the clever manipulate the smart, to take advantage of all.”

That is still the primary lament heard from book-bright people who are unable to innovate, adapt and prosper in clever ways, as opposed to many businessmen who are gifted (clever) in business, but with little respect for or aptitude in academics.

Still, it is THAT very system that produces the most innovation, the most productivity and the most prosperity for the most people.

People can be enslaved and abused by tyrants, but Liberty is like water, it ALWAYS finds a way to the surface.

The lamp of Liberty SHOULD NOT be allowed to go out, but if it does, those who respect it should take heart that it is, in its essence, the way of the world.

Ayers' JOKE About Killing 25 MILLION Americans....It Wasn't a JOKE!

Here's a video of FBI informant Larry Grathwol describing how William Ayers and other Weather Underground leaders gleefully planned to deliver the United States to foreign occupation, and, in the aftermath, planned on murdering at least 25 million Americans.

Grathwohl: "I brought up the subject of what’s going to happen after we take over the government. You know, we become responsible for administrating, you know, 250 million people. And there was no answer. No one had given any thought to economics. How are you going to clothe and feed these people? The only thing that I could get was that they expected that the Cubans, the North Vietnamese, the Chinese and the Russians would all want to occupy different portions of the United States. They also believed that their immediate responsibility would be to protect against what they called the counter-revolution. And they felt that this counter-revolution could best be guarded against by creating and establishing re-education in the Southwest where we would take all of the people who needed to be re educated into the new way of thinking and teach them how things were going to be. I asked, “Well, what is going to happen to those people that we can’t re educate, that are die-hard capitalists?” And the reply was that they’d have to be eliminated and when I pursued this further, they estimated that they’d have to eliminate 25 million people in these re education centers. And when I say eliminate, I mean kill 25 million people."

THAT'S the heart and soul of Bill Ayers.

Very similar, it seems, to another death-cultist Leftist who said, "We are socialists, we are enemies of today's capitalistic economic system for the exploitation of the economically weak, with its unfair salaries, with its unseemly evaluation of a human being according to wealth and property instead of responsibility and performance, and we are all determined to destroy this system under all conditions," some thirty years before Ayers embraced Leftism and the death cult.

Yes that “other” death-cult Leftist was Adolf Hitler (Speech of May 1, 1927. Quoted by Toland, 1976)

The ONLY difference between the two sentiments is that Hitler expressed his with a bit more eloquence, which is not only sad, but pathetic.

Saturday, October 25, 2008

Barack Obama’s Odd Racial Identity







I came across a very interesting article by David Samuels in The New Republic (TNR). It was primarily a glowing endorsement of Obama, but it strove to give some life-style context to some of what drives the very driven Barack Obama.

In his autobiography (Dreams of My Father) you get a very different sense of Barack Obama’s racial dynamic, than what’s been delivered by the MSM.Writing in The New Republic, David Samuels notes;


“It is one of the outstanding ironies of Obama’s story that his political rise has been fueled by a tactical grasp of the same racial logic that condemned Ellison’s invisible man to living in a basement by himself. The blank screen approach that Obama has embraced works well in a moment dominated by the collapse of Wall Street and the Iraq war, issues for which all possible solutions seem unpalatable; what voters want is to feel that things will change, without too much uncomfortable detail about what will actually happen. The fact that the candidate does not make the usual appeal to the authenticity of his personal story makes the usual attacks on him seem nonsensical, regardless of whether or not they are true, a fact that the Clintons lamented during the primary season and John McCain will find equally frustrating during the general election. Crazy right-wing charges that Obama shares the loonier opinions of Dr. Wright or that he is a secret Muslim blend seamlessly into reports of his calls for immediately beginning the withdrawal of U.S. troops from Iraq or his promise to sit down with the leaders of Iran and North Korea without preconditions, or the fact that he began his political career at Bill Ayers’s house in Chicago, or that his financial backer Tony Rezko was a scummy slumlord who paid for the Obamas to have a new backyard. None of it sticks, because Obama is not that kind of candidate. The campaign uses the Ellisonian condition of invisibility to its advantage while also exerting a powerful form of mental jujitsu on guilty white liberals, a species that Obama knows well: Attacks on the candidate are simply projections of the (racist) mentality of his accusers. As they erase the weirder and more specific points of his sensibility in a blizzard of superlatives, whites create an image of a black superman as a kind of photo-negative image of liberal guilt. ...
.
“In a scene (in Dreams of My Father) that owes an obvious debt to Ellison’s famous Battle Royal, in which two black boys are made to fight each other in a boxing ring, the narrator is taken out into the backyard of his Indonesian stepfather Lolo Soetoro’s small house in Jakarta and is made to put on gloves and fight. “The world was violent, I was learning, unpredictable, and often cruel,” he saw. “My grandparents knew nothing about such a world, I decided; there was no point in disturbing them.” Emboldened, Obama asks his stepfather if he ever saw anyone killed, and Lolo says yes.
.
“Why was the man killed? The one you saw?” the young Obama asks.
.
“Because he was weak,” Lolo answers, instructing his half-American, half-Kenyan stepson in the age-old logic of the world outside sunny Hawaii. Obama’s version of the scene ends with a searing recognition that the white part of his family lives in a fantasy world in which the need to learn such ugly lessons simply does not exist.
.
While Obama’s Third World-ism carries with it a certain assumption of American historical guilt, it should not be confused with the cult of victimization that is still popular on college campuses. Obama identifies with his father, Lolo, and other post-colonial men because they are strong. Dark-skinned men can understand power in a way that white men like his grandfather can’t. If you are not strong, Lolo continues, “be clever and make peace with someone who is strong. But always better to be strong yourself. Always.”
.
The most outstanding characteristic of the portrait that Obama draws of his white mother, who also serves as a stand-in for white liberal readers of his book, is her hatred for power — a characteristic that her son finds naive and contemptible. “Power. The word fixed in my mother’s mind like a curse,” Obama wrote, of his mother’s response to the inequities of Indonesian society. “Guilt is a luxury that only foreigners can afford,” her husband Lolo responds. “Like saying whatever pops into your head.” What is notable about this and other passages in Dreams from My Father is the extent to which Obama’s identifies with the verbal slap and with its speaker, rather than with his mother, a girlish and naive white American liberal. White Americans like his mother and his grandfather are unsuitable sources for the author’s evolving subjectivity because they are blinded by the privileges of their race to the realities of power.
.
Obama understands the white liberal American distaste for power as a symptom of white privilege, and he is certainly right. Yet it is hard not to be haunted by the feeling that Obama’s admiration for dark-skinned strength is the mirror image of his personal feelings of weakness and inauthenticity, and that the personality that he has cobbled together out of the historical experience of other men in other time.

...Obama has impaled himself on the horns of a painful dilemma. While the identity that he constructed for himself in his autobiography has allowed him to blossom as a man and as a politician, it bears little resemblance to the conventional narratives of white men who run for president—and contains elements that are likely to frighten off large portions of the electorate, before or after November 4. The story of a man who identifies with a foreign father, and with people who are not Americans, and who does so on the basis of the color of their skin, flies in the face of the simplistic racial pieties that white Americans have embraced since the end of Jim Crow. The identity that Obama so painstakingly created for himself is not one that he can share with the electorate, and so the price of his political success is that he is forced to sublimate the material he had so painfully excavated and again become invisible. His image-makers create new stories about the candidate, which ring false and drain his marvelous abilities as a writer, a speaker, and a leader.



Now, David Samuels piece was actually very pro-Obama, in FACT, I happen to agree (as do many Conservatives) with Obama’s assessment of the sickening Liberal softness/weakness in our midst, seeing it as a “cancer of the West.”
.
In that way I agree completely with Samuels’ assessment that, “The most outstanding characteristic of the portrait that Obama draws of his white mother, who also serves as a stand-in for white liberal readers of his book, is her hatred for power — a characteristic that her son finds naive and contemptible. “Power. The word fixed in my mother’s mind like a curse,” Obama wrote, of his mother’s response to the inequities of Indonesian society. “Guilt is a luxury that only (soft, weak Liberals) foreigners can afford,” her husband Lolo responds. “Like saying whatever pops into your head.” What is notable about this and other passages in Dreams from My Father is the extent to which Barack Obama identifies with the verbal slap and with its speaker, rather than with his mother, a girlish and naive white American liberal.
.
"White Americans like his mother and his grandfather are unsuitable sources for the author’s evolving subjectivity because they are blinded by the privileges of their race to the realities of power.”

<
<
That pretty much defines the great chasm that currently exists between Conservatives and Liberals in America, as well.
.
I don’t believe that most Liberals understand the revulsion bordering on hatred that Conservatives hold them in...I KNOW that Liberals hate Conservatives, but what do I care about the feelings of people too soft and weak to really follow through on them?Liberals should be very concerned about what Conservatives feel about them. For me, I really see virtually no difference between a far-Left Liberal (a Franken, a Moore, and their ardent followers) and jihadists, EXCEPT that the jihadist will actually ACT more decisively and are aware that they will be engaged violently. Both are equally dangerous and destructive, in my view.

A Difference of Perception....






It is always fascinating how differently Liberals and Conservatives view the same things.

Take the video I posted awhile back at
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=onXd8iH3OVQ – while most Conservatives found it troubling, many Liberals found it merely heart-warming.

One woman said, "I did not find this video scary AT ALL. Black youth of America inspired to be all they can be - what is wrong with that!"

Well, I HAD to respond to that and said, “That's NOT what that video is about....kids (black or white) "inspired to be all they can be."
.
"Because of Obama," is NOT "inspiration," it's "adoration" and sublimating your own goals and desires to another mere human being.
.
It's the difference between LIBERTY (the knowledge that your rights are innate, or inborn and derive from God NOT government) and the LICENSE (the view that all our rights and all good things spring from government - a human institution that Thomas Paine called "the human sewer").
.
License ("doing whatever we'd like, so long as we don't harm anyone else") did not build America's prosperity - Liberty ("the grinding burden of complete self-responsibility") did.
.
To me, the video is disturbing because it is Stalinesque/Hitleresque in its "appeal to the man."
.
I've had a number of people inspire me throughout my life and yet I attribute NONE of my aspirations (nor the achieving of them, or not) to anyone other than myself.
.
If that "Because of Obama I aspire to be the next lawyer," kid fails to get into law school, then, at least in his mind, Barack Obama SHOULD BE to blame.
.
That is not only wrong-headed, but dangerous and it has a corollary in what's going on right now in the current campaign.
.
We are, at this point, a very spoiled nation.
.
Right now the bills of years of OVER-regulation (the Frank and Dodd re-tooled and turbo-charged Community Reinvestment Act/CRA that forced banks to make over a TRILLION DOLLARS in bad/subprime loans) are coming due and many people are looking anywhere and everywhere for someone to FIX THIS.
.
This crisis, caused as it is by government, is unlikely to be fixed by government. In fact, since regulation caused the credit crisis, MORE regulation will almost certainly only make things worse. That’s why no matter which of the current two candidates wins in November, that administration will almost certainly come to be blamed for not living up to their unrealistic promises, and BOTH have made unrealistic promises!
.
Barack Obama has, in effect, promised Americans a return to Gingrich/Clinton-era prosperity via policies closer to those of the Carter/O’Neill-era.
.
There’s no reason to expect any different results from Keynesian policies this time than those delivered earlier. In FACT, all our current problems have been exacerbated by Keynesian policies supplanting Supply Side ones – the ill-conceived “stimulus package” of last Spring and the current $700 BILLION Bailout, as examples.
.
So long as Obama and McCain are promising "to return to the prosperity of the late 1990s" they'll be loved.
.
Once one of them has to deliver and fails, that man will be despised.
.
Since May, I've said that perhaps it wouldn't be such a bad thing for an Obama win, as McCain would only serve to "share the blame" for what appears to be a coming and deepening calamity.
.
It wouldn't be the worst thing to see Obama "Carterized" and "liberal" made a dirty word for yet another generation of Americans.
.
Of course, I've seen the Supply Side policies of the past 25 years as close to the edge of over-regulation.
.
Most economists seem to agree that it's been the past two years of outright Keynesian policies have led to the current economic meltdown.”

Friday, October 24, 2008

Both a Prescient and Depressing Assessment by Henry Manne...







In my view, Henry Manne (pictured left) is sadly, but completely on the money and he doesn’t sugar-coat this at all.

We are very much entering a deepening Keynesian cycle. We’ve started this cycle, at least officially, in January of 2007.

How bad does it get?

How much economic liberty and individual freedom will we all lose?

That’s hard to say.

Especially given how naïve and gullible so many “Leftist youths” are. It seems easy to get them to embrace austerity in the name of the environment, the most ubiquitous of personal intrusions (what you can and cannot eat, how much exercise should be mandated) in the name of “health,” and they’ve been incredibly easy to get to replace individual rights with protections for terrorists and child-rapists.

The question doesn’t seem t be whether it’ll get better or worse. We KNOW it’ll get much, much worse. The only real question for those who cherish liberty is, “How much worse will it get,” and short of either some ham-handed over-reaching that even somehow alienates hordes of today’s naïve and gullible youth, or an even more massive economic crisis that can’t be blamed on market failure in a Keynesian cycle, it figures to get very bad indeed.

And Manne is right again in acknowledging that NEITHER Obama nor McCain will do much to change that. In fact, the ultimate difference between these two is minimal, at least in terms of economic liberty and individual rights.

We are entering a dark period for liberty from any conceivable perspective;



"That we are in the midst of one of the most serious financial crises in history is clear. The general causes of this economic maelstrom are now pretty well known: expansion of credit via low-interest rates by the Fed; subsidization and grotesque encouragement of inappropriate housing loans (courtesy primarily of Messrs. Dodd, Frank and Schumer and the FMs); a bad accounting call on mark-to-market by the SEC; and finally exacerbation and opaqueness engendered by financial instruments too complex to evaluate, decipher or untangle.

"Some might add government actions and regulations past and present, such as bans on short-sales or threats to close markets, that have prevented the private sector from making fast and efficient corrections. But that idea is not part of the consensus that has emerged.

"The great credit crisis of 2008 and its aftermath come as a result of a "perfect storm" of almost unrelated events. Leftist attitudes were reaching a crescendo among the ideological classes, spurred on by such disparate and often logically irrelevant notions as racism, feminism, environmentalism, global warming, a health care crisis, an unpopular war and high energy costs. The political part of the mix included a bizarre set of primary elections and unlikely final candidates, one of whom is perhaps the most liberal figure in American politics. Globalization and increasing international trade stirred up the nativists and protectionists more than usual. The inevitable market-distorting results of interest rates kept too low showed up alongside a poor man's affirmative action lending program, all of which created a bubble that had to burst eventually. And new and not well-understood financial devices and organizations were creating public confusion and mistrust.

"It was unlikely that all these influences would come to fruition at the same time, but they did. That is the nature of random events. The unlikely happens, and, almost by definition, no one is prepared for it when it does...


"...The political direction of the country is now determined for a long time to come, and it is inevitably leftward. Politicians would never resist a popular but massive demand for more government regulation (even the few with enough brainpower to recognize what is going on). The business community has never been a strong supporter of free market capitalism, and it certainly cannot be counted on to change its stance this time around. The media, the various leftist trend-setting elites and university faculties have been waiting a long time for an opportunity just like this, and we can be sure that they won't squander it. The shrillness of their attacks on free markets will reach new heights of righteous indignation and assumed moral and intellectual superiority.

"No policy issue based on private property, low taxes, small government or free trade will escape the charge that any unregulated free market will lead to disastrous excesses just as happened with the great financial crisis of 2008. This will be true for such soon to be rebuffed ideas as tuition vouchers for private schools, private health care, lower estate taxes, deregulation in its many forms, reduced use of eminent domain, tort liability restraint and free trade.

"We can anticipate a new reign of mercantilism, as the protectionists among us wield this strong new weapon against globalization and open markets. And all of this is true in large degree regardless of who wins the forthcoming election...


"...Bankers eager for federal help now will find themselves regulated not far short of total federal control of their business behavior. Banks won't be permanently nationalized, but what we will get will differ from that result semantically more than factually. Derivatives, for all their promise of alleviating panics and distributing risk, will not now be allowed to evolve into the brave new system once predicted for them. Accounting rules will become even more convoluted as we continue to ask for more information out of double-entry bookkeeping than it can ever deliver.

"Still, there is a glimmer of hope left to those who detest this seemingly inexorable slide into socialism or its first cousin, the super-regulatory state. That glimmer comes from the ghosts of Adam Smith, Milton Friedman and Friedrich Hayek, who still haunt the halls of the left. And in spite of all the claims made that this debacle marks the demise of free market philosophy, it won't go away so easily.

"This time around, unlike during the New Deal, there is a substantial intellectual establishment to ride herd on leftist proclivities. There are numerous free market blog sites, which, for instance, can be properly credited with forcing modification of the recent short-sale ban. There are countless free market think tanks in Washington and all around the country exerting considerable influence on government policies. Libertarians are a small but growing political factor, and there are even a few university economics departments and law schools where sanity prevails or is at least occasionally evident.

"Like it or not, these few intellectual bastions of freedom philosophy will be about the only thing that keeps these ideals alive in the coming years. But we should never underestimate the power of good ideas. Like the bad ones we are about to witness in large numbers, they may just have to bide their time until a new crisis causes the fickle and uninformed public to demand a new direction.

"If these ideas are maintained in the inventory of ultimate possibilities, then there is always the chance of their public rediscovery and rebirth. It has happened with liberty before. And one thing is absolutely certain: Sooner or later the new era will end in another crisis. Perhaps then the defenders of freedom will be able to claim the moral high ground."


Henry G. Manne is the dean emeritus of the George Mason University School of Law.


Thursday, October 23, 2008

What’s All This About Race?







I get the impression from some folks that it seems I write more than a fair amount about race, even if most of the time it’s peripheral to my main points. That seems to make some folks a bit uncomfortable.

I suppose I do that because race/ethnicity remains a major issue in this country, probably far more than it should be. It's either that or I'm just a race-obsessed dipshit...I'll probably have to get back to you on that - it's a tough one.

At any rate, it seems that there are a number of people who are a might confused about the “facts of life” concerning race and other such matters, so I’ve decided to go over them right here, right now.

First of all, there have always been some whites who hate “other” people just because they ain’t like them. There’ve also always been some blacks who hate “other” people just because they ain’t like them.

What can I say? Life’s rough, grab a helmet. One of the more unsavory things about FREEDOM is that free people are free to like and dislike whomever they please for ANY reason, or NO reason at all. You can too, and I bet you do that all the time, even if you aren’t all that obvious about it. We all do it - we all often find it hard to explain why we like some folks and dislike others. The vast majority of us DON'T base such decisions on race, ehtnicity, religion, etc.But it's OK not to know why you like and dislike folks, it's called "freedom of association," and it's a wonderful thing, that is often misconstrued and attacked by people who naively consider themselves "freedom loving."

One thing I’ve never understood is why any reasonable, rational individual would care at all about what some trailer park, or housing project bigot has to say about them.

If you are one of those who cares about that, I’d say, “Get over yourself and don’t worry about it. In other words, go out there and get a life, they ain’t all that expensive, at least not near as much as you might think.”

To all those whites who say I “tend to sugar-coat things too much,” or I’m “not tough enough on black bigots,” and "I don't focus enough on black atrocities against whites," I can only say is that, “I vehemently disagree.” In fact, I disagree so much, that all I can really say is pretty much, “Go F*%k yourselves.”

And to those blacks who say that “I’ve got no business discussing race, since I’m white and all,” well, I vehemently disagree with that too. In fact, all I can say to that is, well, “Go F#*k yourselves too.”

Now, for all of you folks out there who don’t like my bluntness, please, by all means email me and I’ll invite you to my workplace where I will promptly and pleasantly whup your ass but good.

Now, IF you DO email me, please be aware of what your role is – YOU’RE the “ass-whuppEE,” and, of course, that would make ME the “ass-whuppER.”

I just want to be clear about what’s expected of you, that’s all.

If you email me and come to my workplace, I expect you to show up and say something like, “Hi, I’m a black/white bigot and I’m here to see you whup my ass.”

And speak up, after nearly a quarter century riding under a siren, my hearing ain’t what it once was. So, speak up and annunciate clearly and then I’ll know what you’re there for and I’ll commence to beating your ass the way an organ grinder’s monkey beats his drum...or his cymbals, or whatever, but either way, your ass will be beaten, please believe that. Oh yeah, and PLEASE, don't be a hard-ass, I HATE that, it makes my hands hurt!

Got it, get it...GOOD!

Oh yeah, and for your own sake, you probably want to keep this on “the QT,” or for you black folks, on “the DL.” You don’t want to spread around the fact that some broke down old fireman just whupped your ass but good, OK!
.

Seriously though, this racial hypersensitivity is part of a broader personal hypsersensitivity that's a result of way too many of us taking ourselves waaaaay too seriously...and that's part of the even broader hyper-litigious society we live in, a place where way too many people mistakenly believe they have some non-existant right "not to be offended.
.
What can I say about that, except, "Lighten up, Francis!"
.
This has been a public service announcement. I’m just doing my part to increase the peace.

It’s NOT Socialism...It’s Just, Uhhh....Oh Yeah, It’s SOCIALISM!!!







Courtesy of Wizbangblog, “If House Democrats have their way, the 401 (k) system that currently includes tax breaks will be eliminated:

“Powerful House Democrats are eyeing proposals to overhaul the nation's $3 trillion 401 (k) system, including the elimination of most of the $80 billion in annual tax breaks that 401(k) investors receive.

“House Education and labor Committee Chairman George Miller, D-California, and Rep. Jim McDermott, D-Washington, chairman of the House Ways and Means Committee's Subcommittee on Income Security and Family Support, are looking at redirecting those tax breaks to a new system of guaranteed retirement accounts to which all workers would be obliged to contribute.”

So, who’s behind this confiscation of wealth?

Well, “A plan by Teresa Ghilarducci (the hotty pictured above), professor of economic-policy analysis at the New School for Social Research in New York, contains elements that are being considered.”

“Under Ghilarducci's plan, all workers would receive a $600 annual inflation-adjusted subsidy from the U.S. government but would be required to invest 5 percent of their pay into a guaranteed retirement account administered by the Social Security Administration. The money in turn would be invested in special government bonds that would pay 3 percent a year, adjusted for inflation."

I’m beginning to get this.

Divorce the millions of working Americans currently invested in the stock market via 401 (k)’s, 457’s and IRA’s and you divorce them from any concerns over the stock market.

It’s almost brilliant...in a mouth-breathing, knuckle-dragging sort of way.
.
.
H/T Wizbang Blog
.

Nicholas Kristof – Idiot at Large...







God, I hate to keep doing this, but I really can’t overlook THIS.

Let me first preface my upcoming remarks by noting that it’s really not Mr. Kristof’s fault. His limitations are not only all too obvious, but as they say, "They are what they are."

It just makes one wonder “Just who did he know or blow, to get that (high profile writing) job at the NY Times?”

I know the NY Times is very much into “hiring the handicapped,” they have been for a very long time – Walter Duranty (“Stalin’s USSR is a worker’s paradise”), Jason Blair (who penned “first-hand accounts” of far-away places from his Brooklyn flat), the “hair-twirler” (Maureen Dowd)...and the list goes on and on, but Mr. Kristof is so stultifyingly dimwitted that his hiring surely pushes the envelope on that policy.

In his latest offering (October 23, 2008), Mr. Kristof recounts an alleged conversation with an alleged and unidentified “Beijing friend,” and overlooks the most salient aspect of that alleged exchange to make an ancillary point that is, in essence, reducto absurdum.

I’ll let that pithy alleged exchange stand on its own;


Re-branding the U.S. With Obama

The NY Times
By Nicholas D. Kristof
October 23, 2008
http://www.nytimes.com/2008/10/23/opinion/23kristof.html?_r=2&ref=opinion&oref=slogin&oref=slogin




The other day I had a conversation with a Beijing friend and I mentioned that Barack Obama was leading in the presidential race:

She: Obama? But he’s the black man, isn’t he?

Me: Yes, exactly.

She: But surely a black man couldn’t become president of the United States?

Me: It looks as if he’ll be elected.

She: But president? That’s such an important job! In America, I thought blacks were janitors and laborers.

Me: No, blacks have all kinds of jobs.

She: What do white people think about that, about getting a black president? Are they upset? Are they angry?

Me: No, of course not! If Obama is elected, it’ll be because white people voted for him.
[Long pause.]

She: Really? Unbelievable! What an amazing country!

We’re beginning to get a sense of how Barack Obama’s political success could change global perceptions of the United States, redefining the American “brand” to be less about Guantánamo and more about equality. This change in perceptions would help rebuild American political capital in the way that the Marshall Plan did in the 1950s or that John Kennedy’s presidency did in the early 1960s...
.

.
OK, quick, what is the most telling part of that alleged exchange?


Why surely it’s “She: "But surely a black man couldn’t become president of the United States? "

Me: "It looks as if he’ll be elected."


She: "But president? That’s such an important job! In America, I thought blacks were janitors and laborers."

Me: "No, blacks have all kinds of jobs."

She: "What do white people think about that, about getting a black president? Are they upset? Are they angry?"

Me: "No, of course not! If Obama is elected, it’ll be because white people voted for him."
.

[Long pause.]
.
She: "Really? Unbelievable! What an amazing country!"
.

.
Well, leaving how contrived and patently paternalistic ("the great white Liberal Kristof enlightening his ignorant "Beijing friend") that alleged exchange is, Kristof’s “Beijing friend” really seems to be enunciating a universal truth - that ethnic bigotry is the universal nature (and default position) of mankind and that such a thing would be inconceivable almost anywhere else in the contemporary world.


And THAT is without question, a fact.


Which also makes the last line of that exchange, “She: ...What an amazing country,” to be suspect, to say the least, especially, coming as it does, on the heels of the phrase "UNBELIEVABLE.!"


Of course, in my view, Mr. Kristof’s entire exchange is at least as suspect as his conclusions are convoluted...but again, his limitations are what they are and given what must be his admiration for the likes of Duranty and Blair....well...


So, Nick Kristof takes an alleged ringing endorsement of ethnic bigotry from an alleged “Beijing friend” as proof that “An Obama win will prove America a better place in the eyes of the rest of the world!”
.

WHY???


HOW???


Look, I’d have no doubt that a real “Beijing friend” would consider such a development “Unbelievable,” NOT because “racism is widely considered endemic to America,” as nimrods like Mr. Kristof insist, but because it IS endemic to the entire WORLD, because it’s endemic to the human condition! So riddle me this "Crayons" Kristof, "Why would a largely bigoted world see an absence of what they see as self-preservation, A GOOD THING?!"
.
Uhhhhhh.....Well, the short answer is, they wouldn't...and generally, they DON'T!


Consider, that as disgusted as the vast majority of Americans are by Jeremiah Wright’s “racist, anti-white, anti-American tirades,” is ANY American, black or white, all that surprised?!


Of course not!


Wright’s far from the first black bigot to freely and openly express his broiling hatred for whites, any more than Tom Metzger is the only white to openly express his own hatred for blacks.


Believe me, that one alleged exchange by the alleged “Op-Ed writer” Nicholas “Crayons” Kristof is, without question, absolute and irrefutable proof of how astoundingly, stupefyingly DUMB (so dumb, his dimwittedness is the stuff that other mentally challenged people make fun of) he really is.


What’s so sad about all this is that this is pretty much the standard of quality we’ve come to expect from the once “widely respected” NY Times.

FROM Mike's America: Left Wing Fascists Vandalize Home of MN Senator Norm Coleman



















.
.

Courtesy of Mike's America:


The lovers of "peace" and "tolerance" are at it again!
.
Sen. Coleman's House Vandalized
.
by Walter Alarkon

.
The Hill Blog
.
October 22, 2008

http://mikesamerica.blogspot.com/#1291604102187628785
.
.
Vandals spray painted the words "scum" and "criminal" on the garage of Sen. Norm Coleman (R-Minn.), who is locked in a tight re-election race.Using black paint, someone wrote out "U R A CRIMINAL RESIGN OR ELSE!" on Coleman's garage door at his home in St. Paul, reports KMSP, the Fox affiliate in the Twin Cities. "PSALM 2″ and "scum" were also written on the door.

.
The police are investigating. The vandalism was spotted was spotted Wednesday morning.
.
Coleman faces a challenge to his seat from Democrat Al Franken.
.

Add this up with the growing list of crimes against democracy being waged by leftwing fascists.
.
What will the "news" media say when these fascists actually start attacking people based on their political beliefs? Not much by recent accounts.
.
People should ask: is this the "hope" and "change" Obama promises?
.
Who remembers the last time a campaign of hate was unleashed against political opponents and classes of people?
.
SEE ABOVE...as Mike notes, "Is this the "Coming Obama Thugocracy?"
.
.
H/T Mike's America

Still MORE Ahistorical Stupidity From the MSM...And My Response







Recently Lewis Diuguid (pictured left) wrote a commentary piece in the Kansas City Star and it has gotten some attention across the blogosphere. Unfortunately, it is riddled with factual inaccuracies and outright falsehoods and needs some critical context in order to be evaluated.


So, I'm happy to provide both Mr. Diuguid's article and my own critical context for your consideration;


Shame on McCain and Palin for Using an Old Code Word for Black

By Lewis Diuguid
Kansas City Star Editorial Page columnist
October 21, 2008-10-22
http://voices.kansascity.com/node/2493


The "socialist" label that Sen. John McCain and his GOP presidential running mate Sarah Palin are trying to attach to Sen. Barack Obama actually has long and very ugly historical roots.

J. Edgar Hoover, director of the FBI from 1924 to 1972, used the term liberally to describe African Americans who spent their lives fighting for equality.

Those freedom fighters included the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr., who led the Civil Rights Movement; W.E.B. Du Bois, who in 1909 helped found the NAACP which is still the nation's oldest and largest civil rights organization; Paul Robeson, a famous singer, actor and political activist who in the 1930s became involved in national and international movements for better labor relations, peace and racial justice; and A. Philip Randolph, who founded and was the longtime head of the Brotherhood of Sleeping Car Porters and a leading advocate for civil rights for African Americans.

McCain and Palin have simply reached back in history to use an old code word for black. It set whites apart from those deemed unAmerican and those who could not be trusted during the communism scare.

Shame on McCain and Palin.
.
.
.
.
OK, and I'm trying very hard not to be overly harsh here, as that is occasionally a flaw of mine, but the article in question is quite simply, moronic. There is just no other word for it.

And I use the word “moronic,” because the article is not rooted in ANY factual context whatsoever. If Lewis Diuguid knew ANY history at all, he’d have known that (A) modern socialism (from the time of Marx - mid-19th Century) was a largely Jewish inspired and led political and economic movement and (B) African-Americans played little or no notable part in either the development or expansion of that failed system. Haven't blacks been blamed for enough bad stuff, from an out-of-control crime rate, to race and gender-based preferences to rap? Well, let me be clear on THIS, "I don't know about any of that other stuff, but blacks in America ARE NOT to blame for socialism!"

Mr. Diuguid shows his ignorance by using Paul Robeson as a notable example. Paul Robeson, who self-exiled himself and lived out a self-described miserable existence in what was then the USSR! You can easily look up Robseron's own accounts of his misery in the former-USSR.

If he’d used Hunter Pitts Odell, one of MLK’s advisors, who was also a member of the CPUSA, that would’ve been more accurate, but Robeson and King (despite King’s acquaintance with many “socialists”) are very poor examples.

M. L. King never advanced an agenda that was even as “socialistic” as, say, Hubert LBJ and Humphrey’s at the time.

In fact, African-Americans are even “Johnny-come-lately’s” to American Liberalism, only embracing it during the 1960s, in the midst of the Civil Rights movement that the larger American Left tacitly supported and after that, only continued its support for contemporary Liberalism out of naked self-interest in preserving race-based preferences (ironically enough, a very non-socialist idea) advanced by various anti-establishment Leftists.

Do you know some of the people who've truly advanced socialism and benefited most by it?

The likes of Armand Hammer, founder of Armand-Hammer Products and Occidental Petroleum and founder of the CPUSA (Communist Party USA).

Mr. Hammer had a veritable monopoly status in Stalin’s USSR, running the only state-sponsored factories in that country.

Socialism benefits the wealthiest among us by, in effect, “freezing the game in place,” thereby cementing their gains at the top.

You know who else was a Socialist?

Much opposed as I am to violating Godwin’s law, I’ll let his own words indict him; "We are socialists, we are enemies of today's capitalistic economic system for the exploitation of the economically weak, with its unfair salaries, with its unseemly evaluation of a human being according to wealth and property instead of responsibility and performance, and we are all determined to destroy this system under all conditions."
.
Adolf Hitler


(Speech of May 1, 1927. Quoted by Toland, 1976, p. 306)
.
Who else?
.
How about Margret Sanger (founder of the American Birth Control League which eventually became Planned Parenthood), who said, "We should hire three or four colored ministers, preferably with social-service backgrounds, and with engaging personalities. The most successful educational approach to the Negro is through a religious appeal.

“We don't want the word to go out that we want to exterminate the Negro population, and the minister is the man who can straighten out that idea if it ever occurs to any of their more rebellious members."

-- Margaret Sanger's December 19, 1939 letter to Dr. Clarence Gamble, 255
.
.
I’m generally loathe to interfere with those who’d embrace their own destruction and that’s probably why I generally both despise and am disgusted by Liberals of any and every background with a roiling passion, but there are so many obvious, ahistorical references and conclusions in Mr. Diuguid’s piece, that they shouldn’t go unchallenged, nor should they be digested whole by the gullible without at least some critical context.


In short, it often pays to know what you’re embracing.
American Ideas Click Here!