Look at the Map and Think

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NOTE TO MY LIBERAL FRIENDS (of course I have liberal friends, some more liberal than others): This post is not really addressed to you, though you may want to consider what I have to say. Your hearts, I am convinced, are in the right place, even if I think your political thinking has been seriously compromised. This post is addressed to the hard leftists, the thoroughgoing statists, the communists-in-all-but-name, those men and women who know full well that if ever they made a complete public avowal of their real ambitions for America, they would never win another national election and would most likely be run out of town on a rail. It is addressed, sadly, to those driving the train of the Democratic Party. Even for them, I have some sympathy, for whether sooner or later, disaster will inevitably overtake them--it always does, just ask Robespierre--and I wish their fate on no man.

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As I write, the polling on the race for president is a bit up and down. Some polling shows Mitt Romney--almost certainly the Republican nominee--with an advantage over Barack Obama. Some shows just the reverse. Some makes it look like a toss-up.

I cannot help but think that there is a good--a very good--chance that Barack Obama will be re-elected, yet I am dead certain that, geographically speaking, most of the country doesn't want him. If he is re-elected, it will be because of his strength in more heavily populated, urbanized areas, and even there, because he has successfully demonized his Republican opponent, and because he has lied through his teeth about his background, his political ambitions, and his record. There is no other way. Not enough people want what he is selling. Even his signature achievement, ObamaCare, was achieved only through political skulduggery of the first water and is opposed by a majority of the people. His only hope is to convince an electorate that, in general, barely pays attention to politics until two weeks before the election, that his opponent would be even worse.

And I know that you will be out there, indeed, are already out there, hoping fervently, praying fervently to whatever god it is that you worship (if any), working feverishly to help him do it. You think that if he wins, the long-term success of your ideas, ideas that have never been successful anywhere on the globe, at any time in history, is assured. You think that you will be co-heirs, if not co-rulers, of the kingdom you think you see coming.

You are practically salivating at the thought of victory, aren't you? At the thought of ramming your ideology down the throats of those of us who've long opposed you? I know that you are. I've heard you talk, read what you have to say.

Allow me to suggest that you look again at the map--this map, the county-by-county map of the results of the last presidential election. The one that shows a vast sea of red, with some large blue spots and a number of smaller ones.


It is just as--I know you hate the very sound of his name, but I'm going to say it anyway--Rush Limbaugh has said: Republicans can win most of the counties in the country and still lose the election.

And it is over this that you hope to rule without challenge? Over this vast expanse of land, at least fifty percent of the inhabitants thereof being opposed to your agenda now, and with more who will turn against you as your true nature and agenda becomes progressively more apparent? They will, you know. I know you know. I know you know because you virtually never run under your true colors. You wouldn't dare, not in a national race. You are perpetually running your candidates as centrists, opposed to Republicans whom you relentlessly accuse of "extremism," though their views are well within the mainstream of historical American politics. That this works as often as it does does not mean that Americans are leftists, friends. It means that they prefer, if possible, almost reflexively, to avoid perceived extremes and to be fair, and that you have successfully bamboozled them, lied to them, bewildered them, taken merciless advantage of the fact that you can make most Americans jump through hoops of fire by suggesting that circumstances aren't fair. It means they have given you credit for sincerity that you do not deserve.

It cannot last forever.

I know that you will not listen, but you will not be able to say that I have not warned you. Listen well to one of the wisest statesmen of all time, the right honorable Edmund Burke:

...ask yourselves this question, Will they be content in such a state of slavery? If not, look to the consequences. Reflect how you are to govern a people who think they ought to be free and think they are not.

Andrew C. McCarthy on Barack Obama

This is quoted from The Grand Jihad: How Islam and the Left Sabotage America. Anything I have emphasized is in bold.

It is vital to bear in mind that the president is an Alinskyite, so steeped in the ideology of the seminal community organizer that he became a top instructor in Alinskyite tactics for other up-and-coming radicals. Alinskyites are fifth-columnists. They have, in substance, the same goals as open revolutionaries: overthrowing the existing free-market republic and replacing it with a radical's utopia. That is why Obama could befriend such unrepentant former terrorists as Bill Ayers and Bernadine Dohrn and take inspiration from Jeremiah Wright, a black-liberation theologist.

Alinskyites, though, are more sophisticated, patient, and practical. They bore in, hollowing out the system from within, taking on the appearance and argot of the heartland. Their single, animating goal is to overthrow the capitalist social order, which they claim to see as racist, corrupt, exploitative, imperialist, etc. Everything else--including the cultivation of like-minded Islamists--is negotiable. They reserve the right to take any position on any matter, to say anything at any time, based on the ebb and flow of popular opinion. That keeps them politically viable while they radically transform society. Transform it into what, they haven't worked out in great detail...except that it will be perfect, communal, equal, and just.

This shallow nihilism makes alliances easy to strike...and, when necessary, to shove allies under the bus. If Islam needed pushing aside for a time to secure power, Islam would be pushed aside. Yet the president's Islamic heritage is deeply rooted. As we shall see, to the extent Obama had a religious faith in his formative years, it was Islam. That doesn't make him a Muslim, much less the Muslim "Manchurian Candidate" of anti-Obama paranoia. There is no record of his ever having professed Islam as an adult (profession of the faith being the first pillar of Islam). While much about Obama remains a mystery--despite the 850 pages' worth of autobiography and policy prescriptions he had published by the age of forty-five--the religion he publicly professes is Christianity, and there is no reason to doubt him on that score.

No reason because his formal religion is nearly irrelevant. The faith to which Obama actually clings is neocommunism. It is a leftism of the most insidious kind: secular and uncompromising in its rejection of bourgeois values, but feverishly spiritual in its zeal to tear down the existing order, under the banner of its all-purpose rally-cry: "social justice."

Neocommunists need not adhere to a formal religion. Instead, they tend to infuse causes like environmentalism, privacy, and secularism with religious fervor. For most leftists, though, religion is a useful tool. It is never a straitjacket because neocommunists consider themselves no more bound by the strictures of creed than by the constraints of tradition.

Thus is Obama the Christian the most uncompromisingly pro-abortion president ever to hold the office, just as he was the senate's most vigorous supporter of abortion rights--and, before that, while serving in the Illinois legislature, an apologist for infanticide as the remedy for botched abortions in which the baby inconveniently survived. In America, where it has become declasse to question, much less examine, a person's fidelity to his avowed religious creed, formal religion is endlessly malleable. This is a tremendous asset for the necocommunist. Formal religion lends a patina of transcendence to his attack on the existing order. And any religion will do if its principles can be marshaled--however faithlessly--into a rationale for dissolving American constitutional democracy.

This explains how Obama can purport to have found Christ through the baleful Jeremiah Wright. It explains how he could sit comfortably for twenty years in Rev. Wright's Trinity Church in Chicago, soaking up the fiery pastor's Black Liberation Theology, a pseudo-Christian Marxism colored in anti-Semitic hues, defined most clearly by its anti-Americanism. Sure, when Wright became an electoral issue for Obama, the candidate cast him aside, much as he had cast his Islamic heritage aside, pretending to have been absent or wearing earplugs during the Rev's more bombastic Sundays. But the truth was always there for anyone willing to see it: The grievance-mongering, race-obsessed Obama had imbibed enough to find in Wright the inspiration for his second bestselling me-book, The Audacity of Hope, and to parrot such standard Wright tropes as: "White folks' greed runs a world in need." It should have surprised no one when Obama staffed his White House with race-baiting Marxists, including "Green Jobs Czar" Van Jones, an admitted communist who, when not claiming 9/11 was somehow both America's just desert and an inside job, brooded about "white polluters" conspiring to "steer poison into the people of color communities."

Neocommunism is leftism liberated by the collapse of the Soviet Union. Many naively believed the Soviet demise would be a cautionary tale for the left, a warning against the hubris of big-government schemes to perfect man and society. The opposite, instead, is the case. David Horowitz, today's most eloquent and incisive observer of the revolutionary left, the movement in which he was raised and on which he turned so fiercely, offers a perfect diagnosis:

Far from instilling humility in progressives..., the collapse of socialism has revived their self-righteousness and renergized their assault on the democratic West. The disappearance of the Soviet block has had only one consequence of note. It has lifted the burden of having to defend...an indefensible regime. Because the utopian vision is no longer anchored in the reality of an actually existing socialist state, the left can now indulge its nihilistic agendas without restraint.

Nihilism is the key. Today's hard left is defined by what it is against: the United States, free-market capitalism, and any foreign policy premised on defending American interests or promoting individual liberty. Only this part of the agenda is concrete, leaving neocommunism elastic enough to strike alliances with any movement that shares it. What neocommunists are for, by contrast, is a set of abstractions--"social justice," "equality," "redistributive rights," the "rule of law," and, of course, "our values." The details of those can be worked out later, once the more pressing imperative of undoing the existing order has been realized.

This explains Obama's ruinous spending, the trillions in debt, far surpassing in just a few months the total debt accumulated since the nation's founding. Not content with that accomplishment, the president is rushing headlong to bankrupt the treasury permanently with additional trillions for nationalized healthcare and crushing tax increases--which experience assures us will reduce total revenues available for redistribution--including a "cap and trade" energy scheme that will nullify industry's capacity to generate value. Critics from the right and what used to be the mainstream left are dumbfounded, wondering aloud whether the new administration is in over its head. This drastically underestimates Obama. Quite the opposite of overwhelmed, he has methodically done exactly what was predicted by those who took the time, during the 2008 campaign, to study his radical background: exploiting the new administration's wind-at-its-back period to crush the capitalist system under an enormous commitment of future dollars, a commitment that will be nigh impossible to roll back once the public is finally roused from its slumbers. This "change" is not designed to create a new system. Its purpose is to destroy the old one. What comes next is negotiable.

The more closely you look at Palpatine's background, history,and associations, the more impossible it becomes to believe that he is just an economically naive, run-of-the-mill Democrat. He really did teach Alinskyite tactics, and Saul Alinsky really did teach his students to do just as Mr. McCarthy describes.

It is no longer possible to give Palpatine and rather a lot of his fellow Democrats the benefit of the doubt.

Peter Heck on Christianity and Government "Charity"

More than a few Christians, especially young Christians, are confused on this point:

They tell us that obedience to Christ comes in the form of high taxes on the wealthy to fund social programs for the poor. Even if these programs weren't as miserably ineffective as what they are, look at what they foster: envy, greed, bitterness and resentment. Not exactly the motivations of love and altruism that Jesus said were to be at the heart of our goodwill.

In truth, there is not one recorded instance of Christ advocating government confiscation and redistribution of wealth in the name of charity.

Jesus did say: "The King will reply, 'I tell you the truth, whatever you did for one of the least of these brothers of mine, you did for me.' (Matthew 25:40)

Jesus did not say: "The King will reply, ‘I tell you the truth, whatever you forcibly took from the masses through taxation in the name of these brothers of mine, you did for me."

Jesus did say: "If you want to be perfect, go, sell your possessions and give to the poor, and you will have treasure in heaven. Then come, follow me." (Matthew 19:21)

Jesus did not say: "If you want to be perfect, go, get elected to high office and then use the law to confiscate the property of those who have, and give to those you deem more worthy of it. Then claim you are following me."

You get the point. Barack Obama's social gospel of government sponsored theft is a flat contradiction to what Jesus taught.

In my experience, the way this argument usually unfolds involves blatant equivocation, although the person making the argument doesn't realize that that's what he's done. People say things like this: "But MOTW, don't you agree that we need to help the helpless?"

Well, sure. The questions, though, are, "Who are 'we?'" and "Exactly what is 'helpless?'" If you don't get those answers spelled out clearly and mighty dadgum quick, you will find that instead of talking about the church and people who legitimately cannot work or who have been diligently looking but cannot find it, you are talking about government and any body of people from whom votes can be bought for the price of some public "charity."

Palpatine

I'm sure you remember Palpatine. He was that Star Wars character that spent years in the Galactic Senate, pretending to be a good galactic citizen with the noblest of intentions, eventually rising to the position of Chancellor and invested with emergency powers. In reality, he was an evil Sith Lord, whose goal was to eliminate the Republic and replace it with a Sith Empire.

Why bring him up here?

Well, I've been reading a book called The Manchurian President. It is an interesting read, but I will save you the trouble, if you like. It is little but long and meticulous documentation of how Barack Obama, since he was a small child--since birth, really--has been born to, raised among, influenced by, worked with, worked for, been associated with, favored by, etc., etc., etc., an assortment of communists, socialists, hard-leftists, and Islamist radicals. It is not conjecture. The information has been pulled largely from newspaper accounts, newsletters and magazines (like the Trinity United Church of Christ's Trumpet) and personal interviews.

Many of these people come from organizations where one of the chief tactics is what is termed "boring from within":--joining the established system with the express goal of working from within to undermine and demolish it.

Now, I suppose you can believe one of at least three things:

1) Barack Obama has come from a background of anti-capitalist and anti-America-as-we-know-it thugs, risen to the presidency, and is deliberately trying to crash the system so as to replace it with something else, which would be perfectly consistent with his friends' and acquaintances' ideology and tactics, or...

2) He has played along with all these people since he was a boy, waiting for the right opportunity to betray them all, or...

3) He has somehow fit right in with all these people for decades, yet has absolutely no clue what they're about, or what he's doing, for that matter.

My opinion is that his actions since assuming the presidency strongly point to option "1," but that's just my opinion.

At any rate, for a couple of years now, I've vacillated between "Is he really that stupid?" and "Is he really that evil?"

My mind's made up now. As far as this blog is concerned, he is now "Palpatine." Just in case you were wondering.

A Blistering Assessment

I have seen more than a few assessments of the president like the following, but this one is special to me; special because it's Dave, my relatively-left-of-center blogospheric acquaintance, making it.

I understand that the reason for this trip was for the First Lady to spend time with a mourning friend and I think if this was the only incident then this would be a non-story, but the fact is the President and his family seem to be taking some kind of vacation every other week. Heck based on the reports I hear on the news, it
appears that the President is hardly ever in Washington because he is always off somewhere giving a speech about something.

Look Mr. President we all know that you can give a great speech, that’s one of the things that actually got you this job, but how about you stay in DC for a while and actually do the job we hired you to do? The country is a mess. The economy is in the toilet. People are frustrated and angry, and the last thing we need is for the man who promised to unite the country to go off and take a crap-load of fancy vacations while the rest of us scrape to get by. Why don’t you go and actually get to work on trying to right this wayward ship, okay sir? Also, why don’t you try and act like you are actually one of us and not some stuck-up rich boy on parade with his rich and beautiful family. I supported you because I thought you were the real deal. I thought you were going to try and heal this country and change things for the better. Well, needless to say that I am gravely disappointed in your performance thus far.

And no, if you wondering, Dave's is not the one-sided-to-the-point-of-unintentional-hilarity lib blog to which I frequently refer.

Pat Buchanan on Obama and the White Voter

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I took my notes from Mr. Buchanan's column several days ago and promptly forgot all about them.

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The White House fears it is losing white America because of a false perception that it harbors a bias against white America.

{snip]

Whence comes that perception? Several incidents.

First was the startling accusation by Attorney General Eric Holder, days after Barack Obama was inaugurated in a gusher of good feeling, that we are all "a nation of cowards" when it comes to facing issues of race. A real icebreaker for a national conversation.

Second was the instantaneous verdict of the president, when asked about the arrest of Harvard's Henry Louis Gates by Cambridge cop Sgt. James Crowley. With no knowledge of what happened, Obama blurted out that the cops had "acted stupidly."

[snip]

A third was the revelation that Obama's first Supreme Court nominee, Judge Sonia Sotomayor, the "wise Latina" herself, had gone to extremes to see that the case of Frank Ricci and the New Haven, Conn., firefighters never got to the Supreme Court. Ricci and co-defendants had been denied promotions they had won in competitive exams solely because they were white and no black firemen had done as well.

The fourth was the Justice Department's dropping of charges against members of the New Black Panther Party, whose intimidation of voters in Philadelphia had been captured on tape.

When a department official resigned in protest and went to the Civil Rights Commission to accuse officials at Justice of ordering staff attorneys not to pursue such cases, that explosive charge, too, was ignored by Justice.

Came then the NAACP smear that the tea party was harboring racists, which Joe Biden explicitly rejected on national television on Sunday, before the Monday firestorm over Sherrod.

Now, whatever one's views on each of these episodes in which race played a role, white Americans are being forced to address them.

[snip]

Where the erosion is taking place is in white America, among working- and middle-class folks who voted for Hillary Clinton in the primaries but took a chance with Obama in the fall. Now, every time some new incident erupts, these folks are being tarred.

Opposition to affirmative action is racist. Supporting the tea party gives aid and comfort to racists. Opposing health care puts you in league with folks who used racial slurs on Rep. John Lewis. To raise the issue of the New Black Panther Party is to play the race card.

One understand the bitterness of tea party folks who carry signs that read: "What difference does it make what this placard says. You'll call it racist anyway."

Thomas Sowell Saith:

The voting public's willingness to believe fancy rhetoric and ignore hard facts is a crucial part of this scam.

When the Obama administration said that it could provide health insurance to millions of additional people without increasing the national debt, shouldn't common sense have told you that somebody was just insulting your intelligence?

When the two thousand page bill was rushed through Congress too fast for anybody to read it, shouldn't that have made you realize that you were being played for a sucker?

When this bill that was passed with lightning speed was scheduled to take effect only after the 2012 election, didn't that suggest that they didn't want you to find out how it works in practice in time to turn against Obama when he is up for reelection?

Of course, all these things are true. Any thinking person should have figured out what the Democrats were up to in nothing flat, but far too many people don't bother to think anymore; instead, they emote their way to a conclusion. And of the ones who do think, far too few of them take the trouble to do the reading basic to understanding government and economics.

From A Letter to America

From the letter, emphasis in the original:

Below are words of David Kaiser, a known and well respected historian. Whom do you think he was writing those words about: “How did he get people on his side? He did it by promising jobs to the jobless, money to the money-less, and rewards for the military-industrial complex. He did it by indoctrinating the children, advocating gun control, health care for all, better wages, better jobs, and promising to re-instill pride once again in the country… and across the world. He did it with a compliant media… And he did this all in the name of justice and change. And the people surely got what they voted for.” Did you guess already? No, no, he wasn’t talking about Obama. He was talking about Adolf Hitler, the leader of The National Socialist German Workers' Party, a party of national unity and change! Change! Change! Change!

Hat tip to Cao.

Dan Phillips Saith...

We keep hearing about the bad economy, we know the government needs to cut spending, yet President Obama manages to find the money to try to intimidate a state for trying to do something about his refusal to do his job.

Very pithy observation, that...

It's Just a Wafer-Thin Mint*

Courtesy of a Facebook friend:

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*The title is an extremely sarcastic reference to a wickedly appropriate Monty Python bit. Those who've seen the film will get it.

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Pat and Bay Buchanan on Arizona and Illegal Immigration

Pat and Bay, are, I believe, brother and sister. They each had a column the other day on the same subject. Here are some of the choice bits. From Pat:

With the support of 70 percent of its citizens, Arizona has ordered sheriffs and police to secure the border and remove illegal aliens, half a million of whom now reside there.

Arizona acted because the U.S. government has abdicated its constitutional duty to protect the states from invasion and refuses to enforce America's immigration laws.

[snip]

What is the response of Barack Obama, who took an oath to see to it that federal laws are faithfully executed?

He is siding with the law-breakers. He is pandering to the ethnic lobbies. He is not berating a Mexican regime that aids and abets this invasion of the country of which he is commander in chief. Instead, he attacks the government of Arizona for trying to fill a gaping hole in law enforcement left by his own dereliction of duty.

He has denounced Arizona as "misguided." He has called on the Justice Department to ensure that Arizona's sheriffs and police do not violate anyone's civil rights. But he has said nothing about the rights of the people of Arizona who must deal with the costs of having hundreds of thousands of lawbreakers in their midst.

How's that for Andrew Jackson-style leadership?

Obama has done everything but his duty to enforce the law.

[snip]

The tasks that Arizonans are themselves undertaking are ones that belong by right, the Constitution and federal law to the Border Patrol, Immigration and Customs Enforcement, and Homeland Security.

Arizona has been compelled to assume the feds' role because the feds won't do their job. And for that dereliction of duty the buck stops on the desk of the president of the United States.

[snip]

Last year, while Americans were losing a net of 5 million jobs, the U.S. government -- Bush and Obama both -- issued 1,131,000 green cards to legal immigrants to come and take the jobs that did open up, a flood of immigrants equaled in only four other years in our history.

What are we doing to our own people?

Whose country is this, anyway?

From Bay:

President Obama had the audacity to call Arizona legislators “irresponsible” for passing the law, claiming it will lead to racial profiling. What about the massive invasion along our border that exposes Americans to ever-increasing levels of violence against Americans, including murder and kidnapping? What about their civil rights? Not so much as a footnote for them.

[snip]

A lot of well-meaning Americans who are sympathetic to people who want to come to this country in search for a better life and who follow the rules are tempted to fall for this trap.

What they don’t know, and what open border fanatics try to hide, is that America is letting in more legal immigrants than ever before. Currently one out of every six workers in the country is foreign born.

The Department of Homeland Security recently released its legal immigration figures for Fiscal Year 2009 (October 2008 through September 2009). During this period, over five million people lost their jobs. Amazingly, we increased the number of green cards from 2008 to a staggering level of 1,130,818, over 800,000 of whom can compete against American workers. Outside of the 1986 amnesty, which led to millions of illegal aliens taking green cards, this is the second highest number of green cards we’ve issued since 1914.

Now, I just know there are going to be readers that think I'm raaaaaacist for even bringing this subject up, let alone quoting the Buchanans. Tell you what, before you play that card, consider that my wife is half Mexican, my children (obviously) are a quarter Mexican, that there's Indian blood (Choctaw, to be specific) in my family, that I teach Mexican immigrants, and so forth, and take the time to read my thoughts on racism. Do at least that much, okay?

Star Parker Speaketh Wisdom

She says:

After voters in Massachusetts elected a Republican to replace the late Sen. Ted Kennedy, killing the Democrats' filibuster-proof Senate majority, many pundits wrote that President Obama had to move to the political center.

I wrote then that this wouldn't happen because, unlike President Bill Clinton, who did moderate, Obama is a left-wing ideologue. He didn't run for president to be somebody. He did it to do something. He did it to change America.

[snip]

...if you want to know where it all leads, look at our inner cities that were long ago taken over by government compassion. This is our future, my fellow Americans.

Obamabot/Obama Zombie

After whipping out my last post, I realized a new term--"Obamabot"--had entered my vocabulary. Although I had a pretty good idea of what I meant by it, it occurred to me to see what the interwebs had to say, so I googled it. Googled "Obama Zombie," too, since there's a book out now.

Word. The things I saw. The definition given in one column by the author of the aforementioned book was:

...Obama Zombies—lobotomized Leftist followers...

Seems uncharitable, but unfortunately all too accurate. Hate to say it, but the farther left they are, the less likely it seems that they are willing to 'fess up to actually knowing anything--anything, that is, save that Republicans and Conservatives are wrong, and not merely wrong, but evilly wrong. Not merely wrong, but bad, bad people into the bargain. And Politifact and Media Matters and the Daily Kos and the Daily Beast are the only true arbiters of truth, justice, and the American way.

I exaggerate only a little. It's amazing how often these people don't actually express an opinion in any sort of detail, or show any real understanding of a subject, even a subject about which they feel passionately. For example, you ask them, point-blank, why anyone should believe Democratic claims that Obamacare will actually cut the deficit when Democratic programs like Social Security, Medicare, and Medicaid (which, I'll remind you, was intended to provide health care for the poor; remind you of anything that's been talked about lately?) are all verging on insolvency (Social Security is in the red this year, Baby! Woohoo!), and it's clear that the question just doesn't process. It doesn't have to. They know Democrat claims that it'll reduce the deficit are right because Politifact said so. And besides, a Republican was caught in a lie last week, so any criticism of Democratic policies is clearly bogus. And didn't you hear about that kid--what's his name? Marcellus? There won't be any more Marcelluses under Obamacare.

That's the reasoning of an Obamabot, an Obama Zombie, in my book. They don't think so much as they parrot. Not that they're stupid, mind you, just that their indoctrination jumps to the forefront of their skulls before real cognitive skills can kick in.

Just in case you were wondering.

Recommended: Architects of Ruin

I would love to give Architects of Ruin: How Big Government Liberals Wrecked the Global Economy and How They Will Do It Again if No One Stops Them a full review, but the more I contemplate it, the more it seems like the work of hours. The story it tells is simple enough. Alinsky-influenced radicals started out by using various forms of pressure--like, for example, getting hundreds of people to open up savings accounts with only a buck, and then coming back the next day to close those accounts, which more or less shut those banks down for real business--to induce banks to lower their lending standards so people less likely to be able to pay a mortgage could get one. Then they managed to get law passed that made it necessary for banks, before they could do things like mergers, open new branches, and so forth, to get the community to agree that they'd been properly socially conscious, which ultimately led to banks committing more funds to risky loans in order not to have their applications for such business moves stymied by activist groups. Then the Clinton administration came along and very aggressively implemented that law, going as far as to threaten perfectly good banks with all sorts of investigations and suits in order to pressure them to make such loans. Then people started packaging those bad loans into various kinds of securities and selling those. Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac were hip deep in this sort of thing. Then the Clinton administration kept bailing out Wall Street investment firms--I believe Goldman Sachs got bailed out three or four times during the Clinton administration, if I recall correctly--which encouraged more and more investment in those bad, but politically correct, socially conscious loans. Then a Republican congress failed to ride roughshod over Barney Frank and Maxine Waters, which they certainly should have done, but apparently they were afraid of being called RAAAAAAAAAcists, to get those laws repealed, and the whole mess festered until it all imploded and threatened to take down the world's financial system with it.

Like I say, the story itself is pretty simple. But I have rarely run across--how shall I put this?--so fact-dense a book. If you pull quotes from the book, you are almost inevitably going to find that you need to quote something else explaining some term or some bit of history. It's hard to review a book like that in any detail, so I'm going to just point out one thing and give you one quote.

Ever since President Obama--and yes, this book will give you some interesting information on just what being a shakedown artist community organizer meant to him--started aggressively pushing the statist takeover of the health care system that he calls "reform," I can't tell you the number of people who--blogospherically speaking, nobody says this sort of thing to my face, at least not yet--give an exasperated shrug of their shoulders, place their hands on their hips, and sigh, and say, "I just don't see what you could possibly have against us helping poor people with their medical care! I mean, wouldn't that be tragic if we did that!" They act as if the simple fact that I do understand what would be tragic about that means I am some kind of amoral monster.

Well, the people that started the problems that caused that financial meltdown were prone to the same sort of thinking. Many of them started out saying, "I just don't see what you could possibly have against us helping poor people get mortgages! I mean, wouldn't that be tragic if we did that!"

Well, it did turn out to be tragic--ironically most hurting, as liberal social and financial policies usually do, the very people that were supposed to be helped. And the health care fiasco, which, I assure you, is not dead, but only sleeping, will do the same thing. So will "green energy." If you have not previously understood how this sort of thing works, Architects of Ruin will go a long way to helping you understand. It's only 184 pages; you can almost certainly check it out of your local library.

Go get it. Your time won't be wasted.

The quote? It's this, which I wish everyone, conservative or liberal, would take to heart, for too few understand it:

It's important here to draw a critical distinction: there is an enormous difference between being probusiness and pro-free market. The former position, which the Clinton administration embraced, is concerned primarily with the health of large businesses, in this case the big financial houses. Being pro-free market means being concerned with the health of the capitalist system as a whole and its underlying principles of profit and loss, risk and reward.

Too few putative conservatives understand this, too. Too many of them assume that what's good for business--and they often mean corporate giants--is good for America. What they often fail to appreciate is that there is more than one way to get, or to stay, big. A business may get or stay big by efficiently serving the needs or desires of many people. They may also--sometimes--get or--more often--stay big by working to rig the system by actually trying to make their field more regulated (so as to freeze out smaller competitors) or rigging the tax system, or, as in the case of some of these big financial houses, accepting a horrid alliance with government that leads to foolish risks being taken on the assumption that government will bail them out when the risks prove fatal.

That's not capitalism anymore.

From Architects of Ruin: How Big Government Liberals Wrecked the Global Economy--and How They Will Do It Again if No One Stops Them

I checked Architects of Ruin: How Big Government Liberals Wrecked the Global Economy--and How They Will Do It Again If No One Stops Them out from the library a few days ago. I'd love to reproduce the whole book here, but, copyright violations aside, I just haven't got the time. Those unfamiliar with a more conservative analysis of the mortgage-related financial troubles we've experienced over the last two years would do well to start with this column by Thomas Sowell. That will give you a little more background so that you can better appreciate this material from the introduction to Architects of Ruin.

All of this has led Americans to wonder: What happened? How the heck did we get here? Whose fault is it? Who do we blame? What mistakes were made? How can we get out of this mess?

There has been much debate about this question, but the ultimate source of the problem, it is generally agreed--the triggering event that caused the chain of other dominoes to fall--was the collapse of the subprime mortgage market in the United States. Banks and mortgage companies had made trillions of dollars in loans to individuals with terrible credit. They signed loans with illegal immigrants, offered so-called NINJA (No Income, No Job, No Assets) mortgages, and allowed people with bad credit to leverage their money. When the loans began to fail in large numbers, a new term entered our national vocabulary: toxic assets. And so the crisis began.

Still, an underlying mystery remained: What explains this perplexing behavior? Were they nuts? Did they simply take leave of their senses?

The conventional narrative was written in the first days of the collapse. And as usual, the loudest, most obstreperous voices seemed to prevail. "The private sector got us into this mess," Congressman Barney Frank indignantly declared as events began to unfold; "the government has to get us out of it."

According to this view, deregulation of the banking industry had encouraged the rise of "predatory lenders" who had pushed home loans on people who couldn't afford them. Those loans were then sold to unscrupulous Wall Street financiers, who repackaged them in the form of mortgage-backed securities. The securities were sold in turn to mutual funds, pension funds, and various foreign investors. but their value was grossly overstated and ultimately rested on the faulty assumption that housing prices would keep rising indefinitely. Once again, the supposed result of irresponsible deregulation of financial markets.

This explanation, coming from Frank, had the obvious benefit of pinning the collapse on his political enemies, the Republicans, while completely exonerating any Democrat (such as himself) who had responsibility for overseeing Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, the government-backed lending institutions that traditionally acted as a backstop to the housing market. It is not an accident that Frank has been in the forefront of attempts to minimize the crisis or (when it could no longer be denied) deflect the blame to his opponents. When some conservatives pointed out that Fannie and Freddie had abandoned their sober mission of stabilizing the middle-class housing market in favor of a misguided crusade to expand minority home ownership by forcing banks to lower their lending standards, Frank and his allies brazenly shouted them down.

[snip]

...the rush to heavy government intervention, new programs, and massive spending was now treated as inevitable. It was the 1930s all over again, and Obama was the new FDR. Free-market economics had been tried and found wanting. Obama referred to its theories dismissively as "failed ideas" and refused to entertain any talk of tax cuts or (God forbid) "doing nothing" in response. To the contrary, the crisis proved that it was time to return to stronger government controls. Anyone standing in the way was seen as part of the political fringe, a die-hard ideologue on par with a Holocaust denier.

This is the self-serving fairy tale propounded by Barack Obama and his allies in Congress and the press. The actual truth about what happened was a much more interesting and complicated--and incriminating--story, too complex to be conveyed in a media sound bite.

[snip]

It was a massive social engineering project, a grand generational enterprise, thirty years in the making, carried out by an ad hoc alliance of radical activists, labor unions, liberal politicians, federal bureaucrats, and Wall Street financial titans who sought to make getting a mortgage and owning a home a civil right.

[snip]

...the heart of the story is the role that radical activists and liberal politicians in Washington played in trying to harness the U.S. financial system to advance their socialist agenda. Properly understood, it is a cautionary tale about the perils of trying to use the power of the state to do good, to help people by giving them a leg up, to "level the playing field." Ironically, such efforts have usually ended up doing the most harm to the very people they were intended to help. The result in this case was no different.

[snip]

...two additional facts should be very disturbing to American taxpayers.

First, the same people who caused the debacle have now been tasked with cleaning it up. The Obama administration is full of Clinton retreads, and they show no signs of having learned anything from the damage they have wrought.

[snip]

Second, the same cast of characters is busy leveraging state power to manipulate capitalism for their next great social cause: the so-called green economy. Just as occurred in the subprime mortgage crisis, federal authorities and environmental activists are working in tandem, browbeating energy companies and the automotive industry, using the power of the state to compell the creation of carbon-trading schemes and the forced development of green technologies that are simply not profitable. This approach essentially co-opts the regulatory power of the government to create false incentives to invest in green technologies.

The Silicon Valley investor Eric Janszen (who according to the New York Times accurately predicted the dot-com bubble) says that the hype and activism behind green technology will create enough "fictitious value" that the coming green tech bubble will reach an astonishing $20 trillion...before it bursts. In the meantime, environmental activists and their political allies stand to profit handsomely: former Vice President Al Gore has already netted $100 million in profits from green economy schemes.

Plus, of course, the green agenda offers plenty of scope for good old-fashioned political self-dealing. See, for example, this story from the Washington Times of July 15, 2009: "Rep. Ed Perlmutter of Colorado inserted a provision into the recently passed House climate change bill that would drum up business for 'green' banks, such as the one he has invested in and his family and a political donor helped found in San Francisco...Mr. Perlmutter, a two-term Democrat, has two investments in the 3-year old New Resource Bank, which calls itself the nation's first green bank."

Needless to say, there will be much more to come. This is just the tip of the iceberg.

We have not nearly seen the end of liberal activists trying to manipulate the capitalist system for their own profit and social goals. Unless they are stopped, the rest of us are going to pay the price.

Time and again, since I was but a wee sprout, I have observed that a remarkable amount of the time, politicians get elected by promising to "fix" problems that they have caused. They use the massive power of government to fix some perceived injustice, never dreaming--they haven't the training or background reading to understand the subject, all too frequently--that they are going to cause more problems than they solve, and then, utterly unable to perceive that they have screwed up, blame everyone else for the resulting chaos and try yet again to "fix" the problem.

The story is told of a baseball manager who, unsatisfied with the play of his left fielder, benches him and plays the position himself in the critical last inning. After muffing an easy pop fly, the manager heads back into the dugout and announces to the left fielder, "Son, you got left field so messed up, can't nobody play it."

Right now, more than seventy years of government interference in the natural activity of the marketplace has so fouled up the field that can't nobody play it--and yet if you offer the obvious solution: let the air out of the balloon, get the government off the field--you will be shouted down as the obvious lunatic.

From Going Rogue

Mrs. MOTW was very sweet and brought home Sarah Palin's Going Rogue for me from the library. Haven't read it all yet, obviously, and may just skim it instead of reading it thoroughly (I am very pressed for time, as always), but just flipping through it, I came across this, and thought it worth sharing. Emphasis, where present, is mine and in bold:

Since leaving office I've frequently been asked, "What does Sarah Palin stand for? What's your vision for the future?"

I welcome the opportunity to share it. Keep in mind, I tell my parents the greatest gift they ever gave me, besides building a foundation of love for family and for healthy competition, was an upbringing in Alaska. The pioneering spirit of the Last Frontier has shaped me.

I am an independent person who had the good fortune to come of age in the era of Ronald Reagan and Margaret Thatcher. I am a registered Republican because the planks in that party's platform are stronger than any others upon which to build Alaska and America. I disagree with some of the characters in the party machine, but the GOP stands for principles that will strengthen and secure the country, if they are applied. I'm not obsessively partisan, though, and I don't blame people who dislike political labels even more than I do. My husband, for example, isn't registered with any party, for sound reasons, having been an eyewitness to the idiosyncrasies of party machines. I also don't like the narrow stereotypes of either the "conservative" or the "liberal" label, but until we change the lingo, call me a Commonsense Conservative.

What does it mean to be a Commonsense Conservative?

At its most basic level, conservatism is a respect for history and tradition, including traditional moral principles. I do not believe I am more moral, certainly no better, than anyone else, and conservatives who act "holier than thou" turn my stomach. So do some elite liberals. But I do believe in a few timeless and unchanging truths, and chief among those is that man is fallen. This world is not perfect, and politicians will never make it so. This, above all, is what informs my pragmatic approach to politics.

I am a conservative because I deal with the world as it is--complicated and beautiful, tragic and hopeful. I am a conservative because I believe in the rights and the responsibilities and the inherent dignity of the individual.

In his book A Conflict of Visions, Thomas Sowell explains the underlying assumptions or "visions" that shape our opinions and the way we approach social and political issues. He identifies two separate visions: the unconstrained and the constrained.

People who adhere to the unconstrained vision (the label applied to them is "liberal" or "left-wing") believe that human nature is changeable (therefore perfectible) and that society's problems can all be solved if only the poor, ignorant, disorganized public is told what to do and rational plans are enacted. And who better to make those plans than an elite bureaucracy pulling the strings and organizing society according to their master blueprint? No one can doubt that our current leaders in Washington subscribe to this unconstrained vision.

Conservatives believe in the "constrained" political vision because we know that human nature is flawed and that there are limitations to what can be done in Washington to "fix" society's problems. Commonsense Conservatives deal with human nature as it is--with its unavoidable weaknesses and its potential for goodness. We see the world as it is--imperfect but filled with beauty. We hope for the best. We believe people can change for the better, but we do not ignore history's lessons and waste time chasing utopian pipe dreams.

We don't trust utopian promises from politicians. The role of government is not to perfect us but to protect us--to protect our inalienable rights. The role of government in a civil society is to protect the individual and to establish a social contract so that we can live together in peace.

And all the people said, "Amen!"

Look, I've said before that Mrs. Palin is not my idea of the perfect conservative--but her unabashed avowal of the very principle that I have been hammering on for months encourages me. Yes, that is what government is for. It is here to protect our God-given unalienable rights--which is no more and no less than Thomas Jefferson said in our Declaration of Independence. It is not here to serve as a means by which one group of people can plunder another group of people. It is not here as a medium by which one group of people can finance what they conceive to be society's good with money from other people's pockets. It is not here to serve as a means by which you can chuck all responsibility for your health, your retirement, and your children's education.

It is here to protect your rights. That Mrs. Palin understands that is a very big thing with me.

I can think of other conservatives whom I would prefer to see as president, but they ain't a-runnin', at least not yet. Put Sarah Palin up against a looting, statist thug like Barack Obama, and I'll vote for her without hesitation.

As an aside, some of you won't like that I called President Obama a "looting, statist thug." You think it sounds mean.

You are the same people that told me, "MOTW (though I went by my real name then), give him the benefit of the doubt."

And I told you, "I'm looking at his track record, and his track record is that of a not-so-semi-socialist, abortocentrist, leftist, Christophobic, power-grubbing demagogue."

And you said, "You're so mean!"

Almost a year later, I wonder when you are going to admit that I was not mean at all, but simply descriptive. Probably never, even though the truth of what I told you then is now manifest. I was wrong on not one single point that I can recall. And you? You will not admit what this man is, because to do so means admitting that you had no idea what you were talking about, and that, you will never do. It would eat you up alive to admit that I was right and you were wrong.

And as a second aside, I believe I coined the term "Common Sense Conservative" before Mrs. Palin did. See my definition here.

Great Jefferson Quote

We must not let our rulers load us with perpetual debt. We must make our election between economy and liberty or profusion and servitude. If we run into such debt, as that we must be taxed in our meat and in our drink, in our necessaries and our comforts, in our labors and our amusements, for our calling and our creeds...[we will] have no time to think, no means of calling our miss-managers to account but be glad to obtain subsistence by hiring ourselves to rivet their chains on the necks of our fellow-sufferers... And this is the tendency of all human governments. A departure from principle in one instance becomes a precedent for[ another]... till the bulk of society is reduced to be mere automatons of misery... And the fore-horse of this frightful team is public debt. Taxation follows that, and in its train wretchedness and oppression.

What I fear most of all is that we will see spiraling inflation as a result of trying to print enough worthless money to pay off all the incredible debt we are piling up--and yes, the Bush administration and Republican congress spent way, way too much, but the Obama administration and Democratic congress are succeeding in making even the Bushies look frugal--and the resulting economic and social pressures, added onto the stack of problems trending toward balkanization, will ultimately succeed in breaking the country apart.

No, obviously, I don't expect that to happen next week. But I am concerned that it might happen within my lifetime.

Think it can't happen? I suspect that you have no idea how bad these things can get. At one point before Napoleon took power in France, the situation was so bad that the laundry women were calling for the death penalty for people who sold soap at too high a price. Of course, the escalating prices were driven by an enormous increase in velocity, the speed at which money changes hands, which was driven by France's horrible monetary policies--policies from which the Obama administration and the Democratic Party seem to have learned nothing.

Interested in the concept of velocity? You probably haven't heard of that one before. Most people haven't. Try reading this little book.

Now, There's a Billboard

Michelle Malkin linked to this story about this billboard that some guy put up along I-70 in Missouri. (Click for a bigger image)

Gotta love the sign. That's a rather darn big I-told-you-so, ain't it?

Ben Stein on Obama and the American Public

A relative sent this to me. Emphasis, where present, is mine:

Why is President Barack Obama in such a hurry to get his socialized medicine bill passed?

Because he and his cunning circle realize some basic truths:

The American people in their unimaginable kindness and trust voted for a pig in a poke in 2008. They wanted so much to believe Barack Obama was somehow better and different from other ultra-leftists that they simply took him on faith..

They ignored his anti-white writings in his books. They ignored his quiet acceptance of hysterical anti-American diatribes by his minister, Jeremiah Wright.

They ignored his refusal to explain years at a time of his life as a student. They ignored his ultra-left record as a "community organizer," Illinois state legislator, and Senator.

The American people ignored his total zero of an academic record as a student and teacher, his complete lack of scholarship when he was being touted as a scholar.

Now, the American people are starting to wake up to the truth. Barack Obama is a super likeable super leftist, not a fan of this country, way, way too cozy with the terrorist leaders in the Middle East, way beyond naïveté, all the way into active destruction of our interests and our allies and our future.

The American people have already awakened to the truth that the stimulus bill -- a great idea in theory -- was really an immense bribe to Democrat interest groups, and in no way an effort to help all Americans.

Now, Americans are waking up to the truth that ObamaCare basically means that every time you are sick or injured, you will have a clerk from the Department of Motor Vehicles telling your doctor what he can and cannot do.

The American people already know that Mr. Obama's plan to lower health costs while expanding coverage and bureaucracy is a myth, a promise of something that never was and never will be -- a bureaucracy lowering costs in a free society. Either the costs go up or the free society goes away.

Mr. Obama knows Americans are getting wise and will stop him if he delays at all in taking away our freedoms.

**********

There is his urgency and our opportunity. Once freedom is lost, America is lost. Wake up, beloved America .

To govern is to control, to rule. It is oxymoronic--I am very tempted to say moronic, period--to talk of more government and of liberty at the same time. It's always more of one and less of the other. More government necessarily means more control, more of being ruled.

What happened to the people who famously said, "We have no king but Jesus?"

Sheesh. So many of us tried to warn people. "Just look at who this man's associates have been," we said. "Look," we said, "at what he's said about being drawn toward Marxists in his formative years." "Look," we said, "at the hard left tack he's taken when talking about the Supreme Court. Look at his legislative record. Look. Sure, McCain's a bad deal, but he's not the out-and-out ruinous bomb this guy Obama's gonna be."

And what the heck--people didn't listen. Republicans had so destroyed their reputation that nobody listened, nobody cared. They just didn't want a Republican, and I think that's all they cared about.

A Must Read

A must read, that is, if you care at all about what may end up being the most momentous decision of the Obama presidency.

Some of you--both liberals and conservatives--may not like Pat Buchanan all that much. Personally, I think your dislike is misplaced. That is not to say that I agree with every jot and tittle of what the man writes. I don't. But I do think that you ignore what he has to say at your peril. He is on target in his analysis more often than almost anyone else I read. Not for nothing has it been said that his tombstone should read, "I told you so, you (badword) fools!" Here's a taste:

While America was consumed this summer with quarrels over town-hall radicals, "death panels," the "public option" and racism's role in the plunging polls of Barack, what happens to health care is not going to change the history of the world.

What happens in Afghanistan might.

Gen. Stanley McChrystal has done his duty. He has bluntly told his commander in chief what he must have in added combat troops and warned that if he does not get them, America faces "mission failure."

Translation: a Taliban victory and U.S. defeat, as in Saigon 1975.

Not only does President Obama face the most critical decision of his young presidency, this country is facing a moment of truth.