Squaring the Culture

Research published by the Centers for Disease Control (CDC) a few weeks ago notes that abortions killed more African-Americans than the 7 next highest causes of death combined. (You can read the actual report here; the link points directly to Table 9, which shows the relevant statistics.)

Abortion kills more black Americans than the seven leading causes of death combined, according to data collected by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention for 2005, the latest year for which the abortion numbers are available.

Abortion killed at least 203,991 blacks in the 36 states and two cities (New York City and the District of Columbia) that reported abortions by race in 2005, according to the CDC. During that same year, according to the CDC, a total of 198,385 blacks nationwide died from heart disease, cancer, strokes, accidents, diabetes, homicide, and chronic lower respiratory diseases combined. These were the seven leading causes of death for black Americans that year.

States are not required to report abortion statistics by race (not required to report them at all, in fact.) Abortion statistics by race were only available for 36 states; among those missing were California, Florida, Illinois, Louisiana, and New York outside of New York City. Also, abortions performed by private physicians were not reported to the CDC. Consequently, the 203,991 abortions reported among blacks by the CDC was far lower than the actual number. And still, it was enough to swamp all other causes of death among African-Americans.

Abortion is arguably the most favored “right” among social liberals in America, for reasons about which one can only guess because they’re never candid about it. When Al Gore attempted a rousing speech at the 2000 Democratic convention, the only sound bite that earned him more than meager applause was his full-throated defense of legal abortions. And President Obama, whose measures to nationalize and over-regulate American industry have come at a breath-taking pace, and who has several times directed federal favors in the direction of his union buddies and contributors, took some of his earliest Presidential steps to expand the number of legal abortions — a direction that those of us who actually did our homework about Obama fully expected. Democrats claim that they really don’t like abortions, that nobody really wants them, that steps should be taken to keep abortions rare, but that they must be kept legal to protect women. None of these statements are believable, particularly the last, since recent surveys reveal that women feel pressured to have an abortion in almost 2/3 of actual abortions, and that violence by spouses, boyfriends, and significant others against women rises dramatically when the women are pregnant. But most Democrats scrabble frantically for reasons to reject facts that make abortion seem like a bad bet for women; they’ve been unwilling even to consider the now-voluminous evidence demonstrating serious health effects from abortions. Something other than the safety of women motivates them. They won’t say what it is.

Whatever the motivation, abortion in America seems fiendishly targeted at blacks. Black women have abortions between 3 and 5 times more frequently than white women, depending on which study you’re reading, and nearly half of all black pregnancies end in abortion. Alveda King, niece of the Rev. Martin Luther King, reports that fully 1/4 of the blacks in America have been eliminated by way of abortion. Speaking at the unveiling of a monument to her uncle, King noted:

…that the killing of a quarter of the black population of the US has not been from the lynch mobs of her childhood days, but from abortionists, “who plant their killing centers in minority neighborhoods and prey upon women who think they have no hope.

“The great irony,” she said, “is that abortion has done what the Klan only dreamed of.”

Planned Parenthood, furthermore, apparently targets black neighborhoods and schools as locations for its offices. The black-created anti-abortion group LEARN, the Life Education and Resource Network, reports that nearly 80% of Planned Parenthood’s clinics are located in or near minority neighborhoods. Author George Grant, quoted in LEARN’s article about Margaret Sanger’s Negro project, observes that PP’s school-based clinics show an even stronger emphasis on the lower classes:

Grant observed the same game plan 20 years ago. “During the 1980s when Planned Parenthood shifted its focus from community-based clinics to school-based clinics, it again targeted inner-city minority neighborhoods,” he writes. “Of the more than 100 school-based clinics that have opened nationwide in the last decade [1980s], none has been at substantially all-white schools,” he adds. “None has been at suburban middle-class schools. All have been at black, minority or ethnic schools.”

One might take this to be a macabre manifestation of profit motive — they’ll make more money by placing clinics where the people seek abortions the most — if it were not the case that the founder of Planned Parenthood, Margaret Sanger, voiced her intent to introduce legal abortion specifically to reduce the black population. Sanger, an early 20th century adherent of Malthusian eugenics, felt that the solution to the poverty and suppression of Negroes was to reduce their numbers by means of birth control. While the quotations from her works suggesting a racist motive could be interpreted other ways, it is simply a fact that Sanger favored the reduction of the Negro population, and initiated in 1939 what she called The Negro Project, aimed at reducing the birth rate among poorer, less educated blacks as a means of reducing poverty and “improving human stock.” In the best tradition of American liberalism, there is ample evidence that Sanger felt the reduction of the black population was necessary for their own good, as well as for the good of the nation. So blacks should thank her, you see. [/sarc]

It is hard to imagine that modern staff at Planned Parenthood still share the opinions of its founder. However, it is equally hard to imagine that an organization specifically founded 80 years ago to reduce the black population, is doing exactly that today entirely by accident. There’s something in the abortion agenda that seems distinctly targeted toward blacks. American liberals claim to be eager to extract every hint of institutional racism from American culture; for them to ignore the racism embedded in legalized abortion proves that they’ve got some bigger agenda that supersedes their concern about racism.

We see the same inverted priorities in the arena of education. Vouchered education programs consistently help inner-city parents find decent education for their children. Democrats routinely defeat vouchered education programs, though; it was even reported earlier this year that President Obama’s Education Dept. deliberately obscured the results of research proving the value of a DC voucher program until after Congress had voted not to continue the program. Political common sense attributes this to the Democrats’ reliance on teacher’s unions to win elections.

It’s not that Democrats hate blacks; it’s simply that they don’t care nearly as much about them as they do about some other things. Whenever they have bigger fish to fry, they’ll fry them first. In the case of abortion, it appears to be something as banal and infantile as the desire to have unrestrained sex: none of the reasons they actually offer hold water, and the real reason has to be something a) very personal that b) they would prefer not to admit. Sex fits the bill. In the case of education, it’s simply a matter of political reality; Democrats need political power to do all the wonderful things they plan to do, so they have to cozy up to the groups that will produce votes. If that means millions of black kids have to attend horrible schools where they’ll be bullied, shot at, and kept ignorant and poor… oh, well, it’s nothing personal, folks, it’s just politics. Blacks have shown that they will vote for Democrats regardless of what the Democrats do, so Democrats never feel the need to serve their interests.

This would explain, also, why Democrats have been so utterly vicious towards black conservatives. There are truly only two places in modern America where one can still hear hard-core racist talk. One is in the black community, where some blacks routinely hurl racist epithets at white folks. The other is among liberal writers writing about black conservatives. They do it, apparently, because if blacks ever figure out how damaging Democratic policies are for the black community, the Democrats will never be able to win another election… ever. So, they have to bully them to stay in line. Not because they hate blacks, you see, but because they can’t afford to have them leave the planta… uh, the reservation.

Did I say that? Oops.

The Democratic party’s disdain for the black community is one of the most disturbing elements of the modern political scene, and also one of the most frequently ignored. I do not know how they get away with it. If the Republican party had a clue, they’d be sending organizers into every black district in America reciting the facts I’ve included in this article. And those facts would tell a frightening tale: that whether deliberately or accidentally, liberal abortion policies are producing a holocaust among black Americans. It may not be specifically racist, but it certainly appears to be effective genocide.

Now that Afghanistan is no longer the “war of necessity” and has become, instead, a ball and chain around President Obama’s leg, we can expect the mainstream press to start broadcasting just how badly we’re hated in Afghanistan, how badly we fit in, how incompetently we have handled the war, and how impossible it is that the war can be won. It’s not about national defense, there’s no anti-Western sentiment throughout the Islamic world that we need to address, nobody is trying to attack America [/sarc] — Obama does not need the trouble implied by all that, so now begins the public relations deluge to convince the American public that President Obama is actually defending America’s interests by withdrawing from Afghanistan.

Consequently, the LA Times published a story noting that “hundreds” of Afghans in the capital city of Kabul protested an alleged burning of the Koran by US troops. A rumor without evidence suggested that US troops had shot and then burned a copy of the Koran in the Wardak province. Demonstrators could not identify when, where, or by whom the Koran was burned. From the description, it was not a major event, barely newsworthy. But Obama has to be rescued from the inconvenient war, so…

It seems as though President Obama’s World Apology Tour has not completely silenced hatred of the US after all. They burned an effigy of Obama.

It’s not that the Afghanistan war is going swimmingly well, it’s just that with such a clear agenda to keep the Great One safe and loved, we cannot trust what the press has to say, and need to find reliable sources for war information. During the heat of the Iraq struggle, I found that independent journalists Michael Yon and Bill Roggio consistently offered the most reliable information, and I’ve been impressed so far with the analyses I’ve read at Stratfor. Your mileage may vary.

What practically nobody has been saying about the Afghan war is that the reason we’re in such a pickle there is that the US followed a strategy suggested by presidential candidate John Kerry during the 2004 election: we turned the effort over to an international organization instead of pursuing our own interests there. NATO was called in to handle the Afghan war. The failure is not a US failure (except insofar as the Bush administration consented to make it NATO’s war), but a failure of nations across Europe to send adequate troops, commit to the effort, establish an effective policy to improve the political or economic stability of the country, and so forth. Our allies send roughly half the forces they’re requested to send, leaving the US to shoulder some 2/3 of the staffing, and they shackle their troops with caveats dictating where they may be deployed and what actions they may take. As a consequence, the British and Dutch troops which occupy the bulk of the southern areas of Afghanistan have been ineffective in stabilizing those regions (by the way, notice how the article at this link, written in 2007, asserts that the effort has been successful so far, but lists all the factors that have since turned the situation sour.) The US has been more effective, but it’s not a US war, and the efforts of some are affected by the efforts of others.

And then there’s Pakistan, where al Qaeda fled when we ejected the Taliban from Afghanistan in 2002. The Pakistanis have been trying for years to push the training camps out of their own regions. Sort of. Maybe. Al Qaeda’s training camps continue to operate there, and a long-advertised effort to push them out of South Waziristan will probably just push them somewhere else for a while.

All of which explains why it was so essential for the US administration to maintain a whole-hearted, fully-awake, long-term effort to rid the world of Wahabi terrorists of all stripes. It also explains why we might have been enticed to turn the effort over to NATO, because the effort, addressing a world-wide network of aggressive terrorists, cannot be carried out by one nation, cooperation is required. But NATO is the wrong vehicle; the Europeans, for the most part, lack our resolve and commitment to defending ourselves. We should have kept the leadership in-house, and involved other nations only insofar as their own interests permit them to cooperate, as we did in Iraq.

Nor can it be completed by the beginning of the top-of-the-hour commercial break, which means that people will tire of the war long before it ends. The current administration — like every Democratic administration — lacks the political will to suffer the hit to its ratings that inevitably occur when a President pursues a long-term war and people tire of it. George W. Bush was criticized for his persistence in the face of criticism and difficulty (”Cowboy!” “Lack of imagination!”) but his is the sort of resolve that an effort like this requires. It is not an accident that the escalating, world-wide pattern of attacks against US citizens halted for 7 years. It will not be an accident when it resumes.

So brace yourselves. We’re about to face the same flood we’ve faced in every war since 1970, as Democrats muster the usual ammunition to entice the nation to buy into defeat . We’re the bad guys. There’s no real need. It can’t be won. They hate us. They don’t want us. It has nothing to do with the 2001 attacks. The military is corrupt. We’re only there because of greedy Republican Orcs. We should never have liberated Iraq. Blah blah-blah blah-blah blah blah.

And then, once they’ve weakened our defenses and allowed our enemies to multiply and prosper, they’ll lose an election, and a Republican President will take office — only to be greeted by a successful attack against American interests somewhere on the globe, possibly even here in the US. For which the Democrats will blame the Republicans, just the way they did in 2001, because what they did to embolden and empower the enemy notwithstanding, it happened when the President’s registration said “R,” and history began yesterday. Democrats are predictable.

Which is why the American people cannot trust Democrats with any war. Ever.

Earlier this week Kenneth Feinberg, unelected agent of King Obama tasked with managing the executive compensation of subjects of the Crown, announced severe cuts in pay for highly paid employees at those companies that have still failed to pay back money forced on them by the King. At the same time, the Federal Reserve, a board appointed by the King and ruling with no authority except that obtained by its power to lend funds to banks, announced plans to review and approve the compensation plans of member banks, even those who received no funds from the King.

Before the rise to power of King Obama, compensation for employees of publicly-held companies was determined by the owners of those companies, expressing themselves through their boards of directors. The concept of private property, which is the cornerstone of a self-governing republic, demanded that only those who owned the company could speak to its practices, allowing only those laws that were necessary to protect the peace and safety of the American people an additional voice. Of course, the number, power, and intrusiveness of laws “necessary to protect the peace and safety” have multiplied like aggressive, carnivorous rabbits, eating more and more of the nation’s substance as they overran free trade. But still, there were limits.

But the government became part-owners of those companies by lending to them, an action not contemplated by the authors of the Constitution from which administrations prior to the Obama administration drew their legitimacy by obeying its strictures. And I have seen no effort on the part of the Crown to limit its intrusion into the operations of these companies based on a fair evaluation of the numbers of shares they hold in each; no, it seems that when a firm accepts a dollar of public money for any reason, that firm becomes a wholly-owned subsidiary of the US Treasury Dept., and must obey its every command.

And by similar measure, Congress created the Federal Reserve in 1914, exercising authority it did not possess and forcing banks to become members. Now the Federal Reserve is exercising authority not specified by Congressional act, claiming the power to approve or disapprove the compensation structure of banks that were coerced to become members.

This brings to mind a vital distinction that was made in the century prior to the establishment of the American republic. It was in the years of Queen Elizabeth I, I believe, when the British Crown decided to extend its toleration to religious dissidents, choosing not to prosecute those Catholics and Protestants who refused to join the Church of England. Implied, and clearly understood by all, was the claim that Crown had every right to demand obedience, that it could, at any moment it chose, revoke that benign toleration and arrest and prosecute those dissidents. The fact that subjects of the Crown exercised liberties did not mean they were free; it only meant that for the time being, the Crown chose to grant them liberty. They were still subjects of the Crown. This same concept of toleration covered every other aspect of subjects’ liberties in England; they were free because the Crown granted them liberty, but the power to grant or revoke liberty remained with the Crown.

When the American republic was established, it instituted a new and revolutionary concept for the first time in the planet’s history: namely, that the government had no powers at all other than those specifically granted by the people. Religious liberty, economic liberty, political liberty — the government did not grant them, they inhered to the people. What belonged (and still belongs) to the English people only by toleration from the Crown, belongs to the American people by birthright. At least, it did before King Obama.

Simply by claiming that he has the right, Obama has made himself King over America. It is he who holds all rights, and he who grants, or tolerates, the liberties of the people. He reserves for himself the power to revoke liberties wherever and whenever he chooses, limited only by Congressional cooperation. Rights no longer inhere to the people; now they are all held by the President, and we all live by his benign toleration, just like subjects of the Crown.

There are plenty of valid objections to these ham-fisted measures to limit executive compensation. I predicted months ago (here and here) that top executives would flee from companies subject to pay restrictions, and this is already taking place as the smartest people in the industry anticipate the inevitable and find safer havens from which to earn what the market says they are worth. I also noted (here) that partisanship inevitably affects measures controlled by the government, and sure enough, the compensation caps are not going to affect the King’s favorites at Goldman Sachs and Morgan Stanley, who were permitted to repay their TARP loans (not all recipients of the King’s largess were so lucky.) In all his major policy moves, King Obama picks winners and losers from among the largest firms — and the winners are always supporters. Curious. And finally, it is crucial to remember that the Fed, which is claiming urgency to control compensation because that’s what caused the meltdown a year ago, is itself the body most directly at fault for the meltdown, having created the housing bubble by its aggressively low interest rates in the wake of multiple shocks to the economy in 2001.

The real objection, though, is that President Obama (he’s not really King… yet) is busily erasing the core distinction between American liberty and the monarchies that preceded it — he asserts, by bold action completely devoid of Constitutional empowerment, that the liberties of a free people exist only by his toleration. He grants us liberty to continue free trade in some small measure — for now. By his actions, he indicates that he reserves for himself the power to revoke those liberties at will. We, the people, do not own those liberties; King Obama does.

Many individuals in the nation applaud these limits on executive compensation, exclaiming that such levels of pay are “obscene,” that they are “unjust,” that the fact that even the poor in America live at a standard unheard of through most of the world through most of history does not justify the extraordinary wealth of the most productive and effective among us. They should look to themselves; for if the Crown can tell executives how much they are entitled to make, then the Crown can also tell anybody how much they are entitled to make. Tyrants obtain the power they desire by setting precedents against the unpopular, and then taking the power granted against the unpopular and using it against everybody else. The super-rich have become unpopular here in America, and by controlling their pay, Obama is establishing his Sovereign Right to control the pay of all. He wants the right for a reason, and you can be sure it is not to prevent riches; he’s not limited his own pay, nor the pay of his “Czars,” has he? Most likely, his goal is to prevent riches among his opponents, and to give himself the power to reward his supporters. That appears to be the one, guiding principle under which this King operates.

We are so screwed…

At long last, I continue my series of reviews of the Theological Foundations of a Just Rebellion (TFJR), political sermons delivered in pre-Revolution America. This installment covers a sermon preached by Charles Chancey in Boston on election day, in May of 1747, before the governor, the ruling council, and the house of representatives of Massachusetts. The text of the sermon may be found here.

Charles Chauncy served as pastor of the First Church in Boston for sixty years, and was among the most influential pastors in New England. From 1762 to 1771 he was instrumental in combating the British threat to send an Anglican bishop to America, an issue that rallied Congregationalists across New England against the Crown.

Text

The God of Israel said, the Rock of Israel spake to me; he that ruleth over Men must be just, ruling in the Fear of God.

II Sam. xxiii. 3.

I. That governments are necessary, and that some should rule over others, is evidently the will of God.

Governments are necessary to protect life, liberty, and property; this is necessary because of human sin. No particular system is God-ordained, but every people must choose its own style. It is evident in nature that some men are fit to rule, and others are not.

The present circumstances of the human race are therefore such, by means of sin, that ’tis necessary they should, for their mutual defence and safety, combine together in distinct societies, lodging as much power in the hands of a few, as may be sufficient to restrain the irregularities of the rest, and keep them within the bounds of a just decorum. Such a superiority in some, and inferiority in others, is perfectly adjusted to the present state of mankind. Their circumstances require it. They could not live, either comfortably or safely without it.

II. Rulers must be just, ruling in the fear of God.

A. Rulers must be just

1. They must be just in cooperation with their government’s Constitution. They must remain within the powers granted to them.

They have severally and equally a right to that power which is granted to them in the constitution, and to wrest it out of each other’s hands, or to obstruct one another in the regular legal exercise of it, is evidently unjust.

2. They must be just in the laws that they pass. Righteousness is the sole difference between rightful authority and tyranny.

They have an undoubted right to make and execute laws, for the publick good. This is essentially included in the very idea of government: Insomuch, that government, without a right to enact and enforce proper laws, is nothing more than an empty name.

And this right, in whomsoever it is vested, must be exercised under the direction of justice. For as there cannot be government without a right of legislation, so neither can there be this right but in conjunction with righteousness. ’Tis the just exercise of power that distinguishes right from might; authority that is to be revered and obeyed, from violence and tyranny, which are to be dreaded and deprecated.

Not only must they be just in the form of the laws that they pass, they must also be just in the execution of those laws, and in empowering others to execute them. There must be no favoritism, no self-seeking, no partisanship in their execution.

Augustine’s dictum that “an unjust law is no law at all” comes to mind. Dr. Chauncy would have disagreed, but would have agreed that an unjust law does severe damage to the reputation of the state and the law, and that such laws must be corrected by better rulers.

3. They must be just in their debts. The government must pay what it owes. And in justice to their station, they should be well-paid for their service.

The apparent intent of the Fed in conjunction with the President to repay US debt holders with inflated currency is a stark violation of this concept.

4. They must be just in respect to the liberties of subjects. They must respect and defend them.

Here, Chauncy uses the example of the Apostle Paul receiving deference when it was discovered he was a subject of Rome. So should rulers always defend the rights of their citizens, so that others will fear to intrude on them. In the modern day we might liken this to the appropriate use of the military to protect US citizens abroad. However, Chauncy also clearly means that the state must not intrude on the liberties of private citizens at home.

5. They must be just in preserving the peace and safety of the state. They must not permit undue disturbance among the people.

By this, he means that the state must be swift in putting down rebellion and in protecting citizens from thieves and highwaymen.

6. They must promote the general welfare of the people…

…by discouraging, on the one hand, idleness, prodigality, prophaneness, uncleanness, drunkenness, and the like immoralities, which tend, in the natural course of things, to their impoverishment and ruin: And by encouraging, on the other hand, industry, frugality, temperance, chastity, and the like moral virtues, the general practice whereof are naturally connected with the flourishing of a people in every thing that tends to make them great and happy.

Chauncy adds that rulers will account to Jesus for their execution of Justice, and the judgment for failure to do so faithfully will not be pretty.

In fine, it should be a constraining argument with rulers to be just, that they are accountable to that Jesus, whom God hath ordained to be the judge of the world, for the use of that power he has put into their hands. And if, by their unjust behaviour in their places, they have not only injured the people, but unhappily led them, by their example, into practices that are fraudulent and dishonest; I say, if they have thus misused their power, sad will be their account another day; such as must expose them to the resentments of their judge, which they will not be able to escape. It will not be any security then, that they were once ranked among the great men of the earth.

Chauncy also explains how necessary it is for rulers to possess sound faith. He explains that by no means is faith sufficient grounds to promote a man to governmental responsibility, but that such faith is one necessary condition of that promotion.

In the application of the lesson, Chauncy recognizes the Governor and other officers who were present, and exhorts them to more faithfully fulfill their duties. Apparently, Dr. Chauncy was concerned that the state of warfare and debt in the colonies was linked to their failure to enforce justice in public debts and business, to abuses of credit to the detriment of rich and poor alike, to an excess of vanity among the people, and to an excess of strong drink. Like any good Englishman of the time, he considered it the state’s role to enforce the public morals, both in what we would call social justice and in what we would call private morality.

By far the most crucial thing to notice about this sermon is that it was delivered preparatory to voting. They considered the selection of leaders a solemn duty before God, to be carried out in full awareness of their unity under Christ and of their duty to impartial and non-partisan justice.

I was bemused this morning while scanning the Drudge Report at the number of headlines that remind us all what life is like when the Democrats rule the roost. It ain’t pretty.

U.S. troop funds diverted to pet projects
Study finds $2.6 billion taken from guns and ammunition

Senators diverted $2.6 billion in funds in a defense spending bill to pet projects largely at the expense of accounts that pay for fuel, ammunition and training for U.S. troops, including those fighting wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, according to an analysis.

This reminds us of two important facts about Democrats: 1) They hate the military. They’ve expanded every aspect of American government so far except the Defense Department. Here, they’re using Defense as a piggy bank for pet projects. 2) You can’t pay attention to what they say, only to what they do. To listen to them, Afghanistan was the Right war, the Must-Win war, and they were the True Patriots who loved our soldiers. All lies. There exists no necessary relationship, in the minds of Democrats, between what they say and what they intend; they’ll say whatever they think you want to hear, then do whatever they feel like doing. They are liars.

Harry Reid Suggests Health Care to Cost $2 Trillion

Oops. I guess saving half a trillion reining in fraud and inefficiency in Medicare won’t pay for the national health care proposal after all, will it? (And, let’s face it, if they actually knew how to save that money by improving Medicare, they’d have done it already, wouldn’t they?) Seriously, what reason does any sane person have to believe the cost projections produced by Congressional Democrats, ever? When have they ever been anything but grossly wrong on the low side? Ever?

Elect Democrats, inflate the deficit. Works every time. Only, this time, it will demolish the currency, too. Not to mention turning our medical care system into Cuba’s. Wheee!

Deal may return Zelaya to power in Hondouras… Developing…

The one instance in the Western Hemisphere where a liberal republic executed its laws properly and defended themselves against a lawless neo-Marxist coup, and we backed the wrong side. Whatever they say, Democrats feel stronger sympathy toward World Socialism than they do toward American liberty. Seriously.

Foreclosures: ‘Worst three months of all time’
Despite signs of broader economic recovery, number of foreclosure filings hit a record high in the third quarter – a sign the plague is still spreading.

The President told us it was necessary, unavoidable, that we had to swell the deficit to unheard-of size in order to stimulate the economy and stop the wave of foreclosures. He told us it was so urgent that we had to pass it in the middle of the night, before anybody had even read the bill. And then, he told us that his recovery package was “… a major step in the fulfillment of his election promise of helping millions of Americans troubled by foreclosure.”

It didn’t work. Democrats’ economic plans never work — because they do not understand economics, and they think government spending is good for an economy. Even though Japan tried exactly this strategy in a similar situation in the 90s, and it did nothing. Even though the US tried this strategy in a similar situation in the 30s, and it did nothing. Even though the currency is on the brink of collapse. Government spending, to Democrats, is like bleeding to an 18th-century physician. The patient died the last 30 times, but it’s still the right thing to do. Real experience doesn’t count, we have to do what is consistent with Democratic theory because Democrats are the Smart Ones™.

Plus, this…

Obama says he’s looking at any way to create jobs

Didn’t he insist that he was the only candidate who knew how to do that? Why doesn’t the fact that he’s still using the same language a year later, all his attempts so far having failed, surprise me?

And just out of curiosity… has he considered getting the government the hell out of the economy’s way and letting free markets stimulate innovation, while looking at “any way to create jobs?” Why do I think that hasn’t come up?

How about this one:

Limbaugh dropped from group seeking to buy Rams…
Radio talk show host Rush Limbaugh blames others for dropping his Rams ownership bid

So Rush Limbaugh won’t get to buy into the St. Louis Rams after all. Big deal, right? Except, in order to accomplish this, Democrats politicized sports and assassinated the character of a private citizen, inventing racist quotes out of thin air in an irruption of vitriol and gibbering rage, like demons reacting to holy water, simply because they don’t like the man. Character assassination is just about the only thing Democrats do well. They do it well because they have lots of practice. Just ask Rush. And Clarence Thomas. And Sarah Palin. And George W. Bush. And Carrie Prejean. And Robert Bork. And Newt Gingrich. And Linda Tripp. And Katherine Harris. And the list goes on, and on, and on…

Meanwhile, Democrats caution us how mean-spirited conservatives are. Pardon me while I spit.

By the way, notice the subheading, which was written by Yahoo News. It’s a lovely little demonstration of how Democrats take responsibility for the filth they launch at others. Notice how it’s implied that somehow, it’s only Limbaugh’s deficient personal character that leads him to “blame others” for his being removed from the group buying the Rams. It has nothing whatsoever to do with the flood of lies produced by Democratic media hounds. No. It’s Limbaugh’s own fault, but he lacks the character to admit it. Find it in the dictionary under “projection.”

And then there’s this, the creepiest part of all:

LEAKED MEMO: ‘ORGANICALLY’ PRODUCE NETWORK TV TO PROMOTE GOVERNMENT ‘SERVICE’ AGENDA…

Wow. The entertainment and news industry in league with the White House. What happened to “the watchdog of liberty” and “speaking truth to power?” Suddenly, instead of a free, independent press, we have Brave New World, or 1984 and the Ministry of Truth. And we are not free to pursue life, liberty, and happiness; we have a moral obligation to serve Obama. This is how Democrats interpret the American experiment in government. Did you like “War is Peace?” How about “Liberty is Serving Obama?”

There’s more, but I’ve depressed myself enough. Even this last headline is not sufficient to lift my spirits:

Fox News Poll: 43 Percent Would Vote To Re-Elect President Obama
If the election were held today, 43 percent of American voters would back Barack Obama for president, according to a new Fox News poll.

It’s taken less than a year for voters to remember why they handed the government to Republicans ‘way back in 1994. Give Democrats control, and it’s like you’ve turned a valve on a fireplug leading from hell, and you’re pouring raw evil into the streets. Nothing good comes from it; they promise that everything will get better, and everything gets worse. But because they control, they get to direct what wealth hasn’t been sapped out of the system yet into the hands of their crony buddies, while they remove your liberties, smear their opponents, and turn the Land of the Free into a Socialist Worker’s Paradise.

Those numbers will continue to drop, but what of it? Will the wave of Republican, Libertarian, and Unaffiliated legislators that replace the Democrats in the coming elections have the courage to reverse this flood? Will they systematically list, then systematically repeal, every step of this full-tilt flight into Stalinism? Do they have the guts to do it while the wholly-owned subsidiary of World Socialism, the American Press, screeches in our ears how they’re making war on the poor and needy and re-instituting Hitler’s Third Reich?

We are SO screwed…

Charles Krauthammer has written for the Weekly Standard what has to be the most thorough encapsulation of the US’ current international position that I’ve ever seen. It’s long, but in it he captures the heart and soul of President Obama’s foreign policy initiatives: namely, that the President chooses for America to retreat from the hegemony that was thrust on us unwittingly after World War II, and to become just one among many nations. All his policies, both foreign and domestic, are leading us in this direction. Decline, says Krauthammer, is a choice.

So why not? Why not choose ease and bask in the adulation of the world as we serially renounce, withdraw, and concede?

Because, while globalization has produced in some the illusion that human nature has changed, it has not. The international arena remains a Hobbesian state of nature in which countries naturally strive for power. If we voluntarily renounce much of ours, others will not follow suit. They will fill the vacuum. Inevitably, an inversion of power relations will occur.

Do we really want to live under unknown, untested, shifting multipolarity? Or even worse, under the gauzy internationalism of the New Liberalism with its magically self-enforcing norms? This is sometimes passed off as “realism.” In fact, it is the worst of utopianisms, a fiction that can lead only to chaos. Indeed, in an age on the threshold of hyper-proliferation, it is a prescription for catastrophe.

Heavy are the burdens of the hegemon. After the blood and treasure expended in the post-9/11 wars, America is quite ready to ease its burden with a gentle descent into abdication and decline.

Decline is a choice. More than a choice, a temptation.

His analysis of Obama’s foreign policy and its effects are spot-on. He’s entirely correct about the effect of Obama’s domestic policies on American economic dominance. He is correct about America’s decline being chosen and reversible. And, he is correct in noting that America is the most benign hegemon the world has ever seen, and the only one not to instantly and spontaneously produce a counter-force of allied nations to combat it.

I highly recommend this one.

I’m in the first chapter of Jonah Goldberg’s Liberal Fascism, and I’m delighted to find that he’s accurately identified the religious character of American progressivism.

The one thing that unites these [variously fascist] movements is that they were all, in their own ways, totalitarian. But what do we mean when we say something is totalitarian? The word has certainly taken on an understandably sinister connotation in the last half century. Thanks to work by Hannah Arendt, Zbigniew Brzezinski, and others, it’s become a catchall for brutal, soul-killing, Orwellian regimes. But that’s not how the word was originally used or intended. Mussolini himself coined the term to describe a society where everybody belonged, where everyone was taken care of, where everything was inside the state and nothing was outside; where truly no child was left behind.

Again, it is my argument that American liberalism is a totalitarian political religion, but not necessarily an Orwellian one. It is nice, not brutal. Nannying, not bullying. But it is definitely totalitarian — or “holistic,” if you prefer — in that liberalism today sees no realm of human life that is beyond political significance, from what you eat to what you smoke to what you say. Sex is political. Food is political. Sports, entertainment, your inner motives and outer appearance, all have political salience for liberal fascists. Liberals place their faith in priestly experts who know better, who plan, exhort, badger, and scold. They try to use science to discredit traditional notions of religion and faith, but they speak the language of pluralism and spirituality to defend “nontraditional” beliefs. Just as with classical fascism, liberal fascists speak of a “Third Way” between right and left where all good things go together and all hard choices are “false choices.”

The idea that there are no hard choices — that is, choices between competing goods — is religious and totalitarian because it assumes that all good things are fundamentally compatible. The conservative or classical liberal vision understands that life is unfair, that man is flawed, and that the only perfect society, the only real utopia, waits for us in the next life.

I’ve been saying for decades that the current version of what we call “liberalism,” which its adherents are calling “progressivism,” feels like a religion, and its adherents exhibit all the characteristics of True Believers. These Believers take as axioms — as dogma, really — the inherent virtue of radical egalitarianism, multiculturalism, and moral relativism, dismiss all other views of truth as hopelessly backward, and ultimately celebrate the ascendancy of the enlightened apex of human development, namely themselves.

Understanding that progressivism is a religion explains lots of things. It explains why progressives consider holding their political position the apex of moral virtue, and holding contrary positions, the depths of moral vice. It explains why progressives are impervious to reasons, statistics, or sound arguments that do not support their point of view. It explains why they feel perfectly justified in controlling even the smallest decisions of the populace. It explains why they feel no compunction of conscience while breaking every conceivable law or rule of civil behavior in the pursuit of power. It explains the fervor with which they pursue political power. It explains everything: they’re True Believers.

I produced a decent definition of “religion” in my post on Darwin Day this year:

…“theism” is not a useful definition of religion: there are major, recognized world religions that contain both many gods (Hinduism, Shintoism, Buddhism) and no gods (Confucianism and Taoism.) A better definition of religion would be “a dogmatic set of cohesive ideas purporting to explain the nature and purpose of the universe, and from that to derive how Man should live.”

Progressivism is nothing if not dogmatic; you can’t even raise questions about their presuppositions without getting scoffed at. They definitely have ideas regarding the nature of the universe, and they not only have derived from those ideas how Man should live, but consider themselves the rightful executors of the power to make them live that way. Oh, yes, progressivism is a religion, alright, and a highly coercive one at that.

Some will object that they can’t be religious because they do not believe in God. I’ve had that conversation with atheists of various stripes; they want me to get it through my head that Atheism is not belief, but the absence of belief. That’s like saying that on a sunny, warm day we are not experiencing weather, but the absence of weather. If the topic is “What is the universe, and how should we live in it,” the answer may or may not include God, but all answers to that question are addressing the same topic. The answer that says “We must work together under one Government to create a world without racism, sexism, homophobia, or unfairness” is as much religion as the answer that says “Fear God, and keep His commandments, for such is the whole duty of man.”

As with all True Believers, their cognitive dissonance runs deep. They can hurl the most incredibly vicious racial epithets at black conservatives like Sowell, Thomas, and Rice (remember Clarence Thomas as a lawn jockey?), and then claim that conservatism is the source of all racism without the slightest awareness of the irony. They slur conservative women with utter, unrestrained viciousness (Katherine Harris “applies makeup with a trowel” and Michelle Malkin is “a mashed-up bag of meat with lipstick”) but consider conservatism the bastion of sexist hate and suppression of women. They ruminate about conservative talk show hosts “blowing up like a blimp” and fabricate out of thin air racist quotes to accuse their opponents, but wonder how conservatives can be so mean-spirited. They cannot even watch Sarah Palin on TV without screaming curses at her, and regard capitalists and conservatives as evil incarnate, but lecture us about tolerance and getting past our differences. Because they are The Good Ones, it is simply not possible that they could do evil; because their beliefs are the very definition of tolerance, open-mindedness, and multicultural harmony, what they do simply cannot ever be considered intolerant, bigoted, or vicious.

Adherents engage in a pretense of intellectual discussion among themselves because Reason sits high in their panoply of gods; but it is pretense only, and impervious to serious engagement from outside its own circle of self-congratulation. Ask any conservative what it takes to get a progressive to engage them in reasonable conversation; every one of us who has tried can count on one hand the number of times we have succeeded in getting a cogent, polite response to a sincere intellectual challenge. I’ve been trying for at least 25 years, and still know only a handful of progressives who can talk politics with me without hurling insults. Conservatives can play drinking games betting on how many words it will take before the progressive resorts to sneering: my record is four words. I’m not kidding; a friend asked me “Why Iraq?” and he interrupted with a sneer after “What was intended was…” When Rush Limbaugh gets a call from an acknowledged liberal, he times how long it takes before he gets called a derogatory name; it’s invariably less than 2 minutes. Ask any conservative how many times he’s been called “Nazi,” “fascist,” “racist,” or various shades of “imbecile” simply for offering a contrary idea to one held by a progressive. In my experience, there is no connection between the idea offered and the accusatory response; “fascist” is a definition. To the progressive, intelligent conversation begins with “are you a believer?” If the answer is “no,” then it’s simply an article of faith that what follows is “fascist,” “sexist,” “racist,” or “greed,” and can have no merit.

And then, there are the Christian progressives. These are becoming increasingly common, as the shaming and fault-finding directed by the culture at large toward Christians for remaining faithful to an “outdated” sect take their toll. Increasingly, devout Christians are succumbing to the lie that using other peoples’ tax money to engage the government in programs for the poor is somehow a Christian act. Theft is never Christian; and the notion that the government can force righteousness on a people is as demonic a notion as ever infected a Christian mind. More to the point, though, the dogmatic assumptions of progressivism are biblically unsound; man cannot be perfected through political activism, it is no virtue to make all outcomes equal regardless of performance, and showing love to people of different races and cultures does not imply that all practices are of equal moral worth. By committing to the progressive Utopian vision, no matter how well-intentioned or filled with Christian-sounding endorsements, Christians are serving among the legions of a foreign god.

One must remember when engaging progressives that one is most likely engaging what I would call a Brittle Fundamentalist. Brittle Fundamentalists can only see the world in black and white; they can accept no grays. Consequently, they will resist with intense fervor any effort to move them from serving the goals of progressivism, and simply disbelieve any fact you produce that does not fit their picture of the world. But, like all Brittle Fundamentalists, there is a breaking point; if the preponderance of the facts from a trusted source at any time forces them to acknowledge that they’ve been wrong on any subject, the entire house of cards can collapse in a matter of days. They can quickly become conservatives if they ever permit themselves, even once, to let a contrary thought in. Their faith is inflexible, and that makes it breakable.

The fact that Western civilization has been overtaken by a non-Christian — I should say an anti-Christian — religion, it is clearer than ever that the path to saving Western civilization is not political, but religious. The culture will not be turned by winning a series of elections; the culture will be turned by religious revival, and by nothing else.

The Nobel Prize committee claims it awarded the Nobel Peace Prize to President Barack Obama because of “his extraordinary efforts to strengthen international diplomacy and cooperation between peoples.” A friend points out that nominations for the Nobel closed as of 2/1/2009, so the extraordinary efforts apparently took place during his first 2 weeks in the White House, or while he was still a candidate. Hmmm…

Regardless, in the category of international relations, the President has spent the 9 months of his presidency touring the world apologizing for the US’ arrogance. Consequently, I found the cartoon to the right apropos of the Nobel committee’s esteem for the President, since it seems likely that the string of foreign misadventures listed in the cartoon are foremost among the arrogant acts for which the President is apologizing, and the sort of thing he will ensure the US will never perpetrate again. We all know how much the Nobel committee, composed as it is of adherents to World Socialism of one sort or another, finds this sort of pugnacious behavior a thorough-going hindrance to its own agenda of World Peace.

This cartoon, like the one in the previous post, is an Australian cartoon apparently not published in the US.

I found this in a collection of 15 Australian cartoons that apparently have never been printed by American publishers. I think it’s difficult for a cartoon to express more profoundly the current condition of Western civilization.

If you’re wondering why I might imagine the US upholding Western Civilization single-handed, and why I might implicate both liberalism and Islam in the suicide, perhaps it’s time for us to review an article I wrote about 20 months ago highlighting a couple of erudite Europeans’ observations about why the US is resisting the spread of Islam while Europe is not (Vasko Kohlmayer is a naturalized American citizen, but hails from the Czech Republic.) This information is still current, and extremely important. The short version is that Islam is a religion of conquest, and only a competing religion seems to have the energy to resist its spread; post-Christian hedonism has apparently leached out the West’s capacity to care, and also its capacity to reproduce at a level that will sustain civilization.

The Wall Street Journal brings up an interesting point from the past today regarding Iran’s imminent nuclear capability, and it bears on a great deal of history from the Bush years.

Back in December of 2007, a gathering of government intel professionals produced a National Intelligence Estimate (NIE) claiming “with high confidence” that Iran had ceased its nuclear development as of 2003. That this was not true is evident now. What the Journal reports is that the intelligence community was already well aware of the recently-announced uranium enrichment facilities and weapons design efforts at the time the NIE was published. This demonstrates that the NIE was published as propaganda; they knew it was false, but it served a political purpose, so they published it anyhow. I reported this at the time, and confirmed it with evidence later.

The purpose it seems to have served is to cripple the US’ response to the threat of a nuclear Iran. The Bush administration may have been planning air strikes back in 2007 to address the budding threat; the NIE was the culmination of political infighting within the Executive branch to stop the administration’s unilateral response to the Iranian threat, and more or less signaled the President’s capitulation to his internal adversaries. Scott Horton, the reliably loony leftist at Harper’s, reported this at the time in an article that errs by assuming that the NIE was the truth and that it was Cheney et al that were operating on false information (an assertion we now know to have been 180 degrees off the mark, something that sensible people would have expected even then.)

The propagandistic NIE was merely the last shot in the long-standing revolt by leftists within the US intelligence community against the Bush administration — a revolt that was only a hair shy of being a full-blown attempt at a coup d’etat. Leftist rogues within the intelligence community were actively undermining Bush administration policies, and executing plots with the sole intent of discrediting the President. I’m convinced that the entire Joe Wilson-Valerie Plame affair was one of these — an operation planned and executed by rogues within the CIA to discredit the President. I wrote about the revolt at the time, in the early days of this blog (you can review my thoughts by clicking on the Intelligence Community topic under my topical index, at the bottom of the sidebar.)

History has done us the favor of sorting out the truth quickly, but we should not miss the lesson. The lesson is not just that the NIE was wrong. The lesson is that the intelligence community was deliberately manipulating reports throughout the Bush years with the intent of discrediting the administration and crippling its policies. We should apply this knowledge to whatever we now take for granted from the Bush years that came to us by way of the intelligence community — like the claim that there were no weapons of mass destruction in Iraq.

Almost a year ago, Jeff Lewis at the American Thinker produced an essay explaining the cost of leftist power-seeking in the form of crippling our response to nuclear proliferation:

George W. Bush has been crucified for five long years in the media, by the feckless, hysterical and cowardly Europeans, by the United Nations, and of course by the Democratic Party, because he took the only sane action possible in the face of the apparent WMD threat from Saddam. Because presidents don’t have the luxury of Monday morning quarterbacking. They cannot wait for metaphysical certainty about threats to national survival and international peace. There is no such thing as metaphysical certainty in these matters; presidents must act on incomplete intelligence, knowing full well that their domestic enemies will try to destroy them for trying to save the peace.

But that is water under the bridge by now. What’s not past, but rather a clear and present threat to civilization are the consequences of the unbelievable recklessness of the International Left — including the Democrats, the Europeans, the UN, and the former communist powers. Because of their screaming opposition to the Bush administration’s rational actions against Saddam, we are now rendered helpless against two even more dangerous challenges. With Saddam there was genuine doubt about his nuclear program; the notion that he had a viable program was just the safest guess to make in the face of his policy of deliberate ambiguity. In the case of Ahmadinejad and Kim Jong Il there’s no guessing any more. They have nukes and missiles, or will have within a year.

The entire anti-proliferation effort has therefore been sabotaged and probably ruined by the Left. For what reason? There can be only one rational reason: A lust for power, even at the expense of national and international safety and peace. But the Left has irrational reasons as well, including an unfathomable hatred for adulthood in the face of mortal danger. Like the Cold War, this is a battle between the adolescent rage of the Left and the realistic adult decision-making of the mainstream — a mainstream which is now tenuously maintained only by conservatives in the West.

And now, in the face of a growing Iranian threat, our Peerless Messianic Leader has eliminated the planned missile shield aimed at protecting Europe from an Iranian nuclear threat, in exchange for assistance in managing that threat from Russia, which arguably supplied Iran with the means to produce nuclear weapons in the first place.

David Horowitz has argued for years that there exists an unspoken alliance between radical Islam and radical Socialism. It becomes plausible to assert that radical elements in the US — read “progressives,” and include the President — have more policy goals in common with Iran than they have with conservatives in America, and would prefer a nuclear Iran to a Middle East with stable republics like Israel and a free Iraq. Might this explain President Obama’s fecklessness regarding the Taliban in Afghanistan? Can we trust the President to act in the international community with America’s best interests at heart, or is he serving a wider agenda?

For my part, I think it is long past time to revive treason as a crime suitable for legitimate prosecution. Perpetrators of active disinformation campaigns aimed at undermining actual governmental policy should be prosecuted seriously, with decades-long prison terms at a minimum for active attempts at crippling lawful policy. It is one thing to oppose policy publicly, and to argue against it; it is another thing entirely to undermine that policy actively. Congress should pass laws to that effect, with clear exceptions made for active defense of the US Constitution against unlawful acts by the Executive branch.