From the Worth-Reading-Blog. Dead-on-Balls accurate. Enuff said.
Monday, May 14, 2012
The United States of America is becoming more like Nazi Germany every single day. In fact, the Nazification of America is almost complete. The parallels between Nazi Germany and the United States of today are going to absolutely shock many of you. Most Americans simply have never learned what life was really like back in Nazi Germany. Under Adolf Hitler, Germany was a Big Brother totalitarian police state that ruthlessly repressed freedom and individual liberty. Under Adolf Hitler, Germany adopted socialism, dramatically increased government spending and raised taxes to astronomical levels. Under Adolf Hitler, abortion became legal in Germany, the government took over health care and Christianity was pushed out of the public schools and out of public life. To prove all of these points, I am going to use extensive quotes from two sources. Kitty Werthmann was a child living a peaceful life in Austria when Hitler took over her nation. Her eyewitness accounts about what life was like under Nazi Germany are invaluable. In addition, I will also be quoting extensively from author Bruce Walker. He is the author of a book entitled "The Swastika Against The Cross: The Nazi War On Christianity", and during his years of research he has uncovered some absolutely jaw dropping stuff. After reading the information in the rest of this article, there should be no doubt that the United States is becoming just like Nazi Germany.
Nazi Germany shows us what happens when the state becomes god. Adolf Hitler was certainly more racist than the leaders of America are today, but other than that there are very few differences between the road that Adolf Hitler led Germany down and the path that the United States is being led down.
The following are 25 signs that America is rapidly becoming more like Nazi Germany....
#1 Nazi Germany was a totalitarian Big Brother police state that constantly monitored everything that German citizens did.
Today, the bureaucrats that run things in the United States are also absolutely obsessed with constantly trying to monitor us. For example, there are now control freaks that inspect the lunches of preschool students in certain areas of the country in order to make sure that they contain the "right" foods....
A preschooler at West Hoke Elementary School ate three chicken nuggets for lunch Jan. 30 because the school told her the lunch her mother packed was not nutritious.
The girl’s turkey and cheese sandwich, banana, potato chips, and apple juice did not meet U.S. Department of Agriculture guidelines, according to the interpretation of the person who was inspecting all lunch boxes in the More at Four classroom that day.
The Division of Child Development and Early Education at the Department of Health and Human Services requires all lunches served in pre-kindergarten programs - including in-home day care centers - to meet USDA guidelines. That means lunches must consist of one serving of meat, one serving of milk, one serving of grain, and two servings of fruit or vegetables, even if the lunches are brought from home.#2 Nazi officials often used their positions of power to force others to do dehumanizing things.
This is exactly what the TSA is doing today. It would be really easy to imagine some Nazi military officers forcing a young woman to walk back and forth in front of them several times so that they could admire her form. Well, that is what TSA agents are doing to American women today. The following comes from a recent Wired article....
TSA agents in Dallas singled out female passengers to undergo screening in a body scanner, according to complaints filed by several women who said they felt the screeners intentionally targeted them to view their bodies.
One woman who flew out of Dallas-Ft. Worth International Airport several months ago said a female agent sent her through a body scanner three times after the agent commented on her “cute” body.#3 In Nazi Germany, even women and children were treated like dehumanized cattle.
Well, today schoolchildren are being strip-searched all over the United States. Down in Georgia, one student was recently strip-searched by public school officials after another student falsely accused him of having marijuana.
Another student down in Albuquerque was recently forced to strip down to his underwear while five adults watched because he had $200 in his pocket. The student was never formally charged with doing anything wrong.
#4 In Nazi Germany, authorities could stop you and search you at any time and for any reason.
In America that is not supposed to happen, but it is happening. Last year, TSA "VIPR teams" conducted approximately 8,000 "unannounced security screenings" at subway stations, bus terminals, seaports and highway rest stops.
If you are not able to produce "your papers", there is a good chance that you will get thrown into prison in America. For example, a 21-year-old college student named Samantha Zucker was recently arrested and put in a New York City jail for 36 hours just because she could not produce any identification for police.
#5 Under Adolf Hitler, there were massive increases in government spending.
According to eyewitness Kitty Werthmann, just about everyone was getting some sort of a handout from the German government....
Newlyweds immediately received a $1,000 loan from the government to establish a household. We had big programs for families. All day care and education were free. High schools were taken over by the government and college tuition was subsidized. Everyone was entitled to free handouts, such as food stamps, clothing, and housing.Of course, as I have written about so many times before, this is the exact same thing that we are seeing in the United States today.
#6 Under Hitler, taxes were raised dramatically in order to pay for all of these social programs.
Kitty Werthmann says that "our tax rates went up to 80% of our income."
In the United States our tax rates have not gotten that bad yet, but when you total up all federal taxes, all state taxes, all local taxes, all property taxes and all sales taxes, there are a significant number of Americans that do pay more than 50% of their incomes in taxes.
#7 The economy of Nazi Germany was very highly socialized.
As Ludwig Von Mises once correctly observed, the German economy under Hitler was not capitalist at all....
What Mises identified was that private ownership of the means of production existed in name only under the Nazis and that the actual substance of ownership of the means of production resided in the German government. For it was the German government and not the nominal private owners that exercised all of the substantive powers of ownership: it, not the nominal private owners, decided what was to be produced, in what quantity, by what methods, and to whom it was to be distributed, as well as what prices would be charged and what wages would be paid, and what dividends or other income the nominal private owners would be permitted to receive. The position of the alleged private owners, Mises showed, was reduced essentially to that of government pensioners.The United States has not gotten to the level of Nazi Germany yet, but we do have a socialist president and back in 2009 the cover of Newsweek boldly proclaimed that "We Are All Socialists Now".
#8 In Nazi Germany, if you conducted business outside of the socialist paradigm you were heavily punished.
Well, the same thing is happening in the United States today. For example, the FDA has been runningelaborate entrapment schemes that are designed to entrap producers of raw milk. Any "unauthorized commerce" is dealt with very strictly by the U.S. government these days.
#9 In Nazi Germany, government regulation of business got wildly out of control.
The following is eyewitness testimony from Kitty Werthmann....
My brother-in-law owned a restaurant that had square tables. Government officials told him he had to replace them with round tables because people might bump themselves on the corners. Then they said he had to have additional bathroom facilities. It was just a small dairy business with a snack bar. He couldn't meet all the demands. Soon, he went out of business.
If the government owned the large businesses and not many small ones existed, it could be in control.
We had consumer protection. We were told how to shop and what to buy. Free enterprise was essentially abolished. We had a planning agency specially designed for farmers. The agents would go to the farms, count the live-stock, then tell the farmers what to produce, and how to produce it.Of course we all know about all of the ridiculous regulations that the U.S. government is burdening businesses with today. In every day and age control freaks love to stick it to business people that are just trying to make a living.
#10 Under Hitler, free market capitalism was absolutely hated.
National Socialist theologian Gregor Strasser once stated the following....
We National Socialists are enemies, deadly enemies, of the present capitalist system with its exploitation of the economically weak … and we are resolved under all circumstances to destroy this system.And as I have written about previously, a lot of Barack Obama's strongest supporters are socialists and communists, and an increasing number of Americans are showing disdain for capitalism. In fact, some recent polls show that young adults in America actually have a more favorable view of socialism than they do of capitalism.
#11 In Nazi Germany, the health care system was taken over by the government.
The following is more eyewitness testimony from Kitty Werthmann....
Before Hitler, we had very good medical care. Many American doctors trained at the University of Vienna . After Hitler, health care was socialized, free for everyone. Doctors were salaried by the government. The problem was, since it was free, the people were going to the doctors for everything. When the good doctor arrived at his office at 8 a.m., 40 people were already waiting and, at the same time, the hospitals were full. If you needed elective surgery, you had to wait a year or two for your turn. There was no money for research as it was poured into socialized medicine. Research at the medical schools literally stopped, so the best doctors left Austria and emigrated to other countries.Of course we all know what is going on in America today. The government spends nearly half of all health care dollars and Obamacare is going to mean more government control over the health care system than ever before.
#12 Under Adolf Hitler, abortion was made "safe and legal" in Germany.
It turns out that Hitler was a huge fan of the founder of Planned Parenthood, Margaret Sanger. And as I wrote about recently, it was Sanger that once said the following....
"The most merciful thing that a family does to one of its infant members is to kill it."Hitler echoed this sentiment when he wrote the following in Mein Kampf....
"The demand that defective people be prevented from propagating equally defective offspring. . . represents the most humane act of mankind."After the Nazis came to power in 1933, abortion was very quickly legalized. By 1935 there were approximately 500,000 abortions being performed in Germany every single year.
Yes, Hitler very much encouraged Aryan women to have as many children as possible. But he also very much viewed abortion as a way to reduce "undesirable" populations.
Unfortunately, something very similar is happening today. Abortion clinics are often located in the "poor" part of town, and a staggering 72 percent of Planned Parenthood's "customers" have incomes that are either equal to or beneath 150 percent of the federal poverty level.
#13 In Nazi Germany, killing the "defective", the "weak" and the "disabled" was considered to be a good thing because it made the German people "stronger".
Unfortunately, many in America today have fully embraced the eugenics principles which were so dominant in Nazi Germany.
A 3 year old girl named Amelia was recently denied a kidney transplant because she is considered to be "mentally retarded", and we all remember what happened to Terri Schiavo.
Not only that, the editorial page editor of the Detroit News recently proposed putting contraceptives into the drinking water in Michigan because the state has become a "breeding ground for poverty".
This kind of sick thinking is rapidly spreading in America, and that is a very frightening thing.
#14 In Nazi Germany, education was nationalized and God was kicked out of the schools.
The following is more eyewitness testimony from Kitty Werthmann....
Our education was nationalized. I attended a very good public school. The population was predominantly Catholic, so we had religion in our schools. The day we elected Hitler (March 13, 1938), I walked into my schoolroom to find the crucifix replaced by Hitler's picture hanging next to a Nazi flag. Our teacher, a very devout woman, stood up and told the class we wouldn't pray or have religion anymore. Instead, we sang Deutschland, Deutschland, Uber Alles, and had physical education.Unfortunately, the exact same thing is happening to U.S. public schools.
#15 Under Adolf Hitler, God was mocked and religion was pushed out of every corner of public life.
Just check out the following information uncovered by author Bruce Walker....
The Nazi tract Gott und Volk was distributed in 1941, and it describes the life cycle of German youth in the future, who would: “With parties and gifts the youth will be led painlessly from one faith to the other and will grow up without ever having heard of the Sermon on the Mount or the Golden Rule, to say nothing of the Ten Commandments… The education of the youth is to be confined primarily by the teacher, the officer, and the leaders of the party. The priests will die out. They have estranged the youth from the Volk. Into their places will step the leaders. Not deputies of God. But anyway the best Germans. And how shall we train our children? Thus, as though they had never heard of Christianity!”Once again, this parallels what we are seeing happen in America today. Last year, a high school student in Southern California was suspended for two days because he had private conversations with his classmates during which he discussed Christianity. He was also banned from bringing his Bible to school ever again.
For many more examples of this phenomenon, please see this article: "18 Examples Of How Christians Are Being Specifically Targeted By Big Brother".
#16 Adolf Hitler fully embraced the theory of evolution, and Darwinism provided the intellectual foundation for much of Nazism.
At a Nazi Party rally in Nuremberg in 1933, Hitler declared that "higher race subjects to itself a lower race . . .a right which we see in nature and which can be regarded as the sole conceivable right".
Hitler was obsessed with the "survival of the fittest" and he took this theory to its logical extremes. The following is how one author put it....
"Hitler was influenced above all by the theories of the nineteenth-century social Darwinist school, whose conception of man as biological material was bound up with impulses towards a planned society. He was convinced that the race was disintegrating, deteriorating through faulty breeding as a result of a liberally tinged promiscuity that was vitiating the nation’s blood. And this led to the establishment of a catalogue of ‘positive’ curative measures: racial hygiene, eugenic choice of marriage partners, the breeding of human beings by the methods of selection on the one hand and extirpation on the other"But of course we have no problem with teaching this flawed theory to our children in the public schools of America today.
Haven't we learned anything from history?
#17 Under Adolf Hitler, the state started taking over the job of child care.
The following is more eyewitness testimony from Kitty Werthmann....
When the mothers had to go out into the work force, the government immediately established child care centers. You could take your children ages 4 weeks to school age and leave them there around-the-clock, 7 days a week, under the total care of the government. The state raised a whole generation of children. There were no motherly women to take care of the children, just people highly trained in child psychology.Of course this is exactly what is happening in America today. Children are raised by day care centers and public schools, and most parents spend very little time with their own children.
#18 In Nazi Germany, it became fashionable to mock Christians and the Christian faith.
The following is more from author Bruce Walker....
By 1935, the virulently anti-Christian leader of the Hitler Youth, Baldur von Shirach issued a regulation that prohibited any child from belonging simultaneously to a church youth group and the Hitler Youth, and gradually membership in the Hitler Youth became almost obligatory – parents were told that their children would not get jobs in the civil service unless they belonged to the Hitler Youth and employers were told not to hire children who did not belong to the Hitler Youth. Christian schoolchildren who did not belong to the Hitler Youth or its female counterpart were routinely beaten up by young Nazi thugs.
Boys inducted into the Hitler Youth were required to explicitly reject Christianity by oaths like this: “German blood and Christian baptismal water are completely incompatible.” At Hitler Youth center at Halle, was the following prominent statement: “The Faith fanatics, who still to-day slide down on their knees with faces uplifted to heaven, waste their time in churchgoing and prayers, and have not yet understood that they are living on the earth and that therefore their task is of a thoroughly earthly kind. All we Hitler people can still only look with the greatest contempt on those young people who still run to their silly Evangelical or Catholic Churches in order to vent their quite superstitious religious feelings.” Those that believe that the Nazis embraced Christianity are delusional. The following are direct quotes out of Hitler Youth training manuals....
“Christianity is a religion of slaves and fools.”
“How did Christ die? Whining at the Cross!”
“The Ten Commandments represent the lowest instincts of man.”
“Christianity is merely a cloak for Judaism.”
This is definitely where things are going in America today. Our television shows and our movies regularly mock Christians and they are always portrayed as the "bad guys".
In addition, the name of Jesus is rapidly becoming a forbidden word. Some U.S. courts have even ruled that it is unconstitutional to use the name of "Jesus Christ" during any official government meeting. The following comes from a recent WorldNetDaily article....
But the American Civil Liberties Union and Americans United for Separation of Church and State are standing by their victory in a U.S. circuit court decision that states even "a solitary reference to Jesus Christ" in invocations before the Forsyth County Board of Commissioners' meetings could do "violence to the pluralistic and inclusive values that are a defining feature of American public life."#19 Under Adolf Hitler, sexual promiscuity was actually encouraged.
The following is more eyewitness testimony from Kitty Werthmann....
My mother was very unhappy. When the next term started, she took me out of public school and put me in a convent. I told her she couldn't do that and she told me that someday when I grew up, I would be grateful. There was a very good curriculum, but hardly any fun no sports, and no political indoctrination. I hated it at first but felt I could tolerate it. Every once in a while, on holidays, I went home. I would go back to my old friends and ask what was going on and what they were doing. Their loose lifestyle was very alarming to me. They lived without religion. By that time unwed mothers were glorified for having a baby for Hitler. It seemed strange to me that our society changed so suddenly. As time went along, I realized what a great deed my mother did so that I wasn't exposed to that kind of humanistic philosophy.Of course the exact same thing is happening in America today. If you doubt that your tax dollars are going to promote sexual promiscuity, then I have a video for you to watch. It is a video from the American Life League, and you can view it right here. DO NOT let any children watch this video. It is done by a pro-life organization but it is very graphic. I have posted a link to it because it is imperative that parents understand what is really going on out there. But please be warned that it is very, very graphic.
#20 Once the Nazis took power, they rapidly implemented gun control legislation and later on they took all of the guns away from the populace.
Kitty Werthmann remembers very well what happened in Austria under the Nazis....
Next came gun registration. People were getting injured by guns. Hitler said that the real way to catch criminals (we still had a few) was by matching serial numbers on guns. Most citizens were law abiding and dutifully marched to the police station to register their firearms. Not long after-wards, the police said that it was best for everyone to turn in their guns. The authorities already knew who had them, so it was futile not to comply voluntarily.Last year, more than 10 million guns were sold in the United States, but gun control legislation continues to become even more strict, and it is only a matter of time before the federal government tries to disarm the U.S. population completely.
#21 Under the Nazis, large numbers of children were taken away from good families.
The following is more from author Bruce Walker....
Parents who resisted Nazi anti-Christian indoctrination too strongly simply had their children taken away from them. The Nazis even forbade parents to give their children Christian names and ordered babies instead to be given names like Dietrich, Otto or Siegfried. The home teaching of Christianity by parents in the home was forbidden. Not content with simply driving Christianity out of public schools, Himmler banned all Confessing Church seminaries and instruction in 1937 and he closed all private religious schools two years later.Doesn't this sound exactly like where America is headed?
In many states, CPS ("child protective services") has become one of the most feared government agencies. All over the nation, thousands upon thousands of children have been removed from good homes because the parents were not raising them "correctly".
You can read about one particularly bad CPS horror story right here.
#22 Under Adolf Hitler, society became very highly militarized.
Of course we are seeing the same thing in the U.S. right now.
Sadly, this is even happening to our public schools. According to blogger Alexander Higgins, students in kindergarten and the 1st grade in the state of New Jersey are now required by law to participate "in monthly anti-terrorism drills". The following is an excerpt from a letter that he recently received from the school where his child attends....
Each month a school must conduct one fire drill and one security drill which may be a lockdown, bomb threat, evacuation, active shooter, or shelter-in place drill. All schools are now required by law to implement this procedure.This is the kind of thing that a sicko like Adolf Hitler would try to do, and it is not good for our children.
#23 In Nazi Germany, the prisons were absolutely packed.
Right now, the United States has the highest incarceration rate in the world by far and the largest total prison population on the entire globe by far.
Even children are being arrested in alarming numbers. In a previous article, I described how one 12-year-old girl down in Texas was recently arrested for spraying herself with perfume and how police were recently sent out to collect an overdue library book from a 5-year-old girl in Massachusetts.
#24 Under Adolf Hitler, there was basically no freedom of speech.
In the United States today we are told that we still have freedom of speech, but that freedom is being "chilled" in thousands of different ways.
For example, the FBI is now admittedly recording Internet talk radio programs all over the United States. The following comes from a recent article by Mark Weaver of WMAL.com....
If you call a radio talk show and get on the air, you might be recorded by the FBI.
The FBI has awarded a $524,927 contract to a Virginia company to record as much radio news and talk programming as it can find on the Internet.
The FBI says it is not playing big brother by policing the airwaves, but rather seeking access to what airs as potential evidence.So please speak freely on talk radio. Just realize that the feds will be recording every single word.
#25 Under Adolf Hitler, paranoia was standard operating procedure.
In Nazi Germany, every citizen was a potential threat and everyone had to be constantly watched for suspicious activity.
Of course the exact same thing is happening in America today. Just about anything you do can get you labeled as a "potential terrorist" by the government.
According to a new DHS report, the following are some of the beliefs and ideologies of potential terrorists....
-"fiercely nationalistic (as opposed to universal and international in orientation)"
-"anti-global"
-"suspicious of centralized federal authority"
-"reverent of individual liberty"
-"believe in conspiracy theories"
-"a belief that one’s personal and/or national “way of life” is under attack"
-"a belief in the need to be prepared for an attack either by participating in paramilitary preparations and training or survivalism"
-"impose strict religious tenets or laws on society (fundamentalists)"
-"insert religion into the political sphere"
-"those who seek to politicize religion"
-"supported political movements for autonomy"
-"anti-abortion"
-"anti-Catholic"
-"anti-nuclear"
And the definition of "suspicious activity" has become so broad in America that it pretty much covers 100% of us. In 2012, the following activities are considered to be "suspicious" by the FBI....
-shielding your computer screen from others
-paying with cash
-acting "nervous"
-using multiple cell phones
-requesting a specific room at a hotel
-traveling with a large amount of luggage
-refusing maid service at a hotel
-staying in your room for too long
-changing your appearance
In addition, the U.S. government has decided that it would be a really good idea for all of us to spy on one another. The "If You See Something, Say Something" campaign looks like it could have been pulled right out of a Gestapo security handbook.
But America is not supposed to be about spying on one another and reporting each other to the secret police.
America is supposed to be about liberty and freedom.
Showing posts with label Civil Rights. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Civil Rights. Show all posts
Tuesday, January 15, 2013
Saturday, January 12, 2013
Obama's Disarming Haste
No different than Lenin, Hitler or Stalin. Wake up America!
January 7, 2013
By Daren Jonescu
According to the Washington Post's Philip Rucker, President Obama is committed to moving quickly on gun violence legislation. Reported as good news, in truth this carefully projected haste and urgency ought to be regarded -- and would be reported, by a media that did not have a stake in leftist authoritarianism -- as the gravest warning sign.
"A warning sign of what?" asks the scoffing useful idiot. "Of the end of even the pretense of liberal democracy, constitutional republicanism, or any other form of government answerable to the governed."
It became a cliché during the last century to say that tyranny has the advantage over freedom in a crisis, because while the legitimate government must follow its own internal processes for assuring the consent of the people (or of their representatives) prior to acting, the tyrant may simply issue a decree, irrespective of anyone's objections.
It is true that legitimate governments comprised of co-equal branches, or of deliberative bodies, are somewhat limited in their power to act precipitately. And that limit is precisely the source of their legitimacy.
In almost all circumstances, sometimes even including the most grave and pressing, legitimate governments are compelled to engage in some measure of deliberation. That is, they are restricted in their actions and responses to what can be agreed upon through a process of reasoning. If there are disagreements about the need for action, they must be heard. If there are quibbles about the course of action to be pursued, they must be heard.
Churchill argued vehemently and repeatedly in and out of the British parliament against Prime Minister Neville Chamberlain's appeasement of Hitler, and in favor of forceful action. Through this process, his case, which was initially unpopular both in parliament and among the British people, grew in force and effect, and Churchill himself was chiselled by it into a greater leader of men -- precisely when Britain, and the world, needed such a leader. His path to action was longer and more laborious than Hitler's, but he had right on his side -- and he won.
Churchill was forced to these extremes of patient argumentation in the face of an immediate threat to his nation's survival by a tyrannical lunatic commanding the most powerful military in Europe. That is a case study in what I am calling "legitimate government." Illegitimate government, by contrast, would follow the opposite trajectory: pursue the most radical policy proposals while circumventing or avoiding patient argumentation and debate, even in matters of relatively little urgency.
To state this contrast differently, a free nation thinks before it acts in its own best interests, even in a genuine crisis, while an unfree nation is dragged into unthinking action against its own interests, in response to an illusory crisis.
When Rahm Emanuel described the Obama administration's modus operandi as "never let a serious crisis go to waste," many conservatives latched onto this supposed revelation as Exhibit A against the administration's integrity. In truth, Emanuel was putting the idea out there early, in the first weeks of the administration, so that, through repetition, it could be transformed, over the course of Obama's first term, from evidence of alarming cynicism into the definition of responsible governance.
Thus it is that mainstream reporters can now matter-of-factly describe the White House's mission on gun control this way:
Obama's advisers have calculated that the longer they wait, the more distance there is from the Newtown massacre and the greater the risk that the bipartisan political will to tackle gun violence will dissipate.
"This is not something that I will be putting off," Obama said on NBC's "Meet the Press" in an interview broadcast last Sunday.
At the White House meeting, [Sheriff Richard] Stanek said, "the vice president indicated that there was a very short timeline for him to get back to the president with his recommendations because the American public has a short memory."
Think about that. The president and vice president of the United States are urging immediate action on gun control, pre-empting all debate about the measures' constitutionality; and their justification for this urgent, anti-constitutional action is that "the American public has a short memory." In other words, this is not a real crisis (i.e., an ongoing threat), and the public will soon realize that, and carry on with life as usual; therefore, we must act before that happens.
Here is Rucker's account of the administration's intentions:
A working group led by Vice President Biden is seriously considering measures backed by key law enforcement leaders that would require universal background checks for firearm buyers, track the movement and sale of weapons through a national database, strengthen mental health checks, and stiffen penalties for carrying guns near schools or giving them to minors, the sources said.
As for where the federal government would get the authority to require "universal background checks," monitor the "movement" of private property, impose "stronger" mental health checks (on whom?), or punish private citizens for "giving" guns to minors (teaching your son to shoot?), these are precisely the kinds of questions for which the normal process of legitimate government would be in order -- deliberate, debate, reason. But the administration is unwilling to accept the likely outcome of such a process, and therefore wishes to foist its illiberal ideas on the public without open discussion. We all know the pattern now: in place of the deliberative process designed to protect the public from unjust government, Obama, Feinstein, et al will rush through legislation and executive orders, and then "lead a public relations offensive to generate public support."
There is a striking dissonance between the alleged need to act immediately, and the nature of the measures proposed. Rucker repeatedly tells us the government's response will be "comprehensive"; Biden's working group has "expanded its focus" to areas in which the president may act without congressional support, such as "changes to federal mental-health programs"; the administration is "quietly talking with a diverse array of interest groups"; they are "developing strategies to work around the National Rifle Association," such as "rallying support from Wal-Mart and other gun retailers for measures that would benefit their businesses" (i.e., crony capitalism in the name of restricting gun sales); their proposals constitute a "deeper exploration than just the assault-weapons ban"; and the discussions include the secretaries of Homeland Security, Education, and Health and Human Services.
These are strategies for radical change in the nature and order of American society. One does not solve an immediate crisis by abandoning the entity undergoing the crisis. A man whose kitchen is on fire does not respond by calling a real estate agent to discuss buying a new house; he calls the fire department, and tries to save his property. A nation in a crisis does not abandon its laws and principles; it tries to shore them up with some form of corrective action. Conservatives were rightly disdainful of George W. Bush's nonsense about "abandoning the free market in order to save it." Now, the Obama administration's response to a violation of individual rights (gun violence) is to abandon individual liberty and the right of self-preservation.
A government that responds to a genuine crisis -- such as foreign attack, or wide-scale insurrection -- in a precipitate fashion is acting irresponsibly. A government that manufactures a crisis in order to justify acting precipitately is behaving tyrannically. A government that follows this pattern as its normal method of operation is not merely behaving tyrannically - it is a tyranny.
"Never let a crisis go to waste" is cynical politics of the highest order. "Never let an opportunity to create the illusion of a crisis go to waste" is worse than cynical; it is diabolical. It is also fundamentally delegitimizing of the government that pursues this policy. A health care "crisis" necessitates immediate passage of a bill that no one has read, let alone debated. A student loan "crisis" necessitates a federal government takeover of the loan industry. A fiscal "crisis" necessitates the passage of a bill that was presented to the U.S. Senate -- "the world's greatest deliberative body" -- six minutes prior to the vote. And so on.
Now, a gun violence "crisis" -- which has been cleverly expanded into a mental health "crisis" -- requires immediate, undeliberated measures to begin the final process of ending private gun ownership, while extending the federal government's power to assess, label, restrict, and/or detain private citizens as "mentally unstable," according to guidelines that will be written by the leftist authoritarians at HHS, the Justice Department, and Homeland Security. Talk about the lunatics running the asylum!
The only real crisis at play here is a crisis of liberty; the U.S. federal government has become unmoored from any notion of legitimate representative government, and its illegitimate practices have become broadly acceptable to the American public. Corrective measures are certainly in order, but these will not come from the government. They will come, if they come, from the people.
Here, from the Washington Post article, is the sensibility now governing America's public policy, in a nutshell:
"As we get involved in these ad nauseam debates over the Second Amendment, our children are still at risk," said Jon Adler, national president of the Federal Law Enforcement Officers Association. "Debating is not the action verb we need to protect our children."
Actually, Mr. Adler, it is. Debating -- discussing the appropriateness of proposed policy in light of the nation's interests and fundamental principles -- is what legitimate governments do, as long as they wish to represent the will, rather than exploit the ignorance and fear, of the people.
While we're at it, Americans might like to consider a few other action verbs pertinent to this moment, and to "protecting their children": resisting, debunking, teaching, thinking, and fighting.
January 7, 2013
By Daren Jonescu
According to the Washington Post's Philip Rucker, President Obama is committed to moving quickly on gun violence legislation. Reported as good news, in truth this carefully projected haste and urgency ought to be regarded -- and would be reported, by a media that did not have a stake in leftist authoritarianism -- as the gravest warning sign.
"A warning sign of what?" asks the scoffing useful idiot. "Of the end of even the pretense of liberal democracy, constitutional republicanism, or any other form of government answerable to the governed."
It became a cliché during the last century to say that tyranny has the advantage over freedom in a crisis, because while the legitimate government must follow its own internal processes for assuring the consent of the people (or of their representatives) prior to acting, the tyrant may simply issue a decree, irrespective of anyone's objections.
It is true that legitimate governments comprised of co-equal branches, or of deliberative bodies, are somewhat limited in their power to act precipitately. And that limit is precisely the source of their legitimacy.
In almost all circumstances, sometimes even including the most grave and pressing, legitimate governments are compelled to engage in some measure of deliberation. That is, they are restricted in their actions and responses to what can be agreed upon through a process of reasoning. If there are disagreements about the need for action, they must be heard. If there are quibbles about the course of action to be pursued, they must be heard.
Churchill argued vehemently and repeatedly in and out of the British parliament against Prime Minister Neville Chamberlain's appeasement of Hitler, and in favor of forceful action. Through this process, his case, which was initially unpopular both in parliament and among the British people, grew in force and effect, and Churchill himself was chiselled by it into a greater leader of men -- precisely when Britain, and the world, needed such a leader. His path to action was longer and more laborious than Hitler's, but he had right on his side -- and he won.
Churchill was forced to these extremes of patient argumentation in the face of an immediate threat to his nation's survival by a tyrannical lunatic commanding the most powerful military in Europe. That is a case study in what I am calling "legitimate government." Illegitimate government, by contrast, would follow the opposite trajectory: pursue the most radical policy proposals while circumventing or avoiding patient argumentation and debate, even in matters of relatively little urgency.
To state this contrast differently, a free nation thinks before it acts in its own best interests, even in a genuine crisis, while an unfree nation is dragged into unthinking action against its own interests, in response to an illusory crisis.
When Rahm Emanuel described the Obama administration's modus operandi as "never let a serious crisis go to waste," many conservatives latched onto this supposed revelation as Exhibit A against the administration's integrity. In truth, Emanuel was putting the idea out there early, in the first weeks of the administration, so that, through repetition, it could be transformed, over the course of Obama's first term, from evidence of alarming cynicism into the definition of responsible governance.
Thus it is that mainstream reporters can now matter-of-factly describe the White House's mission on gun control this way:
Obama's advisers have calculated that the longer they wait, the more distance there is from the Newtown massacre and the greater the risk that the bipartisan political will to tackle gun violence will dissipate.
"This is not something that I will be putting off," Obama said on NBC's "Meet the Press" in an interview broadcast last Sunday.
At the White House meeting, [Sheriff Richard] Stanek said, "the vice president indicated that there was a very short timeline for him to get back to the president with his recommendations because the American public has a short memory."
Think about that. The president and vice president of the United States are urging immediate action on gun control, pre-empting all debate about the measures' constitutionality; and their justification for this urgent, anti-constitutional action is that "the American public has a short memory." In other words, this is not a real crisis (i.e., an ongoing threat), and the public will soon realize that, and carry on with life as usual; therefore, we must act before that happens.
Here is Rucker's account of the administration's intentions:
A working group led by Vice President Biden is seriously considering measures backed by key law enforcement leaders that would require universal background checks for firearm buyers, track the movement and sale of weapons through a national database, strengthen mental health checks, and stiffen penalties for carrying guns near schools or giving them to minors, the sources said.
As for where the federal government would get the authority to require "universal background checks," monitor the "movement" of private property, impose "stronger" mental health checks (on whom?), or punish private citizens for "giving" guns to minors (teaching your son to shoot?), these are precisely the kinds of questions for which the normal process of legitimate government would be in order -- deliberate, debate, reason. But the administration is unwilling to accept the likely outcome of such a process, and therefore wishes to foist its illiberal ideas on the public without open discussion. We all know the pattern now: in place of the deliberative process designed to protect the public from unjust government, Obama, Feinstein, et al will rush through legislation and executive orders, and then "lead a public relations offensive to generate public support."
There is a striking dissonance between the alleged need to act immediately, and the nature of the measures proposed. Rucker repeatedly tells us the government's response will be "comprehensive"; Biden's working group has "expanded its focus" to areas in which the president may act without congressional support, such as "changes to federal mental-health programs"; the administration is "quietly talking with a diverse array of interest groups"; they are "developing strategies to work around the National Rifle Association," such as "rallying support from Wal-Mart and other gun retailers for measures that would benefit their businesses" (i.e., crony capitalism in the name of restricting gun sales); their proposals constitute a "deeper exploration than just the assault-weapons ban"; and the discussions include the secretaries of Homeland Security, Education, and Health and Human Services.
These are strategies for radical change in the nature and order of American society. One does not solve an immediate crisis by abandoning the entity undergoing the crisis. A man whose kitchen is on fire does not respond by calling a real estate agent to discuss buying a new house; he calls the fire department, and tries to save his property. A nation in a crisis does not abandon its laws and principles; it tries to shore them up with some form of corrective action. Conservatives were rightly disdainful of George W. Bush's nonsense about "abandoning the free market in order to save it." Now, the Obama administration's response to a violation of individual rights (gun violence) is to abandon individual liberty and the right of self-preservation.
A government that responds to a genuine crisis -- such as foreign attack, or wide-scale insurrection -- in a precipitate fashion is acting irresponsibly. A government that manufactures a crisis in order to justify acting precipitately is behaving tyrannically. A government that follows this pattern as its normal method of operation is not merely behaving tyrannically - it is a tyranny.
"Never let a crisis go to waste" is cynical politics of the highest order. "Never let an opportunity to create the illusion of a crisis go to waste" is worse than cynical; it is diabolical. It is also fundamentally delegitimizing of the government that pursues this policy. A health care "crisis" necessitates immediate passage of a bill that no one has read, let alone debated. A student loan "crisis" necessitates a federal government takeover of the loan industry. A fiscal "crisis" necessitates the passage of a bill that was presented to the U.S. Senate -- "the world's greatest deliberative body" -- six minutes prior to the vote. And so on.
Now, a gun violence "crisis" -- which has been cleverly expanded into a mental health "crisis" -- requires immediate, undeliberated measures to begin the final process of ending private gun ownership, while extending the federal government's power to assess, label, restrict, and/or detain private citizens as "mentally unstable," according to guidelines that will be written by the leftist authoritarians at HHS, the Justice Department, and Homeland Security. Talk about the lunatics running the asylum!
The only real crisis at play here is a crisis of liberty; the U.S. federal government has become unmoored from any notion of legitimate representative government, and its illegitimate practices have become broadly acceptable to the American public. Corrective measures are certainly in order, but these will not come from the government. They will come, if they come, from the people.
Here, from the Washington Post article, is the sensibility now governing America's public policy, in a nutshell:
"As we get involved in these ad nauseam debates over the Second Amendment, our children are still at risk," said Jon Adler, national president of the Federal Law Enforcement Officers Association. "Debating is not the action verb we need to protect our children."
Actually, Mr. Adler, it is. Debating -- discussing the appropriateness of proposed policy in light of the nation's interests and fundamental principles -- is what legitimate governments do, as long as they wish to represent the will, rather than exploit the ignorance and fear, of the people.
While we're at it, Americans might like to consider a few other action verbs pertinent to this moment, and to "protecting their children": resisting, debunking, teaching, thinking, and fighting.
Thursday, April 8, 2010
Big Brother Becomes Big Bully
I know I need to catch up on my reading but this is what I have been trying to get across to you readers for quite some time now. Read it, live it , love it pass it on. American Thinker is one of the best conservative site on the web.
March 29, 2010
Big Brother Becomes Big Bully
By Ed Lasky
The government in the Age of Obama has gone beyond the big brother that watches out and cares for us. Instead, it has becomes the big brother that torments and bullies us and then takes what is rightfully ours: our savings, our freedom, and our futures.
Liberals are often labeled as wanting to bring out the nanny state (the feminine version of a big brother). This is wrong. A nanny cares for her wards so that they can mature into responsible adults able to take care of themselves.
But a bully has other desires. A bully cares only about himself and his own greedy will to power. A bully taunts and threatens. A bully holds others in contempt. A bully disregards not only the wishes of those around him, but also the rules that may his restrain his power. A bully takes what is not his.
A bully will not stop until people rise up and put an end to him.
Has our government become a big bully? Let us count the ways.
Very early in 2009, the troika of Pelosi-Reid-Obama sought to expand the power of the federal government over states, businesses, and us. They all but nationalized the American auto industry (save Ford), overriding debtor rights and decades of law. They have also taken over chunks of the financial industry and, via their control over Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, much of the housing industry. Many salaries will be set by the White House. Education, a local matter, is increasingly becoming a federal one. The student loan industry has also been brought in-house -- the White House, that is. That was merely a warm-up.
The smash-and-grab style of governing has since run rampant: rules, regulations, taxes, and mandates; the proliferation of unelected czars; the orders and commands; the abuse of power; the diktats-all stuffed down our throats.
Does it feel like we are all being waterboarded?
The Department of Justice has hired a legion of lawyers for its Civil Rights Division. They will be busy investigating businesses across America for violations of civil rights laws. Fine -- but they will be using what is called a "disparate impact" standard. Under that criterion, any business that has job standards -- even legitimate ones -- that happen to result in fewer minorities being hired than the DOJ sees fit will be hit with the full might of the Justice Department, which has been staffed with a coven of radical lawyers. Not to be outdone, the Education Department will also be sending out investigators to ensure that schools do not discriminate, either. Discrimination is often in the eye of the beholder, and under Eric Holder, I can guarantee you that those eyes will see racism across the breadth of America (because, after all, we are a nation of racists). Businesses, local government, schools -- all will be bullied in the years ahead.
But wait...there's more.
The Environmental Protection Agency has gone mental -- off the deep end.
Eager to expand its power to bully businesses, the EPA is busy trying to regulate every carbon molecule out of existence (except those burned by Al Gore, John Edwards, Nancy Pelosi, Barack Obama, and their friends and allies, what with those massive homes, private flights, and hothouse White House), even if it means circumventing Congress to do so. The climate con is being used to seize sweeping power over much of the economy.
Cap-and-tax is coming, as are shortages and price increases -- even though climate change (fictitious or not) is dead last in a list of public priorities in a recent Pews survey.
The Interior Department has all but killed drilling offshore and in vast parts of onshore America, despite Americans' overwhelming desire to tap our nation's bounty of our concerns and of us. Adding insult to injury, the feds now may seek to seize vast swaths of land via "presidential proclamation."
The old smash-and-grab.
The bullies running our country don't care. They care only about themselves.
One could go on and on.
The Occupational Safety and Health Administration is on a hiring binge to make sure the height of the steps in your business is centimeter-correct.
The Federal Communication Commission has become a playpen for those who want the airwaves filled with even more liberal claptrap than we have now. Obama and company have declared war -- not on Osama bin Laden or Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, but on Rush Limbaugh and Rupert Murdoch. And remember when they wanted our friends and neighbors to report "fishy" stories about Obama's agenda?
Bullies want only their own voices heard.
The Labor Department has been outsourced to allies of the Service Employees International Union -- and these people know how to bully.
Obama will use his executive power to coerce businesses that receive government contracts to pay its workers what he in his imperial wisdom decides satisfies him and his union pals and promoters. He enjoys issuing executive orders -- skirting the legislative branch and quaint notions such as the separation of powers. He has also used signing statements to "sidestep" new laws passed by (a Democratic) Congress. Why should Congress and the little people tie him down? He will also reportedly circumvent the Senate confirmation process by naming Craig Becker (a leftist union ally) to the National Labor Relations Board via a recess appointment.
A bully fights in underhanded ways.
How will they know when is "enough"? There is no such word in their vocabulary. These are people who have never had to meet a payroll, in the words of Democratic Senator Blanche Lincoln, and are strikingly lacking in real-world business experience.
But who cares? It's not their money, but ours. Bullies take and give to satisfy their whims and not our needs. They want to pay off their allies, not our debts. (Can we console ourselves that it will all be funny money issued by a Banana Republic by the time they get done with us?)
Pelosi-to-Reid-to-Obama then moved into the major leagues: paving the way to the nationalization of health care.
Why?
Americans don't want ObamaCare, and the more they know, the more they rebel against it. The bullies that rule over us do not care. When they want our opinion, they will give it to us.
So why did Obama make health care reform the focus of the past year in the face of a struggling economy and poor job numbers (not helped by the hyped-up so-called stimulus)? A crisis was just too good to waste (ask Rahm Emanuel), as was the filibuster-proof Democratic majority in Congress. Therefore, the massive redistribution of wealth that was a goal of Barack Obama all along (the "spread the wealth" gaffe that was one of the few truthful sentences Barack Obama uttered in 2008) has been done behind the façade of health care. What a charade.
We have been subjected to a year-long spectacle that can best be described as a Congressional Grand Guignol -- a grotesque theatre of the absurd where arm-twisting, bribes, payoffs, job offers, reconciliation trickery, loopholes, and thuggery are substituted for genuine bipartisanship or even much discussion among Democrats themselves regarding the monstrosity of the so-called "Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act" (euphemism alert). Voters don't want ObamaCare, and they don't want it done through strong-arm tactics that mock our democratic principles.
The three-headed hydra (Pelosi, Reid, Obama) just bullied it through, overcoming opposition among not just Republicans and some Democrats, but also most Americans. They engaged in financial gimmickry that makes Bernie Madoff look like a piker .
They misused parliamentary procedures and customs, broke promises and rules.
So what? Nannies obey rules; bullies don't.
Or as Congressman Alcee Hastings of the House Rules Committee summed it up, "There are no rules here; we make ‘em up as we go along." (And he knows how to break rules; he was impeached as a federal judge for breaking them himself -- hence his spot on the House Rules Committee. Make sense?)
Now we (but not congressmen or their staffers) are forced to buy health insurance. But that is just a relatively small loss of our freedom because the goal, according to Congressman Dingell, is for Obamacare to eventually "control the people."
The Constitution is just so much fish wrap to these Democratic leaders. Smash and grab.
Barack Obama himself admitted that he saw it as an obstacle -- some Constitutional Law professor (lecturer, part-time) he must have been. No wonder he fled from conversations with other law professors.
So we have what may very well be an unconstitutional abuse of power in the form of the health care act. The mandates will be piled on us, as will the micromanagement of health care. There are at least twenty ways in which ObamaCare will take away our freedom, writes David Hogberg in Investor's Business Daily.
Will there be much freedom for us left after this takeover? Not freedom to earn, save, invest, and spend as we see fit.
We have already seen local governments grasping for our money. Police are swarming the streets to raise cash via an epidemic of ticketing, traffic cams are proliferating, tax refunds are being held, and states are mining IRS data as never before to extract money from citizens. Big brother/big bully wants to take or tax candy and soda pop from us, too.
But these are picayune. Wait 'til the IRS gets into the game.
The Internal Revenue Service is yet another growth area of government. Even before the health care bill was on its way to passage and signing, the IRS was busy hiring more people. Now at least 17,000 more people will be hired not to watch out for you, but to watch you (at the additional cost of one billion dollars per year and with reams of personal information about you at their fingertips).
Scores of new federal mandates and fifteen different tax increases totaling $400 billion are imposed under the Democratic House bill. In addition to more complicated tax returns, families and small businesses will be forced to reveal further tax information to the IRS, provide proof of ‘government approved' health care and submit detailed sales information to comply with new excise taxes.
Thank you, Mr. President, Madame Speaker, and Mr. Majority Leader!
Recall that Barack Obama joked about unleashing the IRS on people before. He wasn't joking.
A bully does not care about your money, except insofar as he schemes to make it his money.
Smash and grab.
We should have known how he would govern by how he campaigned. His focus group slogan may have been "Yes we can!" but that was for the yahoos. When he was off script, he revealed his true style in taunting that if his opponents "bring a knife to the fight, we bring a gun." He echoed these comments when he was president and confronted a Democrat who resisted the health care takeover with the warning, "Don't think we're not keeping score, brother." In one generation, the Democrats have gone from "Ask not what your country can do for you -- ask what you can do for your country" to "Think about what I can do to you." Bully for him!
We should get used to these types of thrashings since, in the wake of the health care coup d'etat, Speaker Pelosi has promised that the passage (or as Pelosi put it, "the kick through the door") of the health "reform" act will empower the Democrats to push through more such "reform." Wonderful!
But in the end, bullies become hated figures.
We have reached that point.
Congress is held in very low esteem, and generic Democrats poll badly. A recent poll found that Pelosi has an 11% favorability rating, which beats the pants off of Harry Reid's 8% (and of the two, she wears the pants -- or designer pantsuits). Barack Obama himself is listing as well; his job disapproval rating tops his approval rating. His ratings have gone down and down and down. We just don't believe much of what he says anymore, and we now recognize him for what he is: a bully who rules but does not govern.
Have we had enough of the bullying from big brother, and are we prepared to defend ourselves from "the mugging of personal freedom"?
Will Howard Beale's cry -- "I'm mad as hell and I'm not going to take it anymore!" -- become this year's "Yes We can!"?
We may be there.
A CNN poll found that 56 percent of Americans believe that the government has become so powerful that it constitutes an immediate threat to the freedom and rights of citizens.
But it gets worse for the Democrats. A Rasmussen poll reveals that "only 21 percent of the people believe the US government is governing with our consent." Have any of our Democratic politicians ever read the Declaration of Independence? Such thoughts and righteous rage give rise to revolutions.
These are the leading indicators that the Democrats are in for a bad fall season.
How can the little people show the tyrants the door? How do people get rid of bullies who stomp all over us? We come together as we always have.
Hence, the Tea Party movement has emerged at this time and place in our nation's history and why the "Don't Tread On Me" flags are now flapping in the wind.
People are willing to fight to protect the freedoms and futures for themselves and generations to come.
Come November 2010 and 2012, they will be heard, loud and clear.
Ed Lasky is news editor of American Thinker.
March 29, 2010
Big Brother Becomes Big Bully
By Ed Lasky
The government in the Age of Obama has gone beyond the big brother that watches out and cares for us. Instead, it has becomes the big brother that torments and bullies us and then takes what is rightfully ours: our savings, our freedom, and our futures.
Liberals are often labeled as wanting to bring out the nanny state (the feminine version of a big brother). This is wrong. A nanny cares for her wards so that they can mature into responsible adults able to take care of themselves.
But a bully has other desires. A bully cares only about himself and his own greedy will to power. A bully taunts and threatens. A bully holds others in contempt. A bully disregards not only the wishes of those around him, but also the rules that may his restrain his power. A bully takes what is not his.
A bully will not stop until people rise up and put an end to him.
Has our government become a big bully? Let us count the ways.
Very early in 2009, the troika of Pelosi-Reid-Obama sought to expand the power of the federal government over states, businesses, and us. They all but nationalized the American auto industry (save Ford), overriding debtor rights and decades of law. They have also taken over chunks of the financial industry and, via their control over Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, much of the housing industry. Many salaries will be set by the White House. Education, a local matter, is increasingly becoming a federal one. The student loan industry has also been brought in-house -- the White House, that is. That was merely a warm-up.
The smash-and-grab style of governing has since run rampant: rules, regulations, taxes, and mandates; the proliferation of unelected czars; the orders and commands; the abuse of power; the diktats-all stuffed down our throats.
Does it feel like we are all being waterboarded?
The Department of Justice has hired a legion of lawyers for its Civil Rights Division. They will be busy investigating businesses across America for violations of civil rights laws. Fine -- but they will be using what is called a "disparate impact" standard. Under that criterion, any business that has job standards -- even legitimate ones -- that happen to result in fewer minorities being hired than the DOJ sees fit will be hit with the full might of the Justice Department, which has been staffed with a coven of radical lawyers. Not to be outdone, the Education Department will also be sending out investigators to ensure that schools do not discriminate, either. Discrimination is often in the eye of the beholder, and under Eric Holder, I can guarantee you that those eyes will see racism across the breadth of America (because, after all, we are a nation of racists). Businesses, local government, schools -- all will be bullied in the years ahead.
But wait...there's more.
The Environmental Protection Agency has gone mental -- off the deep end.
Eager to expand its power to bully businesses, the EPA is busy trying to regulate every carbon molecule out of existence (except those burned by Al Gore, John Edwards, Nancy Pelosi, Barack Obama, and their friends and allies, what with those massive homes, private flights, and hothouse White House), even if it means circumventing Congress to do so. The climate con is being used to seize sweeping power over much of the economy.
Cap-and-tax is coming, as are shortages and price increases -- even though climate change (fictitious or not) is dead last in a list of public priorities in a recent Pews survey.
The Interior Department has all but killed drilling offshore and in vast parts of onshore America, despite Americans' overwhelming desire to tap our nation's bounty of our concerns and of us. Adding insult to injury, the feds now may seek to seize vast swaths of land via "presidential proclamation."
The old smash-and-grab.
The bullies running our country don't care. They care only about themselves.
One could go on and on.
The Occupational Safety and Health Administration is on a hiring binge to make sure the height of the steps in your business is centimeter-correct.
The Federal Communication Commission has become a playpen for those who want the airwaves filled with even more liberal claptrap than we have now. Obama and company have declared war -- not on Osama bin Laden or Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, but on Rush Limbaugh and Rupert Murdoch. And remember when they wanted our friends and neighbors to report "fishy" stories about Obama's agenda?
Bullies want only their own voices heard.
The Labor Department has been outsourced to allies of the Service Employees International Union -- and these people know how to bully.
Obama will use his executive power to coerce businesses that receive government contracts to pay its workers what he in his imperial wisdom decides satisfies him and his union pals and promoters. He enjoys issuing executive orders -- skirting the legislative branch and quaint notions such as the separation of powers. He has also used signing statements to "sidestep" new laws passed by (a Democratic) Congress. Why should Congress and the little people tie him down? He will also reportedly circumvent the Senate confirmation process by naming Craig Becker (a leftist union ally) to the National Labor Relations Board via a recess appointment.
A bully fights in underhanded ways.
How will they know when is "enough"? There is no such word in their vocabulary. These are people who have never had to meet a payroll, in the words of Democratic Senator Blanche Lincoln, and are strikingly lacking in real-world business experience.
But who cares? It's not their money, but ours. Bullies take and give to satisfy their whims and not our needs. They want to pay off their allies, not our debts. (Can we console ourselves that it will all be funny money issued by a Banana Republic by the time they get done with us?)
Pelosi-to-Reid-to-Obama then moved into the major leagues: paving the way to the nationalization of health care.
Why?
Americans don't want ObamaCare, and the more they know, the more they rebel against it. The bullies that rule over us do not care. When they want our opinion, they will give it to us.
So why did Obama make health care reform the focus of the past year in the face of a struggling economy and poor job numbers (not helped by the hyped-up so-called stimulus)? A crisis was just too good to waste (ask Rahm Emanuel), as was the filibuster-proof Democratic majority in Congress. Therefore, the massive redistribution of wealth that was a goal of Barack Obama all along (the "spread the wealth" gaffe that was one of the few truthful sentences Barack Obama uttered in 2008) has been done behind the façade of health care. What a charade.
We have been subjected to a year-long spectacle that can best be described as a Congressional Grand Guignol -- a grotesque theatre of the absurd where arm-twisting, bribes, payoffs, job offers, reconciliation trickery, loopholes, and thuggery are substituted for genuine bipartisanship or even much discussion among Democrats themselves regarding the monstrosity of the so-called "Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act" (euphemism alert). Voters don't want ObamaCare, and they don't want it done through strong-arm tactics that mock our democratic principles.
The three-headed hydra (Pelosi, Reid, Obama) just bullied it through, overcoming opposition among not just Republicans and some Democrats, but also most Americans. They engaged in financial gimmickry that makes Bernie Madoff look like a piker .
They misused parliamentary procedures and customs, broke promises and rules.
So what? Nannies obey rules; bullies don't.
Or as Congressman Alcee Hastings of the House Rules Committee summed it up, "There are no rules here; we make ‘em up as we go along." (And he knows how to break rules; he was impeached as a federal judge for breaking them himself -- hence his spot on the House Rules Committee. Make sense?)
Now we (but not congressmen or their staffers) are forced to buy health insurance. But that is just a relatively small loss of our freedom because the goal, according to Congressman Dingell, is for Obamacare to eventually "control the people."
The Constitution is just so much fish wrap to these Democratic leaders. Smash and grab.
Barack Obama himself admitted that he saw it as an obstacle -- some Constitutional Law professor (lecturer, part-time) he must have been. No wonder he fled from conversations with other law professors.
So we have what may very well be an unconstitutional abuse of power in the form of the health care act. The mandates will be piled on us, as will the micromanagement of health care. There are at least twenty ways in which ObamaCare will take away our freedom, writes David Hogberg in Investor's Business Daily.
Will there be much freedom for us left after this takeover? Not freedom to earn, save, invest, and spend as we see fit.
We have already seen local governments grasping for our money. Police are swarming the streets to raise cash via an epidemic of ticketing, traffic cams are proliferating, tax refunds are being held, and states are mining IRS data as never before to extract money from citizens. Big brother/big bully wants to take or tax candy and soda pop from us, too.
But these are picayune. Wait 'til the IRS gets into the game.
The Internal Revenue Service is yet another growth area of government. Even before the health care bill was on its way to passage and signing, the IRS was busy hiring more people. Now at least 17,000 more people will be hired not to watch out for you, but to watch you (at the additional cost of one billion dollars per year and with reams of personal information about you at their fingertips).
Scores of new federal mandates and fifteen different tax increases totaling $400 billion are imposed under the Democratic House bill. In addition to more complicated tax returns, families and small businesses will be forced to reveal further tax information to the IRS, provide proof of ‘government approved' health care and submit detailed sales information to comply with new excise taxes.
Thank you, Mr. President, Madame Speaker, and Mr. Majority Leader!
Recall that Barack Obama joked about unleashing the IRS on people before. He wasn't joking.
A bully does not care about your money, except insofar as he schemes to make it his money.
Smash and grab.
We should have known how he would govern by how he campaigned. His focus group slogan may have been "Yes we can!" but that was for the yahoos. When he was off script, he revealed his true style in taunting that if his opponents "bring a knife to the fight, we bring a gun." He echoed these comments when he was president and confronted a Democrat who resisted the health care takeover with the warning, "Don't think we're not keeping score, brother." In one generation, the Democrats have gone from "Ask not what your country can do for you -- ask what you can do for your country" to "Think about what I can do to you." Bully for him!
We should get used to these types of thrashings since, in the wake of the health care coup d'etat, Speaker Pelosi has promised that the passage (or as Pelosi put it, "the kick through the door") of the health "reform" act will empower the Democrats to push through more such "reform." Wonderful!
But in the end, bullies become hated figures.
We have reached that point.
Congress is held in very low esteem, and generic Democrats poll badly. A recent poll found that Pelosi has an 11% favorability rating, which beats the pants off of Harry Reid's 8% (and of the two, she wears the pants -- or designer pantsuits). Barack Obama himself is listing as well; his job disapproval rating tops his approval rating. His ratings have gone down and down and down. We just don't believe much of what he says anymore, and we now recognize him for what he is: a bully who rules but does not govern.
Have we had enough of the bullying from big brother, and are we prepared to defend ourselves from "the mugging of personal freedom"?
Will Howard Beale's cry -- "I'm mad as hell and I'm not going to take it anymore!" -- become this year's "Yes We can!"?
We may be there.
A CNN poll found that 56 percent of Americans believe that the government has become so powerful that it constitutes an immediate threat to the freedom and rights of citizens.
But it gets worse for the Democrats. A Rasmussen poll reveals that "only 21 percent of the people believe the US government is governing with our consent." Have any of our Democratic politicians ever read the Declaration of Independence? Such thoughts and righteous rage give rise to revolutions.
These are the leading indicators that the Democrats are in for a bad fall season.
How can the little people show the tyrants the door? How do people get rid of bullies who stomp all over us? We come together as we always have.
Hence, the Tea Party movement has emerged at this time and place in our nation's history and why the "Don't Tread On Me" flags are now flapping in the wind.
People are willing to fight to protect the freedoms and futures for themselves and generations to come.
Come November 2010 and 2012, they will be heard, loud and clear.
Ed Lasky is news editor of American Thinker.
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)
