Archive Listing
February 11, 2010 - February 4, 2010
Wednesday, March 04, 2009
What to Do:
Hey!
Forget about the
Obama-Carville-Begala vs Limbaugh show. Now!
WAKE UP CALL. I don't know how many of you have noticed what Republican politicians and conservative journalists and pundits don't seem to, but let me spell it out in clear language. In a few short weeks, the Obama administration has hijacked the United States of America.
This is not politics as usual, no matter how much TV shows, newspaper columns, blog forums like National Review Online and RealClearPolitics, and, yes, even talk radio shows make it seem so because of their stolid, predictable formats. While everyone with access to a microphone frets about this issue, that controversy, and the other inside the beltway gossip, Barack Obama is taking this country apart in huge bloody chunks.
He has doubled the whole history of U.S. national debt totals with one stroke of his pen. There is no end in sight to the level of additional spending, wealth transfer, and outright wealth destruction he yet intends within a matter of mere weeks. The stock market is plunging like a rock precisely because the people who must make economic decisions about the future aren't convinced the president of the United States isn't driving us single-handedly into a decade-long depression.
Why aren't they convinced? Because if that were indeed his stated aim, he still couldn't have chosen a better set of policies to achieve it. His income tax, capital gains tax, and payroll tax increases on $200K and up earners, coupled with his projected limitations on their deductions, including charitable deductions, will increase their tax burden by as much as 50 percent. This giant act of theft will significantly diminish new business investment and reduce job creation in the private sector. His unimaginably huge, unfunded increases in government spending will certainly suck vast sums out of private capital markets and result in enormous inflationary pressure, which will not only devalue pensions and individual savings but constitute another crippling tax on every income-earner in the nation. But even that isn't enough for him. He also intends to tax U.S. corporations for the income they earn overseas, which will decrease profitability and reduce jobs further at home by making our products uncompetitive in world markets. AND his planned carbon tax will ripple endlessly through the U.S. economy. hitting all businesses and individuals in wave after wave of additional costs -- for fuel itself and for all goods and services made or transported with fuel. But he also has already quietly buried the possibility of drilling for more oil at home.
All of this is mandated by what he has already signed, quietly decreed, or put on the legislative calendar. He is on course to destroy the entire American economy for a generation. The union card check bill he promised again this week to the AFL-CIO will doom small businesses. His mortgage bailout scheme will add more costs to every mortgage procured by solvent homeowners. His proposed healthcare system will represent a brand new tax for young workers who opted out of health insurance as well as for corporate employees, whose health benefits he intends to tax as income to subsidize indigents. The slate of new programs and government jobs in his $800 billion "stimulus" package will also eventually hit every taxpayer, hard -- because when the stimulus money runs out, those programs and government jobs will be a permanent part of the government infrastructure requiring funding (and increases) in perpetuity.
Overseas, he has already signalled his intention to cut Israel off at the knees by publicly chastising them for not reopening the roads to Gaza and by sending multiple envoys to friendly meetings with Israel's mortal enemies the Syrians. But he hasn't been too busy to insult the Prime Minister of the U.K. and to humiliate his own country with a moronic and weak attempt to bargain away missile defense for a kind word from Putin. Which he didn't get. All this has made him too busy to spend any time on working out a rational plan for leaving Iraq. We're just going to do it. As quickly as possible. Because we need the money. But he wasn't too busy to float the possibility of a New Deal for the whole globe, whatever that means. And he's openly shopping for ways to cut defend spending and the U.S. military while devolving the war on terror to its pre-9/11 status as a matter for law enforcement and the courts.
His social assault is also already well underway. He has restored funding for abortions in international medical aid. He is moving toward suspending the "conscience rule" permitting health care workers to opt out of procedures and drug sales that violate their standards of personal morality. He has allowed his goons in the executive branch and congress to begin the task of restoring the Fairness Doctrine, or a sneakier equivalent, to silence talk radio. And he has smuggled huge funding for racially motivated voter fraud and greenmail organizations like ACORN into his spending bills.
He is taking our country away from us at breakneck speed. It's happening so fast it's hard to keep up with the dozens of large and small explosions in the fabric of the nation that are occurring every day.
So what are the politicians and pundits of the loyal opposition talking about? Rush Limbaugh. Or the outrageous total of $8 billion in earmarks in the latest leviathan spending bill. ($8 billion? That's all John McCain can find to get worked up about?!) Or whether Obama's staff isn't acting a mite high-handed with congress. Or whether there's something wrong with the fact that all his cabinet-level appointments are lobbyists or tax cheats or both. Or whether the Republicans shouldn't try a little harder to seem more cooperative and less obstructionist. Or how much more time Obama has to blame everything on Bush before voters start holding him accountable. Or what the latest public opinon polls say. Or if it's any kind of a long-term problem that Nancy Pelosi is filling the Speaker's role like the brain-damaged harridan she is. Or who it is exactly who has the gravitas and vision (or spiffy enough education) to rebuild the Republican Party before the midterm elections...
Stop it.
This is insane. I N S A N E. Everything is on fire, people.
So here's what everyone needs to do. Drop everything else and get busy with letters, phone calls, and emails. To all the Republicans in congress. To all the conservative journalists, columnists, bloggers, and media pundits. All of them. Tell them to wake up to what's going on and start talking about the only subject that matters -- the ongoing, well advanced hijacking of the United States of America. Tell them to oppose it, to fight it with all their strength, to talk and write about nothing else because every little thing is only part of the one great big thing, which is all-important. This president is already the biggest disaster ever elected to the office. It doesn't matter how much the clueless and inattentive love him. They're wrong. He's already had enough time. Now he must be opposed, stopped in his tracks, and condemned for his truly damnable intentions.
Do it.
Tell them. All of them. Now.
posted at
3:19 pm
by
LocoPunk
Friday, February 27, 2009
The Derb
Offends
From his website. He calls it a mugshot. He's under arrest here too.
BONEHEAD INTELLECTUALS. I'm not going to reinvent the wheel here. John Derbyshire's assault on conservative talk radio is here. It is also competently fisked here. Which means that if you're interested, you can read up on the flap created by this inveterately grumpy National Review contributor and then come back for my few additional comments.
Blaming talk radio for the present misfortunes of conservatives is just plain idiotic. According to his own voluminous c.v., Derbyshire is a Brit who first lived in the United States in 1986. He cannot know what it was like growing up in this country before the Reagan administration terminated the Fairness Doctrine. The only broadcast on which you could hear conservative voices was Firing Line. And it may be news to Derb, but you didn't have to be a lowbrow to object to much of Buckley's presentation. He was so self-consciously intellectual, so enraptured by his own vocabulary and semantic complications, that even genuine intellectuals frequently felt like smacking him on the back of the head. Brilliant? Yes. Also often laughable. That conservatives in the population at large did not respond eagerly to conservatism as an elaborate gentleman's game does not make them lowbrows or deny them qualification as the middlebrows Derb claims to value.
Populism is an extremely argumentative term to throw around. By connotation at least, it usually refers to political movements which organize and manipulate the have-nots in an effort to extort benefits from the haves. It implies simplistic rabble-rousing rhetoric, phony "common man" leadership, and continual resort to the ugliness of class warfare. That's not Rush Limbaugh's shtick and it's not his audience, either. Limbaugh tapped into a huge population of "the Forgotten Man" intellectual conservatives claim to speak for, the ones who pay the bills for the social engineering delusions of liberals. But oddly enough, they're too busy living their lives and paying the bills to have much patience with the inside baseball affectations of the National Review. To them, politics is not an abstract philosophical debate that mutters on through the centuries in panelled drawing rooms and stylish cocktail parties. Someone who figures out a way to reach the people who are paying the bills is not a populist. He's an educator, a communicator, a common sense analyst, and, yes, an entertainer. He expands the political base among the competent doers on which the whole nation depends. That's a far cry from the populist bomb-throwing of a Huey Long or William Jennings Bryan.
Of course, not all conservative talk radio hosts are of the same caliber. Just as not all National Review contributors are quite as brilliant as Buckley even if they're ostentatious about wrapping themselves in his mantle. What's strange is that some of Derbyshire's charges indicate that he hasn't actually listened to talk radio any more than the liberal haters have. It's absolutely not true that Limbaugh and Hannity defended everything Bush did. Their objection to his spending, to his failure to veto outrageously wasteful legislation, was almost a drumbeat. But they knew, as so many intellectual conservatives seem to have forgotten in the past year, that the alternative waiting in the wings was worse, disastrously worse. Now we have Obama. Our country is vanishing down the rabbit hole at truly terrifying speed. And this is to be blamed on Limbaugh and Hannity? I don't think so. And quoting turncoat Christopher Buckley's disdainful sneer at comparisons between his father and Limbaugh in the course of making such a wrongheaded accusation is frankly odious.
Derbyshire can be smart, insightful, and thought-provoking. This time he is none of the above. He's being an ass.
posted at
11:50 am
by
InstaPunk
Thursday, February 26, 2009
What the hell is
this?
Is it just me, or is this really really creepy?
Is it just me, or is this really really creepy?
THE GAIA IMPERATIVE. So Drudge linked this silly vignette from Germany and I guess we're supposed to chuckle at the continuing adulation still flowing from the country that greeted Obama as if he were the world's new fuehrer:
A carnival float depicting a flying
U.S. President Obama with Europe being dragged along is seen during the
traditional carnival parade in Duesseldorf, Germany, on Monday, Feb.
23, 2009. Rose-Monday-Parades in the carnival strongholds of
Duesseldorf, Mainz and Cologne are watched by hundreds of thousands of
revelers and mark the highlights of Germany's carnival season. (AP)
But I can't help seeing some imagery here that begs for some explanation. See what I mean?
From
left to right, the "cloud" upholding the flying Obama, the sculpture
"Monumental Woman," and the oldest sculpture of a woman yet found,
"The Venus of Willendorf," (c. 24,000 BC) discovered in Lower Austria.
"Monumental Woman," and the oldest sculpture of a woman yet found,
"The Venus of Willendorf," (c. 24,000 BC) discovered in Lower Austria.
I don't know what it signifies. Lots of things occur to me. The weird new cult of Gaia embraced by the New Age paranoids of Global Warming (or climate change as it seems to be termed during a particularly harsh winter). The continuing elevation of all things female as somehow wiser and superior to the, ahem, male patriarchy. Also, the fact that the Germans have always been crazy pagans, curiously resistant to civilization ever since they managed to avoid being conquered and de-barbarianized by the Roman Empire. (Don't believe it? See this. The other two parts, too. A pivot of history.) And the looming inevitability of the nanny state mentality which seeks to transform free adults into populations of helpless whining children, permanent wards of government largesse and control. Heck. Maybe it's Angela Merkel. (NSFW)
Is this a hint, a joke, an insight, a promise, a warning, a threat... or do I just need stronger reading specs? You tell me.
